the tyranny of the bullet point

What on earth is going on at The Guardian? After the bizarre "Britain's top 300 intellectuals", a feature which served to illuminate quite how large the number '300' is (very large, apparently), while leaving the word 'intellectual' languishing in mystery, and the irritatingly definitive 'History of modern music' (whose lesson in 'Indie' today ignored every single actually indie institution, from Postcard Records to The Wedding Present, and instead focused entirely on its 1970s cultural antecedents and 1990s commercial consequences)  we now have the strangest of the lot: the 100 greatest non-fiction books. One would be tempted to blame High Fidelity-era Nick Hornby, but this stuff is giving 'Anoraks' a bad name.

The first problem with the 'non-fiction top 100' is that, rather like economists describing every messy aspect of actually-existing-capitalism as an 'externality', it assumes that books are normally novels. How else to lump together such a ragbag of 'non-fiction', as to include Hegel's Phenomenology and Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody? But of course the novel is a latecomer, emerging in the 18th century. And so to describe a work of philosophy as 'non-fiction' is a bit like describing Beethoven as "non-jazz music" (and putting Plato on this list becomes like describing the Parthenon as a 'non-skyscraper').

But this raises a further question. Where are the most important works of, ahem, non-fiction in all of this, such as The Bible? If Kant's Critique of Pure Reason can make it into this fictionless list, why not the Koran? The clue may be in the article's sub-heading: "this is our list of the very best factual writing..." Factual? So now 'non-fiction' means 'factual'? I'd be interested to see someone unearth a single fact from Hegel's Phenomenology, or, for that matter, an intelligible sentence.

Oh, of course it's all a bit of fun. And newspapers are in a battle for survival nowadays, meaning that if this is all just a complicated scam to promote The Guardian bookshop, then so be it. I shall, of course, continue dotingly spending a pound every morning on a paper copy of this doddery old friend, if only to save it from descending further into the production of such Lonely Planet-meets-self-help style identikit bourgeois training packs. But a week after AC Grayling set about converting higher education into a high-stakes game of pop intellectual Top Trumps, I'm not sure I can cope with much more of this relentless tyranny of the bullet point.

Comments

[IanC]

Spot-on, Will. And the very strange Guardian history of indie music failed to cover the phenomenon of 'landfill indie', the plethora of identikit whining vocalists and chiming guitars of the past 10 years or so, all trying and sadly succeeding in sounding exactly like Coldplay.
You might consider the Guardian's list-mania in the light of all the recent books with titles like 1000 Places to See Before You Die, 1000 Films to Watch BYD etc etc. This is surely symptomatic of a culture convinced that this life is All There Is and also aware of its own inability to avoid unsustainable development. The collective unconscious looks like it's beginning a vast box-ticking exercise before obsessive economic growth and consumerism lead capitalism to eat itself and the Earth.

[alice]

Could be worse, could be describing universities as magic fact machines http://www.universitiesweek.org.uk/factsharegenerator/Pages/default.aspx

(In interests of openness, I should say I did once judge a 100 most powerful people in science for the Times, but mainly because I thought the arguments involved would be funny and I'd learn from them. They were and I did)

[Thony C.]

I'd be interested to see someone unearth a single fact from Hegel's Phenomenology, or, for that matter, an intelligible sentence.

Quote of the month

[Matt McG]

Their characterisation of some of the books is a bit odd, too:

Dawkins launches a revolution in biology with the suggestion that evolution is best seen from the perspective of the gene, rather than the organism

Or, erm, not. Given that George Williams, and Hamilton had already done rather more than _suggest_ this idea, a decade before. I can sort of see how you might have fun producing a list like this by asking people who actually know something about a subject to provide a 'top 10', but mistaking a popular work aimed at non-specialists for the root of a scientific revolution is just stupid. Ditto for other examples on their list.

[Dick Pountain]

I'd guess this list-o-mania infecting both TV and press is a natural development of consumerism. No-one wants to be seen consuming anything less than "the best", but they need someone to tell them what that is because they've lost the critical capacity to discover for themselves. Unfortunately this incapacity extends to the pundits they choose - it's how dumbing-down proliferates.