Something in Richard Florida’s Flight of the Creative Class struck home with me. In the first chapter, Florida responds to the many critics of Rise of the Creative Class including a sort of “I don’t have an agenda” defense where he says:
I work closely with mayors, governors, and business, political, and civic leaders from both sides of the aisle on economic-development issues. A good deal of the time, quite honestly, I can’t even tell who’s a Republican and who’s a Democrat–a welcome contrast to the bitterly polarized and broken-down state of our national politics.
I used to really care about politics…I was a Hill staffer 12 years ago when we glumly watched the fall of the House and Senate. Since then, my idealism has been redirected–I would not say it went away–but I clearly felt powerless in the political realm. Now, even with the Democratic reversal of fortune, I am older and wiser enough to know not to expect magic. Nancy Pelosi is not going to ride into town and save the country. The best we can hope for from politicians is that they will recognize the direction the wind is blowing and avoid making things worse, while non-political people try to make a difference.
I think Florida’s optimistic pragmatism is an inspiration. Recognizing that social progress and economic development are fundamentally-related, his view of the creative potential of all people offers an alternative to the divisiveness that serves only to distract and annoy us. We should be focused on things that matter for the future.
But it is all related. My home state of Virginia provided the final tip to give Democrats control of the Senate by elected Jim Webb by a razor-thin margin. But they also amended their constitution to prohibit gay marriage. That vote was not even close. By Florida’s Tolerance Index, VA just shot themselves in the foot. However it is senseless to make an argument that the people of Virginia should not have passed that amendment because it will hurt their economic development prospects. The vote is only evidence of the reality that Virginia is not as tolerant of gays as say Arizona, where a similar amendment was defeated…but then again, Arizona also passed an English-only amendment because they are fed up with all the Mexicans coming across the border.
It doesn’t fit. It’s the wrong question–to attempt to look at these issues directly and then relate them back to concepts of creativity, tolerance, and economic development. The issues are merely indicators of underlying attitudes and feelings that need to be understood and addressed in a more comprehensive and deeper manner. When the underlying concerns are resolved, the hot issues will cool off.
My writing about following the thread is an attempt tonight to find a way to tie together the book I just finished reading, Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman back to Economic Development. Tough. But there is a thread between all the books I have read recently; by simply following my interest I find resonance that I think speaks to the overall social issues raised here.
Social Intelligence is a more technical book; much of it is devoted to explaining the neuroscience behind how are brains are “wired to connect” with other people. I had not truly appreciated the power of empathy until reading this book. I don’t think the key lesson of the book is that social skills are as important as logical thinking, but I think Goleman gives us something to think about in summary with:
Those who would say that social intelligence amounts to little more than general intelligence applied to social situations might do better to reason the other way around: to consider that general intelligence is merely a derivative of social intelligence, albeit one our culture has come to value highly.
Our brains are complex; they operate on several levels. People like me who read and write so much, spend most of their time exercising the rational side of things. But the social side is not only important, it is inseparable and it is the route to the kind of insights Malcom Gladwell talks about in “Blink.” I also observe, from personal experience as a runner and cyclist, that there can be such a thing as “physical intelligence” as well–maybe it is just motor coordination, but the brain is definitely involved in making the body comply with our rational (or irrational, perhaps) decisions to say, run a marathon.
The exciting thing about Social Intelligence is that we are not completely hard-wired. OK, maybe in middle age, it is too late to go from being a hard-core introvert to an extrovert. But as we exercise different patterns of experiencing life, our brains do build, repair, strengthen, and favor certain neural pathways.
How we find the path differs depending on the type of learning. Reading books about being nice or friendly is a start, but to make a change, you have to go out and do stuff that stimulates the social areas of your brain. It would be like training for a marathon…you don’t just will yourself to do it. You run 3 miles, 4 miles, 5 miles…20 miles… Mentally, preparation is challenging. And arguably, it is not so qualitatively different from preparing for taking a major test like the bar exam. Despite what stereotypes might say, athletes have to be smart.
Solving social problems requires a social brain. We can’t just diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution. But we can’t just take pragmatic action either. There is a vision component, a rational component, but also an emotional and social component…
We need to exercise our empathy skills, perhaps not to understand why, for example, gays make Virginians so uncomfortable, but to communicate our genuineness. Back in college, I wanted to write a thesis on race relations issues in Virginia…to somehow understand and reconcile how “good people” could be so racist. How could kindly old people think nothing of using the N-word or refer to the 70-year old black man who mowed the lawn as “my boy that cuts the grass?” When you think of people impersonally, it is easy to label them as bigots, racists, whatever…but when you know that these are people who care deeply about their families and are basically good people…what gives?
The answer I pull from Goleman…and it is a huge stretch I’m sure he never intended…is that why doesn’t matter. At some level, in order to engage the people we need in order to make change happen, we have to accept them for who they are. The analytic why and the justice impulse make us want to fight and strike down what is wrong…but there are too many to strike down. We need them to join us. We need to find a way to make the leap across these chasms without feeling that we are compromising our principles and without an agenda to change the people or argue them into submission to our right ways.
The link to economic development is that Richard Florida is right about a lot of things, but people are going to fight the vision because it makes them uncomfortable. It is not enough to demonstrate by research and statistics what may be empirically true. And it is not about winning the hearts and minds of people either. It is about repairing the broken social ties so that we can collectively move forward.
This is a blog, not a manifesto…I know…next entry will be more practical.
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