Goliath Gladwell and his artful truthiness

David & Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants Malcolm Gladwell, Allen Lane, R255

MALCOLM Gladwell is the best known business writer of his generation, and also the slyest, and the smoothest, and therefore the one who flatters his readers the most determinedly. The title of his new book is almost irresistible. Who doesn’t see himself as David?

What we don’t realise, Gladwell explains, is that David had all the advantages from the start. Goliath is slow, half blind and, at sixnine, probably has a disease of the pituitary gland. Since no American book is complete without a brief ode to Israel, Gladwell footnotes Moshe Dayan — “the architect of Israel’s astonishing victory in the 1967 SixDay War” — on the premise of David’s technological superiority. Even Gladwell, the perpetual astonisher, can be astonished.

The rest of this unreliable book is devoted to anecdotes and examples which demonstrate the unexpected strengths of the Davids of this world. There’s the amateur Indian school basketball coach Ranadivé who “had come to America as a 17-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily.” There’s the Bedouins and Lawrence of Arabia versus the Turks: “The Turks simply had not thought that their opponent would be crazy enough to come at them from the desert.” And who would expect that in the Middle East?

Then there’s the long list of military Davids and Goliaths, from the Pindaris versus the British to the Peruvians versus the Spanish. The principle is simple. When Davids use their cunning, mobility, and unconventionality they win. When they try to slog it out with Goliath in the straightforward fashion they lose.

Gladwell has the art of the pitch. His distinction, borrowed from sports, between people who panic, because they have no idea what to do next, and people who choke, because they have too many ideas and can’t decide between them, is a useful way to sort out different groups of writers. It has what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness”, or what the radical analyst Mats Alvesson calls “persuasion”, the real currency of the public sphere.

When pressed, Gladwell is almost open about the fact that he is creating plausible stories rather than advancing any real argument. He’s selling books to an audience in an airport or a shopping mall. As at certain universities, the one party to this transaction pretends to be teaching while the other party pretends to be learning. He’s not promising to be right. He’s promising to be entertaining.

In his nimbleness Gladwell is a David. But in his sales figures, and in his entirely conventional exchange of truth for money, he is simply a skinny and prodigious Goliath. —