The passion of Jonah Lehrer, and a people addicted to Insights

October 30, 2012  Eric Garland

A few weeks ago I fielded an interview request from Boris Kachka at New York Magazine to discuss my essay about Jonah Lehrer, Malcolm Gladwell, and the culture of glib intellectual superstars. It was a great conversation, getting right to the root of the matter – why do we seek easy answers from faux-experts? Why do we fall for slick over substantive time and time again? And is this why our leadership is so poor these days?

The article in question has finally seen the light of day, and as the kids say, it’s pretty epic. Entitled “Proust Wasn’t a Neuroscientist. Neither was Jonah Lehrer,” Kachka moves quickly beyond the sins of one purveyor of gossamer wisdom over another, right to the real issue – the cultural infrastructure around which our wise men of the age conspire to seduce us.

In the world of magazines, of course, none of us is immune to slickness or oversimplification—New York included. But two things make Lehrer’s glibness especially problematic, and especially representative. First, conferences and corporate speaking gigs have helped replace the ­journalist-as-translator with the journalist-as-sage; in a magazine profile, the scientist stands out, but in a TED talk, the speaker does. And second, the scientific fields that are the most exciting to today’s writers—neuroscience, evolutionary biology, behavioral economics—are fashionable despite, or perhaps because of, their newness, which makes breakthrough findings both thrilling and unreliable. In these fields, in which shiny new insights so rarely pan out, every popularizer must be, almost by definition, a huckster. When science doesn’t give us the answers we want, we find someone who will.

Ours is a culture of people staring at tiny devices, enraptured by constant BREAKING NEWS and bons mots and LOLZ and memes and updates and celebrity epic fails and a million other distractions to keep us from sitting still and considering who we are and what we are doing. Led by people who grew up in the 20th century, which was constantly upended by disruptive technologies and historical events, we cannot abide that some things simply do not change fast enough to matter in our lifetimes.
Witness the Singulatarians and their Baby Boomer high priest, Ray Kurzweil, who believe that biotechnology will “merge” with nanotechnology and information technology in our lifetimes to do nothing less than deliver us from the inconvenience of dying. Not just that we might significantly alter how humans age at the cellular level someday, with enough technology and scientific progress, but that we will experience the end of death in the lifetime of any given Boomer.
When you are expecting that kind of return on scientific wisdom, surely it isn’t too much to ask for our best science journalists to give us a glimpse into how neuroscience is changing how we eat, drive cars, learn musical instruments, work, develop websites or something? Come on, that Human Genome Project happened twelve years ago and we still have friggin’ cancer – can’t somebody give us an update on how we’re learning the secrets of the universe (minus, naturally, the unfathomable complexity of what scientists actually are uncovering)? And, as Kachka concludes, if the scientists won’t jack up and hit the lecture circuit, we’ll supplant them with journalists who are more than willing to play the sage on the stage.
Kachka then gets down to business and indicts the whole business model:

Lehrer was the first of the Millennials to follow his elders into the dubious promised land of the convention hall, where the book, blog, TED talk, and article are merely delivery systems for a core commodity, the Insight.
The Insight is less of an idea than a conceit, a bit of alchemy that transforms minor studies into news, data into magic. Once the Insight is in place—Blink, Nudge, Free, The World Is Flat—the data becomes scaffolding. It can go in the book, along with any caveats, but it’s secondary. The purpose is not to substantiate but to enchant.

He quotes me a bit later as an “unlikely” source of criticism, given that I am in fact in the same business as Messieurs Gladwell, Lehrer, Surowiecki, et al. But then again, I’m not. The key value of these writers has been to provide a plausible narrative that will give the audience that all-important feeling of control, of having a sophisticated view of the world. I may be just as full of shit (your mileage may vary) but my background in competitive analysis in support of billion-dollar decisions imbued me with a sense that if your work isn’t completely backed up with rigor, people will ultimately find out that you are bullshitting, and destroy your reputation. You see, actual strategic decisions aren’t (well, shouldn’t be) about intellectual palliation, but about getting the best information possible and then launching yourself into an uncertain future. Oh, and if you’re working with scientists or engineers, they will peel the skin off you if you obviously screw up the important details of their work – your credibility is toast. There simply isn’t room for cheap anecdotes and high-falootin’ analysis. That, sadly, has been relegated to the conference hall, the TV studio, the pedestal on which we seat our Serious People.
It’s an idea whose time has passed. If there is crushing pressure bearing down on our current cadre of thought leaders, that’s probably because, in the words of Justin Fox, they aren’t doing a very good job of leading our thoughts. The leaders of the world need to reapply for their jobs. Let us make sure that we judge them on merit and not mediagenic charisma.