14 October 2024

Malcolm Gladwell’s cult of smartness

The educated rationalists addressed by Revenge of the Tipping Point are sometimes the dumbest – and baddest – of them all.

By John Gray

Photographed for the New Statesman by Alice Zoo

Malcolm Gladwell’s international bestseller The Tipping Point (2000) concluded with a message of rational optimism:

“But if there is difficulty and volatility in the world of The Tipping Point, there is a large measure of hopefulness as well. Merely by manipulating the size of a group, we can dramatically improve its receptivity to new ideas. By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its stickiness. Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics. In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action.”

A quarter of a century later, Revenge of the Tipping Point ends with the same optimism. Tipping points – moments in which an idea or practice becomes contagious and society suddenly changes – seem beyond human control. When their mechanisms are understood, however, these pivotal junctures can be used to benefit society: “The tools necessary to control an epidemic are… right in front of us. We can let the unscrupulous take them. Or we can pick them up ourselves, and use them to build a better world.”

Determined to exhibit an awareness of the complexity of the issues with which it deals while insisting on the power of human agency to resolve them, this is the sermonising discourse of liberal meliorism. In this still pervasive yet distinctly shaky creed, the evils of human life are problems that can be solved by smart people. Using growing knowledge from the social sciences, we can “build a better world”. But who exactly are we? What is this collective agent that “manipulates” groups, “shapes” social epidemics and can guide the wayward course of history? Surely not the New York-based writer and his gigantic but amorphous readership. Gladwell is invoking a more mysterious entity. A universal subject that floats above the contending multitudes with their conflicting values and visions of the good life, “we” are humanity itself.

Although it is read throughout the world, the genre of which Gladwell is an unsurpassed master is unmistakably American. He was born in the UK in 1963, his father a British mathematician and his mother a Jamaican psychotherapist, and his family emigrated to Canada in 1969. But he has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1996, and a familiar insularity pervades his latest book. The universal “we” he invokes is the metropolitan American liberal, unthinkingly projecting their idiosyncratic mores on to all of humankind. The “humanity” for which they claim to speak is imaginary, a fictional species confected from ignorance of history and inexperience of other cultures.

According to Gladwell, “social epidemics” in which ideas and behaviours spread like viruses are generically human and obey universal laws. In The Tipping Point, he identified three such laws: the Law of the Few, according to which social epidemics originate with small numbers of people; the Stickiness Factor, which refers to the content of an idea that makes it memorable and durable; and the Power of Context, the importance of the situation from which a belief or practice is transmitted. Revenge of the Tipping Point extends this analysis, arguing that social contagions can be traced back to “viral superspreaders” whose behaviour is propagated by emulation, which then develops into an overarching narrative or “superstory”.

If Gladwell’s universal “we” is parochially American, so are nearly all his case studies. Revenge of the Tipping Point begins and ends with its opioid epidemic featuring as an exemplar of his universal laws. He recognises that the American epidemic was sui generis: “Only one country has had a truly catastrophic experience with opioid overdose… the United States.” It came about, he tells us, through “a tiny fraction” of American doctors writing “a staggering number” of prescriptions for the pain-control medication OxyContin. Varying procedures for monitoring prescriptions in different states allowed the epidemic to increase in scale. Salespeople for Purdue Pharma, the company owned by the Sackler family that manufactured the drug, targeted doctors they knew were already prescribing it in large quantities. Between 2006 and 2015, one doctor prescribed 319,560 tablets. Such striking details add colour to what has become a much-told tale.

Gladwell’s Americocentric narrative sidesteps an awkward fact: the country’s disastrous epidemic could not have occurred anywhere else. It is not that he is unaware of other systems of healthcare: “Canadian medicine is, in many ways, very different from American medicine. Canada has national health insurance, not a bewildering network of private insurers.” He observes that the UK, despite having “more than its share of social problems”, has not experienced anything like the American catastrophe, and writes vividly of blatant medical scams in Florida, where an influx of drug money in the Eighties was laundered through fraudulent Medicare providers. Yet nowhere does he ask whether America’s uniquely awful epidemic might have been generated by its singularly flawed system of healthcare.

There is a larger question. Like the US’s mass-shooting sprees, its ferocious woke movement and its insatiable thirst for conspiracy theories, America’s drug epidemic poses a question about the country itself. What is it about American culture that makes it so prone to outbreaks of mimetic insanity?

If Gladwell’s case histories are disappointingly narrow in scope, his faith in social science is grossly inflated. It was not until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the mental disorders listed in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders II. Until then, being gay was categorised as a disease. Half a century later, some US psychotherapists are treating an attachment to “white identity” as a sign of mental illness. There is nothing here of the cumulative increase in knowledge achieved in science, just a succession of toxic local ideologies.

Gladwell’s laws of human behaviour should be taken with a large pinch of salt. He writes illuminatingly of how American policies of positive discrimination can end up harming the groups they were meant to help. But what does America’s peculiar and not particularly successful model of multiculturalism teach us? Singapore has built a cohesive multicultural society without employing affirmative action in the workplace, and with the aid of ethnic quotas in housing. Why Singapore succeeded and America failed is a question that cannot be answered by reference to supposedly universal principles. Civilisational differences and historical contingencies are only two of the factors at work. Whether there can be such a thing as a law-governed social science remains an open question.

Throughout his books, Gladwell writes as if highly literate, educated people are relatively immune to social epidemics. In fact, they are more prone to catching and spreading them than most. The left-progressive “anti-racism” that is de rigueur among higher minds, focusing exclusively on groups formerly oppressed by Western power and ignoring those oppressed by anti-Western states today, is an emblem of a university education. Hare-brained schemes for exporting democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq were backed up by cod-science such as “modernisation theory”. The pub bore banging on about the graveyards of empire was closer to the truth: the smartest people are often the daftest.

They are also sometimes the baddest. Like liberal rationalists everywhere, Gladwell assumes that smart people will be benign. Evil is error, a lapse in understanding for which knowledge is the sovereign remedy. A smattering of history demolishes this notion. Edward Bernays’s pioneering study Propaganda (1928) founded the 20th-century study of public relations. It also became a guidebook for the Nazis in their project of manipulating mass psychology. Bernays was horrified when he learned in 1933 that Joseph Goebbels was using the book when constructing the cult of the Führer, but not surprised. A nephew of Sigmund Freud’s, Bernays never doubted that the findings of rational inquiry could be used for malignant ends.

One of Gladwell’s most characteristic literary devices is addressing his readers as if they were much like himself. A plain prose style, enlivened by a profusion of homely anecdotes, protects him from any accusation of intellectual conceit, and provides the reader with a rare mix of instruction and entertainment. In Revenge of the Tipping Point he shows how the American view of the Holocaust was created by television, how elite American universities engage in social engineering to the advantage of the offspring of their wealthy alumni, and how superspreaders who infected large numbers of people with Covid can also infect them with flu and other viruses. You can’t read Gladwell without learning something interesting and unexpected. You won’t, on the other hand, be any the wiser. He is much too canny a writer to threaten the comfort of the reader with intractable truths.

Archetypal airport books, Gladwell’s bestsellers assure marooned travellers that they will reach their destination. This may be a formula that has passed its peak, but he has little reason to worry. He writes for an anxious audience, which shows every sign of expanding as the world becomes ever more disordered.

Revenge of the Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell
Abacus, 368pp, £25

Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops

[See also: The two sides of Boris Johnson]