Culture Clash

These two volumes could bookend any collection of writings about the old right/left philosophical schism. In fact, they would have to be bookends, since proximity would cause spontaneous combustion.

The flavour of Laura Penny’s More Money Than Brains is caught in its subtitle: Why School Sucks, College Is Crap and Idiots Think They’re Right. A literature teacher at Mount St. Vincent University, her outrage begins with the steady devaluation of the humanities—not to mention spelling and basic literacy—in our school system, and spreads outward, forest fire–like, feeding on the inanity and materialism of the larger culture. These she blames squarely on the “idiocracy” created by right-wing populism and its enabler, corporate capitalism.

In The Authenticity Hoax: How We Got Lost Finding Ourselves, Andrew Potter, a long-time Maclean’s columnist of the conservative variety, takes a more moderate tone and purports to be writing...