Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them - Hardcover

Introduction: The Nerd Dilemma

or Why Ashton Kutcher Is Your Kid's Worst Nightmare

Not so long ago, in the days of classic television shows like The Twilight Zone, people were entertained by the “alien visitor” exercise: If beings from another planet were visiting America, what would they think of us? What would they conclude about how our society works? The exercise was weird, and fun, because it invited us to look at ourselves with a fresh eye, to examine what might not otherwise draw our attention because it is so familiar. The alien visitor has gone on to be a comedy staple since then—think the Coneheads, Mork and Mindy, or Third Rock from the Sun—and although the ponderous self-examination of Rod Serling has been replaced by something much lighter, or sillier (depending on how ponderous one is feeling on any given day), the exercise is still a good one. With that in mind, I ask you, dear reader, the following question: Have you ever watched Beauty and the Geek?

Imagine you were a visitor from another planet and you watched an episode, or (God forbid) the entire season of Ashton Kutcher's recent venture into television “reality.” If you were an alien visitor, you would learn one important thing about American culture: American earthlings come in two subgroups. There are beautiful people who appear to be hotly desired by everyone else for something called “sex” and there are ugly people who are not desired at all for the thing called “sex.” And then there are intelligent people, who seem to know an awful lot, and stupid people, who seem to be, well, really stupid. And here's the really interesting part, if you're the alien visitor: All the really intelligent people are ugly, and all the beautiful people are dumber than a box of rocks.

A charitable alien might say, “How nice! How fair! All the good qualities human earthlings demonstrate are distributed so nicely and fairly! No one gets to be beautiful and smart, and no one has to be dumb and ugly!” A less charitable alien might say, “How nice! They will be easy to conquer because the smart ones all want to mate with the dumb ones, and therefore earthlings will never get any smarter! We won't need much more than a weed whacker to take over this whole planet!”

Whatever the extraterrestrial aliens might end up thinking, they've got a lot to mull over when they watch Beauty and the Geek. But my point is not about those aliens. It is about the little terrestrial aliens already in our midst: our children. Children are just like those aliens; even the cultures they are born into are alien to them. They need to make sense of the adult world, the world of their own culture, and they approach this world with alien eyes. Some of the rules are easy to learn: their native language, what to eat and what not to eat:—things that are simple enough. But learning complex cultural constructs takes time and practice and maturity. And the more complicated a cultural construct is, the more time and growth it takes for kids to get it.

That's what this book is about: how kids learn the complicated constructs “nerd” and “geek.” Even the subtle distinction between nerds and geeks is not easy for kids or grown-ups to learn, as we shall see. But learning the whole complex is an even larger undertaking. American kids are not born knowing what a nerd is, and what they learn and how they learn it says a tremendous amount about them and, of course, about us, the adults doing the cultural transmission. This book is about how we let kids in on the notion that beauty and brains are mutually exclusive…well, sort of. As I said, the notion is complicated. But this book is also about what happens when you send a complicated message to an uncomplicated recipient. What parts of the message are received, and in what order? Because kids are a lot less complicated than we are, they get the message in parts. This book is about the parts: what parts of the message kids get first, what they get later, and what effect it has on them.

If you watch Beauty and the Geek for a whole season (an exercise I wouldn't wish on a dog, but never mind that), you'll see that the message really does get complicated. Toward the end of the season, the “beauties,” all beautiful women who appear to have IQs hovering somewhere on the basement stairs, try to teach the “geeks” something about being beautiful. And indeed, the geeks, people who look like they are allergic to every kind of soap, become somewhat more beautiful. Because all's fair in Kutcherworld, the geeks do the same for the beauties. Toward the end of the season, they try to teach the gorgeous young women to be smarter, and the gorgeous young women do indeed learn a lot of things. So one could argue that the message of the show, even for kids, is that people do not have to be stuck in their stereotypes: People can change and become multidimensional. Whether or not kids get this message is another story, as we shall see later.

Beauty and the Geek is not really so unusual; it has the formal properties of a lot of popular culture. It's actually a lot like the Berenstain Bears books for children or The Simpsons. Papa Bear or Homer Simpson might learn a lesson or two in the course of an episode, but by the beginning of the next episode he has reverted to his old stupid, infantile self. If he didnít revert, he wouldn't be Papa Bear or Homer Simpson. It's not a bildungsroman, and we shouldnít expect it to be, right? So what Beauty and the Geek might teach our little aliens is that some clueless, ugly, smart people can be rehabilitated, and some moronic sex objects can be enlightened. But it takes effort, a lot of effort, and of course when the next season starts you realize there is an unending supply of moronic beauties and ugly geeks in the world. Let's just say that no matter how uplifting the late-stage transformation, it never calls the show's basic premise—that beauty and brains are mutually exclusive—into question.

How Nerds Are Like WASPs, Except When They're Not

So this book is about the process of stereotype acquisition and the nerd/geek stereotype in particular. But anyone writing about stereotypes needs to come clean about his own attitudes and his own positions about a particular stereotype and stereotyping in general. So, being a responsible citizen, I state my own biases here: I don't think the nerd/geek stereotype is particularly healthy for kids or for American society. I don't think kids should have to give up things they really love, even if they are nerdy or geeky things, in order to get a date. I don't think hunky scientists should have to pose for beefcake calendars just to prove there is such a thing as a hunky scientist. And I don't think kids or grown-ups should be so eager to punish “geeky” enthusiasm with shaming, even if the enthusiasm is for arcane things.

It is this last point that is most important, at least to me. I spend a lot of time with kids, and I like them because they are kids. One of the things that makes kids kids is their lack of self-consciousness, and one of the things that most distinguishes nerdy kids from nonnerdy kids is exactly this quality, as we shall see later on. One might say that the kids whom others label as really nerdy are the ones who are the last to develop the self-consciousness of adolescence or, in other words, the last to grow up. The weird enthusiasms, the willingness to cooperate with adults, the lack of social skills—all these things seem nerdy and pathetic to sophisticated,...