The Unconscious Civilization
Anne Coombs, The Australian, March 1997
Civilisation is teetering on the edge of an abyss of ignorance and delusion. The Western world is governed by an ideology that deifies the corporation as the most effective unit of society, individual citizens are unable to reflect upon or criticise the fundamental direction their society is taking, public discourse is controlled by special interest groups, universities have abandoned the field of free inquiry for the narrow lanes of corporate sponsorship and vocational training.
Globalisation and the marketplace rule as gods. This is no Brave New World, but John Ralston Saul's view of our civilisation at the end of the 20th century.
This alarming and inspiring book consists of the five Massey lectures, which Saul delivered on Canadian radio in 1995, the same year that Eva Cox delivered her Boyer lecture series, A Truly Civil Society. Some of the ground they cover is similar, but Saul's arguments are both broader and far more detailed.
His target is the corporatism that he believes now rules the Western world and which is steadily eroding democracy. The solution is a return to the notion of the public good and greater citizen participation in public life.
In a convincing analysis that ranges across the centuries, Saul argues that when any one ideology runs amok, a crisis inevitably develops. The divine marketplace is such an ideology. And when it fails, as it did in the Great Depression, it is government that will be expected to again rescue us.
Saul is a champion of government. It is, he says, the only powerful public force over which the citizenry has control. Its demonisation by business interests has turned the public against their own instrument. The corporate managers have foisted their own preoccupation with cutbacks on government, but "cuts can't produce growth or prosperity or effectiveness...We must force ourselves out of the corporatist obsession with form in order to concentrate on the content that is at stake."
Saul is equally critical of universities for abandoning their true role: to encourage people to think. As for the deconstructionists now entrenched in academia, "they have effectively attacked our addiction to answers, but in such a way as to undermine the validity of our questions".
|
