We’re almost halfway through Elul, the month of soul-searching and repentance, and soon it’ll be Yom Kippur, with its “I’m sorries” galore. Just in time, then, we’ve been treated to a marquee apology, by Malcolm Gladwell.
Gladwell confessed on a recent podcast that he was on a panel in 2022 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discussing the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports. “I’m ashamed at my performance on that panel,” he told the show’s host. His admission, which appeared to be entirely self-prompted, was widely covered by the press.
Should we forgive Gladwell?
Taking a page from the great simplifier of science himself, let’s approach this question empirically.
Had Gladwell said something like “Hey, you know what, I feel terrible because I used to believe that trans athletes belonged in women’s sports, and I’ve since taken the time to learn just how insane this idea truly is and how it puts women not only at a disadvantage but also in jeopardy, and I’m really sorry because I should have followed my own advice and studied the facts without succumbing in the moment to crazed propaganda,” we might have applauded and congratulated the celebrated journalist for being introspective, candid, and brave.
But that’s not what Gladwell said.
“The reason I’m ashamed of my performance on that panel,” Gladwell told his host, is “because I share your position 100 percent. And I was cowed at the idea of saying anything on this issue.”
I was in full possession of the facts in 2022, Gladwell was essentially saying, and therefore believed that biological males had absolutely no place competing against women in sports. Yet faced with a public opportunity to say so, I instead told my audience the exact opposite of what I believed to be the truth.
What Gladwell’s self-serving excuse for an apology taught us is that he does not see journalism as a tool for telling the truth; he understands it as a pursuit of social clout and career advancement.
How should we characterize such behavior? For once, Gladwell’s reputation for higher-level clarity failed him. “I was objective in a dishonest way,” he said, coining a phrase that belongs right up there with jumbo shrimp or military intelligence in the pantheon of plainly contradictory and patently idiotic terms.
Let us help poor Gladwell by giving him the Gladwell treatment and explaining this complex question in a way that’s easy to understand: By Malcolm Gladwell’s own admission, Malcolm Gladwell simply lied for his own convenience. Therefore, Malcolm Gladwell is a liar.
That much is clear. But here’s a more intricate question: Should we forgive him?
Ours is a famously merciful religion, and the whole point of the spiritual marathon that leads to the Gates of Heaven and the Book of Life alike closing at the end of Yom Kippur is to do whatever we can to seek and grant forgiveness. But forgiveness is not a blank check; it’s the beginning of the conversation, not its end. Rambam, the wise Maimonides, famously taught us that teshuva, or repentance, means little unless it is backed up by concrete action. If the point of Gladwell’s mea culpa was repentance, there was much he could—in fact, must—have done.
For example, he might have decided, since he lied like a lying liar to avoid the negative fallout that might have resulted from telling the truth, to dedicate his vaunted perch at The New Yorker to profiling someone who didn’t lie—someone who instead spoke the truth and paid the price. Gladwell could have written, maybe, about Jennifer Sey, the founder of apparel brand XX-XY Athletics and a longtime fighter for the rights of female athletes, or about Riley Gaines, the champion swimmer denied her accomplishments by a biological male competitor with whom she was later forced to share a locker room. Both would have made for terrific Gladwell profiles, giving the famed journalist a chance to use his prominent platform to explain to his readers how social contagions work and how they can infect even well-regarded, richly compensated reporters and the publications they write for. See, Gladwell might have written, “Here is a person who did what I could not find the courage to do; let’s all belatedly admire their conduct, which at the time we condemned.”
Instead, his latest piece for the magazine, published earlier this summer, deals with violent crime and continues Gladwell’s streak of ignoring obvious observable realities that clash with progressive orthodoxy. In this spirit, for example, he argued that “we have been trying to stop violent offenders without understanding what goes on in the mind of the violent offender,” a sweeping statement that must certainly come as a surprise to the hundreds of university departments where professors and students have spent the past 75 years dedicated to the formal study of criminology, a field of study that began in Europe in the late 18th century—or to anyone paying taxes in New York state, say, where the latest budget earmarks $33 million to giving psychological services and treatments to convicted criminals.
What Malcolm Gladwell’s self-serving excuse for an apology taught us, then, is that Malcolm Gladwell does not see journalism as a tool for telling the truth; he, like so many of his colleagues, understands it as a pursuit of social clout, career advancement, and other earthly rewards by advancing dogmas that are popular among a certain class of people and clothing them in the mantles of reason and science regardless of what a reasoned examination of empirical evidence may tell us about their social and physical effects. Which in turn requires prevaricating until it is no longer profitable to do so.
While being wrong is an inevitable and therefore forgivable part of the business of public opinionating—up to a point, past which you should graciously retire—knowingly lying to your audience to ensure your place among the rightthinkers is a different game entirely. Whatever their personal politics, readers should properly have no use for self-serving liars, especially those who have spent two decades portraying themselves as pure-at-heart priests of dispassionate empiricism. And there’s no reason for any sane person to be swayed by mawkish mea culpas whose purpose is presumably further career advancement by belatedly presenting the courageous and winning arguments of others as your own.
But hey, Elul ain’t over yet. There’s still time before Yom Kippur, and anyone, even writers for the legacy press, may yet repent.
Tablet Magazine
