Triumph of the Airheads
If there was a motto for Christmas, it would be: to give is better than to receive. Personally, I find it a lose-lose proposition. As my family well knows, I am absolutely crap at buying presents for people. And I am often stunned at what people buy me.
One of my brothers gave me a book that I would never have picked for myself. Nonetheless, I have just finished reading The Triumph of the Airheads: and the Retreat from Commonsense, by Shelley Gare. According to its dust jacket,
The airheads are winning. We live in an upside-down world where celebrity matters more than substance; correct spelling is considered less important than knowing how to do PowerPoint; bright maths and science students go into investment banking so they can make truckloads of money; and small girls seriously regard a trashy hotel heiress as a role model. We have an American president who gets Sweden and Switzerland mixed up and Australian politicians who spend millions on spin doctors while schools and hospitals go begging. The age of the airhead has one message. Commonsense doesn’t pay off. If you’re smart, be smarter: play dumb.
My brother told me he found the book insightful. It was one of the best books he had read in the last 12 months. If there was ever the need for evidence that siblings can be worlds-apart different; I found the book fatuous (according to chapter 5, this is the new F-word). For much of the book, I was wondering whether it was satire. Was it a clever send-up of airheads supposedly written by an airhead? Or was it just a long, angry stream of disconnected anecdotes purporting to be an argument against illogical thinking and the woes of (post) modernity? In the end, I settled for the latter explanation.
The book does not define an airhead. The reader is left with the task of triangulating a definition from the many, many examples in the book. Airheads appear to include economists; statisticians; economic rationalists; postmodern academics; people with executive MBAs; people who use management jargon-speak; rich people; people more interested in process than outcomes; people who focus on the immediate rather than the longer-term; people addicted to consumerism; people who don’t read much beyond business, lifestyle and gossip magazines; people who think more about themselves than they think of others; people with theories (go figure); people without ethics or morals; and people who want to be accepted by their peer group. If you can see the common thread through all these categories of people, let me know.
Not only is an airhead not defined, their ascent is not charted nor is the mechanism of their ascendancy identified clearly. The book argued that airheads have soared over the past twenty years. However, the case for this argument is not put. Almost all of the anecdotes come from the last ten years. Gare did not refute the possibility that airheads have always been ascendant (although she does acknowledge there have always been airheads). The best she does at explaining the mechanism of their ascent is to say that “there was something in the newly postmodern, economically-rationalist atmosphere that gave them lift”. It’s a circular argument.
The Triumph of the Airheads is a stream of anecdotes of stupid decisions, actions and statements organised loosely into thematic chapters. While these stories were funny, there was no thesis and little connecting story. The book read more like a series of opinion pieces from a magazine — light hearted and amusing, but not compelling. There were ironies here. It read like a montage from the glib lifestyle magazines it so deplored, and it was written by someone who cannot mount an argument (in the classical rather than the postmodern sense).
Beyond the rant, it was difficult to see a proposed course of action to address the triumph of the airheads. There was no remedy. There was no prescription to fix the problems Gare identified. The book is largely a lamentation for a lost — perhaps mythical — time when airheads did not rule the roost.
At the end of the book, I decided an airhead was anyone who disagreed with Shelley Gare’s eclectic world view; myself included. After all, I did some economics and statistics at university. I work in the public service. And (like Howard and Rudd), I am economically conservative.
Ultimately, this book is little more than succor for angry, middle aged, left-leaning, reasonably well-off but not wealthy, (small-c) conservatives. It confirms their prejudices, and names and shames the usual suspects: the rich and powerful, the economic rationalists who have ruined everything, the postmodern academics who have trashed the education system, and the senior bureaucrats and businessmen who run their organisations for their personal gain. It is little more than the latest incarnation of the age-old argument against change. It is a rant against the youth of today (especially the vacuous, selfish, rich under-30s), with their limited understanding of classical literary references (indeed, references to anything that was not on television last week).
Name-calling is an airhead way of dealing with those with whom we disagree. You can see why I wondered whether it was an attempt at satire.
Two stars for the amusing anecdotes.
