Mental Floss History of the World

Mental_Floss (www.mentalfloss.com) is the online and print magazine devoted to “knowledge junkies” who are looking for “an intelligent read, but not too intelligent.” For that audience, Mental_Floss has just released their History of the World, subtitled “An Irreverent Romp Through Civilization’s Best Bits.” The book does what its title claims: it offers us a series of cheeky glimpses at the stuff that’s happened since, well, human beings started leaving evidence of their lives scattered around the globe. Needless to say, that’s a lot of stuff.

The idea behind the book, similarly to that of the magazine, seems to be that someone who isn’t very interested in reading or in ideas but who wants, nevertheless, to sound erudite, can leaf through the History pages and come away with some tidbits about how, say, early civilizations were led by men who “have hogged the remote ever since.” “Some tidbits” is an understatement. The Floss guys have packed a whole lot of cultural history into a few hundred pages. There are sidebars about important contributions in areas ranging from medical advancements to social institutions to literature. We learn, for example, that Indian surgeons invented techniques in 600 B.C. that we now call “plastic” surgery, and that the 8^th century Chinese city Chang’an had the equivalent of a 45-lane highway thoroughfare.

I was particularly interested in their “Enlightenment Cheat Sheet,” which provides some names and ideas of prominent thinkers throughout Europe from the mid-16^th to the end of the 18^th centuries. Things get a bit shaky here, which makes me wonder what a scholar of, say, Medieval Middle Eastern history might think of the Floss folks’ treatment of the Arab world — something about which I know approximately nothing. On the other hand, I’m pretty comfortable with Modern Philosophy, so when the Flossers take a stab at Descartes, my interest is piqued. In my view, Mental_Floss attempts the impossible here. For example, they (gasp!) attempt to encapsualte Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. The result is some gaping holes in the chain of ideas, which renders the account inaccurate. So anyone who wants to chat about Kant’s moral theory at a cocktail party by reference to Mental_Floss’s book is bound to end up appearing either a boorish idiot or far too drunk to pull together a coherent set of thoughts. I won’t even try to comment on the Hegel blurb, as reading it makes me want to cry out in agony.

Nevertheless, the book is, overall, really good fun. I’m just not sure what we’re supposed to do with it and when we’re supposed to do it. It’s not a book that’s really concerned with knowing, but data. For example, if I tell you that Thales believed everything is water, that’s nice, but the more interesting idea is why he thought that. One can spew out all sorts of purported facts, but this does not equate to knowledge. As Aristotle tells us, the man of knowledge does not just know that, but knows why. He knows the causes of things.

Then again, the Mental_Floss guys admit that what they’re really after is meaningful fun. Okay, I can live with that. I mean, if there’s a choice between putting lit firecrackers in the mouths of frogs and then watching them blow up or reading about the Renaissance “in a nutshell,” I’ll go for the nuts, even if some are cracked. Moreover, in fairness to the authors, the book does aim at offering entrees into pretty complicated ideas without pretending that there is no difficulty. The danger of superficiality is offset by the authors’ deception — and I mean this in a good way. On the Mental_Floss website is the claim about appealing to people who want to sound smart around their friends. They make it seem like the process of learning is a snap, a piece of cake, and loads of fun at the same time. In other words, they lie. It is, however, the best sort of lie, since in so doing, they trick their readers into willingly engaging in a task that is, in reality, arduous — which is not to say it’s not still fun. If The Mental Floss History of the World can get us interested in the whatness of our world, then they’ve got us one step closer to asking why. After all is said and done, I think they’ve succeeded in getting us interested.