Maclean’s: Issue on Canada’s Best Thinkers, 22 December 2003

“Uncommon Sense: John Ralston Saul”

The tradition of the public intellectual goes back to the ancient Athenian philosopher Socrates. He described the job as being that of a stinging gadfly nipping at the haunches of the big, lazy horse that is society. For his troubles, the 70-year-old Socrates was executed in 399 B.C.

That unfortunate outcome hasn’t deterred others form the dangerous vocation of speaking their mind. Canada’s distinguished roster of such useful, if irritating, people has included Marshall McLuhan; Northrop Frye; novelist Mordecai Richler; philosophers George Grant and Charles Taylor; and even a Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau. Now add John Ralston Saul, 56, author of The Unconscious Civilization and other urgent defenses of democratic society and the country’s most relevant public thinker of the past decade.

Saul’s current realm extends beyond the intellectual. His Excellency, as he is formally titled, is the spouse of Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s ceremonial head of state. Even critics of the monarchy concede that the elegant Clarkson and her consort have been the most energetic and intelligent couple in living memory to occupy the post of Queen’s representatives.

Though he performs his quasi-diplomatic duties diligently, Saul’s primary value to the nation since the early 1990s has been to skip the niceties of protocol and tell us what he really thinks. He made his mark with the 1992 best seller Voltaire’s Bastards, which warned that a slavish adherence to the Enlightenment dream of reason was threatening to turn society into a soulless machine. Saul followed that up with The Doubter’s Companion, a humanist plea arguing that creative doubt is healthier for democracies than the false certainties of technology and commerce. Subsequent works include Reflections of a Siamese Twin, a passionate tribute to his native Canada, and most recently, On Equilibrium, a meditation on the civic virtues.

But Saul’s 1995 Massey lectures, complied in The Unconscious Civilization, are his masterpiece. Saul’s big idea here is that the authentic life of the individual has been gravely distorted by “corporatism,” the domination of public life by corporate bodies of business and professional, academic and political groups, both left and right, whose special interests override the citizen’s interest in the public good.

At a time when governments were being demonized by both the media and tax-cutting politicians, Saul declared, “The most powerful force possessed by the individual citizen is her own government… Government is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good. Without this greater interest, the individual is reduced to a lesser, narrower being limited to immediate needs.” In short, we become consumers adrift in the mall. Our public schools turn into job-training centers rather than teaching students to think. And echoing George Orwell, Saul warns that in an “unconscious” society, language degenerates into ideological sloganeering.

That this prophet has been honored in his own land is perhaps as much a testament to Canada as it is to John Ralston Saul, author of the country’s most thoughtful jeremiads.

- Stan Persky

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