Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian author, best known for his popular podcast titled Revisionist History. Educated, with the kind of education you would expect from someone who wrote for years in The New Yorker, adequately refined, with that kind of diffuse but not necessarily profound cultivation, with all the right sensitive points and measured enough to be universally accepted (especially since he maintains his Christian faith), he constitutes almost a characteristic ideal type of the moderate, progressive intellectual.
It is exactly these characteristics of his that make the incorporation of holistic elements into his discourse impressive, obviously without him even being bothered. In one of his latest shows, titled The dog will see you now (26/8/2021), he deals with the topic of dogs’ hyper-developed sense of smell and how it can be used with high accuracy even for medical diagnoses. Inevitably, the discussion leads to the question of whether dogs can smell and detect someone who is infected with the coronavirus. The expert’s answer is, of course, affirmative.
From this point on, the host indulges in a delusional crescendo of corona-hysteria, fantasizing about dogs in schools sniffing out students and isolating cases, or even roaming the streets, having been trained as super-spreaders of the coronavirus. Unfortunately, as he concludes, we do not have enough trained dogs for such a thing.
The most terrifying part? The details of this entire fantasy are presented in the most matter-of-fact tone, without the slightest hint of horror, without Gladwell even seeming to consider the dystopian dimensions of such a scenario. When psycho-intellectual degeneration has reached such a point that social barbarity has become second nature even to otherwise “progressive” subjects, this means that barbarity is already here, even if for now it shows only its veiled gaze and not its bloodstained teeth.