Jonah Lehrer, Malcolm Gladwell, and the Simplistic Explanation

For those of you who don't follow the navel-gazing world of internet journalism, Jonah Lehrer, staff writer for the New Yorker, was released from his duties when it became apparent that he had fabricated a quote from the quotable Bob Dylan in his recent bestselling book, Imagine. Lehrer had previously been reprimanded by the folks at the snooty periodical I can't help but love for essentially reposting his old material from his Wired days on his New Yorker blog without indicating the duplication. But misquoting and misrepresenting the voice of a generation was a bridge too far. And now Mr. Lehrer is out of work.

Unsurprisingly, I find Alan Jacobs's reflections on this issue illuminating and well-reasoned. This is unsurprising because Mr. Jacobs is responsible for the best biography I have ever read (The Narnian, a bio of C.S. Lewis) as well as the best book on reading and books I have ever read (The Pleasure of Reading In an Age of Distraction). He writes:

If things go a certain way, this fall from grace could be the best thing that ever happened to Jonah Lehrer. In spending the past decade striving to be The Next Malcolm Gladwell, he has fallen victim to Gladwell’s besetting sin, which is glibness. In the Gladwellian intellectual cosmos, immensely complex ideas and experiences get boiled down to simplistic binary oppositions or are run through a single interpretative filter (here’s the tipping point, there’s the blink of instantaneous judgment).
. . .
But maybe, just maybe, it’s not worth it: maybe the neat little points you make that way aren’t intellectually substantive enough to justify the risks you take on their behalf. There could be a better way to go about this business of trying to understand human behavior and explain it to others. That other way will require more patience, more research, possibly more education (Lehrer has two bachelor’s degrees); and it will probably result in books that don’t sell as well, so the lifestyle will take a hit. But if you can make a real and lasting contribution to the human understanding of ourselves, the tradeoffs are more than worth it. I hope Jonah Lehrer finds that better path.

Jacobs cuts to the heart of my problem with so much of Gladwell's writing (someone I find immensely entertaining) and Lehrer's standard practice and so much of what counts for intelligent discourse: how simple it all becomes. The Marxist screams "economics!", the feminist "patriarchy!", Gladwell shouts "blink!". And they are all hammers with every bit of sociological date looking like a nail.

I remember listening to Gladwell's breakout hit, The Tipping Point, on audiobook driving out to Phoenix and being blown away by what I was hearing. It all sounded so incredible. The intense crime of late 80s New York was ceased by fixing broken windows and painting subway cars! How simple! Think of how easy it would be to fix other problems: you only need to find some simple cure. And I bought it, and others that I know bought it. A good pastor friend of mine was trying to figure out what the tipping point was for the Church and how, through one simple thing, we could experience revolution, go viral.

But it is not that simple, of course. There were multitudinous factors at play in New York in the late 80s that helped curb crime: the waning of the crack epidemic, the high profile prosecutions by Rudy Guliani of Gotham crimelords, a mounting frustration on the part of New Yorker's towards crime, and a dozen dozen other things. To attribute it to something simple glosses over everything else at play.

And Gladwell knows this and Lehrer knows this (I don't mean to entirely conflate the two, I find Gladwell far more trustworthy of an author, especially now), but there is something so sexy about having a really clever and surprising thesis statement that it causes writers to see One Uniting Theme linking everything. And so these writers perform intellectual gymnastics to get specific cases to fit the Master Thesis. Lehrer wanted a Bob Dylan quote to say something that he wanted it to say. But he couldn't find one that fit perfectly. And, as The Atlantic points out in a recent article on quoting, sometimes the appeal of inventing a quote to say something a bit better than what was said, a bit more in line with the point you are trying to drive home, is irresistible.

The Atlantic ran another article recently by a history professor from the University of Iowa, named Marshall Poe. Poe writes of his struggle to squeeze a book he was under contract to write about Wikipedia into this One Big Explanation mold of the sociological bestseller mold. But he couldn't do it. There was no easy pattern there. And Poe, mercifully, had the intellectual honesty to accept that the rise of Wikipedia, or the rise of any one thing really, was not simple and to resist the temptation to manufacture an easy (and pithy, entertaining, and possibly bestselling) explanation. It cost him materially, no doubt, maybe even a TED Talk (the reigning king of pithy, simplified explanations) and the social clout of being the Explainer. But at least he told the truth. And maybe Poe's type of writing, and Jacobs's type, and every other honest academic who doesn't conceive of a thesis and do research to prove it, but lets the material speak for itself, will be how Lehrer recovers and finds a way back from his exile.