The Limits of “Revisionist History”

Led astray by love for the late bloomer (Gladwellocalypse, Part 1)

Concluding not too long ago, I wrote a series of articles commenting on Old Masters and Young Geniuses.¹ At the beginning, I was thinking about how the types the author, David Galenson, theorized applied to my own medium of video games. But as I read further, I began to question the whole notion he was laying out. As he extended from painters to those working in other media, his taxonomy of creator styles seemed weaker and weaker to me, until I ultimately decided he was on one hand recapitulating the classical and romantic aesthetics established long ago, and on the other trafficking in codswallop.

So why did I invest so much time and thought into something I ended up feeling this way about? Well, sometimes understanding a different point of view can be useful and other times it can turn out there’s nothing to be gained. I’ve read — and sometimes stopped reading — plenty of books over the years I’ve disagreed with.

This time, just as when I turned away from political satire, I’ll tell you, it’s Malcolm Gladwell’s fault.

However, unlike that incident, this is not a positive event where my eyes were opened, as is often my experience of reading his works and sources. Instead, it was a letdown. I’ve been reading him since The Tipping Point,² and have typically enjoyed his fresh perspective, interesting research, and engaging writing style. But this was a definite slip up, and I set out to trace the reasons for it.

The piece in which I learned about the book was the “Hallelujah” episode of his podcast, Revisionist History (RevHist),³ mainly about music. More specifically, it was about the constant remixes certain “Cézanney” musicians have done, most notably Leonard Cohen, and his many variations of the song the piece takes its title from, “Hallelujah”.⁴

But unlike the book review⁵ referenced in “The Satire Paradox”,⁶ which crammed massive depth into a relatively concise piece, Galenson waxed prolix, with dozens of charts and deep dives into specific aspects of his theory with which I happen to disagree. So in a bang-for-the-buck analysis alone, score one for the London Review of Books.

So why did Gladwell repeat and endorse Galenson’s ideas? I set out to learn, and here’s what I found:

Interviewer Brian Lamb asks him which of his pieces he’d spent the most time on. Gladwell has a ready answer:⁷

There’s a piece in What the Dog Saw called “Late Bloomers”,⁸ which took three years to get into the magazine. […] I read this book by an economist from Chicago named David Galenson in which — I thought was so fascinating — in which he talked about how genius comes in two very different forms: he talked about the conceptual innovator, who is the person who has the big bold idea, and he talked about the experimental innovator, who is the person who succeeds — creates — through trial and error. And the conceptual innovator is the prodigy, right? And the person who works through trial and error is the late bloomer.

And I loved this idea so much because he was dignifying the late bloomer. Which I thought — there was something wonderful in there, but I had a devil of a time finding the right stories to illustrate that point. Because I like — when I have an academic argument — I like to find narratives that complete it. And it just was really hard to find the right ones. But sometimes you have to be persistent.

That time around, he found Ben Fountain for his late bloomer, and his prodigy was Jonathan Safran Foer. I’ll reserve judgment here as I haven’t read the piece, but since Gladwell reopened the subject, I can only deduce he was not satisfied.

In retrospect, the first red flag should have been the title of Galenson’s book. Gladwell, like myself, is not a fan of the term genius as too charged: unattainable and alienating. And it’s a concept he’s already refuted himself.

Second, Galenson is, as Gladwell notes, an economist. He is a complete outsider to the field of art history, and looking for a yardstick with which to measure a group of people he has no real understanding of.

I am a fan of Freakonomics, the work of University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner, just as Gladwell is. The pair seem to be thorough in their research and careful to establish causal relationships rather than correlations. But beyond their work, economics has been reviled throughout its history, with Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle dubbing it “the dismal science” already in the 19th century.⁹ And as Mark Twain claims Benjamin Disraeli said on the topic:¹⁰

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Actually, Disraeli never said it; it’s been ‌attributed to Twain himself, but clearly predates either of these uses. Misquotes and poorly attributed quotes strangely have become a minor theme of this article. Certainly, there have been advances in economics but having professional insight into how big data is mined and interpreted — also one of the main tools the Freakonomics guys bring into play — I can tell you mistakes are common, and scrutiny often uncovers mistaken assumptions.

Back to the topic of so-called geniuses, I’d say, using an argument I learned from Gladwell, these prodigies are explained by the “10,000-Hour Rule” he cites repeatedly in Outliers.¹¹ Their supposed precociousness actually relates tautologically to the fact they started early, Mozart being a notable example. Meanwhile, “late-blooming” artists like Cézanne fit better under the heading of perfectionists like Rick Barry in another RevHist article, “The Big Man Can’t Shoot”.¹²

And in the end, it’s a false dilemma. Talking on the level of creator styles, and definitely setting aside the notion of genius, I could be placed by Galenson into the former category: I obsessively played and made games as a child, and discovered D&D as an excellent sandbox in which to explore storytelling, worldbuilding, how games could be improved or not through rules changes, etc. By the second half of high school, I was thinking about how to parlay that work into a career, and other opportunities lacking, created one myself, running a game at a local community center. From there, getting into video games was a much easier step, and games I’ve worked on have the critical acclaim and awards to show a healthy success trajectory.

But I also might be called a late bloomer. Even though I started early, my first real successes didn’t come until I was nearly 30. And even those I lucked into: I always had big ideas, always tried to execute the best game I could, but a project’s scope and genre, whether it used an IP or was original, the skill sets and abilities of the team, the limitations of the tools or platform, how the game was marketed, if we could get it on the shelves in time for Christmas shopping, all were factors over which I had zero to limited control. The Christmas-shopping timing for games has proven a fallacy since the bad old days of games. Also, shelves are a metaphor rather than a reality today.

And that’s the biggest fallacy both Galenson and Gladwell engage in: success is not a meritocracy. The Impressionists broke away from the Salon just when the bourgeoisie became wealthy enough to afford art, and their scenes of natural beauty were just the sort of stuff that appealed to the tastes of these buyers. The official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris was the most important art event in the Western world from 1748 to 1890, taking place annually or biennially. The Impressionists tired of trying to produce works of the scale and style the Académie preferred and so held their own exhibition.

Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs, better known as Vienna Secession, similarly broke from the Gesellschaft bildender Künstler Österreichs (Association of Austrian Artists) of the official Künstlerhaus, and similar movements occurred across Europe. If we recontextualize the Dadaists into that position, they’d have been an art history footnote at best. As their provocation is directed at the “serious art world” and the middle classes, it’s doubtful they’d have made any friends at all.

The current buzzword encapsulating this notion is market fit. Its suggestion is before you create your magnum opus, you consider for a moment who the audience for said work might be. Woody Allen’s famous quip:

80 percent of success is showing up.

Also contains the same idea: being in the right place at the right time trumps a lot of cleverness, skill, or what have you. This is unfortunately one of those quotes for which there are various versions. It seems to have been attributed to Allen, and later claimed by him… which I guess proves the point.

The opposing point of view is summed up in the slightly paraphrased Field of Dreams line:¹³

If you build it, they will come.

The actual quote is “… he will come.” This is a very American, manifest-destiny, build-a-better mousetrap, will-to-power myth. And furthermore, it’s far from a benign one. It’s the one Randian asshats pat themselves on the back with: their success proves their worthiness, setting aside the silver spoon they’ve gummed since birth, and all the breaks they’ve had along the way, and people who are unsuccessful just didn’t have the bootstrapping grit they should have, and so exist only to be vilified, exploited, or ignored.

Despite my hyperbolic title, this is not an article about how Malcolm Gladwell is a hack who’s wrong about everything, and who you’d do well in the future to avoid reading, let alone citing. (Update: or is he?) This piece is about that one time Gladwell got it wrong. I submit people have built careers out of being wrong most of the time, and being well-intentioned, but not quite having your point nailed once in a while is exceptional.

Mainly, it’s important to understand how personal biases play into our errors. This is a case where Gladwell hasn’t found the research to back up his value for the late bloomer, and lacking that, hasn’t found a narrative to go along with it. As someone who (I hope) continues to grow intellectually and as a creator, I hope he finds them.

Read subsequent articles in the Gladwellocalypse series

Part 2: The Unfit “King”

Part 2 Addendum: Gladwell’s Golf Guff Gets Grief

Part 3: Descent into the Absurd

Part 4: The Immaculate Miscegenation

Notes

1. David Galenson, Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, 2007.
2. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, 2000.
3. Gladwell, “Hallelujah”, Revisionist History, June 2016.
4. Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”, Various Positions, 1984.
5. Jonathan Coe, “Sinking Giggling into the Sea”, London Review of Books, July 2013.
6. Gladwell, “The Satire Paradox”, Revisionist History, August 2016.
7. “Malcolm Gladwell”, Q&A, C-SPAN, November 2009.
8. Gladwell, “Late Bloomers”, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, 2009.
9. Thomas Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question”, 1849.
10. Mark Twain, “Chapters from My Autobiography”, North American Review, 1907.
11. Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, 2008.
12. Gladwell, “The Big Man Can’t Shoot”, Revisionist History, June 2016.
13. Field of Dreams, 1989.