Lexicon for the leery
John Bemrose, Maclean's, 10 October 1994
If a prize were offered for the most dangerous book of the year, it might well go to John Ralston Saul's The Doubter's Companion. It purports to be a dictionary. But although it does bear some resemblance to one - there are more than 300 entries - the "definitions" it offers are highly entertaining mini-essays by Saul on subjects ranging from Big Macs to free trade, neoconservatism to penises. The book is dangerous because it heaves a big, juicy mud pie in the face of conventional wisdom. Among its suggestions: that debt-burdened nations simply walk away from their debts; that expert economists and business-school graduates do not know what they are doing; that eating the kind of apples available today is more likely to bring the doctor than keep him away. It may all sound like the ravings of a crank, but there is a strangely seductive common sense in Saul's crankiness. People who read his book are in danger of becoming cranks themselves - or, as Saul approvingly calls them, "doubters."
At first glance, The Doubter's Companion appears to comprise a lot of renegade opinions fired off every which way. But there is a consistent argument behind it all - one that Saul, a Canadian novelist and intellectual, first developed in his 1993 book, Voltaire's Bastards. That study looked at the increasing fetish Western civilization has made of what Saul calls "rational structures." The term refers to systems of both thought and organization that depend heavily on specialized language, knowledge and methods. They are dominated by "experts" - the sort of people, such as doctors, economists, education specialists or the executives of big corporations, who are forever telling society what direction it should take. The problem, Saul argues, is that they are often wrong, largely because they are capable of viewing society only through the special-interest lenses of their own disciplines or organizations.
One of Saul's most striking examples of this "rational blindness" in Voltaire's Bastards concerns Robert McNamara, the Detroit auto executive who became the U.S. secretary of defence under President John F. Kennedy. He reorganized the nation's army along the "rational lines" of the Ford Motor Co., and in the process undermined both efficiency and morale and contributed to America's catastrophic defeat in Vietnam.
The Doubter's Companion lays into the McNamaras of every stripe, pointing out that, like the emperor in the fairy tale, such self-appointed experts are often clad only in their pretensions. Some of his favourite targets are the big-business leaders and economic pundits who loudly (yet somehow vaguely) proclaim the benefits of an unhindered, unregulated, capitalism. Saul argues quite convincingly that capitalism is like nuclear fuel - very useful if properly handled and contained, destructive if allowed to do whatever it wants. Under the entries "Free Trade" and "Global Economy," he predicts poverty for many countries if completely free global trade comes into effect (he is equally hard, however, on extreme protectionists). In the same vein, he lambastes NAFTA for freeing "the transnational corporation and its managers from geographical realities and obligations," comparing it unfavourably with the more socially comprehensive trade policies of the European Community. And he lashes out at those economic determinists who, he says, devalue and destroy human freedom by claiming that the move to completely open trade is irresistible.
Whether savaging a trade pact or dissecting some trivial consumer item, Saul has a flair for exposing the rationalist sawdust at its heart. He describes the bland Big Mac as "the communion wafer of consumption. Not really food but the promise of food" - a triumph, in short, marketing over reality. He defines a corporate executive as "not a capitalist but a technocrat in drag," and he describes a think-tank as "an organization which invents disinterested intellectual justifications for the policies of the corporate groups that fund it." Muzak he terms "a public noise neither requested nor listened to by individuals. It is the descendant of a school of public relations invented by the Nazis" - namely, the "total motivational atmosphere" of the Nuremberg rallies.
When not demystifying the smoke and mirrors of the rationalists, Saul makes it clear that he does believe in something. He calls it humanism, praising it as the richest and most difficult of all philosophies. It involves honoring and balancing the various human capacities: morality, common sense, creativity, experience, intuition, reason. By letting reason run amok, humanity has produced a terrible lopsidedness that has generated waste and suffering. By re-embracing its wholeness, Saul argues, mankind can create a more humane and democratic society.
His position suffers - as his trivializing comments about psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung make clear - from undervaluing the role of irrational forces, for good or ill, in shaping human life. Yet, on the whole, The Doubter's Companion is a welcome handbook to the confusions of the age. It encourages people not only to doubt, but to think for themselves. A dangerous book indeed. Perhaps the authorities should burn it now.
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