Ecce Homo Statisticus

The other day, I was reading some questions that were soooo Malcolm Gladwell. ‘Why do I know a few more things? Why I am so clever altogether?’ The other lines of inquiry – ‘Why I am so so wise’ and ‘Why I write such excellent books’ – were equally reminiscent of Gladwell’s latest bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), if not Gladwell himself. Indeed, the Guardian recently knighted the journalist-cum-author ‘a global phenomenon, one of the most brillant and influential writers of his generation.’

Of course, those questions were both posed and answered by Friedrich Nietzsche in his autobiographical essay Ecce Homo (1888-9). The German philosopher, while turning autobiography into auto-eulogy, never managed to complete this homage to himself, as he suffered a nervous breakdown. But the subtitle of the essay – ‘How One Becomes What One Is’ – suggests a shared field of inquiry between the narcissistic Nietzsche and the more humble Gladwell: the search for the origins of exceptional people.

Neither thinker seems to be fully convinced by innate gifts or natural talent. Nietzsche boiled down his brillance to a combination of beneficial exterior factors (climate, place, recreation, nutrition) and a good dose of egoism (self-preservation and selfishness), although his breakdown suggests that you can have too much of a good thing. In Outliers, Gladwell uncovers the common statistical origins often hidden behind successful people. One of his examples: the majority of Canadian professional ice hockey players are born between January and June. While practice and dedication can’t hurt, a decisive role is played by the 1st January cut-off date for joining junior hockey teams across Canada – a date that gives a developmental advantage to those born earliest in the year.

Gladwell takes a similar approach to explain his teenage success as a runner, but there are not as many statistical clues about his success as a writer – unless someone discovers that a significant percentage of today’s bestselling non-fiction authors openly admired Ronald Reagan in their youth. The solution to this mystery may lie between Nietzsche’s exterior-egoistic factors and Gladwell’s statistics. The humble Gladwell, who grew up in the small Canadian town of Elmira, used to say that his greatest claim to fame was coming from the same place where the BlackBerry was invented – probably until he found out that the BlackBerry was invented some 15 kilometers away in Kitchener-Waterloo. But what’s 15 kilometers to ‘a global phenomenon’? Elmira is home to the largest single-day Maple Syrup Festival in the world, so perhaps there’s something global in local water. Or as Nietzsche wrote: place and nutrition.

Having grown up around the same time in the nearby town of Guelph – a fateful 25 kilometers from both Gladwell and BlackBerry – I was obviously too far away to enjoy global recognition today and yet close enough to share something else: StatsCan. To the rest of the world, that’s Statistics Canada, the federal government agency that collects and distributes economic, social and census data. Every single day in the news, there are reports from StatsCan: unemployment rates, price indexes, health attitudes among full-time students. The role of statistics in solidfying the ever-quivering collective Canadian identity cannot be overstated. Relative to its status as the world’s second largest country with more than 9.9 million km2 of space, Canada has a tiny population of around 33 million people. (The UK packs over 60 million people into 244,820 km2.) The overwhelming ratios of land-to-inhabitants makes StatsCan a boon to filling up the space, puffing up the population and closing the vast distances that separate Canadians. Saying 10% – instead of one person in ten people – makes the loner sound like a crowd.

So the mystery of Gladwell’s success may indeed lie between Nietzsche’s emphasis on place and Gladwell’s emphasis on statistics – not a particular statistic but statistics as a way of living, thinking and perceiving the world beyond one’s self. Statistics also drove his first bestseller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000), which examined the origins of epidemics, both medical and social. Instead of taking the surveys, Gladwell looks behind the percentages, gives a narrative to the numbers and individualizes the data. Gladwell did not watch television as a child growing up in Elmira – remember what Nietzsche said about recreation – but he could not have missed the newspaper and the radio, which wakes up Canadians every morning with the words ‘StatsCan’. Statistically, no Canadian can avoid StatsCan, whether becoming a statistic or hearing about one. Even after leaving Canada to work in the US, Gladwell became part of StatsCan’s data on emigrating Canadians.

Gladwell is not the only Canadian writer to gain international renown in the genre of statistics. Douglas Coupland turned the census into fiction with his survey of the coming-of-age-group Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). Recently, Christian Lander, living in the US as Gladwell does, compiled Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions (2008). While inspired by statistical surveys, these efforts may be covert autobiographies, closer to Nietzsche’s auto-eulogy. After all, StatsCanLit pioneer Coupland belonged to Generation X. Stuff White People Like seems a thinly-disguised list of stuff that Lander likes. And it’s hard not to see Gladwell’s books as apologies for hip intellecutals like himself, who are not academics but want to realize the impact of their thinking on the world. His Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) – an excuse for intuition, or perhaps for mass ignorance – describes a phenomenon while essentially creating and legitimizing this phenomenon.

Ultimately, statistics might just be a way of hiding the loner – and his ego – in the crowd. If Gladwell had been less humble – listen to Nietzsche! – the subtitle to Outliers could have been ‘The Story of My Success’. Yet one burning question remains: How did the StatsCan perspective become a global literary phenomenon? Why do Gladwell et al. enjoy such international popularity, beyond the Great White North? Maybe globalization – a way of belonging beyond the nation-state – makes us all feel a bit Canadian: one little person living in vastly larger place and linked to people whom one can never meet because they don’t even live in the same time zone. ‘My time has not yet come,’ wrote Nietzsche. ‘Some are born posthumously.’ And others – the timely ones – don’t just become statistics; they are wise enough to recognize them as a birthright.