Malcolm Gladwell and the limits of New York liberalism

In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Finch (played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film version) sought to expose Jim Crow to the world, not change it overnight.

by Glynn Wilson

Just when I thought the South and race had been reduced to comedy and thus removed from literary thought out of New York for the final time, one of my favorite science writers recently decided to step out of his expertise in sociology to take a stab at history. The result, as usual, reveals more about the opinions of New Yorkers about the South than it does about the problem of race relations and what to do about it.

Regular readers will remember that I have praised Malcolm Gladwell before, most recently for his book Outliers: The Story of Success. But his most recent piece in The New Yorker on Big Jim Folsom and Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism cries out for criticism.

A number of my Facebook “friends” have shared this story around, so I know many people have read it. If you have not already, I recommend it. Hit the link and read it. Then come back and see why I think it has shortcomings.

At first scan, the story makes sense. The point being that when Big Jim Folsom was trying to influence the hearts and minds of the people of Alabama in the 1950s, he did so by example, knowing it would take a lifetime. He did not advocate immediate change through protests and law. If he had, he would never have been elected in the first place, and so he would never have been able to bring about any change at all.

Anybody who knows anything about politics knows you can’t do anything unless you get elected.

It is not clear whether Gladwell is even aware of it, although it’s hard to imagine he’s not. But when he uses George Orwell’s criticism of Charles Dickens to take on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, he becomes Orwell in his own story.

To summarize, Orwell attacked Dickens in an essay once for his lack of “constructive suggestions” on social reform in his day.

Dickens was a powerful critic of Victorian England, a proud and lonely voice in the campaign for social reform. But … there was little substance to Dickens’s complaints. “He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places,” Orwell writes. “There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature.’ ” Dickens sought “a change of spirit rather than a change in structure….” He believed in the power of changing hearts, and that’s what you believe in, Orwell says, if you “do not wish to endanger the status quo.”

Gladwell accuses Harper Lee of the same infraction with her character Atticus Finch, calling her crime a “Folsomism.”

“Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another,” Gladwell writes.

Atticus Finch is faced with jurors who have one set of standards for white people like the Ewells and another set for black folk like Tom Robinson. His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites like Boo Radley and another for white trash like Bob Ewell. A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb, Alabama.

But in cases where the status quo involves systemic injustice this is no more than a temporary strategy. Eventually, such injustice requires more than a change of heart.

Can you spot the fallacy quickly enough yourself? Gladwell is a fine sociologist, but not much of a historian. Orwell was a fine social critic and novelist, but not much of a historian or literary critic himself.

They both are guilty of “presentism:” analyzing a historical situation in terms of a modern understanding of things without acknowledging the circumstances of the times.

Then Gladwell and Orwell make the mistake of thinking the authors were trying to change things in their time, when in fact, both were merely trying to tell a narrative story to document the attitudes of the time. So Gladwell misses the most important lesson of all.

It is not the purpose of literature to bring about immediate social change. That should be the job of the activist, and in some cases the journalist. Changing the law may bring about some change in the short term. But without that long-term change of heart, there is no true evolution in society. That’s sometimes the goal of the novelist. Appealing to the heart to change the mind. It can’t happen overnight.

A couple of examples to bolster this point.

Abraham Lincoln changed the law in 1863 by emancipating the slaves in the middle of the Civil War in a last-ditch effort to save the Union. But it took another 102 years before attitudes in the U.S. had changed enough for President Lyndon Johnson to propose and for congress to ratify the Voting Rights Act of 1965, giving African-Americans the right to vote.

The Supreme Court struck down the separate but equal doctrine in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which Gladwell points out was the moment of Folsom’s political undoing in a way. Yet it took another 20 years for attitudes to change enough in the South for the public schools to actually be integrated.

Finally, I am in total disagreement with Gladwell’s assertion that a change of heart is a “temporary strategy.” In fact, it should be obvious there can be no long-term change in the “status quo” and its “systemic injustice” — without a change of many hearts. Folsom was only doing what he knew the Christian people of Alabama would respond to: Leading by example, something they all learned from their religious upbringing.

Sometimes in politics science is not enough…

For Gladwell to criticize our populist politician, Big Jim Folsom, for trying to bring about some change in his time, and to attack our beloved Harper Lee for trying to tell the world what her world was like in her time, I find him guilty of another fallacy, one of my own invention: New Yorkerism.

I am sick and tired of being told what to think and write by New York writers and editors who watch our particularly Southern struggle from afar and refuse to acknowledge that there are writers on the ground here who not only understand the struggle better, but who can also articulate it just as well. There are some of us with just as much education or more who understand these problems and know how to communicate them effectively — if only there were editors in New York who would take the time to listen.

As for readers in the South, I’m wondering when they are going to realize it doesn’t have to be written by someone in New York or published out of New York to have validity and value.

Tags: Atticus Finch, Big Jim Folsom, Charles Dickens, Facebook, George Orwell, Harper Lee, Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorkerism, presentism, Race Relations, The New Yorker, To Kill a Mockingbird

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Authors/Books, Under the Microscope III. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.