David and Goliath

by

Malcolm Gladwell

David and Goliath: Chapter 7: Rosemary Lawlor Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Rosemary Lawlor is a Catholic woman who lived through the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The Troubles began in the late 1960s and raged on for over three decades, embroiling the country in a violent conflict between the Protestant majority (which was unofficially backed by the British military) and the Catholic community. In 1969, Gladwell explains, Lawlor and her husband had just had a baby and moved into their new home in Belfast, but they were soon forced to leave because their neighborhood was no longer safe for Catholics. Consequently, they slipped out one night and tricked a cab driver into taking them to Ballymurphy, a Catholic neighborhood in West Belfast, where they stayed with Lawlor’s parents. The following year, the conflict escalated, with acts of grave violence taking place more frequently on the open streets. Lawlor and her husband continued to hide out in Ballymurphy.
At this point, Gladwell begins to examine the complicated struggle that took place among Protestants, Catholics, and the British military between the 1960s and 1990s. In doing so, he prepares to apply his argument about underdogs, advantages, disadvantages, and power to a notoriously complex situation. And though the story he tells is largely from the perspective of a Catholic community, it’s worth keeping in mind that the power dynamics during the 30-year conflict were extremely fraught—a fact that on its own destabilizes the notion that power remains consistent under all circumstances.
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While at her parents in Ballymurphy one day, Lawlor hears a woman named Harriet Carson walking through the streets and calling out to the residents, urging them to come outside. She informs them that the residents of another nearby Catholic neighborhood called Lower Falls are in trouble. Responding to a tip that there are illegal weapons in the neighborhood, British forces have put the entirety of Lower Falls under a curfew, forbidding families from leaving their homes. Harriet Carson explains that children are going hungry because families are running out of food. This enrages the people of Ballymurphy, who take to the streets and make their way to Lower Falls.
As the residents of Ballymurphy descend upon Lower Falls, a clear power struggle begins to emerge. The British people occupying Lower Falls are part of the military, whereas the Catholics coming from Ballymurphy are simply concerned citizens. Given these circumstances, it would be natural to assume that the military will easily win the conflict. In the context of David and Goliath, though, readers ought to consider Gladwell’s interest in exploring mismatched power dynamics and how underdogs often surprise “giants.”
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Gladwell considers the nature of “insurgencies,” turning to a report written by two economists named Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr. in the aftermath of World War II. In their report, Rebellion and Authority, they argue that people in positions of authority don’t need to think about how the people they’re trying to control feel about them. Rather, they simply need to respond harshly when insurgents break the law. Gladwell notes that Ian Freeland—the British general assigned to handle the conflict in Northern Ireland—is somebody who took this message to heart by ordering his troops to respond to adversity with great force, so as to teach insurgents a lesson.
It makes sense that Gladwell would be interested in the thinking that fuels any attempt to suppress insurgency, since David and Goliath is about the ways in which power functions. The question in this section, then, is whether or not harsh displays of force are actually effective when it comes to fighting against people who aren’t powerful in conventional ways. The problem with this tactic, of course, is most likely that powerful organizations tend to wield their power in specific, predictable ways that don’t always succeed in discouraging underdogs, as evidenced by Goliath’s loss to David.
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Quotes
Gladwell uses an educational example to illustrate the mistake the British made in their attempt to enforce law and order in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. He references video footage of a kindergarten classroom in disarray. In the video, the teacher fails to engage the vast majority of the students because she’s focused on helping just one child read aloud. As this happens, the other students begin to fidget and blatantly break the rules, but the teacher doesn’t do anything. Gladwell uses this to suggest that, though many people think of authority as “a response to disobedience,” this dynamic can actually invert itself—disobedience is sometimes a response to authority. What the teacher fails to do, Gladwell upholds, is figure out how to stop her students from misbehaving in the first place.
Gladwell’s point about the teacher’s failure to engage her students suggests that Wolf and Leites’s belief about authority—that people in power don’t need to pay attention to those they hope to control as long as they enforce great discipline—is incorrect. The teacher’s pedagogical method overlooks the needs of the entire class and tries to enforce a dry, uninspiring educational model, one in which children are expected to sit still and listen even if they’re unlikely to get anything out of the lesson. By creating this kind of environment, the teacher relies upon nothing but her own authority to keep the children from misbehaving. But her authority alone is clearly not enough to do this, demonstrating that people in positions of power would do well to tailor their actions to the people they hope to control. 
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In another classroom video, a teacher hands out homework and proceeds to read every single word on the worksheet. This bores her students, who immediately lose interest. When one boy begins to complete the homework, the teacher admonishes him. Gladwell suggests that this punishment is ineffective because it will do nothing but make the child frustrated and cynical of the value of the rules. This is known as the “principle of legitimacy,” a theory which upholds that people will only heed authority if they feel as if they “have a voice” in the context of that authority. It also suggests that the rules must remain consistent in order for people to respect them and that they also have to be perceived as fair. According to Gladwell’s argument, this theory applies to insurgents just as much as it applies to schoolchildren. 
The reason this teacher’s scolding will most likely fail to sink in for this child is that her authority doesn’t feel legitimate. After all, the child undoubtedly finds it unfair that he’s just gotten in trouble for doing homework, since actually completing the worksheet is a far more valuable use of time than going over a chunk of text he could easily read for himself. Applying this idea to the Troubles, it’s clear that the Catholic community most likely doesn’t respect the legitimacy of the British military’s authority, which is yet another reason that the people of Ballymurphy are willing to stand up for their fellow Catholics at Lower Falls.
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To further illustrate the principle of legitimacy, Gladwell tells the story of a police officer named Joanne Jaffe. When Jaffe became the head of New York City’s Housing Bureau, it was her job to address the extremely high crime rate in Brownsville, Brooklyn. To do this, she compiled a list of every juvenile offender in Brownsville who’d been arrested for mugging in the past year. The list had 106 names, and Jaffe applied herself to establishing a connection with these young people. To do this, she assembled a team of officers who reached out to every person on the list and explained to them that their information had been added to the Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program (J-RIP). The officers explained that they would do everything they could to help the “J-RIPpers” succeed in life, but that they’d also crack down on them if they were caught committing another crime.
Gladwell’s interest in the Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program is connected to his ideas about authority and “legitimacy.” In order to successfully influence a group of people, he believes, a person or organization must ensure that those people respect them and value the nature of their authority. Joanne Jaffe clearly grasps this, which is why she attempts to make a personal connection with the young people on her list. By engaging with them on a personal level, she hopes to foster a sense of mutual respect that will confirm the police’s “legitimacy” in the community.
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Jaffe’s task force set up trailers in the parking lots outside the housing developments where the J-RIP members live. They keep close watch on them and make sure they know it, too, so that they think twice before breaking the law. At first, this method doesn’t work because families refuse to let the officers into their homes and lives. However, things change when an officer and his colleagues decide one Thanksgiving to put their personal money together to buy a turkey for the family of one particularly misbehaved young man. This young man, Gladwell explains, is considered something of a lost cause, but the officers decide to make this gesture because there are a number of other children in the same family, so they hope to get through to them before they follow in their brother’s footsteps.  
By buying this young man’s family a turkey for Thanksgiving, the officers demonstrate that they care about the quality of his life. Rather than sticking to conventional policing tactics—which are impersonal and authoritarian—they make an effort to establish a relationship with the community, thereby going against the status quo to ensure that they’re seen as “legitimate” among J-RIPpers and their families.
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Jaffe loves her team’s idea to buy a turkey for one of the members of J-RIP so much that she gets her boss to give her the funds to do this for all the families in the program. This has a profound effect, as the families welcome the officers into their homes and show them great appreciation. The reason Jaffe does this, Gladwell notes, is because she doesn’t think the people of Brownsville see the police as a “legitimate” form of authority. After all, almost every young person in the J-RIP program has a father, brother, or cousin in jail, making it hard for them to see the law as fair and right. Moreover, this bleak reality makes it all too difficult for the members of J-RIP to believe that police officers would ever actually care about their wellbeing. 
Gladwell suggests that one of the reasons most J-RIPpers don’t believe in the “legitimacy” of the police has to do with the extremely high number of people from their community who’ve been sent to jail. This pattern effectively shows them that the police are out to get them and are therefore completely uninterested in their overall wellbeing. Consequently, they’re pleasantly surprised when Joanne Jaffe and her team go out of their way to show compassion. This, in turn, demonstrates not only that it’s often helpful for people in positions of authority to break from convention, but also that a small amount of empathy can go a long way.
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Jaffe starts hosting toy drives for J-RIP families at Christmastime. Slowly but surely, she and the other officers develop meaningful relationships with the kids on their list and their family members, doing whatever they can to make their lives easier. As a result, the crime rate in Brownsville falls significantly. Within three years, robbery-related arrests of J-RIP members decreases to under 50 per year from over 350 per year. In turn, Jaffe demonstrates that Leites and Wolf were wrong when they wrote in Rebellion and Authority that it doesn’t matter what people think of those trying to control them. In reality, it matters a great deal. 
Gladwell uses Jaffe’s success story to challenge the idea that people in positions of power need not worry what others think of them. This, Gladwell intimates, is a deeply flawed way of approaching authority, since projects like J-RIP prove that empathy, compassion, and engagement are integral to the process of working productively with disempowered communities.
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During and leading up to the Troubles, Gladwell explains, Protestant “Loyalists” (as they’re known) march through the streets every July to celebrate their long-ago victory against the Catholics. In doing so, they burn images of the Pope and shout out various chants disparaging the Catholic community. When the residents of Lower Falls see the British Army entering the neighborhood to search for weapons, then, they are all too ready for some kind of intervention, but they aren’t sure if they can embrace the British authorities. The British Army originally came to Northern Ireland to serve as “an impartial referee between Protestant[s] and Catholic[s],” but England is a mostly Protestant country, so it’s hard for the Catholics of Lower Falls to feel as if the British Army is there to enforce a form of law and order that will actually benefit them. 
Once again, Gladwell underscores the importance of “legitimacy” when it comes to authority and power. Even though the British military is supposed to function as an impartial presence that will ensure peace in Northern Ireland, the country’s Catholic community is set on edge by its presence. This is because the Catholics don’t see the British military as truly impartial, meaning that they don’t view them as a legitimate or dependable form of authority and safety. For this reason, the army’s presence only exacerbates the Catholic community’s fear and misgivings about their surrounding environment.
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General Freeland, Gladwell suggests, tries to enforce the law in Northern Ireland without stopping to consider whether or not he has the “legitimacy” to do so. In fact, Gladwell asserts that Freeland doesn’t have this legitimacy, since he represents a powerful force that the Catholics see as biased against them. Instead of acknowledging this, though, Freeland decides to meet any kind of resistance with extreme force, resulting in 25 deaths in 1970. That year, Rosemary Lawlor’s brother is shot and killed by the British Army because they suspect he’s a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Even when Lawlor tells this story to Gladwell decades later, she says she’s still distraught and was angry for a very long time.
Freeland’s decision to meet resistance with relentless force is a dangerous one, since it further complicates the already fraught situation in Northern Ireland. Rather than recognizing that the Catholic community has no good reason to see the British military as a dependable authority, he focuses on using brute force to suppress any conflict that might arise—a tactic that ignores the nuances of the situation and only leads to escalation.
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In Lower Falls, the priest is the most respected individual in the community. When the British Army comes to search the neighborhood for weapons, everyone flocks to the church, but this doesn’t stop the British from entering and spending 45 minute searching it for weapons, eventually emerging with multiple guns and a trove of explosives. By this point, a crowd has gathered around the church. A riot breaks out, and when the soldiers turn to leave, some of the angry residents throw stones at their retreating vehicles. In response, the soldiers stop and turn around, shooting tear gas into the crowd. This only further infuriates the residents. Why, Gladwell wonders, did the soldiers turn around? They could have continued on, but they came back to fight. This, he says, is because they’ve been ordered to meet resistance with force. 
Freeland’s decision to meet force with force only results in escalation and unnecessary violence. While it’s true that the people of Lower Falls (literally) cast the first stone, it would have been easy enough for the British Army to leave. Instead of doing this, though, they turn around and fight, because this is what people in positions of power typically do. By aligning with conventional ideas about how to prevail over others, then, Freeland’s army exacerbates an already fraught and dangerous situation.
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On the night of the conflict at Lower Falls, 337 people are arrested and 60 are wounded. Several are even killed. Eventually, Freeland calls for backup and institutes a curfew, forcing everyone into their homes. Within days, the residents are starving, so Harriet Carson rallies Catholics in Ballymurphy, urging them to bring food to the people of Lower Falls. A steady stream of women come outside and pack their baby-strollers with bread and other necessities. When they reach Lower Falls, the British soldiers don’t know how to respond, not wanting to attack a group of women. Still, a group of soldiers meet the women with force and start pulling their hair and fighting with their fists. However, so many women have joined Harriet and the others that they eventually outnumber the soldiers. Before long, one of the soldiers orders the others to give up, and the British Army lifts the curfew.
The story of Lower Falls is yet another tale that follows the David and Goliath format. Like David, the Catholic community in Northern Ireland uses alternative tactics to get the better of a seemingly indominable foe, changing the nature of combat by playing on the soldiers’ consciences. Indeed, the people challenging the British are women pushing baby strollers, ultimately putting the soldiers in a precarious position—after all, if word gets out that they’re attacking unarmed women pushing strollers, their “legitimacy” will plummet even further in the Catholic community. In this way, Harriet Carson’s approach is similar to Wyatt Walker and Dr. King’s clever attempt to goad the Birmingham police force into doing something that can be used against it.
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