I cannot tell you how many times in the last 12 hours I have gotten the question, “So, what IS your deal with Malcolm Gladwell?” Well, I could tell you but the answer is not at all flattering to me, so I won’t tell you. The deal is this: Mr. Gladwell is good with the words. He is artful at taking a piece of research which I could not care less about and describing it in a way that makes it interesting. He is also able to take the conclusion of that research and connect it to a societal issue. Not bad, huh?
Well, that depends. Take the article he wrote on brain damage and football for the most recent New Yorker. In it he deftly and compellingly outlines the emerging research on the long term effect of brain injuries sustained during football games. Good stuff which I had not seen so clearly described before. He also seeks to connect football and dog fighting. With the continuing story of Michael Vick in the zeitgeist, one can understand Malcolm Gladwell going there. But the connection, once made, is never fully explicated. Half baked, it seems to be presented as a novel statement which, being obvious, needs no further exploration.
But the fact that athletes in general are asked to sacrifice their health and maybe their lives for our entertainment is not a new idea. In addition to introducing us to Renee Zellweger, “Jerry Maguire” did a nice job of exploring this moral territory. When it comes to football specifically, and especially to the ambiguous relationships between player and fan; poverty and wealth; and black and white, Michael Lewis did that already to great effect in The Blind Side.
In the one book of Malcolm Gladwell’s which I have read, Blink, this same fault arises. Early in the writing, we learn that people make decisions and judgements about other people much more quickly than we would like to admit. Compelling stuff, but the narrative doesn’t go much farther than that. In another recent New Yorker article, Gladwell decries the failure of Southern Liberals to bring about societal change because they did not work to change institutionalized racism, preferring instead to attempt to change individual’s attitudes. One of his main examples of this is Atticus Finch. Finch, of course, is a fictional character. Harper Lee, who created Finch to be an example for an alternative to impersonal and institutional solutions to a problem rooted in individual attitudes, is a real person. Despite her obvious discomfort with the spotlight, she produced a compelling alternative to re-enacting Reconstruction using modern uniforms.
By focusing on the character rather than the act of popularizing that character, Mr. Gladwell misses the point. But we are sure not to miss his, because he will make it again. And again. And once again. Despite his research and literary abilities, Mr. Gladwell’s conclusions are often shallow and unsupported. Rather than observing a phenomenon and finding multiple perspectives that confirm or deny the truth which the phenomenon seems to illustrate, Gladwell takes other phenomena and fits them into the same matrix. While the connections he makes are sometimes inventive and often well described, they are ultimately incomplete.
That’s the deal with Malcolm Gladwell.