Apparently there is nothing that Malcolm Gladwell is not interested in.
Take his latest book, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures. There are nineteen essays there, all of them written for his employer, The New Yorker. The essay from which the title is taken, "What the Dog Saw," is about Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer” and television personality, about how he works, which turns out to be so complicated and intricate that it requires the skills of not just ethologists---people who analyze animal behavior---but also psychologists, Millan's wife, dance movement experts, former clients and so on.
The nineteen essays cover an enormous range, from the challenge faced by those who studied the pictures purported to be the places where the Iraqis hid their weapons of mass destruction and how this is a similar challenge faced by those who study pictures of suspected cancers (“Connecting the Dots”), to plagiarism (“Something Borrowed”), to the Challenger explosion (“Blowup”), to the discoverer of the birth control pill, and on and on.
In nearly all of the essays you get a strong sense of how Gladwell works, how he struggles to get inside the skin and skulls of his informants, how he follows them around, watches them, models them, sits with them, and then fills his pages with another world, the fascinating worlds and stories of really interesting people at work, doing their jobs, day in and day out.
As he says in the preface to What the Dog Saw, in all of his stories, Gladwell is seeking to address the “Other Minds” problem, trying to figure out what is going on in another person’s head, how this person is seeing the world, or perceiving a challenge or a crisis or opportunity in the world, and responding. With most of the stories we the readers are the onlookers, even the voyeurs, catching a glimpse of how truly talented people including Gladwell exercise their skills.
In most of the stories we feel like we have met with another strange and often beautiful part of the world, the world that Gladwell lives in and lights up, and why maybe all of life itself just as important if only we take the time to look at it more carefully with a most sympathetic and observing eye and ear.
And of course there is the writing. If we could write like Gladwell we would quit our day jobs---or, in my case, quit retirement---and spend all our days writing.
Then a story or a subject comes along that some of us may already know a great deal about. And nearly always there is another and often larger story that Gladwell may or may not pay attention to. And when the larger story is known, it may turn out that the story being read to those who know big picture feels little cheated. This is because the larger story can change and even discredit the story that Gladwell is telling. And for this reader who knows much more, the talents of the story teller are employed to hide a story---whether intentionally or carelessly---that is not so important after all,
For example, who can enjoy a well-written story about a wild goose chase if the wild goose chase is used to make a point that can't be made when the rest of the story is known?
The essay I have in mind is a recent one in The New Yorker, “Drinking Games.” And the story is about two anthropologists who, over 50 years ago, accidentally stumbled upon a finding that raised what seemed then to be a very important question. Is it just possible that it matters more how we drink than how much we drink? Is what we do with drinking more important than what drinking can do to us?
Put it another way: Could we learn as a society and as individuals learn how to drink more, perhaps much more, and yet behave well, hold our liquor better?
As you might guess, a lot of people would be interested in the answer to that question, and especially if the answer were yes. And just 20 years after Prohibition many people were keenly interested in that question.
This time however Gladwell strikes out, not because he failed to get inside the minds of those who studied culture and drinking but because the question never seemed to really get traction, not the least because a much more important question soon loomed on the horizon and crowded it out.
And it left at least this reader wondering why Gladwell didn't tell the rest of the story, or if he even bothered to learn about it.
The essay is "Drinking Games" in the February 15 edition of The New Yorker. (An abstract of the article is here.)
In "drinking games" Gladwell once again gets inside his informants heads and memory and lets them tell the story, and as often he does, his stories are about people stumbling into fundamentally important insights quite by accident. The story about drinking happened over 50 years ago and was told by people who didn't know what they had found. (The drinking games story reminds me of the famous response George Orwell got when he asked the coal miners in Wales when they learned that their housing was so bad. The miners said, "When we were told about it.")
In the familiar and wandering way of a good essay, Gladwell begins the story of two graduate students in anthropology, Dwight Heath and his wife Anna Cooper Heath, and their journey to South America to study land reform. They had originally wanted to do the research in China but the Chinese refused them permission, and lucky for us or for the story their next choice was a remote town in Bolivia. This was in 1956.
The essay opens with the Heath's recounting of their trip to Bolivia, beginning with their flight to Lima, Peru. In Lima they were to fly to La Paz, Bolivia, in a bomber from WW II donated to the Bolivians by the U.S. after the war.
Before flying to La Paz, however, the bombers were required to be equipped in Lima with boosters to fly at high altitudes. The boosters were supposed to enable the bombers to fly at 10,000 feet. La Paz is 12,000 feet. The Heaths flew over the Andes looking down at the wreckage of airplanes on the mountaintops that didn't make it to La Paz.
Then, after reaching La Paz, they traveled 500 miles to a remote town called Montero, located in the Amazon basin. (Montero today has a population of 9,000 but apparently was much smaller in 1956. It is an agricultural town some 600 meters above sea level. I'm surprised Gladwell didn't point out that Montero was "quite a letdown.")
Heath and his wife then spent a year and a half in a town that does not seem to have had a store or a restaurant or even paved streets. The inhabitants of the town were known as the Camba and their language was Camba, not Spanish. Apparently the Heaths learned to speak Camba fairly quickly.
Okay, you know you are reading a New Yorker essay and not just one written by Gladwell when a story on drinking and culture begins with a flight deep into the Andes in a WWII bomber donated by the American government and then a 500 mile trek to this remote outpost where people speak a language nobody else has heard of.
With a beginning like this, there's got to be a great secret waiting for you when you get there, or at least finished with reading the story.
Actually there wasn't. The Heaths spent a year and a half studying land reform in remote Bolivia. In Gladwell's essay we never learn a thing about their land reform research. On the weekends the Heaths often partied with the Camba in the ritualistic games of drinking of significant quantities of a bitter, foul-tasting alcohol that made people pass out and fall asleep but never produced the kind of aggressive behavior we in the U.S. and other countries associate with drinking.
The Heaths were mightily impressed with the fact that although the drinkers, male and female, passed out several times during the weekend, they remained peaceable. But land reform was their subject not drinking. And they forgot about it.
It was only after they returned to New Haven and Yale a year and a half later that someone else pointed out the great discovery they had accidentally stumbled upon.
One day when walking on the Yale campus they tried to enter a building that had intrigued Anna Health, who, as Gladwell informs us, is or was an architect nut. The Heaths had noticed the building before but they had never found it open. This time it was and the Heaths entered to find a room with a "couple of small, white-hared guys" sitting there looking at them. On noticing the deep, deep tans of the Heaths, the small white-haired guys immediately asked where they had been. When they said "Bolivia" one of the two white-haired guys, a man named Mark Keller, jumped up and grabbed them by the lapels and demanded: "Tell us about drinking in Bolivia."
Gladwell's writing has a cinematic quality. This is a scene straight out a Frank Capra movie or a sequel to The Lavender Hill Mob, starring Alec Guinness. The story the Heaths had to tell is a wonderful story, a story that suggests the thesis Gladwell’s article: It may not really matter how much we drink but how we drink.
It seems they had stumbled into the Yale Center for Alcohol Studies. Besides Mark Keller, the other small white-haired guy was E. M. Jellinek, who, according to Gladwell, was then the world's leading experts on alcohol. Because this is something I know a little about. I knew for example that the number of people in the world who were expert on alcohol in 1957 was perishingly small. In 1975 we were only two decades beyond Prohibition and in the United States the entire subject of drinking and alcohol was still radioactive.
As it turned out, the Heaths didn't tell the two white-haired guys about drinking in Bolivia.
They told them about the drinking they observed in the small town of Montero, and especially about the weekends when the Camba drank copious amounts of a very foul-tasting laboratory-grade alcohol (we called it Everclear, in Texas) and getting very drunk in drinking parties by sitting in a circle and passing the bottle around and toasting. Later, when they had returned to Yale, the experts at the Yale School of Alcohol Studies said, after analyzing a bottle of the stuff the Heaths had returned with, that it was "laboratory alcohol" 180-proof. This is like "Everclear" or 190 proof alcohol.
The Heaths joined the Camba, presumably drinking more moderately. The Camba drank so much during the course of a drinking weekend that from time to time they passed out, and then, after several hours of sleep, they woke up and resumed their drinking. Apparently this often went on all weekend.
The important thing, to the great astonishment of the two white-haired guys, was that no matter how much the Camba drank, no matter how drunk they got, no matter how many times they passed out, they behaved themselves. As the Heaths reported, the Camba never drank alone, they never drank on work nights, and they only drank within the structure of the ritual. The Camba never engaged in what some sociologists later called, "Drunken Comportment."
The two white-haired guys became very excited and asked the Heaths to write up their observations and so the Heaths went back and consulted their notes that were coded for alcohol. Gladwell notes that the code was 30A. (These little touches of verisimilitude added by Gladwell after a while gets a little annoying.)
At the invitation of the two old guys the Heaths submitted their "findings" and it was published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol---according to Gladwell a well-regarded journal---and inquiries from around the world began to pour in.
Since alcohol studies in the 1950s was so relatively unknown, I wonder what "well-regarded" and "inquiries came pouring in" really means but never mind.
At any rate, Gladwell's point and the point the Heaths were making is that others, not the Heaths, saw the potential relevance of their "findings." As Anna Heath said in telling her part of the story to Gladwell,
This is so often true in anthropology. It is not anthropologists who recognize the value of what they've done. It's everyone else. The anthropologist is just reporting.
Apparently "everyone else" who recognized the value of what they had "done" included the alcohol industry as well as those who wanted to take an entirely different approach to alcoholism---a medical or treatment approach---coupled with a campaign to educate Americans in "responsible drinking."
I will return to "Drinking Games" in a few days.
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