SNATCHING VICTORY FROM THE JAWS OF DEFEAT

Sequels are two a penny with novels, less so in non-fiction. Malcolm Gladwell has broken that trend with ‘Revenge of the Tipping Point (Abacus, 2024), a follow up to the riotously successful The Tipping Point published in 2000.

 

His first book was full of millennial hope and how small interventions can make big differences in culture and society. In keeping with the spirit of the age, his sequel attends to the darker side of tipping points, especially when they are engineered to preserve elite power in varied social settings.

 

He also talks about how big changes, when they happen, take people by surprise.

 

In our generation, the collapse of East European communism is a stand out event. The world was full of politicians, advisers, intelligence gatherers, academics and assorted punters who failed to predict even weeks beforehand that the Berlin Wall would be breached; that east and central European countries would become democracies and the Soviet Union cease to exist.

 

For Malcolm Gladwell, part of the answer lies in the overstory. This is the ‘upper layer of foliage in a forest and the size and density and height of the overstory affect the behaviour and development of every species far below on the forest floor’. We may not like grand narratives in our post-modern world, but we are governed by stories we barely register. And one of these, for the person of faith, is the coming of the kingdom of God.

 

The Israelite exiles were languishing in Babylon with the hope of a return to their land just about extinguished, but Daniel, reading the prophecy of Jeremiah, saw the length allotted to this exile was seventy years. He took this promise as the overstory of exile and held God to his word. The people were in despair, but their deliverance was drawing near.

 

The land was suffering from severe drought when the prophet Elijah knelt down on Mount Carmel to pray for rain. The people had lost all energy and hope, but Elijah still trusted in God. He asked his servant to look out over the Mediterranean for signs of a change in the weather and was not dissuaded when at first there was no change and that, even at the seventh viewing, there was only a ‘little cloud no bigger than a person’s hand’. Elijah saw rain in a cloudless sky because faith gave him a different overstory.

 

Elisha, successor to Elijah, was surrounded in his house by a large army of Aramean soldiers tasked with his capture. His servant, understandably, thought there was no escape. But Elisha saw ‘the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around’ and asked God to open the eyes of his servant to this astonishing overstory. The pair was rescued.

 

We may feel that Daniel, Elijah and Elisha inhabited a different level of trust, but the words of Jesus on the cross shows even he could lose sight of the greatest overstory of all: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? he said. In pain, humiliation and loneliness, Jesus felt abandoned, but he was the faithful servant of the overstory.

 

Gladwell’s point is that change does not seem to be coming when it is, and that when it arrives it often comes quickly, meaning we are taken completely by surprise. We may be edging ever closer to victory but it feels like we are losing.

 

Writing in his seminal essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless’ Czech dissident Vaclav Havel said of the Soviet yoke:

‘What if (the brighter future) has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us and kept us from developing it?’

 

He could have been speaking of the coming kingdom of God.

 

Jesus told us to be persistent in prayer. We assume this is because we have to keep chipping away at an immovable iceberg, and sometimes we grow discouraged because there appears to be no change. But faith is ‘the conviction of things not seen’. An overstory has already shaped the world around us. God’s salvation is so very near. And none more so than when we feel all is lost.