Podcast review: Revisionist History, season 1, Malcolm Gladwell (2016)

I was recommended to listen to this show by a Facebook friend. I don’t remember who that was, but I’m glad the tip came to me as I mostly enjoyed the first season. The title is a bit misleading as not much is historical (though some is): the purpose of the series seems to have been to allow Gladwell to get on his hobbyhorse and campaign for more equity, but this, as we’ll see, presents the listener with some problems.

One is that the theme of each episode isn’t strongly enough made, so you lose track of the central theme while listening to all the attendant details. And Gladwell is on firmer ground when he sticks to the USA. The first episode, ‘The Lady Vanishes’, is about a woman painter of the Victorian era, and Gladwell tries to make a modern comparison by roping in Julia Gillard (whose name he mispronounces), the ex-PM of Australia. The points he wants to make fall a bit flat as his sneering scorn is unleashed upon Tony Abbott and the conservative commentariat. The thesis being that even though a person belonging to a minority is welcomed into the establishment – for example Elizabeth Thompson or Gillard – that doesn’t mean the status quo changes. The door, he says, immediately slams shut and the establishment carries on as though nothing had happened. 

As for Australia, I’m not sure that this holds true. There’ve been two prominent state leaders – we call them “premiers” – who are women, for a start, but beyond that the generalisation Gladwell likes to make with respect to the Australian political settlement eliminates some key details. He says nothing about how Gillard came to office, for example. His narrative is focused on 2012, but he says nothing of the razor-thin margin Gillard had in Parliament as a result of two independents siding with her following the 2010 election. He says nothing of Tony Abbott’s being replaced – just as Gillard replaced Rudd, by back-room manoeuvring – so his suggestion that the establishment (as represented by the unappetising Abbott) won out was misplaced. Abbott was replaced by the very small-l Liberal Malcolm Turnbull, who favoured gay marriage (which, just to spite Gladwell, Gillard didn’t).

More alarming for me was the tone Gladwell uses as he tries to make his points. Though they’re accompanied by an impressive array of facts, listening to the series felt a bit like being caught next to a person, at a dinner party, whose obsession is allowed to occupy all the conversational space. I would’ve liked there to have been more editing, and more refinement of the mechanism of transferral of all that information, like in the very slick ‘The Dropout’ (by America’s ABC). 

Gladwell is roughly on the right track, but when he on one occasion – already mentioned – looks outside the US he turns up the sneer to 11. The sneer is Gladwell’s main weapon, in the service of which his finely developed taste for arcana deploys, but like many North Americans he’s got up on the wall in his office, “Only if made here!” Sort of like Trump’s “Make America great again”, Gladwell’s exhortation to his listeners to stay on-shore is the flipside of the sneer: because people outside NA deign to occasionally criticise America and – worse – to do things better than Americans, he’s going to sneer at all foreigners unless they belong to a persecuted minority. You have to have suffered an acceptable degree of obloquy or neglect in order to qualify for canonisation in Gladwell’s universe, where the sneer sits, like a washer, snug up against the bolt used to secure the author’s enthusiasm. 

Normal, everyday good ideas like adequate federal funding for secondary school and university, or single-payer healthcare, are not enough to get you a ticket to the good seats. Such ideas have to sit at the back – in Limbo. 

While he’s busy blazing trails that lead nowhere, Gladwell also indulges in a bit of serendipitous coinage, such as when in episode five he substitutes for a perfectly good word – “equity” – another one that he needs to define so that other people will know what he’s talking about – “capitalisation” which means, in his world, the ability of the community to capitalise on the potential of all of its members. It’s almost as though, knowing that most people won’t share his enthusiasm for exotic fauna, he’s determined at the outset to scotch the possibility of success, so that he can blame other people when he fails. 

Where would Gladwell be with nothing to criticise?