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I was a smart kid in grade school, smart enough to read a Boy Scout Master’s manual which warned him that smarter Scouts might identify with adults, and the Scoutmaster too, instead of their peers. Yes. I preferred Mr. Sulu and Chief Engineer Scott over Ensign Chekov. And Ensign Wesley.
In high school, in my day, alas, there was no computer club for me to escape to. I survived, tempering my frustration by using humour, to the limited degree that any adolescent can detach with humour from his milieu. Luckily I was a nerd, so I could resist peer pressure by knowing that other space-times were different. This was back when boys wore long hair, had peace sign belt buckles, and claimed to believe in building a better world, better that what the older generation had achieved. But in reality? When I carried a slim blue volume about social reformers, (Such as the headmaster who ended school bullying at Rugby) the students taking algebra all asked what class it was for. Sensing they wouldn’t care, I didn’t share my enthusiasm for historic reform.
As an adult, I became a web essayist, partly because of the essay site of computer millionaire Paul Graham. I found his site, while lurking on a Live Journal net of polyamory computer programers, because one of them linked to show the others one of Graham’s famous essays: Why Nerds Are Unpopular (in high school) Graham asks: If nerds are smart enough to hack tests, then why aren’t they smart enough to look around and hack the tricks to being popular? Graham answers: They might think they want to be popular, but what they want far more is to be smart. So they follow their interests, even if it means being less interested in ordinary life.
Maybe, in the space-time of 1950’s popular culture, for regular teens, their interests follow the line of Main Street between the high school and the Malt shop hang out. For them, that’s the world. Living as if under a strobe light showing only the present. Another year, in 2029, most students, a month before they turn 18 and get the right to vote, still won’t know whom their local and regional representatives are—but they’ll know where they plan to drink on their birthday.
During college, a few years back, as covid emerged, I think nerds were too earnest to congregate during “Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale; yahoo!” Regular students, though, had no problem conforming to congregate. None of them expressed any doubts or shame to the TV news crews.
(Graham has an essay on nerds “being earnest,” a quality that, he says, is NOT what succeeds for being cool in high school, or on snap social media—yet another reason I despise such media)
Speaking of glamorous Fort Lauderdale, Graham pointed out that nerds starting a new computer software company would want to find local millionaires to fund their startup venture. The problem? While regular millionaires, like regular people, like to live in the glamour cities like Miami and Vegas, nerds like to live in the smaller walkable places like San Francisco and Boulder—adding that while regular people like a loud flashy disco, nerds may prefer a cafe or used bookstore. For me that was comforting to know—whew!— since a scientific corner in the back of my brain had wondered if there was something wrong because I didn’t like the loud glamour that others did.
Another thing I’ve become reconciled to: At university the average student, despite having, by definition, an above average I.Q., is nevertheless not smart enough to be a nerd: He won’t call himself a scholar. Furthermore, something I’ve noticed at several campuses: The tavern for undergraduates will be on the ground floor, dim, with few if any windows, and with, often, overly-loud music. It might as well be an establishment non-student bar. But some students, I learned, will have a membership in the Graduate Student Society, entitling them to use the grad student’s hangout/restaurant/bar. Such a difference I see at my old campus! High in the air, big windows all along the wall, bright overhead lights, soft music to allow meaning-of-life conversations. That lounge is comforting to me as I reflect that, hey, here are my sort of students! (Incidentally, the faculty lounge, also well lit, is still higher)
Previously I mentioned that the main definition of a nerd, besides being quite intelligent, is being quite independent of society’s fashions for clothing and beliefs. The closest comparison, I guess, would be artists: They may not know much about science, but they know that if they are to follow their art and fearlessly express their Truth, then they must remain independent of what society thinks. Hence their jeans might have decorations sewn on, and their T-shirt might be topped with a neck scarf. No constraining business suits to constrain their thinking. To help “close their ears” to their natural herd instinct artists may remove themselves to a remote cabin or an artist colony.
Artists and nerds are likely to know: If you believe everything your society believes, hook, line and sinker, then you mi-i-i-ght want to think about whether such conformity is truly coincidence, or not.
There is a big problem with following your path of Truth to see where it leads, as commercial artists know: “Conventional people are roused to fury” by someone who is different. So said a Noble Prize winner in the early 20th century. Lord Bertrand Russell. Or as a smart science fiction character put it, “A pink monkey is torn apart by the brown monkeys.” Russell’s strategy among his relatives was to achieve the position of a “licensed lunatic” because he would make it clear, “even to the stupidest” that he was not criticizing them. Me too. I was once in a general studies college class (on Outstanding Lives) where my peers affectionately called me “professor.” They said I was “not arrogant” so I was OK.
As I see it, to be a pink monkey that rolls in the mud to look safely brown, is to “nerd proof.” Truly an excellent skill, provided I copy regular folks only from awareness, not from fear. No chance, then, of looking like a cartoon nerd poster, while carefully being “non arrogant” and gentle with “even the stupidest.”
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Next Week, MORE ABOUT NERD PROOFING … although three essay in a row on one topic may be pushing the envelope. I’ll check to see if there’s any interest.
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Sean Crawford
December
In the cold shadow of the Rocky Mountains
Footnote: The Outstanding Lives we took were three, all from our century, all of whom died an untimely death: Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Simone Veil. The latter, during the German occupation of France, wrote the shortest work I ever bought as a textbook, The Poem of Force, comparing the Nazi armies to the armies of Homer’s poem of the Trojan War.
