Seeing Through The Media Book

I'm very fond of Malcolm Gladwell's writing. It is hard for me to not gush about someone who is living a life I would love to live. I guess I should feel jealous of him, but instead I just feel grateful to know that someone can live that life.

And I really love his writing. He is a writer who never leaves his readers behind, who is always beautifully clear and who structures what he has to say in ways that not only compel you to go on reading, but also so he takes you by the hand and makes sure you are always alongside him.

It is impossible not to feel perfectly safe with Malcolm Gladwell - and given that some of these articles are about killer dogs and mass murderers, feeling safe with the writer seems almost obligatory.

I'm not going to talk about the subject matter of any of these articles - I'm assuming that most of you are going to eventually read them anyway, so it feels a bit pointless spoiling things for you. Instead, I would like to look at how he structures his articles and why I find what he does so utterly compelling.

If there is a philosopher that I really admire it is Aristotle. I mean, the guy was a genius and dominated Western thought for two thousands years. It is fair to say that for a very, very long time Western thought, as far as it was 'thought', was Aristotelian. But I admire Aristotle because he is so different from me, not in the least because I would like to be like him. If there is one thing I truly know about myself it is that I am nothing like Aristotle. You see, Aristotle was the great categoriser. He had a brain that was like a filing cabinet and he could come to something completely new, something no one had ever thought systematically about before and he the remarkable ability to see how to file things away in this totally new subject. He virtually created many of the disciplines we study now, such as physics, biology, metaphysics, logic, poetics, and the list just goes on and on.

I need to make that a bit more clear. It wasn't just that he could come to a subject like poetics and say (this is not a literal quote, though he does say something similar), 'the major division is between tragedy and comedy - in tragedy a character gets what he deserves, while in comedy a character gets what he thinks he wants'. It was more that he was able to see that the division between tragedy and comedy was a key division. If you were going to talk about drama, Aristotle just knew that you had to virtually start by talking about that division and how a play that was a comedy was different from a play that was a tragedy. He didn't just invent the filing cabinet, he also put the first labels on the files and then put some gobsmacking content in those files as well.

Even while dancing around in my most sunny of dispositions I don't for a moment think that I am anything like Aristotle. I really don't do categories in the way he does. My mind doesn't quite work that way - just as I don't paint like Picasso - but I'll tell you what, I love it when I see it.

And what has this got to do with Gladwell and his latest book? Well, the whole way through this book I kept thinking that Gladwell has learnt so much from Aristotle. He has learnt how to play with categories in ways that are pure delight. What he does looks so simple and so obvious - it is really no wonder that people try (and generally fail) to copy it. It takes lots and lots of hard work to make writing look quite this effortless.

I cavalierly started off by saying I wouldn't tell you anything about the articles in this book and now find I have to - such are the meanderings these reviews take me on. In the last chapter of this book there is a long discussion of what is a Pit Bull Terrier and whether it is the dog or the owner that should be put down after an attack (no prize for guessing the answer to that one). Except, Gladwell's point is that banning a bred of dog is incredibly difficult, as Pit Bull is a category that is imposed on a wide and various group of individual dogs and as a category it struggles to stretch across all of the dogs it seeks to cover. This is because a category is generally selected to identify a problem - but the dogs themselves aren't actually the problem - it is the (as they say in France) arseholes that own them. That he then used this distinction to talk about the identification of terrorists and why stopping only people who look like Middle Eastern men is a stupid idea almost had me cheering.

In another article he deconstructs the category of FBI Criminal Profiler and confounds it with the category of psychic cold-reader - and not in a complimentary way. In yet another chapter he compares our categories of quarterback (someone who involves himself in a kind of game mostly played, from what I can gather, in the US) and teacher. What Gladwell often does is force us to look again at the categories we use to divide up the world and then to see if they really still make any sense. In a way, he is doing the opposite of what Aristotle did. But either way, I think he does it just as beautifully.

As a case in point, it may be that my favourite part of this book is where he says at the end of one of his articles that if we are expected to spend so much time outside of the box perhaps we should be getting a new box. You know, watching someone do that to a cliché (particularly one I hate) is just about the most satisfying thing I can think of.

But he doesn't just tear down old and tired metaphors - he also helps to show interesting distinctions between categories we generally think of as being pretty much about the same things. Like the fascinating distinction he draws between a puzzle and a mystery. Do you see what he does? He uses metaphors in the way that they are meant to be used. A metaphor can be used in two ways: either to stop us thinking or to get us to see something almost as if for the first time. Metaphors that stop us thinking are called clichés - let's list some: to my way of seeing, thinking outside the box, at the end of the day, let's unpack that, we should populate this data set … I'd better stop or I'll be making myself sick. Metaphors can do better than that, though. They can also be used to instruct us in things we don't know anything about and they do that by comparing the new thing to those things we think we already know very well.

In this book when Gladwell discusses how he would like to distinguish between a puzzle and a mystery he uses the example of the sorts of questions that might have been asked during cold war spying on Russia (what is the size of the Soviet economy? how many nuclear weapons does China have?) and then that most amusing of games, where in the world is Osama Bin Laden? to show that these are questions that could be answered if only we had enough new data, if we had enough new information. These are puzzles. They are problems that could be solved if we just had a couple of more pieces.

A mystery, though, is something quite different. To solve a mystery you don't need more information - one of the 'rules' of mysteries is that you already have all of the information you need. The problem isn't that you have too little information, it is that you have far too much and that you have no way of grading the information you've got into what is important and what is just trivial noise.

And right there you see a new distinction open up between categories that allows you to think anew about a range of issues that might not have made a lot of sense before. Gladwell discusses Watergate as a puzzle and Iraq as a mystery. He then has some very interesting things to say about public accounting of private corporations and whether companies providing us with thousands and thousands of pages of information on how they are going is designed to inform or confuse us. And then asks if maybe we need to not look at company accounts as ways of solving puzzles, but rather if we might not be better off approaching interpreting the health of a company more as a mystery. It is possible that this distinction sounds more profound than it really is - I'm quite prepared to admit that - but all the same, I'm not terribly concerned about that. What it does do is to get me to think about that distinction and to wonder about it. He does this over and over again in all of his books. Needless to say, I really like it.

I love Gladwell's stuff. He brings so much joy and so much interest to his articles that it is always a delight to read him.