You may know Malcolm Gladwell from his non-fiction “ideas books” such as Blink or Outliers. Though probably you’ll know him from his very first work, The Tipping Point, published in 2000, which catapulted him to stardom and popularised a term plucked from sociology journals. Gladwell argued that the hidden currents that chivvy life from here to there can be managed, just like epidemics. Although this was not a new idea, nobody had explained it so clearly before. Gladwell smoothed out the nuances and contradictions of mysteries from fashion trends to crime waves, and made explaining them seem easy.
“Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do,” he wrote, electrifying nearly everyone who wanted to sell something. Individuals could make a difference! The fog of social change seemed to lift.
A quarter of a century later, Gladwell has had another go at the subject, having digested the torrent of criticism that came his way. Some of his tipping points, it turned out, weren’t tipping points after all. In our new age of anxiety, after years of climate change, misinformation, Trump and Covid, portals to a better world seem harder to spot than they did in 2000.
And yet there is nothing dispiriting about Gladwell’s latest search for actionable intel. He has always been a joy to read: antic, exuberantly curious, a squirrel for the kind of juicy kernels readers adore, but whose brilliance lies less in intellectual analysis than in keeping us enthralled with stories about bank robberies and measles outbreaks. Gladwell is a spectacularly skilled essayist but we are left wondering what it all means.
He has gathered a collection of genuine scandals, and that’s good, because people need to know about the staggering rates of medical fraud in Miami and the way the Covid virus overturned the medical consensus by insisting on spreading through air. Tacking a bit of intellectual scaffolding on top seems unnecessary. Occasionally, his nerdy passion for finding an overall principle blinds him to basic sensitivities, such as when he compares a cluster of teen suicides to cheetah breeding.
And yet, although not every reviewer thinks so, I believe Gladwell’s heart is in the right place. Genuine journalism is impossible, I think, without a sense of outrage, and this runs through Gladwell’s writing like fire ants on the march.
He takes a hard look at the mysterious and very posh Harvard Women’s Rugby team, which looks like it is being used by the college to keep out students of colour. And there’s the Covid superspreader event at, of all things, a medical conference, in which one speaker may have led to more than 300,000 infections. What were the organisers thinking?
Gladwell bookends his volume with laser-like fury at the Sackler family, for aggressively marketing an addictive drug to certain doctors in America. He argues that the opiate epidemic and the medical conference Covid epidemic relied on superspreaders – extremely rare individuals who did an astounding amount of damage. Gladwell ends his book with a striking sentence. “[Epidemics] are driven by a number of people, and those people can be identified.”
Or, at least, he should have ended there. Unaccountably, in his last few lines, he shifts focus back to the reader, seemingly uneasy about losing the self-help vibe which moved so many units. “The tools necessary to control an epidemic are sitting on the table, 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.”
Where is the acknowledgment of the wider forces at work here? The unfettered corporate greed, the lack of care and oversight from agencies whose job it was to prevent this, the poverty and lack of infrastructure? It’s as if Gladwell found the ingredients, laid them on the table “right in front of us”, but didn’t quite get around to baking the cake.
Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell (Abacus, $39.99), is out now.
