In Praise of Popular Philosophy: Great Thinkers

Why would anyone not read Great Thinkers, the encyclopedia from School of Life which curates and summarises for busy working people famous philosophical ideas still urgent and relevant to modern life? It has high production values (just holding the volume and turning its pages is a treat), each entry is no more than a few pages long (making it an ideal coffee companion) and its contents are compelling, insightful, practical and consoling.

One reason, I would propose, is a certain rigid aversion many thinking people seem to reserve for anything popular or easy. 'Popular science' and 'popular philosophy' have a peculiarly derogatory ring, implying such content might be suitable for children or the masses, but surely no self-respecting intellectual. I'm thinking for example of this 2013 review in The Guardian for a series of books on philosophy by School of Life (the closest I could find to an actual review of Great Thinkers), in which the writer deemed it necessary to maintain throughout the entire evaluation a tone of unrelieved, if benevolent and sympathetic, condescendence. Smart people don't require summaries or simplifications, clear prose or - if such an absurdity even bears consideration - pictures in their books. Most of us, it seems, hate nothing with as much bitterness and knee-jerk outrage as we hate being patronised. This article in The Independent has Alain de Botton reporting that "Simon Blackburn (...) sells lots of copies, but he has to be careful not to reveal how many to his colleagues at Cambridge because it's seen as not quite acceptable." This is very intriguing.

However, I do not think one should dismiss this attitude as simply snobbish, elitist, incomprehensible or fuelled by status anxiety. It must signal some legitimate concerns. For instance, oversimplification. To take an example from history, saying that the Second World War was "caused" by Hitler is to dismiss the wider historical, cultural and socio-economic causes of that war in favour of a jauntier if probably misleading Bad Guy narrative. Reality is never that simple. "In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events" Tolstoy would argue. Another valid concern might be dilettantism. People who think they understand things even when they do so only superficially can do more harm than those who recognise their own ignorance and agree to defer to experts. "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter" quipped Winston Churchill, an observation which must sound accurate and bitter-sweet to anyone in the aftermath of an election - regardless of side. Finally, there is the concern over actual deception. How can you really trust that what you are being taught is valid, comprehensive, balanced, accurate, sensible and free from ulterior motives without yourself becoming an expert in each field? This is the wider issue of trust (in experts or authority), a singularly modern malady. Since God has died and Science is becoming increasingly specialised and inaccessible, what can be the rational basis for accepting anyone's point of view, ever? These and many others are valid and entirely sensible concerns.

Computer science is intimately familiar with a version of this problem, which it calls ranking. Google's PageRank famously proposed a ranking system based on counting the number and quality of references for each site (the problem of calculating relevance or how well a set of sites matches a user's query, is closely related but separate). Everyone is all too familiar with the failings of technology on these issues, from the ills of click-baiting to those of social echo chambers.

With all this in mind then what can be said in defence of reading something like Great Thinkers?

In a recent entry on how to get the news when there is far too much of it, I was arguing that what helps with choosing between 75 types of salad dressing helps here too. Brands exist to advertise consistency and to help people choose and find their way back to helpful and high-quality products reliably. School of Life is a brand as is its founder, Alain de Botton. Getting to know the brand a little, you can generally guess what are its blindspots and agenda. So you might conclude that the good people of School of Life are neither stupid or evil, cynical or deceptive, but in fact genuinely convinced by and invested in their brand's mission statement.

Here is George Orwell: "Today, for example, one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, a pacifist, an anarchist, perhaps by an old-style Liberal or an ordinary Conservative: one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him [her, they] is talent, which is probably another name for conviction". Great Thinkers is sane, logical and honest. Add to that the beautiful and fluid prose, the genuinely interesting content and (let us not forget) the pictures (:O) and you have a book worth reading.