In some ways, this is what you would expect from any large, disordered system. Think about the predictable and quantifiable way that gases behave. It might be impossible to trace the movement of each individual gas molecule, but the uncertainty and disorder at the molecular level wash out when you look at the bigger picture. Similarly, larger regularities emerge from our individually unpredictable lives. It’s almost as though we woke up each morning with a chance, that day, of becoming a murderer, causing a car accident, deciding to propose to our partner, being fired from our job. “An assumption of ‘chance’ encapsulates all the inevitable unpredictability in the world,” Spiegelhalter writes.
But it’s one thing when your aim is to speak in general terms about who we are together, as a collective entity. The trouble comes when you try to go the other way—to learn something about us as individuals from how we behave as a collective. And, of course, those answers are often the ones we most want.
Gladwell’s new book is called Talking to Strangers and, here we are, two strangers, conversing over tea in a fashionable Covent Garden hotel about the difficulties that can sometimes arise when, as he puts it, “we are thrown into contact with people whose assumptions, perspectives and backgrounds are different from our own”. Like the previous bestselling books that made his name – The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008) – Talking to Strangers is essentially an exploration of human behaviour that also challenges much of our received wisdom about that behaviour and its motivations. Unlike them, though, it lacks a single iconoclastic, zeitgeist-defining idea, instead roaming far and wide to illustrate the problems, individual and collective, personal and ideological, that dog our interactions with others in our globalised, but increasingly atomised, culture. “Any element which disrupts the equilibrium between two strangers, whether it is alcohol or power or place, becomes problematic,” he tells me. “The book is really about those disruptive influences.”
There’s a scene in the US political thriller House of Cards in which Claire Underwood, played by Robin Wright, goes for a run in a cemetery and, to her shock, is berated for doing so by an elderly woman who is there to mourn. Aside from underlining the moral complexity of Underwood’s tough-minded character, the scene speaks to an uneasy sense that, at least in advanced capitalist nations such as the UK and the US, where the processes of secularisation have recently been distinctly uneven, we don’t quite know how to behave in places that, in Erin-Marie Legacey’s phrase, make space for the dead. I can remember provoking a similar morally outraged reaction when, a decade ago, I took my small children to the local cemetery for a picnic.
The dummies employed by ventriloquists have an odd split personality — they're either funny or terrifying, sometimes both at once, and this kind of bifurcated existence slips into The Ventriloquists, E.R. Ramzipoor's lively novel of the WWII homefront in Europe. It's the story of a group of resisters aiming to lampoon the Nazis by publishing a fake edition of a real newspaper, which had been turned into a mouthpiece of the occupation. Ramizpoor based the plot on actual events that took place in Brussels, reality providing the underlying horror for the satirical conspiracy.