Alain Deneault’s Mediocracy is a collection of essays in the French understanding of them. They represent thought modules that have a common base – inequality and corruption. Deneault pretends it is because of the mediocre quality of Homo sapiens. It drives his narrative and it’s a breathtaking ride.

Catharine Browne has done a splendid job translating from the French, often noting that the original had two possible meanings by the choice of words, and explaining context from French history and culture. It makes reading the book a double education.

Mediocracy begins with lots of small insights that are perceptive and memorable. “American universities have progressively become philistine schools where misogyny, racism and alcoholism are openly cultivated.” And, the wealthy cannot be original, they can only be the origin of creative endeavors through their control and sponsorship.

Deneault is at his most entertaining describing the miasma of academic writing. It’s not enough to constantly publish mediocre papers – to keep ahead of the competition at other schools - but academics like to put quotation marks around perfectly ordinary words as if they had a unique approach to their meaning (“learning”, “children”). That a whole library of prefixes like bio-, techno-, cyber- and homo- disguise otherwise elementary (at best) concepts. And there’s the revolting habit of pluralizing collective nouns to make then seem significant (“resurgences”). For communicating: “We can only conclude that PowerPoint extinguishes the mind’s autonomy.” It’s a product of no time for research and writing, too much time in bureaucracy and so much pressure to publish that academics have taken to sharing papers with numerous counterparts to gain more publishing credits. It’s a pity party for professors.

But from that chapter on universities, the book descends into the usual leftist screed, decrying the decline of unions, the ascent of the corporation, the arrogance of the wealthy, the co-opting of art, the rape of colonies, the hypocrisy of democracy and the lie of government. Deneault’s analyses are dead on, but, dare I say it, mediocre.

He complains about all the labels we divide politics into. There’s liberal and conservative and variations of them, but they’re all just sides of the same mediocre coin. The left has simply self-destructed and no longer represents anything, even to itself. His keenest contribution is “but” as in neoliberal-but, socialist-but and so on, leading everyone back to the mediocre center. Except he does not call it mediocre. For Deneault, it is the “extreme center”.

What is most striking is the relentless negativity. Deneault sees evil everywhere. Some is from mediocrity, but it’s mostly standard corruption and greed. He never gives examples of a better way. There are zero heroes to point to. No examples where anyone has broken away from mediocrity. There doesn’t appear to be a single leader of a company, a city or a country who is not a living disaster area for mankind.

The main problem is that Deneault does not make his case. Mediocrity is everywhere (and always has been). But it is not the cause of our woes and it is not at the center of our corruption. It is the very level of crime and corruption that ruins every aspect of society that is the problem. Deneault demonstrates it repeatedly throughout, despite his thesis. The mediocre have inherited the earth, but it is still run by the criminally greedy.

David Wineberg ( )