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.