Gladwell Gets Spiritual
by Andrew Collins
“The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
So opens Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. The quote comes from the biblical account of the story of David, who famously defeated the giant Goliath and became king of Israel despite being the youngest of eight brothers. Gladwell (author of bestsellers, The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw) quickly shows us how, since we first heard the story of David and Goliath, we’ve been getting it wrong.
Christian spirituality rests in large part on the paradox of finding strength in weakness. In 2 Corinthians 2, also quoted by Gladwell, the Apostle Paul explains how he was given a thorn in the flesh to torment him, because when he is weak, then he is strong. Theologians often speak of this as a means to keep one humble and dependent on God, yet the principle may be more widely potent than one might think. A “thorn,” according to Gladwell, can take many forms.
It could be dyslexia, which Gladwell says has plagued David Boies his entire life. Don’t feel too sorry for him though. Because Boies couldn’t read well, he came up with strategies to get around reading – namely, listening well and honing his memory. Today he’s a crack trial lawyer, devastating in cross-examinations because he remembers everything. Would he be as effective a lawyer if he hadn’t had trouble reading? Probably not. Granted, most people with a reading disability like this cannot master all the steps needed to survive in a world driven by words, Gladwell summarizes, “but those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.”
Consider the “thorn” of attending an average university instead of an Ivy League school. Gladwell reasons that being a talented person in a pond stocked with people seemingly more talented can devastate one’s aspirations. Comparing the performance of students from top schools vs. average schools, he found that students who would rank at the back of the pack at places like Harvard and Brown are less likely to stick with a difficult major than they would be at a less competitive school. So someone who barely makes it into Yale should think twice about attending. There’s a good chance they would be better off at the top of the class in a state school.
I had only two minor complaints with David and Goliath. Compared to Gladwell’s previous books, this one didn’t seem quite as tightly argued. Underdogs come across as both honorable and dishonorable, for example. But maybe that’s because the phenomenon that he’s trying to get at isn’t quite as clear cut as an outlier or a tipping point.
My second complaint is stylistic. Compared to his previous works, David and Goliath seems tinged with an extra dose of pop appeal. Gladwell often addresses the reader in second person, and makes his thesis painfully clear (“This book is about underdogs…” Ok, we get it!). This doesn’t affect the quality of his arguments or the power of the stories he tells, but it did make me feel talked down to at times.
But only at times. By and large, Gladwell’s prose is a delight to read because, as good journalists often do, he assumes the posture of a co-learner rather than a teacher. It’s as if he were inviting us to join him in the adventure of probing the depths of our unfathomable world. And even though he pulls no punches in telling us when we’ve gotten something wrong, we still sense, in the subtext of his animating impulse, a voice saying “Hey, look at this funny thing I discovered! We sure got that wrong, didn’t we?”
In a society full of political spin, religious and cultural judgment, and widespread ignorance, a voice like this is supremely refreshing. Gladwell’s stories skirt the rhetoric of political narratives on both sides of the aisle and tread the realms of sociology, history, and even religion with hardly a hint of agenda. The assumptions he challenges with his counter-intuitive claims — underdogs gaining strength from an absence of material resources — tend to be almost universally held.
We’ve all heard the story of David and Goliath, but few have considered that, in the context of the times, we should expect David to win. When challenged by the champion of an army, it was customary in ancient times for the two to face each other in hand to hand combat, yet David comes at Goliath with a projectile weapon. Before Goliath even has a chance to strike a blow, he finds himself on the ground, stunned.
Americans of all beliefs generally accept that the accomplishments of the civil rights movement were a good thing that reflected a noble cause. Without impinging on the value of what it accomplished, Gladwell demonstrates that many of the tactics deployed by civil rights leaders were quite sneaky and almost nefarious. He considers it, like any political victory, a public relations war to give the American people a certain perception of segregation and those enforcing it. Recall the famous picture of a police dog jumping up to bite a seemingly defenseless young black man. It rocked the nation. Everyone from the president on down talked about it. Yet Gladwell sees a different story. If you look closely, he says, the officer is trying to restrain the dog, not loose it. And the man isn’t simply standing there passively. His leg is coming up to kick the dog. He wasn’t a martyr. Gladwell cites research that suggests the man wasn’t even officially a demonstrator.
“It was a little bit of Brer Rabbit trickery,” Gladwell says of the photograph. That’s one thing underdogs do, after all. They don’t play by the conventional rules. They find any way they can to game the system and trick their opponents.
Even if you don’t agree with the broader principles Gladwell purports to reveal (is the biblical David really that analogous to, say, London circa World War II?) he makes it fun to learn all the same. We discover, for example, how David’s sling had the stopping power of a .45 handgun, or how the Nazis’ incessant bombing of London actually strengthened Britain’s resolve instead of inspiring mass-panic, as both sides anticipated. Both stand as interesting factoids on their own merit, keeping readers turning the page even if the book doesn’t sweep them up with its larger argument.
Most significantly of all, though, I found that despite its design for a mass audience, David and Goliath peeled back a bit of the mystery of faith. As his most spiritually-charged work to date, it moves beyond unpacking social curiosities to sharing wisdom as Gladwell explores the real-world power of trusting in something other than the visible power structures of this world. One of the book’s most powerful chapters tells the story of Wilma Derksen. Derksen was the mother of a Mennonite family in central Canada. Her daughter Candace disappeared on her way home from school, and was later found in a shed a quarter mile away, frozen to death. At this point, Gladwell writes, the Derksens were on the precipice of a very dark future: “They could lose their health and their sanity and each other if they allowed their daughter’s murder to consume them.” Instead, with immense difficulty, they chose the higher path of forgiveness, seeking to show love to their daughter’s murderer. Instead of writing him off as a monster, Wilma chose to see him within the realm of humanity. “We have all done something dreadful in our lives,” she said, “or have felt the urge to.”
The Derksens chose to avoid the hate that consumed a similar victim named Mike Reynolds. After his daughter was shot in cold blood, Reynolds launched a crusade in California to pass the three-strikes law. Though Reynolds claims the law saves lives every day, Gladwell shows that the law’s impact has been debatable at best, possibly even detrimental. Reynolds never stopped crusading. “I told her it will be over when my daughter comes back,” he said in an interview. That simple statement captures everything wrong with seeking ultimate justice, because such crime cannot be rectified. Even after the huge changes in the legal system – an impressive political accomplishment by any standard – Gladwell notes, “Mike Reynolds would always be grieving.”
This is why underdogs matter. This is where the “weapons of the spirit,” as Gladwell likes to call them, prove greater than the weapons of the flesh:
“A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive – and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.”
David and Goliath
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Date: October 1, 2013
Available at: All major booksellers
Price: $19.00 (hardback), $4.00 (paperback)
