Geek Heresy (28 page)

But even economists’ most vocal critics – qualitative scholars who emphasize culture, context, and complexity – don’t offer frameworks of individual progress. Some cultural anthropologists instead celebrate the diversity of human behavior that results from a diversity of context. Under their cultural relativism, human beings adapt intelligently to their geography, history, culture, and structures of power. All peoples are equally worthy, and there is little allowance for either personal or societal progress.
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The economic and anthropological models of human behavior sit at opposite extremes of the social science spectrum – the fields are often at odds in the way of snakes and mongooses – but they still have one trait in common: They assume that behavior depends largely on external context, so they focus on changing external circumstances while neglecting intrinsic growth.
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The same neglect happens in politics. During America’s 2012 presidential debates, the candidates presented what they felt were their most appealing positions. Obama captured the left’s emphasis on external forces outside of the person: “The federal government has the capacity to help open up opportunity and create ladders of opportunity and to create frameworks where the American people can succeed.” Representing the right, Mitt Romney said, “The primary responsibility for education of course is at the state and local level. . . . Every school district, every state should make that decision on their own.” The left is afraid of blaming victims and downplays individual intrinsic growth. The right leaves communities short on intrinsic growth to fend for themselves.
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Either way, intrinsic growth is neglected where it’s most needed.

That neglect lines right up with the Tech Commandments, which demand that we twiddle external circumstances and steer clear of wrestling with values. But social inequities cannot be eliminated with value-free changes alone. Disparities are due in part to individual differences in traits to which we ascribe value. It cannot be true both that intrinsic growth matters to a good life
and
that more intrinsic growth isn’t somehow better. We can debate what makes a person good, and we should. But pretending that everyone is equally good, or dismissing virtue-building policies as those of a “nanny state,” undermines attempts to foster heart, mind, and will.

Imagine if, with the wave of a magic wand, the wealth of everyone on the planet were suddenly to increase, and imagine the windfall happened progressively, so that dollar-a-day people had their wealth multiplied by ten, while billionaires saw only a 1 percent increase. With that one spell, you’d have generated economic growth, more equality, greater dignity, increased freedom, and instantaneous happiness. Yet it is not at all clear that the world will have become a better place in the long run. The happiness would fade, we’d consume even more, and poorer people would slip back into poverty. Suppose, instead, that the spell created a sudden increase in everyone’s heart, mind, and will, with no other change. That would tend to lead naturally to economic growth where desired (and less where not), more justice, greater dignity, more
freedom with responsibility, and increased likelihood for enduring global well-being.

Intrinsic growth stresses internal maturation over external change. It accepts that real progress is slow and gradual. And it links progress to the flourishing of certain universal values – not only of personal freedoms, but of personal goodness. A framework of human development provides a counter to the Tech Commandments. Real progress isn’t strictly about satisfying our every present desire. It’s about our desires themselves evolving.

CHAPTER 9

“Gross National Wisdom”

Societal Development and Mass Intrinsic Growth

P
rogress can be a dangerous idea. It can mean labeling people with scores, and people read a lot into them. Labels discourage or insult low scorers, induce arrogance and complacency in high scorers, and cause society as a whole to warp with prejudices, none of which is helpful.
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What’s worse, the claim that progress is dependent on personal qualities such as heart, mind, and will begins to sound a lot like blaming the victims of poverty, oppression, and prejudice, as if lack of intrinsic growth were their fault.

This is an incendiary issue, and I believe we have put off for too long an intelligent conversation about it. One way to tease out the tough ethical issues is through the story of a high school student I once tutored. David was born into a poor, dysfunctional family and became the foster child of wealthy parents. They provided a stable home and enrolled him in an expensive private school, where he was respected as a star athlete. But he was behind in all of his classes. Working with him on geometry, I found he was able to do the math if he put his mind to it, but, without adult prodding, he wouldn’t. He didn’t have much motivation to study (intention), didn’t seem to think it worthwhile
(discernment), and, in any case, didn’t apply himself to his assignments (self-control).

I don’t blame David for his poor showing in geometry, or even for his lackluster heart, mind, and will. Nor should anyone else. His birth family might have been cursed with drug abuse, alcoholism, homelessness, illiteracy, insolvency, emotional turmoil, or just garden-variety bad luck or bad judgment. You can’t blame a child for not developing good study habits under constant distress. Yet Walter Mischel’s famous “marshmallow study” showed that the capacity to delay gratification – a kind of self-control – expressed at ages four to six is among the strongest predictors of achievement and social adjustment in young adults.
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It doesn’t make much sense to hold six-year-olds accountable for their personalities – it’s obviously not up to them. But what Mischel’s research further implies is that the responsibility for an adult’s degree of self-control isn’t black or white, either.
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A person’s intrinsic growth is never wholly of his own making.

But, even if David wasn’t to blame for deficiencies of heart, mind, and will, he needed more intrinsic growth to be better prepared for a better life.

Meanwhile, we need more intrinsic growth from richer and more powerful people as well. Accustomed as they (we?) are to comfortable cocoons, they maintain self-absorbed, self-satisfied lifestyles without expanding their circles of intention. Recent studies suggest that, compared to those with lower social status and less income, people with greater status or income express less empathy, act less ethically, and give proportionately less to others in need.
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Whatever intrinsic growth influential people have – and they don’t deserve all the credit for it any more than David deserves blame – more is needed. Due to the power they wield, their further intrinsic growth is essential for societal well-being.

If individuals are reluctant or unable to cause their own intrinsic growth, though, what could encourage them? I’ve emphasized individual heart, mind, and will so far, but nothing in this book is meant to suggest that our lives are entirely within our own personal control.
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External conditions matter. Social structures matter. Agyare and Awuah
both credit their initiative to supportive parents who always encouraged their endeavors. Sreenivasa’s life would be very different if she had been born not in rural South India, but in Sweden, Soviet Russia, or Saudi Arabia.

But external circumstances as an individual perceives them are often under human control as society’s collective actions. The legal freedoms you enjoy, the tax rate you pay, the public education available to you and your neighbors, and the culture in which you are immersed are not products of decisions you make on your own, but they are human choices nonetheless.
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Would individuals be better off with improved health care? Better education? Stronger communities? Would citizens be better off with wiser leaders? Future-focused policies? Separation of wealth and state? Absolutely. But these require better intention, discernment, and self-control at the level of whole societies – what you might call
societal intrinsic development
.

Of course, societies are infinitely complex, and social norms are notoriously difficult to alter. Large-scale social problems, though, are not intractable. Change may be slow, hard, and entangled in complex issues, but it happens. Most of us have witnessed it within our lifetimes, which should give us hope that mass social change is not a fluke. By considering cases of societal intrinsic development, we can see how they’re connected to individual intrinsic growth.

A Billion Shifts in Aspiration

William Blake saw the world in a grain of sand; I saw India in a taxi driver. I met Narasimha through a dial-up cab service one day when I needed to go to the airport. I was used to drivers who called five minutes late only to tell me it would be another ten minutes. So this time I had specified a much earlier pickup than I needed. Narasimha, however, showed up ten minutes ahead of time. On the road, he was unlike other Bangalore drivers. He didn’t seem to have an insistent death wish. He was safe and steady.

We started a conversation, but when we hit the limits of my Kannada, Narasimha switched to Hindi. When that, too, proved insufficient,
he switched to broken English. I learned that he was unmarried and came from a village a couple of hours outside of Bangalore. His family farmed, but an uncle had introduced him to the taxi business. Narasimha’s dream was to own his own car, and he had nearly saved what he needed to purchase one. As we approached the airport terminal, he handed me a business card and asked me to call him whenever I needed a ride. By calling him directly, I would be cutting out the middleman.

And so I did. Narasimha worked smart and hard. I sometimes had flights leaving at two o’clock or six o’clock in the morning, but he never turned down the 30-kilometer ride to the airport. Sometimes he was committed to multiday tours outside of Bangalore and would call up one of his “brothers” – friends from his network of fellow drivers – to substitute. He would then call me before the meeting time to let me know the driver was coming and confirm during the ride that I had been picked up. His friends all got me to the airport, but none as promptly, safely, or reliably as Narasimha.

One day Narasimha arrived in a shiny white Ford Icon. It was the first car he owned himself, and it meant that he was his own man. He no longer had to rent cars from the cab fleet. I happened to be his first ride, and he beamed when I congratulated him. He pampered his vehicle, and on each subsequent trip, I noticed he had acquired something new for it: a carpeted cover for his dashboard, rear speakers, blingy LEDs for the deity on his dashboard, and eventually a stereo with a CD player. I asked Narasimha, now that he had his own car, what he wanted most in his life. He said he wanted to trade up to a larger vehicle. He also wanted to find a suitable husband for his younger sister – he had to raise enough dowry to be able to do this. It seemed the next generation of Narasimha’s family would be raised in a world very different from the one in which he had been brought up.

Narasimha is part of a national shift in India. He represents a new stratum of Indian society that is rapidly climbing out of poverty. It’s driven in part by the country’s growing wealth and in part by a wave of mass intrinsic growth. Although Narasimha grew up in a poor rural family, the combination of basic education, self-motivation, and economic opportunity puts him in a new category. He’s somewhere
between the vast population of the extreme poor who haven’t yet seen much change and the historical upper classes. He and his peers are transitioning en masse from low-income survival to middle-class security.

In the sociological classic
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
, Max Weber suggested that Christian Protestantism, and specifically its tendency to see worldly work as virtue, provided the spark for modern capitalism. Had he witnessed what I saw in Narasimha, though, he might have reconsidered his thesis. Ironically, the “Hindu rate of growth” was once a term of derision used by Indian intellectuals to complain about the country’s 1.3 percent per year growth in per capita income, a snail’s pace that lasted from independence in 1947 through the 1980s. In the 1990s, though, the Indian economy took off. From 1992 to 2010, India’s GDP growth averaged 6 to 7 percent a year, at times hitting 8 or 9 percent even during the global recession. If Weber were born a hundred years later and 6,000 kilometers southeast, he might have overlooked Protestant worldly asceticism as the cause of rational industry, and instead pointed to a Hindu ethic to work uncomplainingly at the task at hand. Or, if he had visited modern China, he might have linked Confucian discipline to modernization.
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