So here we have this piece by Malcolm Gladwell about basketball and Lawrence of Arabia.
In it, Gladwell purports to explain how (a) weaker and (b) less gifted entities can whup the ass of stronger and more gifted entities.
The big secrets: Play by little-used rules (or as Admiral Kirk put it in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," "change the conditions of the test") and work harder.
Thus he uses the example of:
--a middle-school girl's basketball team from California, filled with a bunch of short, naturally-mediocre and inexperienced players. Their coach decided to adopt the little-used strategy of the full-court press against their taller and more gifted opponents. The opponents had not trained to the full-court press, got flustered, and lost games.
--and--
--Lawrence of Arabia's guerrilla insurgency against the British, which followed essentially the same outlines, except instead of shooting baskets, they shot guns.
The moral? If you're weak, prepare ten times as hard as your opponent, take his game away from him, and you'll probably win.
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Sounds good--which is exactly the problem with Malcolm Gladwell. As his detractors are quick to point out.
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Here's the thing. Gladwell is right, but he's also wrong.
I think the people who get mad at Gladwell get mad because he's facile, or more precisely, he's getting away with being facile. Who the fuck let him do that? I wish I could introduce him to my graduate professors. Like, all of them. Every time they thought--and I still dispute about 50% of those incidents as having more to do with style than substance--but every time they even so much as thought I was being facile, they came down on me like, well, Goliath.
(And that's why the academic humanities in general have become so tragically irrelevant. Somehow, these keepers of the legacies of Hume, Whitman, Moliere, Voltaire, Austen, Twain, Wodehouse, Waugh, Shakespeare for Christ's sake, decided that the thing to do was be pedantic. And nobody stopped them. This is a case of Goliath beating himself.)
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So anyhow. Gladwell. Facile.
Here's the problem with Gladwell's pro-underdog handbook: he never talks about the strategy part. He takes it as given that any old David will be able to see any old Goliath's weak spots ("They never use full-court press," "They're only guarding Medina and not the long desert border"). In other words, Gladwell takes insight and inspiration as given.
Gladwell also assumes that the holes in Goliath's armor will match up with the tools in David's sling. It doesn't always work that way. Take the horrifying story of the Native American David versus the Euro-American Goliath. Native American tribes were filled with fleet and awesome warriors who knew the land way better, had survival skills to make a Navy SEAL weep, and, mano-a-mano, could kick Euro-American ass inside out.
But they simply never found a hole in the overall defense that matched one of their strong points. There just wasn't one.
Meanwhile, we Euro-Americans were loaded with ammo at their weak points--never had smallpox before on this continent? Boy, have we got a surprise for you. Never had alcohol before on this continent? Oh, honey. What's that you say? How many of us can there possibly be? Funny you should ask.
So, no. The theory of out-thinking, out-preparing, and exploiting the fine print of the rule book, while by no means a bad strategy, is not a magic bullet.
Then again, Gladwell, no dummy, never quite says it is.
Which may be the essay's shrewdest point of all.
