Philosopher King
John Ralston Saul's On Equilibrium solidifies his reputation as Canada's leading public intellectual
John Geddes, Maclean's, 4 February 2002
Just about any pat description of the roles John Ralston Saul has played ends up defining him as something he rails against. Saul began his working life as a manager in the investment and oil businesses - but he inveighs tirelessly against the power of the corporate managerial set. He went on to become a favourite author of the political left - all the while insisting that he has no patience for ideology of any sort. Most recently, he has moved into Rideau Hall as the husband of Gov. General Adrienne Clarkson, which surely puts him near the pinnacle of Canada's social hierarchy - yet he says his experiences as vice-regal consort have only deepened his conviction that ordinary citizens need to regain the upper hand from elites.
If these apparent contradictions make slotting Saul seem tricky, here's one label he doesn't mind: best-selling author. His books move, even though they are about philosophy. He made a splash internationally in 1992 with Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, a long polemic against the way elite groups have, in his view, corrupted the concept of rational thought to create societies run by experts, not citizens. His status as Canada's best-known public intellectual was solidified with 1995's The Unconscious Civilization, a more easily digested repackaging of his case that managers and specialists have usurped the rightful place of citizens and voters. Then came 1997's Reflections of a Siamese Twin, in which Saul argues that Canada's complexity - especially the ties that bind its French and English parts - make it a model for the sort of pragmatic, non-ideological democracy he favours.
And now On Equilibrium is topping the best-seller lists. Nothing new about that. What has changed, though, is Saul's official status. This time he is not just a freelance intellectual gadfly, but also the husband of the Queen's official representative in Canada. As such, his latest tome got an unusually close read when it appeared in December. The result was a front-page controversy conjured up mostly out of a few sentences about Sept.11. "From what at first sounded like a bizarre accident," Saul wrote of the terrorist attacks, "a wave of explosions and accidents and deaths spread through the day, at the end of which a rather frail, awkward man appeared on television to read a speech from a teleprompter in order to reassure Americans, indeed the world."
Few who watched George W. Bush's first televised response to the horror would dispute that he appeared shaken. Saul's description might even be read as sympathetic. Still, critics pounced on the passage as too much coming from the Governor General's spouse. The implication was that Saul, long associated with the left, couldn't resist breaking with the protocol of vice-regal innocuousness to slight a Republican president. "Of course, it's entirely possible to take a couple of words out of a sentence and pump them up as if they meant something they didn't mean," Saul says now. "But that has nothing to do with what I wrote. I've always written about ideas and society. I've never written about politics."
There's no denying that On Equilibrium, while touching on contemporary issues from terrorism to trade, is not about politics in the usual sense. There are no direct references to current Canadian politicians. By contrast, 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico is cited an enthusiastic 15 times. That's the sort of stuff readers are in for when they tackle Saul. So why do so many try? Philip Coulter, a Toronto-based CBC radio producer who worked closely with him on the broadcast Massey Lecture series that was published as The Unconscious Civilization, says Saul feeds a hunger for ideas that are big enough to makes sense of the narrower issues that dominate the news. "Whether it's abortion or health care or education," Coulter says, "there is the larger question about whether all these debates add up to a picture of society - a vision which we all share in common. John plays an important role in that."
Saul looks like an unlikely candidate for touching a popular chord. Slumped on a couch in a suite at Ottawa's Chateau Laurier for an interview, he is the picture of the salon intellectual, droll at times to the point of sounding smug. His background, though, is far from privileged. His father joined up with the Royal Winnipeg Rifles for the Second World War, fought in the tough Italian campaign and stayed on to serve in peacetime. Saul was born in Ottawa in 1947, and grew up on army bases in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario and Québec, changing schools, by his own count, 13 times. He inherited the reading gene from his bookish mother, and remembers after picking up Graham Greene's The End of the Affair when he was still young enough for the title alone to make it seem enticingly adult.
He went to Montreal's McGill University in the late '60s, and threw himself into the era's tumultuous campus politics. On graduating, he flirted with the idea of joining the foreign service, but opted instead to pursue a doctorate at the University of London. His thesis research on Charles de Gaulle's modernization of France led him to live mainly in Paris. ("A very nice city to be poor in," he recalls fondly. "Not forever maybe, but as a student.") He stayed on there after finishing his Ph.D. to run a subsidiary of a British investment house - a strange leap from his history studies. "They said I knew all about how France worked, which I did, and they could teach me the business part," he explains.
On his way back to Canada in 1975, Saul was introduced in New York City to Maurice Strong. At the time, Strong, who went on to become an influential figure in the rise of environmental concerns at the United Nations, had been tapped by Pierre Trudeau's government to found Petro-Canada. On the basis of a half-hour chat, Strong invited Saul to move to Calgary to work as his assistant. Strong proved to be a powerful influence - as he has been for others whose careers he has touched, notably the young Paul Martin. "He's one of the most remarkable Canadians of our times," Saul says, "I always say jokingly that he's the St. Paul of the world environmental movement. He's the man who imagined all the international structures and put them in place."
While he was working for Strong in Calgary in 1977, Saul published his first book, a novel about French politics called The Birds of Prey. Three more novels, on subjects ranging from the oil business to art smuggling, followed in the 1980s. (By this time, he and Clarkson were a couple, although they did not marry until the summer of 199, a step they took to clear the way for Clarkson's appointment as Governor General that fall). A mixture of exotic locales and serious ideas in his fiction reflected Saul's devotion to Joseph Conrad, the author of Heart of Darkness, and his heirs in fiction, including Greene and Gabriel García Márquez. But it was with the non-fiction Voltaire's Bastards, dedicated to Strong, that Saul started attracting serious attention. In the Washington Post, culture critic Camille Paglia said Saul "offers a promising persona for the future: the intellectual as man of the world."
By 1995, Saul was well enough known in the United States to be named one of "100 Visionaries" by the Utne Reader. But with The Unconscious Civilization and Reflections of a Siamese Twin, he attended to his home audience - and solidified a big Canadian following. Mark Kingwell, a University of Toronto philosophy professor whose popular books put him in a small club of public intellectuals who aspire to be in Saul's league, suggests the time was right for a thinker to challenge the conservative orthodoxies that had taken hold in the era of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney. "in the 1980s, right-wing thinkers got a lot of profile," Kingwell says. "In Canada, which is basically a social democratic country, people wanted to hear somebody articulating what they already believed. In a useful way, Saul does that. He has a following not because anything he's saying is particularly startling, but because he's saying it in a way that people can say, 'Oh, yeah, that's what I've been thinking all along'."
Saul resists any bid to categorize him as a champion of even the moderate left - or as a foe of the right. "I've never actually thought in those terms," he insists. He says he prefers an issue-by-issue assessment - citing public education and universal health care as policies he sees at the core of Canadian democracy. Still, with those convictions, there's no danger of falling out of favour with those who tilt left. His targets, on the other hand, tend to be held in high esteem by those who lean right, including the World Trade Organization. "We are obsessively trying to regulate society through trade," he complains in On Equilibrium. True to his new book's title, though, Saul balances his critique of the WTO with a warning against the danger that rising opposition to the free trade doctrine might "fling us hard in the opposite direction, right into the arms of negative nationalism and closed markets."
In fact, the book's whole thrust is to praise the human capacity for balancing conflicting impulses. Saul divides it into chapters on six qualities that he identifies as essential to responsible behaviour - common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason. Anyone looking for a concise system, a formula for making the right decisions, will be disappointed. He detests the expert prescription, the purportedly rational solution. If that can make him maddeningly hard to pin down, Saul is not apologizing. "What makes you human," he says, "is that you don't really have the answers." But as the brisk sales for On Equilibrium are proving again, a lot of Canadian readers are hooked on the way Saul puts the questions.
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