Malcolm Gladwell and
The Public Intellectual
With all the modern issues pundits and wise savants taking
advantage of our beloved Internet, public intellectualism has evolved into a
dais for freedom of speech and democracy. There are vast and almost immeasurable amounts
of blog posts and articles written every
day that are used as voices of change. Is this how its supposed to be? There are some
conflicting views that we will visit. Scholars such as John Donatich hold a
popular belief that a limited few, ones that are in the upper echelons of
society, relatively speaking, are public intellectuals who serve a purpose to
enlighten the rest of us. Another scholar,
Stephen Mack, challenges this view:
Any
argument for the public intellectual that, like Donatich’s, rests the
assumption that common citizens are forever childlike and must be led by a
class of experts is politically corrosive and historically dangerous.
Mack argues that this belief is wrong because it influences
the intellectuals to involve in extra effort to keep their work popular and to
really, protect their own reputations as revered public intellectuals.
Red
flag! Now if there is anything I remembered from psychology class in high
school, it is the naturalistic notion of the
self-serving bias.
Mack is correct in saying that there
shouldn’t be a select class to determine what the common folk need to know
because they may have alternate agendas that most probably involve
self-preservation.
Back to the huge collections of blogs and articles written
to share thoughts with readers all over the world.
Someone interesting that I bring up is
well-known and slightly eccentric writer Malcolm Gladwell.
He has written five best-selling books, was
discovered when working at the Washington Post, currently writes for
the New Yorker, has done much public speaking including a
TED talk, and to top it off, was
on
Time’s list of 100 most
influential people in year 2005!
Wow… seems like a lot.
If you are familiar with Gladwell, you’ll know that he likes to showcase
correlations between the most peculiar and unexpected events. He works like a detective and starts off with
data that doesn’t seem to add up in his mind.
In his first book, The Tipping
Point, Gladwell points out that many years ago, in the early 90’s, New York
City was incredibly dangerous. However,
when looking closer he noticed something else when studying the numbers:
In
1992, there were 2,154 murders in New York City and 626,182 serious crimes with
the weight of those crimes falling hardest in places like Brownsville and East
New York. But then something strange happened. At some mysterious and critical
point, the crime rate began to turn. It tipped.
Within five years, murders had dropped 64.3 percent to 770 and total
crimes had fallen by almost half to 355,893.
Gladwell goes on to explain that if one asked the New York
police department, they would tell you that the extreme drop in crime was
because the “city’s policing strategies dramatically improved.” Criminologists
would attribute the drop to the downturn of the crack drug trade or to aging of
the population. He even talked to
economists who told him that it could be due to the improvement in the economy
that allowed more individuals to find jobs instead of getting into trouble on
the streets. This still did not sit well
with Gladwell. Since policing strategies, narcotics control, and the improvement
in the economy are all gradual changes and cannot account for the sharp decline
in crime. He came to the conclusion that
this very enigma was a result of the Tipping
Point:
Ideas
and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do… It wasn't
that some huge percentage of would-be murderers suddenly sat up in 1993 and
decided to commit any more crimes… Somehow a large number of people in New York
got “infected” with an anti crime virus in a short time… The name given to that
one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is
the Tipping Point.
It’s an interesting idea if you ask me. There are some other perspectives on this:
Economist Steven Levitt reevaluates this mystery and comes to the conclusion
that it has much to do with Roe vs. Wade and abortion being legalized in the
70’s. The number of unwanted births
significantly decreased and as a result, crime rates dropped:
The
homicide rate of young males (especially young Black males) temporarily
skyrocketed in the late 1980s, especially in urban centers like Los Angeles,
New York City, and Washington, DC, before returning to regular levels soon
thereafter. These young males who were hitting their peak crime years were born
right around the time abortion was legalized.
Was Gladwell or Levitt correct on this topic? Who knows…
Perhaps they both are in their own way.
What both these intellectuals did is they challenged the way people
think of things.
Gladwell writes about a wide array of topics ranging from
professional hockey players to plane crashes.
For example, in his book Outliers,
Gladwell provides the reader with a player roster of the 2007 Medicine Hat
Tigers, which gives the players’ information such as height/weight, position,
hometown, and birthdate. Seems
completely random right? He then continues to explain that if one takes a
closer look at the roster, they will notice something incredibly strange: a
whopping 70 percent of the players were born in January, February, March, or
April. This could not just happen by
chance, and Gladwell attributes it to the cutoff date for little boys' hockey
leagues:
It’s
simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January
1. A boy who turns ten on January 2,
then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of
the year – and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve month gap in age
represents an enormous difference in physical maturity… Coaches start to select
players for the all star teams at the age of nine or ten, and of course they
are more likely to view as talented the bigger and more coordinated players,
who have had the benefit of critical extra months of maturity. And what happens when a player gets chosen
for a rep squad? He gets better coaching, and his teammates are better, and he
plays fifty or seventy-five games a season instead of twenty games a season
like those left in the “house league”… and from there [the player is more
likely to get] into the big leagues.
And just like that Gladwell showed his millions of readers
that success isn’t completely based off hard work and self-merit. He explains in Outliers, that this cut off system has the same effect on baseball
players in America. Not what you would expect, right? He included in his book another bizarre story relating plane crashes to the pilots' background
culture growing up. After providing data
and figures involving large scale plane crashes all over the world, Gladwell
pointed out that in addition to technical problems of the aircraft and bad
weather, there was another correlation to the crashes: culture. He brings up
Hofstede’s dimensions and explains why factors such as uncertainty avoidance,
and power-distance affect how the pilots make decisions when flying a
plane. National Geographic published an
article on it’s website citing Gladwell’s work:
Gladwell
argued that in Colombia, as in Korea, cultural norms tended to dictate that
people avoid directly questioning authority. To Gladwell, this may have
explained why Korean Air Flight 801 crashed into a hill while on approach to an
airport in Guam in 1997, killing 223 people. In addition to a series of
misfortunes, including bad weather, an offline warning system, and outdated
charts, the co-pilot was afraid to question the poor judgment of the pilot,
wrote Gladwell—a fatal mistake.
Although experts in fields such as crime, hockey, baseball,
and aviation may prefer to provide alternate explanations for some of these
events, it is important that Malcolm Gladwell wrote what he did. He was merely trying to show that events in
general, have a wide variety of causes and it is our duty to dig a little
deeper.
Is this what public intellectualism should be like? Should children be dismayed if they weren’t
born at the most opportune or advantageous times of the year in order to be professional
hockey players? Should discourse of “non-experts” be widely read and trusted?
Does work like Gladwell’s deserve to be a catalyst for change? Is there a standard for how and what evidence
is used in coming to conclusions? The
answer to all these questions can be disputed over and over again by hundreds
of scholars.
What I do know is that Malcolm Gladwell is doing what Mack
mentioned in his blog article: “prod, poke, and pester the powerful
institutions” that seem to be ordinary to most of us. Do keep in mind that Gladwell received a one
million dollar advance to start writing his book The Tipping Point. However
this does not concur with Donatich’s view because Malcolm Gladwell is not part
of the select class of experts that should dominate public
intellectualism. In fact, there are many
skeptics of Gladwell’s cases and many believe that he may not be the most
evidentially sound writer. I would urge
people to not linger on the fact that Gladwell received a hefty advance because
most people do have alternate agendas of why they are writing what they are
writing. I do not necessarily think that
this is the self-serving bias that Mack discussed. Some facts we will never know. That doesn’t
mean that we should undermine the work. If
it has substance, we should tune in.
Gladwell prods, pesters, and pokes you until that “ohhhhh” moment jumps out and smacks you
in the face. You can't help but question
conventional wisdom. By showcasing the correlations
between random and unexpected events, Gladwell simply “keeps the pot boiling”
as Mack would say. Although some of
Gladwell’s spiels and cock-and-bull tales may seem like a little bit of a
stretch sometimes, they still provide some substance to that simmering pot,
perhaps even causing it to boil. The key
word here is “public” and everyone knows to take public stuff with a grain of
salt. Mack puts it nicely: “The measure
of public intellectual work is not whether the people are listening, but
whether they’re hearing things worth talking about.”
