Democracy and Doubt
Stephen Matthews , The Canberra Times ,15 March 1997
John Ralston Saul bemoans the fact that, "In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform." Undeterred, he likes to celebrate doubt, seeing it as a necessary antidote to the childlike certainty purveyed by what he calls "our enormous, specialised, technocratic elites".
The provocative Canadian author of Voltaire's Bastards and The Doubter's Companion is one of the principal guests at next weekend's Word Festival at the Manning Clark Centre, ANU. His most recent book, The Unconscious Civilization, a collection of essays based on lectures given at the University of Toronto, will be launched at the festival. It's calculated to rouse readers from their topor; indeed, after reflecting on Saul's analysis of the rhetoric and propaganda that "normalises the untrue", it's impossible to contemplate the contents of a television news bulletin or a newspaper with quite the same equanimity.
Saul believes that "passivity is one of ideology's most depressing effects. The citizen is reduced to the state of the subject or even of the serf." We suffer, he says, "from an addictive weakness for large illusions. At the time of each obsession we are incapable of recognising our attitude as either a flight from reality or an embracing of ideology." As examples of facts that are known but have little apparent effect on our behavior, he cites the 50 million people killed since peace began in 1945 by wars that are fed by arms trafficking; the undernourishment, low life expectancy and crushing debt endemic in the Third World; and the Western world's unfinanceable levels of unemployment.
Our passivity has its roots in the dominant ideology of our time: a creeping corporatism (first cousin to fascism) which encourages individuals to give their primary loyalty not to society - to a concept of public good - but to groups. Corporatism "claims rationality as its central quality. The overall effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in those areas which matter and non-conformism in those which don't." Saul is deeply critical of the contemporary equation of individualism with selfishness, which "represents a narrow and superficial deformation of the Western idea. A hijacking of the term and - since individualism is a central term - a hijacking of Western civilisation." Our unconsciousness is causing us to lose "to the darker side within us and within society" certain crucial struggles - struggles between humanism and ideology, between democratic individualism and corporatism and between language and propaganda. Ironically, notes Saul, the search for self-knowledge promoted by Freud and Jung has accelerated our retreat into unconsciousness and encouraged us to embrace the notion that what should properly interest the individual is himself rather than society or civilisation. "Freud and Jung set out to conquer the unconscious. However, by sending us back into the arms of the Gods and Destiny, they may instead have pushed us to cling hysterically onto the unconscious...It is as if our obsession with our individual unconscious has alleviated and even replaced the need for public consciousness."
We are being let down by contemporary philosophers. Philosophy, asserts Saul, must be a matter of public debate "or it is nothing. Philosophy as just another specialist corporation is a flagrant return to medieval scholasticism." Socrates is Saul's hero. He contrasts Socrates' virtues with the traits shown by his chronicler, Plato: "Socrates - oral, questioner, obsessed by ethics, searching for truth without expecting to find it, democrat, believer in the qualities of the citizen. Plato - written, answerer of questions, obsessed by power, in possession of the truth, anti-democratic, contemptuous of the citizen." He credits Socrates with facilitating the escape from the "totems of inevitability" (the Gods and Destiny) - an escape that made Western civilisation possible.
But now we're "enthralled by a new all-powerful clockmaker god - the marketplace and his archangel, technology", and Socratic questioning is being undermined by an education system that over-emphasises vocational training designed to prepare the young to accept the structures of corporatism. Too great an emphasis is placed on learning how to operate computers. "Basic technological training is, of course, useful. but to treat it as anything more than that, is to lock students into technology that will be obsolete by the time they graduate. The time wasted will also deprive them of the basic training in knowledge and thinking that might help them adjust to the constant changes outside." Saul notes the oddity of classrooms full of students behind machines "where they can be educated in isolation by something less intelligent than a human. This sacrifices one of the primary purposes of education, particularly in a democracy - to show individuals how they can function together in a society."
Critical though he is of educators, particularly in universities, Saul reserves his sharpest barbs for economists. Despite its dominance over the last quarter of a century, he says, economics "has been spectacularly unsuccessful in its attempts to apply its models and theories to the reality of our civilisation." In particular, Saul skilfully shows how wrong-headed an ideology privatisation is. He lays the blame for stagnant economies on a bloated and unproductive managerial elite whose passion for privatisation can only slow the economy by encouraging capitalists to put into basic production and services the private energy and money that would be better spent on "front-line capitalist activity".
Democratic governments should maintain their role in the provision of basic services. But democracy requires active participation on the part of its citizens and corporatism is busy subverting involvement in democratic processes. Corporatism puts self-interest before "that level of shared disinterest known as the public good" that only government can nurture. We cannot leave the public good to the market, for the market cannot learn; "being devoid of disinterest, it has no memory. There can be no such thing as a natural market equilibrium."
Though Saul suggests how we might begin to free ourselves of our corporatist somnolence, he doesn't - indeed can't - pretend to have detailed prescriptions. He advocates a practical humanism that can be no more than a "voyage towards equilibrium without the expectation of actually arriving there". Reason helps on the journey, but it's only one of the human qualities upon which we can draw; we must also look to common sense, creativity, ethics, intuition and memory.
And the key to the whole endeavour is self-knowledge. Saul cites the question posed by John of Salisbury in 1159: "Who is more contemptible than he who scorns knowledge of himself?" Without self-knowledge there can be no real individualism, the kind that brings with it the obligation to act as a citizen.
Voltaire's Bastards was the first salvo in Saul's analysis of contemporary social crises.
It's an exhaustive and penetrating analysis of the way in which the faculty of reason has been warped and misused by Western ruling elites. The Doubter's Companion, subtitled A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, pursues many of the same concerns, but in a more immediately digestible fashion, employing lashings of acerbic humour and tart irony.
No less spirited than its predecessors, The Unconscious Civilization continues to address vital and fundamental questions about what makes a good society. Saul suggests directions we may take in search of enlightenment but he never attempts to impose answers. His purpose, as in the earlier books, is to shake unquestioned certainties, to focus on the issues that really matter.
I urge you to read John Ralston Saul. But don't expect to remain unchanged afterwards.
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