On ‘Outliers’

Genius attracts us ad infinitum, ad absurdum. Notwithstanding the Malcolm Gladwells who would almost have us strike the word out of the lexicon. Gladwell, originator of such scintillating concepts as “tipping point” and “blink”, and a rather “successful” man in any modest sense of the term, albeit with his “genius” debatable, asks us in his latest book, Outliers, to downgrade the intrinsic worth of the individual and focus on his/her environment. If Christopher Langan, with an IQ of 195 to Einstein’s 150, didn’t become “a nuclear rocket surgeon” and ended up on a Missouri horse farm, it was because “no one in Langan’s life and nothing in his background… could help him capitalise on his exceptional gifts”. But big-time New York lawyers, Bill Gates or the Beatles, or modest Gladwell himself are where they are mostly because the environment helped. Success needs practice and hard work — 10,000 hours of it, not talent.

The presence and absence of genius have spawned theories aplenty; including those that question its existence and essence. Arthur Schopenhauer and Immanuel Kant, for instance, had very different philosophies of genius, but neither denied nor disputed the existence of attributes that made one individual better than and different from another. Later, we entered the “nature versus nurture” debate: whether innate qualities or the environment is the secret to success. And behavioural geneticists came in with more sophisticated tools, and fancy new terms. Affirmative action, something which Outliers advocates, tried to balance nature and nurture somewhat. Finally, political correctness made us believe that we are all geniuses.

There is much worth, if not genius, in Gladwell’s propositions. But popularising ideas and academic research and turning it into bestsellers have their limitations. You also run the danger of being called old-fashioned sooner than those behind the actual research, when the ideas are discredited by posterity.