Is Malcolm Gladwell "America’s most important public intellectual"? That's not a title I would have granted him. But the author of this piece makes an interesting case for Gladwell being central to public intellectual life, of a certain sort, in the US across the past decade:
He is an intellectual hedonist: his big idea is that ideas should be pleasurable. Rather than trying to persuade, he seeks to infect readers with his enthusiasms: isn’t this interesting? This ethos has birthed a whole publishing industry. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that, without Gladwell, there would no Freakonomics, no Nudge, no TED Talks, no “Smart Thinking” section in Waterstones. For those who find the whole genre unbearably superficial, Gladwell is to blame.
That seems plausible to me. It reminds me of a discussion in the 1990s between two observers of American religion; the one on the left said "public theology is dead, there are no public theologians," etc., etc.. Meanwhile, the one on the right said "public theology is more powerful and influential than ever! The most important public theologian these days is Rev. James Dobson, of Focus on the Family." When I read that exchange, I knew that we scholars were looking at different phenomena, depending on our prior assumptions, and that in this case the scholar more on the right had a very important point. Maybe the same is true in this instance.
I admit, I worry a bit about Gladwell being the gold standard. Note, this is not because I do not enjoy his writing, or his podcast; I haven't kept up with "Revisionist History" very well, but several of the episodes are amazing, especially the one about the song "Hallelujah" and the nature of artistic creativity--seriously, if you haven't heard that one, I think from the first season of RH, you should do so: it's about creativity, tradition, the way that a single work of art can be created by multiple hands, the nature of different kinds of intellects across the life span, and so much more.
But a lot of Gladwell's pieces seem heavily produced, and produced not to make a point, but to amuse. Do they amount to anything more than that? I'm not sure. What is he trying to do? Is "intellectual hedonism" a good name for it? Who wants that, and why would they want only that?
It's a serious question for me. I think that intellectuals should help us see deeper into the world. Gladwell's basic point seems to be that there is no deeper to see:
Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point, drew from medicine and sociology to describe how behaviours spread through populations in the manner of epidemics. Published in 2000, it became a global bestseller. He effectively reinvented the position of public intellectual for readers who aren’t interested in rarefied academic debate but in ideas that make new sense of the world. The Tipping Point’s emphasis on the way that apparently small changes in policy can have big effects opened the way to the popularisation of behavioural economics. His 2005 book Blink helped change the way people think about the strengths and pitfalls of intuitive decision-making. Outliers (2008) did the same for the equation of talent, effort and success – a theme he picked up again in David and Goliath (2013). Here, the moral heart of his work resides. While we tend to attribute success to individual genius, Gladwell wants us to see it as a function of situation. Insiders are just outsiders who, through a combination of luck, guile and endeavour, got through the door.
What he is, is an evangelist of accident, an anti-Hegel, a poet of contingency. This little thing happened, and then this, and this, and now we have this big thing, and we think the scale of the reality must be echoed in the scale and significance of its cause, but it isn't. That's his fundamental gospel. Things are interesting. But do they amount to anything like a vision of the world or a conspiracy theory? No--that would be something left for theologians and cranks.
In a way he's distilling a lot of the logic of post-1970s social science, which is his jam. A lot of that blanched from its elders' vast, secular theologizing about major social concerns; that got us Marxism, the new critics said, and vatic German professors opining about the hippies and conformism, and the Vietnam war. Scholars recoiling from that opted instead for "middle-range" theorizing. Here you don't ask big questions about what the basic structures of meaning and moral order; you just hover a bit above empirical minutiae, and study what it can tell you, without getting too carried away. (I think one of my favorite bits of this work, "the strength of weak ties" thesis, is really terrific, though the modesty with which it is often communicated belies the profundity of its potential implications. But I would say that, wouldn't I? Because, after all, I am a real theologian.) It used to be that the social sciences were a way of doing social theory, and thinkers like Albert Hirschman or Orlando Patterson or Daniel Bell or Mary Douglas were the legitimate heirs of Weber and Durkheim. Now "social theory" sounds much more like something a philosopher would do. And a philosopher is someone who opines about politics and society but without any immediate responsibility to any empirical data.
There's lots of reason to complain that the social sciences who have gone down this path are fundamentally and improperly unimaginative, content to stay within the bourgeois confines of pre-given social facts. I launch those complaints myself, from time to time. Gladwell gets a lot of flack for not being very critical of the work he is interested in, or the thinkers he studies. As the article points out, he's an ironist.
This seems to me -- and here you should beware of me -- why I find him interesting, but finally also dissatisfiying. He's kind of the journalist equivalent of Richard Rorty: a liberal ironist, interested in contingency because there's nothing larger or deeper in which to be interested. But he lacks the missionizing zeal of Rorty's fundamentally existential and birthright commitment to socialism. So where Rorty would sometimes unsheath a longsword and start swinging it around, astonishing (and sometimes terrifying) everyone in his vicinity (I mean all this metaphorically; I never saw him actually wield any bladed weapon) with his insistence on strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest, Gladwell is not interested in revolution or apocalypse; that would harsh his mojo too much.
Here, I think, is an interesting clue: He's interested not in revolution but in immersion; the piece talks about how much he wants his work to be "an immersive experience," something captivating. I think this is a deep clue to a lot of our internet-narcotized and social-media-doped world we live in. All the technologies are designed to be immersive--to saturate your conscience, overwhelm your capacity to see beyond them, "flood" your mind, drown you with . . . what? They give us more, and the more they give us is, I suspect, mostly more of the same.
I am not against the Internet. I use it all the time. But I don't use it as a direct device for wisdom. The kind of immersion it provides, I think, hampers and short-circuits critique, suffocates us with immanence, refuses us any critical distance. Its aesthetic is absolutely superficial, and absolutely vertiginous, at the same time: it overwhelms with other surfaces, suggests there's only more of this, superficiality all the way down, an infinite of beyond, but nothing behind, or beneath.
This isn't only something he victimizes others with; it seems he's also a victim of this terminal shallowness. For example, Gladwell seems to misunderstand one possible rival, Michael Lewis. Gladwell characterizes himself as more theoretical than Lewis, amazingly enough:
“At some point I’d like to write a book that didn’t have any theory. If I could write a book like Michael Lewis’s, where the ideas are there but exist entirely within the context of character, and the intellectual part recedes entirely into the background – that is the gold standard for me.”
I think as an analysis of Lewis's writing style, this is good; as an analysis of Lewis's books, it is bad. I do like Gladwell, but I am more impressed with Lewis's ability to see the big picture as well as the micro-story. It's true that he typically hosts his arguments on depictions of character and narrative; but those genre devices are used to tell a big story. It's Lewis, not Gladwell, after all, who wrote Liar's Poker, and The Big Short, and Moneyball, and The Fifth Risk, among others--books that tell individual stories but in the service of larger narratives. And those narratives look for all the world like the big stories, and the big theories, that Gladwell doesn't indulge in. You can be amused by Lewis as much as by Gladwell. But you can be inspired, re-oriented, and enraged by him as well. That's why I think Lewis is a better, deeper public intellectual.
But I do think a good case can be made for Gladwell as the most important public intellectual today. Precisely because he helped to inaugurate, and to encourage, the kind of "immersive" public intellectual world we live in. And that may be near to the core of our problem.