THE TIPPING POINT: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, March, 2000 by Timothy Noah

THE TIPPING POINT: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference By Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown, $24.95

IN 1966, ROBERT KENNEDY GAVE THE SPEECH in South Africa that included his now-famous statement about the improbably large changes for the good brought about through individual bravery and idealism. "Each time a man stands up for an ideal," Kennedy said, "or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance." Not only can, but in the case of South Africa, did, just one generation later.

But how? How were Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and others able to defeat apartheid? Why have their counterparts in China and North Korea failed to defeat communism? And why have their counterparts in Russia and Eastern Europe been successful in defeating communism? Malcolm Gladwell, the author of this gem of a book, would say that events in South Africa, Russia, and Eastern Europe reached a "tipping point," while events in China and North Korea did not.

Gladwell, a talented staff writer for The New Yorker who began his career writing for conservative publications like The American Spectator, is not the sort of person who's burning to change the world. There is, in fact, nothing in Gladwell's book about turning the tides of history or throwing off the shackles of oppression, and quite a lot about how to devise a successful children's television show or sell a new brand of sneaker. Even when Gladwell writes about emotional issues like teenage suicide, he does so with a detachment that can seem other-worldly. Nonetheless, The Tipping Point could well prove to be an influential text for political activists.

Gladwell's book is built around the theory that ideas, trends, habits, and other kinds of social behavior spread much the same way that infectious diseases do. This idea is not a new one. Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, coined the term "meme" (from the Greek "mimesis," which means "to imitate") to describe the non-biological mechanism by which certain behavioral patterns spread through the human race. What genes do through reproduction, memes do through imitation. Aaron Lynch, in his 1996 book, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, elaborated on Dawkins' idea and demonstrated the ways that memes for such various things as parenting strategies, religious convictions, sexual habits, and political beliefs replicate themselves. In Lynch's view, people don't acquire ideas so much as "ideas acquire people."

One particularly compelling example Lynch cites is the seemingly irrational taboo regarding teenage masturbation. As Charles Peters recently observed in these pages, it's one of the most efficient ways for young people to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Yet when promoted, especially within the political realm, it draws snickers at best and strong moral disapproval at worst. Why? According to Lynch, the taboo is self-perpetuating: People who have no other outlet for their sexual urges will likely marry young, have many children, and then teach these children that masturbation is wrong. People who masturbate, however, will likely stay single longer and do other "immoral" things like have premarital sex using birth control. The downside to separating the pleasures of sex from the necessities of procreation, in other words, is that you end up spreading your memes to fewer offspring.

Where Dawkins and Lynch described, on a fairly abstract level, the march of memes from one generation to the next, Gladwell describes, much more concretely, how particular behavior patterns spread within a few months or years. According to Gladwell, behavioral patterns (he doesn't actually call them "memes") don't change gradually; they change quite suddenly when a small but critical number of strategically-placed converts reaches a tipping point.

The "tipping point" term was first used by social scientists to describe the number of black families moving into a predominantly white neighborhood that it takes to trigger "white flight"--i.e., a mass exodus of white families that effectively resegregates the neighborhood, this time as predominantly black. But it can also be used to describe more favorable trends--for example, the point at which a few, seemingly symbolic policing policies in New York City (such as a crackdown on subway farebeaters) triggered a massive decline in murders and other violent crimes. And it can also be used to describe trends that are neither particularly good nor particularly bad, like the revival of Hush Puppies as a popular shoe brand in the early 1990s.

In Gladwell's scheme, behavior patterns are transmitted by "mavens" (experts), "salesmen" (people who go to unusual lengths to persuade others to do a certain thing) and "connectors" (people who have an unusually large number of social contacts with whom they swap information). Gladwell's example of a classic "connector" is a woman named Lois Weisberg who is Chicago's commissioner of cultural affairs. By Gladwell's count, Weisberg is connected to eight disparate subcultures: the worlds of actors, writers, doctors, lawyers, park-loving conservationists, politicians, railroad buffs, and flea market aficionados. This places her at the axis of an amazing number of people. An example of her extraordinary reach is that even though I live in Washington, not Chicago, and am not especially sociable, I myself know at least half-a-dozen people who know her. (Her son Jacob is a friend and Slate colleague.)