In answer to your question
This is one of those books that we should read and re-read for the rest of our lives
Bob Ellis, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2-3 February 2002
How much of our intuition, imagination, memory and “common sense” did we lose in the past 500 years and how much did we need to keep? Where, in the time of Auschwitz – and Rwanda and the Tampa and Kosovo – did our ethical sense go, and how do we get it back? What that was good in the way we were can be salvaged in the age of number-mania and international forgetting and slash-and-burn economics and new greed? How best can we order the way we live now in this deeply disorderly, brain-damaged era of new marauding empires, amoral business practice and the worship of machines?
It is not the habit of John Ralston Saul to ask small questions or to make the answers easy. Like Orwell, Koestler, Marshall McLuhan, Primo Levi and Tim Flannery he tells us unsparingly (as he did in Voltaire's Bastards and The Unconscious Civilization) how tremendously we got things wrong, how much magic the Age of Reason cost us. In On Equilibrium he tells us, or attempts to tell us, what to do now.
Warming to his task, which is nothing less than the composition of a post-religious Koran for thoughtful humankind, he roves through military strategy, Renaissance art, Guatemalan fiction, the French Underground, Greek tragedy, animism, Picasso, ethology, Cervantes, ice hockey, Plato's ongoing war on his mentor Socrates and mad cow disease in quest of the total jigsaw (the unified field theory, if you like) that makes us what we are, and were, and could be.
What, for instance, he asks, is the "common sense" (that is, the shared memory) of the monarch butterfly? It has "a brain the size of a pinpoint. It winters in Mexico, summers in Northern Canada and reproduces in the United States or the way between the other two. It takes three generations to make the round trip, over thousands of kilometres, year after year, summering precisely where they always summer and wintering on a few precisely chosen, high, wooded hills in central Mexico. These hills are isolated one from the other. On each hill the monarchs gather, tightly packed, onto the branches of the great trees, millions of them, creating the patterns of monstrous tigers in the half-light of the forest canopy."
How do they know how to do these things? In what like pilgrimages is our species trapped, and how can we learn what they are?
In his search for the measureless things that move and guide and haunt us and how we might now resurrect them he trespasses (of course) on ground long held by the Greens, the New Agers and the various ragged-trousered disciples of drugs and Zen and morphic resonance and telepathy and table rapping without ever once (in my view) sounding silly or shallow or underinformed. For every hypothesis he puts up (that some of our memory, for instance, may reside in places other than the brain; that mad cow disease comes from feeding vegetarian animals processed meat) he has impressive evidence, and for almost every thought a forebear - Euripides, Homer, Jefferson, Montesquieu, Northrop Frye, Colin Powell, the author of The Epic of Gilgamesh (the first buddy movie) and that Bradman of ice hockey Wayne Gretzky, who said: "You must skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is."
It's hard, though, to summarise even a paragraph of this omnivorous, persuasive, many-tentacled book, which is in itself a concentrated summary (easy to read for a page or so, but necessary to put down and resonate with for an hour or two thereafter) of what we now might guess is the shape, and scope of things as they are in our universe, and in our tribal memory, and why our present rulers so hate our creativity, our intuition, our sense of right and wrong and need to erase them from the vocabulary of dissent.
Some thoughts, however, seem his alone. Among hundreds, this one on the Deity hit me hard:
"Gods to protect us from fear are gods to protect us from the necessity of imagining our long past and the probability of tomorrow. Gods give us truth. We can deny all the rest.
"And what is a god? Rarely the complex figure imagined in most religious texts. Usually a certainty. A totem of some sort. A structure. A way of doing things. Something asserted to be progress, or efficient. Something asserted to be the way things are done. All that such belief requires is a willingness not to imagine. You may continue to think, but in a linear manner from the base of truth, not in a lateral or preobjective manner.
"Not to allow yourself to imagine is a choice. It is choosing not to have a choice. In a sense, that is your problem. Although to choose not to choose can quickly take on a force of its own. Because we live in societies, it means that you must then discourage others from imagining. How else can you live without them? That is the story of religious or racial wars. Or of self-destructive social attitudes."
Like Orwell, he is a trove of information - on the fact of Jean Moulin, who died under torture refusing to give information that he knew was known already because this was the right thing to do; on the beauty of the assassin in Carpaccio's painting of the martyrdom of Saint Ursula; on the way Uluru turns tourists into the kind of awed worshippers - corralled behind a fence and clicking away - that pilgrim indigenes once were. He is particularly good on military matters (in childhood he was the oft-relocated son of a solider) - how Napoleon's intuition and not his intellect won his battles and how his unaided intellect, later, lost them; how all the expert information available to the generals of World War I could not prevent the slaughter of the Somme, because another unknowable factor was at work, probably, a lemming rush of the tribes of Europe into Gotterdammerung, oblivion.
If he has a fault it is earnestness (I speak as an acquaintance delighted by the Woody Allen-style personality of his after-hours discourse) - and over-concentration perhaps; or his belief that humankind can be nudged towards sensible solutions as easily as Canadians.
But given that this, and not Finnegan's Wake, is one of the books that we should read and re-read for the rest of our lives and (let me put it precisely) among the most important, absorbing and fulfilling books of our time (along with Voltaire's Bastards, The Future Eaters, A Distant Mirror and Ian Kershaw's Hitler), he deserves a little self-congratulation, however demurely he seeks it, as the most wide-ranging mind, and one of the greatest organising and focusing teachers we have.
|
