Outliers

My friend Jonathan once said of Malcolm Gladwell, "He's a moron/genius." I confess that I bought and read Gladwell's most recent book, Outliers, while in transit. And after finishing the book, it was this moron/genius dichotomy that I found best described my feelings towards the book.

It's a page-turner. I don't know how to explain it, but it reads a bit like an adult, non-fiction Harry Potter. No, I take that back. Ew. Harry Potter is genuinely exciting, what I'm trying to say is that Gladwell certainly succeeds in keeping his readers in his thrall.

The book is about success, and its insights are interesting but certainly not world-shaking. For Gladwell, the figure-ground configuration shifts towards an emphasis on ground, and he writes about how our typical storytelling methods fail to convey the importance of ground. The argument is similar in ways to what I blogged about earlier, and, unlike David Brooks, I do read the book as a call to social action.

So the insight in the first part of the book is about the ubiquity of a favorable ground for the successful figure. The insight in the second part of the book is about cultural legacy. Gladwell draws extensively from a Dutch psychologist, Geert Hofstede, and discusses his cultural psychology in relation to plane crashes. Funny for me, because I read Hofstede while doing summer, Swarthmore-sponsored research. Basically, Gladwell tells us that cultural legacy determines much of our behavior in ways that we typically fail to detect.

This is the problem for me, I suppose. I feel like I have come to the same insights that Gladwell writes about on my own before. Not that my thoughts were particularly original, but I felt ownership over the ideas because I had arrived at them personally. But here Gladwell comes sauntering around the corner, and he packages ideas that were for me hard-earned into these hearty little packages that are just waiting to be consumed by his eager readers.

Unfortunately, I cannot help but feel that the very popularity of Gladwell's books has a cheapening effect on the ideas that he writes about. It is as if the value of knowledge exists in inverse relation to its accessibility. If an idea is made overly accessible, it diminishes in value. Who wants an idea to be whorish in its ways? Is Gladwell a pimp of ideas then, bringing previously exclusive ideas and granting access to a popular audience?

Another thing about the lessons of Outliers. They aren't very sexy. In stories, we often mythologize the successful as figures outstanding simply for who they are. We don't like to think about the circumstances that produced them. Part of what Gladwell does in his book, however, is dymystify successful people. These guys were tremendously lucky and hardworking. I imagine a successor book about love and relationships. What we imagine as a primal force noted for its independence to circumstance, Gladwell will dissect as being no more than the product of forces we'd rather not think about: geography, socioeconomic class, age, culture... Just not very sexy to think about.