Voltaire's Bastards : The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992)
I'm not in the business of
suggesting solutions... I don't belong to the Platonic
tradition, I belong to the
Socratic tradition.
-John
Ralston Saul
John Ralston Saul, one of Canada's leading political philosophers, has drawn an apt analogy in comparing himself to Socrates, but pointedly not to Plato, because he offers a great insight (which is essentially liberal in nature) into the Modern condition, but his personal political predilections (which are essentially Liberal in nature) blind him to the implications. Thus, he is an amusing gadfly, puncturing many myths and prejudices, but he backs off of several cows that are sacred to him, unwilling to apply the rigor of his own argument, and he presents no general program or solution to the problems he perceptively delineates, perhaps because such a program would jibe so closely with the conservative agenda.
Saul's essential insight is that Reason has replaced Religion as the central organizing principle for human affairs, but that Reason, which is essentially just a competing set of beliefs, is extremely dangerous because it has no inherent moral structure. The danger, and this is the most compelling part of Saul's argument, is that rational elites (bureaucrats) have risen up as a modern priesthood; acting as if they are blessed with some special sacred knowledge, they impose rules and regulations on the rest of us to try to make reality fit their technocratic vision. This social engineering inevitably leads to the repression of human freedoms, but at it's worst, can also lead to outright tyranny and state violence (i.e., Communism, Nazism).
So far so good. But from there on, Mr. Saul goes badly astray, seemingly unable to face the fact that his is a conservative critique of the Modern World. He ends up flying off into nonsensical diatribes against free marketeers and advocates of globalization, as if these apostles of freedom were the fundamental threat to liberty. What is the better alternative to the Free Market, if you oppose having elites impose their ideas? He offers none (perhaps because there is none). Meanwhile, forgotten are the bureaucrats, technocrats and the Social Welfare State itself, which should be the real targets of his righteous anger.
His other big bugaboo is what he calls Corporatism--the tendency of voters to act as members of blocks rather than as individuals. But he mistakenly believes that they are voting as members of Large Multinational corporations; in fact, the real problem is that Union members, Blacks, Jews, etc. reflexively vote Democrat in overwhelming percentages. There are no comparable conservative voting blocks, except perhaps for conservative Christians. One wishes that every employee of a multinational did vote for free market solutions, lower taxes, etc. But obviously this is not the case. Once again, Saul has lit out after a straw man.
As he goes along, Saul continually repeats this pattern, bang on the mark on many issues (particularly his criticisms of Freud, specialization, the modern university, economists, pursuit of happiness, etc.), then failing to apply his own logic on other issues (inexplicably he supports public schools, adopts Galbreath's opposition to the Growth Economy [read Orrin's review of The Affluent Society by Galbreath], etc.) It's like reading a book by Harvey "Two Face" Dent as cogent analysis alternates dizzyingly with purblind defense of liberal canards and gratuitous attacks on his natural allies.
The end result is that Saul emerges as a kind of idiot savant; on the big issue--the triumph of Reason over Religion--he has had a significant, though unoriginal, insight, but frequently when it comes time to spin out the implications of his epiphany, he stumbles badly. And there are virtually no policy prescriptions here, other than that we should cultivate doubt (no duh!, one of the 20th century's conservative icons, Karl Popper, explained that the essence of Scientific Thought is the maintenance of doubt) and that people should be given time off from work to participate in civic affairs (during which time they would universally head for golf courses or bars). These conclusions are so heavily indebted to others, on the one hand, and so feeble, on the other, as not to deserve being taken seriously. Saul, like the libertarians whom he obviously resents resembling (see Orrin's review of The Future and It's Enemies by Virginia Postrel), is strong on the critique, but weak on the constructive, as anyone who opposes the omposition of faux expertise must be..
Saul has some interesting things to say and, simply by virtue of the
virulence of his polemic, he is often quite amusing, but, because of the
dichotomy between his insight and its application, these books, which
overlap one another extensively, can basically be graded in descending
order of the length of their argument. Voltaire's Bastards, weighing
in at 600 pages, is so long that the weaknesses in his argument become
obvious and they have time to become tedious. Unconscious Civilization
is
based on a series of lectures and is short enough that the problems
are less evident. Far and away, the best of the three is Doubters
Companion, although it is somewhat dependent on the other two. It
is essentially an alternative dictionary, offering Saul's observations
on myriad political and cultural terms in a breezy, aphoristic style.
As the examples below show, he is pretty amusing and cares not whose ox
is being gored:
A Big Mac: The communion wafer of consumption.
Birth Control Pill: responsible for a sense
of loss and even failure among people who came of
age in the 1960's, the birth control pill produced
a twenty-five-year-long holiday from reality. For
the first time in history, sex had no consequences.
It was what it felt like. Nothing more.
Buddhism (Tibetan): The most popular form
of Buddhism in the West because it has the least
Buddhist content.
Corporatism: Corporatism is the persistent
rival school of representative government. In place of
the democratic idea of citizens who vote, confer
legitimacy and participate to the best of their
ability, individuals in the corporatist state are
reduced to the role of secondary participants. They
belong to their professional or expert groups--their
corporations--and the state is run by ongoing
negotiations between those various interests.
This is the natural way of organizing things in a
civilization based on expertise and devoted to the
exercise of power through bureaucratic structures.
Deconstructionism: A generalized denial of Civilization can't help but be a voice of evil.
To insist that language is in contradiction with
itself or nothing more than a system of self-serving
formulae or essentially meaningless is to argue
that human communications have no ethical, creative
or social value. Fortunately deconstructionism
can also be seen as a school of light comedy. After
all, to argue that language has no meaning is to
eliminate your own argument. The
deconstructionists may after all simply be suffering
from an acute lack of Irony.
Dialects: Formerly variations in language
produced by geographical isolation, dialects are now the
variations encouraged by specialists to prevent
non-specialists access to their professional territory.
Dictionary: Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order.
Direct Democracy: An appealing idea
which has been unworkable for more than two thousand
years. This makes it a favourite with political
groups whose basic instincts are anti-democratic.
Doubt: The only human activity capable
of controlling the use of power in a positive way. Doubt
is central to understanding.
Florida: Former American state. Latin
Americans are now locked in a long-term struggle with
Canadians for control. The Latin Americans
are driven by their need for financial and political
stability, the Canadians by theirs for warmth and
a place to die.
Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied
with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to
convincing everyone who would listen--or better
still, talk--that their parents were just as bad.
Growth: The assumption that prosperity
is dependent on growth is an inseparable part of our
obsession with Competition, our confusion over Debt
and our exclusionary approach towards
economics.
Individualism: The exercise through public
participation of our obligations to the body of the
citizenry.
Happiness: A tired and twisted notion which
has become an increasing embarrassment in a
confused society.
Humanism: An exaltation of freedom, but one
limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part
of nature and society.
Mythology: Having killed God and replaced
him with ourselves, we are dissatisfied with the
results. How else can the rise of mythology
be explained.
Private Lives: The private lives of
public people may be considered private only so long as they
don't trade on them to advance their careers.
Technocrat: This is someone whose skill
is the exercise of power. It follows quite naturally that
there is no suggestion of purpose, direction, responsibility
or ethics. Just power.
Tennis: A middle-class version of professional wrestling.
Tenure: A system of academic job security
which has the effect of rating intellectual leadership on
the basis of seniority. This may explain why
universities are rarely centers of original thought or
creativity.
University: a place in which a civilization's
knowledge is divided up into exclusive territories.
The principal occupation of the academic community
is to invent dialects sufficiently hermetic to
prevent knowledge from passing between territories.
There is much chaff here, but there's sufficient wheat to be gleaned
that he's definitely worth a read. I especially recommend The Doubter's
Companion.
GRADE: C+ (Unconscious Civilization)
GRADE: C (Voltaire's Bastards)
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (B+)
