Populism Against Progress (PDF)

The increasing complexity of industrial society, together with the prospect of economic and environmental threats on a scale never before experienced, entails an ever-great demand on the educational and citizenship-skills of the ordinary individual. An appropriately educated public is needed to ensure effective democracy, and also, that suitably qualified men and women are elected to power – and this is something which transcends the narrow factor of party politics.

Unfortunately, as this book demonstrates, in the industrialised world today we live in a society where standards of education and good citizenship are declining, relative to the increasing complexity of the financial-industrial infrastructure, and the prospect of unprecedented threats on the horizon. The author attributes this decline to what he identifies as populism, defined as the short-termism of the easy option which compounds rather than resolves the issues of life. These are traced to two main sources: firstly, the faulty values promoted by or arising from political decision-making; and secondly, from the malign influence of marketing forces on public attitudes in dumbing-down standards in so many spheres of life.

Whilst a new perspective is put on politics, of most significance is the emphasis placed on education. The question of maintaining high culture, and correlating this with the needs of a classless and democratic society, is a theme which dominates the book. The appeal for raising aspirational standards in a heterogeneous society, challenge some of the totemic ideas in contemporary education, such as the questionable value of relativism and post-modernism as a preparation for good citizenship.

A sociological analysis of populism reveals it as the cancer of democracy. The breadth of the subject matter covers such issues as Islamic fundamentalism in barring the path to progress; the self-destructiveness of Western politics through a facile view of our real condition; and a glance at the arts. A broad canvas, covering many disciplines in the social sciences, is evoked in furthering the crucial arguments in this interesting book.