Saul Searching
Luke Fletcher, HQ (Australia), March 2002
Charity is becoming an increasingly necessary feature of our society and as such is signalling a return to a class-based society with marginalised ethics. We are slaves to technological progress and are unable to start "asserting our authority over circuit boards" because constant technological explosions have shattered our collective memory. The employment contract is a tyrannical device in which the employer controls the knowledge and ideas and therefore the freedom of speech of the employees. Non Government Organisations are a reactive and not a progressive force: their set-up mirrors the structure of the very organisations they oppose."
Only in a book by John Ralston Saul could you find such an intriguing array of ideas, and more. If you found any of the above assertions challenging or objectionable, consider perhaps the most controversial of his statements: that the invention of waste disposal systems did not come about merely through rational thought. In fact, he says, the toilet is as much testament to commonsense, ethics, intuition, imagination and memory as it is to the existence of human reason.
Saul is a true intellectual maverick, one who revels in his role as an iconoclast and provocateur. His latest book, On Equilibrium, is his most wide-ranging work since Voltaire's Bastards. And like Voltaire's Bastards, it is almost impossible to categorise: is it a neo-classical humanist treatise; a philosophical exploration or a critique of contemporary society? Whatever the answer, his project is to identify the patterns of dysfunction underlying human civilisation, including its historical and intellectual origins and its present social, cultural and political manifestations.
As usual, a litany of historical and literary figures and philosophical thinkers are produced to support his argument. One by one, figures such as Solon, Socrates, Sun-Tzu, Harry Truman, Giovanni Batista Vico, Jung, Ken Saro-Wiwa, David Malouf and Robert Owen (to name but a few) are commended for their insight, and their words examined for their wisdom. Plato and Descartes do not fare so well, nor do Schopenhauer, Hegel or Hobbes, among others; various aspects of their thought is exposed for leading us into precisely the sort of predicament Saul believes we now find ourselves.
His usual suspects come in for another pasting: corporatism, the contemporary institutional bias of management over thought, false heroes and, of course, his all-purpose whipping post, utilitarianism.
At various points in the treatise, he draws upon examples as diverse as the mad cow disease epidemic, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Serbia and their respective international responses, and the French Resistance martyr Jean Moulin.
Saul is first and foremost a humanist, and so the work is structured around the six qualities he identifies as humankind's basic attributes, the same qualities mentioned above as indispensable to the invention of the toilet: Commonsense, Ethics, Imagination, Intuition, Memory and Reason.
Each chapter, named after one of the qualities, is a meditation on where the particular quality can be found and how it can best be used (invariably in combination with the other five attributes) and what contemporary problems can be explained by its misapplication.
The sweep of the book's vision and the breadth of Saul's knowledge are sometimes mind-blowing, but such virtuosity is not matched by the smoothness of his argument. Saul is not only consistently brilliant but also consistently difficult to follow as he races from one idea to the next.
Perhaps this is why his standing is that of a kind of public intellectual rather than one cherished by the more rigorous academic world. Whatever the flaws in his methodology, On Equilibrium is well worth a read, and not just for its theoretical value. If you read between the lines, you can find fresh insights into many of our domestic political sore points, including the doctrine of practical reconciliation and the debate that characterised oru recent election campaign. And the final chapter of the book, written in the aftermath of September 11, is arguably the finest moment of On Equilibrium, and proves to be worth the effort.
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