Nerds and Normals

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got nerds?

Nobody believes me when I say am a nerd. So then I chuckle to myself thinking, “OK, then I’m a recovering nerd.”

Here’s a cool nerd factoid: How about that South Korean flag? It includes a prominent Yang and Yin symbol, two-in-one black and white teardrops. 

It was Chairman Mao, the first communist ruler of China, who pointed out that, actually, the black and white did not have to be scrupulously fifty-fifty. In his essay On Contradiction he explained how one color can be dominating, sixty-forty, for example, then—flip!—The colors can switch places, so the other one is more prevalent. He wrote this to explain the philosophy of “dialectical materialism,” (footnote) to give brand new leaders, after the revolution, some self confidence that they could replace the mandarins and officials—who were given the boot— and then go run the “people’s republic.”

Right now, I am imagining those two colors as nerd and non-nerd. I’m sure all of us have a touch of nerd, as when we like factoids, while all of us have a touch of that Regular American: a plain fellow who believes that everything could, and should, be explained simply, distrusting educated complexity. That distrust is why Hollywood rivals and villains, like that clown on The Simpsons, are often educated Britishers… implying that US universities, except for the household name ones, are below the level of British and Canadian ones. (Probably so, given that my degree equals a US masters degree, according to my professors who have compared curriculums while at American conferences) 

As for understanding nerds, it was a computer millionaire, Paul Graham, who wrote of how the really smart boys, back in high school, were supposedly, somehow, not smart enough to figure how to appear normal and be popular. His explanation was: Yes, teens all want to fit in—something easier to do back in elementary school—but teenage nerds want something even more: to be smart. OK, I’m oversimplifying. Graham also said teen “high school society” has a lack of shared real problems. Therefore the only shared “problem” they have, of helping each other strive to be “normal” and popular is, for a nerd, just too unreal, too un-motivating, and too airy-fairy. But for an unthinking regular teen, “normal” is whatever other teens say it is. 

Of course, in the adult world, with real group problems, status is not from being the most conformist, but from who will help the most with tackling a group’s problem/project/shared goals. There’s a reason why, at the annual dinner, people clap for the volunteers. Those hardy volunteers have earned some status. 

A few decades back, a baby boomer wrote a book called Is There Life After High School? I answer: Sure there is, but I think, in adult society, the trick is to find your vocations and avocations within groups small enough for a person to be noticed for achieving some “status and popularity” through real contributions.  Graham, who preferred small computer startup companies, would warn that in the big conventional companies it is harder to measure your actual contribution, hence there is more attention to office politics and image and fakery. Call it, ‘high school lite.’

Some former teens will see the entire country as their peer group, and resort to status from the only thing they have left for such a gross undiscerning crowd: conspicuous consumption. Money. But adult nerds are quick to see through that ploy. That’s why in Silicon Valley no brainy millionaires will desperately crave to know what is the latest, most excruciatingly correct clothing-fashion-for-the-wealthy. In fact, they dress rather like nerds.

I have been over simplifying, so far, by making nerds seem non-regular because of their brains. But there can be another reason for being different: social isolation. At the end of the movie Revenge of the Nerds II, as I dimly recall, a laundry list of nerd characteristics is recited, a list which includes things having nothing to do with being smart, such as poor hygiene or being able to burp long and loud. Well. If I was a proud hermit, coming into town only occasionally for supplies, then I would nevertheless make it my business to cultivate an “awareness level” for what is normal among the townsfolk. Examples of folks employing such an “awareness skill” would be undercover spies, television set decorators, actors, and the writer of the Jack Reacher mysteries. Being observant, as every Boy Scout knows, is fun. 

Oh, such a fun life the founder of Boy Scouts had! Life would never be boring for the man who once drew a few sketches of different men to show how each man’s personality is reflected by how he tilts his hat. As for folks who would never do the Boy Scout thing of being “observant,” well, I think they would risk living in their own little bubble. As if they value being oblivious.

What I observe, besides other things, is nerds: Because if I’m real smart, then being a nerd would be my default—I want to know what to avoid.

I wonder: Are nerds stiff and humor-challenged? Then I could take a night class in stand up comedy improvisation. Not that I ever have, but I could. Do they dress dull? Then I could rip through my closet tossing out anything beige. Hey, maybe I’d look good in mauve. Are they close-minded and set in their ways? I could take a night class in liberal arts. 

Are nerds scared to meet and mingle? Me too, sometimes, but …then I remember how comedian Red Green ends each show by saying, “We’re all in this together” adding “I’m pulling for you,” and “remember to keep your stick on the ice.” As I see it, the best way to de-nerdify would be, just like Red Green, to care about others. Call it the Zen of Caring—No wonder the Boy Scouts  learn to do a good turn every day. Here’s a mantra: “If I care about others, then awareness of others will come naturally.” And for mingling, there’s always that mantra from Galilee: “Perfect love casteth out all fear.”

I enjoyed mingling in my shared house. I’m still chuckling over talking to the parents visiting a young man there. “For an only child,” I marvelled, “your son is sure unspoiled.” 

“We had the only swimming pool on the block. That way, when the other kids came over, they made sure he wasn’t spoiled!”

I guess somewhere along the trail I must have mingled enough, because no one today believes I’m a nerd.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

June

2019

An abstract footnote:

~”Dialectical materialism, “the trick of seeing things “in terms of their contradictions,” can be a life-changing trick, according to Barak Obama’s mentor Saul Alinsky, in his book Rules For Radicals. I must confess I don’t do any dialectical materialism myself, but I’m throwing it out there. I suspect it was Karl Marx who saw things as “thesis, antithesis and synthesis.” Just throwing that out for you.
Or as a comic book hero says:
“Contradiction is the seed of conciousness. I knew, from the pain of contradiction, that I was. And what I was.” 
― Joss Whedon, Astonishing X-Men, Volume 2: Dangerous

Some not so abstract footnotes:

~In his review (link) of Revenge of the Nerds II, (a movie of regular popular culture) Roger Ebert explains what nerds are, saying it’s something the movie doesn’t understand.

~I sympathize with struggling nerds and “social isolates”: Nora Ephron once remarked in an interview, “Nobody interesting had an ordinary childhood.” She wrote interesting things like her 2006 bestseller I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman and, back in the 20th century, Wallflower at the Orgy where she slightly mocked editor Helen Gurly Brown’s articles in Cosmopolitan magazine saying “She’s just trying to help” which is, I guess, what folks might say about my own essays. (And yes, her book title is more literal than figurative)

~Nora mentioned that her fellow writers wrote “beneath themselves” doing simple articles for popular magazines in order to pay the bills. If here, for my essay site, I write simply with very few complex-compound sentences, it’s because I write for regular people, in keeping with my journalism past. As feedDigest Channel on the web says:

QUOTE: 

According to the data and stats that were collected, ‘Essays by Sean’ channel has an excellent rank. The channel mostly uses long articles along with sentence constructions of the basic readability level, which is a result indicating a well-balanced textual content on the channel.

UNQUOTE

link to more stats: http://channels.feeddigest.com/Essays_by_Sean

Also, my site has “low traffic” and “extraordinary global rank.” Hurray! The blog sometimes gets translated too, which I only know about from having google statistics. The translators are never polite enough to say hello.

~As for our cultural belief that it is best to speak plainly, that everything can be simplified and paraphrased and summarized to be simpler: Wrong! There is a reason why professors don’t talk like high school teachers, but will instead use several clauses in their sentences. Samual Delaney said that, for detailed sentences, to even paraphrase is to change the meaning.

I’m angry at our culture because: It was “busy” politicians who wouldn’t read past the summary and into the actual report, which had nuance and qualifiers, probabilities and footnotes, who would then conclude that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One politician, too self-important to read the report, bleated like a sheep, “We mustn’t let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud.”

Meanwhile, I am a little angry, mostly contemptuous, at the UN because the IPCC, the UN’s climate change guys, according to a Manchester reporter, write their UN report summary first, and then the various scientists are expected to constrict their reporting to fit the summary.

Here’s a dense sidebar about the consequences of our distrust of complex talk, 

in the form of a quote included in my essay Death of the Liberal Class archived May 2015:

<< …(The liberal class was) forgetting, as MacDonald wrote, that “as in arts and letters, communicability to a large audience is in inverse ratio to the excellence of a political approach. This in not a good thing: as in art, it is a deforming and crippling factor. Nor is it an eternal rule: in the past, the ideas of a tiny minority, sometimes almost reduced to the vanishing point of one individual, have slowly come to take hold on more and more of their fellow men.”

The cultural embrace of simplification, as MacDonald warned, meant reducing a population to speaking in pre-digested clichés and slogans. It banished complexity and further pushed to the margins difficult, original, or unfamiliar ideas. The assault on radical and original thought, which by definition did not fit itself into the popular cultural lexicon, saw art forms such as theatre suffer.  (P. 88) >>