This is my third essay about the social-science writer Malcolm Gladwell's work as characterizing secular America's reigning ideology, and—again—I am nervous about singling Gladwell out. I've done so only because of both the breadth and prestige of his writing; if there's any official version of reality in our élite media, this is it.
How to conclude? With the cult of success, or of talent, or of technology, or of innovation, or of expertise? None of these is very new or startling, and they've all found far more noxious expressions than in the prose of Gladwell, who shows a strong concern for reform, fairness, and opportunity. But all of these idolatries center on human ability, and might crudely be lumped under "the cult of sweeping competence"—a fitting cause for a highly skilled, persuasive author. Here is an example that struck me, because of some circumstances in my own background.
"Case Study: Suicide, Smoking, and the Unsticky Cigarette" is a chapter in Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000), a rapt study of "social epidemics," with an emphasis on how they originate—and how they can be stopped when necessary. Suicide, plainly, could use some prevention. But as everywhere in Gladwell, the appearance of problem-solving is much more important than the problem, even a life-or-death one like this.
Having built up the "social epidemic" argument as literally compelling drama, Gladwell seems stuck within it himself. He can see the problem of suicide only as a "contagious" teenage fad, and so he posits nothing that might be done about it—on the Pacific islands where his account has concentrated, or elsewhere. "Boys will be boys" is close to how he sums up:
What is tragic about this is not that these little boys were experimenting. Experimenting is what little boys do. What is tragic is that they have chosen to experiment with something that you cannot experiment with. Unfortunately, there isn't ever going to be a safer form of suicide, to save the teenagers of Micronesia.
I Googled "Micronesia 'Social Problems' " and immediately found "Youth Suicide and Social Change in Micronesia," by Donald H. Rubenstein (Kagoshima Research Center for the Pacific Island Occasional Papers #36, Dec. 2002), a report pursuant to an epidemiological study. Rubenstein provides useful data that Gladwell's informants must have known and that he himself should at least have suspected. Micronesia changed rapidly but not thoroughly from a subsistence economy to a consumer one, and in the same manner from a tribal to a modern society. The patchwork revolution was much harder on young men, whose roles were more often redefined and in many cases diminished.
The domestic conflicts Gladwell depicts as the immediate impetus for suicides, downplaying them so as to play up mere imitation of peers as a decisive force, took on a deeper significance when I read Rubenstein's remarks that at sexual maturity boys had customarily moved out of their parents' homes to live with other relatives or unrelated young men—an option less available in postcolonial society, which may not be equipped to handle the resulting new tensions. Also, alcohol, unknown to the indigenous culture, was restricted or banned until the 1960s—when, as Gladwell reports, the suicide rate began to rise—and by the 1970s, government reports and conferences marked concern about young men's drinking. Alcohol appeared to be involved in up to half of suicides.
Gladwell doesn't only fail to touch on these conditions or the possibility that local people might want to discuss and adjust them. He actually shows a strong prejudice against the idea that anything can be done for any problem on the inside, in traditional ways—much less that the loss of traditional ways is the main cause of any problem. It's only experts who understand and can help—and if it's not clear how they can, then nobody can.
Tied into the chapter's theme of how to stop youth from self-destructive behavior is the topic of smoking, and the author insists that the obvious sources of authority are useless: "As any parent of a teenage child will tell you, the essential contrariness of adolescents suggests that the more adults inveigh against smoking and lecture teenagers about its dangers, the more teens, paradoxically, will want to try it."
He goes on to quote experts in the same vein, not bringing to the surface what they self-interestedly repress. It's the public anti-smoking campaigns, masterpieces of their own and allied fields, that have failed, the "propaganda," the anti-smoking commercials beside the anti-stubble and anti-static-cling ones. And it's parental authority that didn't get a chance, during decades when divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and households with two parents working full-time proliferated. But instead of noting this, Gladwell turns to a rather far-fetched hope, of a new kind of cigarette that is "unsticky," nonaddictive, so that young people can experiment with smoking without serious risks.
The author seems to represent quite a labored intellectual system, which exists mainly to void the system that has worked well for millennia. During my childhood, there were certainly smoking "Salesmen" such as Gladwell describes, cool kids who made forbidden things fascinating, but my father cut off their influence with a single conversation when I was eleven or twelve. As he drove me home from a birthday party and asked what it had been like, I blurted that the hostess and her other guests had passed around a cigarette.
Where were the adults? That's what my father wanted to know. I answered with a short version of the following. The hostess' mother had been in the kitchen with a friend, talking and smoking, and the children and teenagers in the living room had discussed whether they themselves could light up—would the women see or smell it? Finally, someone lit a cigarette, peered into the kitchen to make sure the adults weren't paying attention, then took a drag; other children did the same.
I'd had a hunch that the two women weren't really deep in conversation but just ignoring us in an ironic, amused way—but I don't think I could have articulated that impression at the time, so I probably didn't share it with my father. In any case, he was outraged and told me I was never to go to that house again.
I didn't; I didn't want to. I and my close friends felt safe and comfortable with such negations, which seemed to open up on the other side to things that were much more appealing. I had a more explicit experience of this as a teenager, when my father found out about pot use at my school: in deference to my advancing age, he forbade nothing but gave me a stack of articles from peer-reviewed medical journals to back up his assertion that pot smoking was likely to impair my academic performance and thus reduce my chances of becoming a professor like himself.
Well, not one like himself, it turned out: my rebellion took the form of choosing ancient languages and not biology as a field. He disapproved and said so. I cursed and cried and slammed doors. It was partly to spite him that I completed my Classics BA in three years, summa cum laude, and won the country's richest fellowship for Greek and Latin doctoral study, at Berkeley, only to turn that opportunity down and sign up at Harvard, a most unfriendly place for a middle-class midwesterner with literary ambitions. That was one of my many idiotic decisions, and far from the worst. But I never smoked a cigarette. Once in college I burned a whole box of them one by one, holding them in my hand as part of a Halloween costume—I went to a party as the host, whom I had a crush on, and who looked as dazzlingly insouciant with his smokes as any of the "permission-giving" Salesmen Gladwell describes—but I never put a filter to my lips; it had been ruled out for me long ago.
A few days ago, I read Eyal Press' Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (2012), about four people who stood up against authority for what they felt was right: a Swiss official who refused to deport refugee Jews back to Nazi Austria; a Serb who saved Croats from his fellow Serbs in 1991 Yugoslavia; a member of an élite Israeli Defense Force unit who resigned in protest over Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory; and the stockbroker who blew the whistle on Allen Stanford's ponzi scheme. I knew that Gladwell was an influential writer, but I had never expected to see his framework on such an unsuitable topic as the exercise of conscience in the modern world.
Three of these individuals were patriotic—hardly an unusual quality in a Swiss civil servant, a man who had grown up on a kibbutz, and an immigrant to America who had made good—but the other, the Serb, emerges as a lackadaisical nonconformist who only partly articulated his motivations to Press as a persistent interviewer.
What, then, makes these four people "outliers," a Gladwellian term? Press creates, in each case, a virtual overlay of a Gladwell essay, emphasizing individual personality and circumstances as causes of social phenomena—but then covering for the inadequacy of these as explanation by adding sheer dismissals of more likely answers, and pleas of mystery and complexity.
The plain truth is that these four people are outliers not as heroes of conscience but as exceptions among heroes of conscience. he great majority of these make sacrifices for well-established, well-thought-out reasons—those of politics or religion. Though Press (in line with Gladwell's sentiments whenever he considers the state of society) implies that ideology wasn't vital for resistance to evil during an episode such as World War II, he is thoroughly mistaken. The largest national resistance then was Yugoslavia's, and they were communists; communists were the fiercest anti-Nazis anywhere. But the most self-sacrificing ones were religious: there were more than 2,700 clergy in the Dachau "Priests' Barracks" alone, many of whom were tortured and died without a murmur of concession.
Press does dilate on the ambiguity of an individual witness of the Thoreau sort, who does not want to lead, does not have a passion for defending the weak, does not deeply long for change, but is content to keep his own hands clean—two or three of these four "outliers" totter on the edge of this category: ejected or excused from taking part personally in evil, they just get on with their lives. But even through very ordinary people, ideology has created some striking contrasts to this attitude—and to its usual result, that evildoers go back to doing evil, not much disturbed by someone whose morality, as a purely personal preference, correlates to that of those few outliers on the opposite end of the social and emotional spectrum, the sadists. Both do what they do because they get satisfaction out of doing it. When the unpleasant consequences of doing it outweigh that satisfaction, they stop. Thoreau let his aunt pay his poll tax to support the war against Mexico and went home, never to return to jail. Press's Yugoslavian hero, for one, appears content with his single momentous intervention.
My favorite example of a true conscientious resister is Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian farmer and devout Catholic who during World War II envisioned, among other horrors, crowds of German-speaking people eagerly boarding a train for hell. Before being executed for refusing conscription into the German army, he wrote to his church's hierarchy seeking support, but received no friendly answers. Those immediately around him were hardly anxious for him to persist. He enjoyed, in fact, no prospect of a future on earth such as Press's resisters had: only a set of ideas.
He is remembered chiefly because he carefully documented these, believing—it is a common religious belief—that the witness of even one obscure person for God matters. His papers became the basis for a biography, which helped inspire Daniel Ellsberg to risk prison by leaking the Pentagon Papers, which helped end a war.
I've now gone far beyond Malcolm Gladwell—but maybe that suits this series of essays. I did want to suggest how extremely narrow a chink for looking through to the universe can be, even though the people who constructed it call it a whole planetarium.
—This is the concluding installment in a three-part series.
Sarah Ruden is a visiting scholar in classics at Brown University. She recently finished translating the Oresteia of Aeschylus for the Modern Library series with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. The Music Inside the Whale, and Other Marvels: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible is forthcoming from Knopf in 2014.
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