Defending citizens against the lies of corporatism
Stan Persky, The Globe and Mail , 6 January 1996
One of the genuine intellectual high points of the year in Canada is the CBC's annual broadcast (and Anansi's subsequent publication) of the Massey Lectures. In recent years, these broad-range overviews of the human condition have been provided by such distinguished contributors as Conor Cruise O'Brien, Jean Elshtain, Robert Heilbroner and Charles Taylor.
The 1995 Massey Lectures, Canadian writer John Ralston Saul's The Unconscious Civilization, are not only a thoroughly worthy addition to the series, they're also, to my mind, the best work of popular political philosophy produced in this country in a decade or more.
Saul takes on those sizable topics - economics, democracy, citizenship, education, language and ideology - for which the Massey Lectures are intended as a platform. His central idea is that democracy and its source of legitimacy, the self-governing individual citizen, have been displaced by a structure of self-interested groups - a system that Saul dubs "corporatism" - that is fundamentally anti-democratic and that espouses a false version of individualism, one that dispenses with any substantial notion of a common good or disinterested public judgment.
These remarkable lectures offer a delicate, almost classical defence of the individual as citizen. Saul rejects any entity that would interpose itself between citizens and their independent thinking about the good of the society in which they live. Thus, under the heading of corporatism, Saul is pointing to a vast array of groupings, irrespective of their location on the political spectrum, form logo-familiar business corporations to professional elites to the "identity politics" of competing multiculturalisms. He isn't against corporations and the like as such, but only insofar as they put their interests ahead of the public good.
Indeed, every group that insists on its partial interest over that of a commonly shared mutual interest in the fate of the real world is, in Saul's view, the perpetrator of soul- and mind-stealing ideologies that propel us into the state of "unconscious civilization" referred to in the title of these talks.
At the same time he also rejects all models of the individual other than as citizen, first and foremost. Again, he doesn't deny other aspects of the person, rather, his resistance manifests itself when minor features of our existence would displace those that are central to our being.
Whether it's the marketplace notion of the individual as consumer, the anarchist version of the individual as the opponent of government, or the angry populist seeking immediate satisfaction in "direct democracy" or referendums, Saul holds out for the doubting, broadly educated, moderate-in-all things ancient ideal of the engaged citizen, one willing to thoughtfully participate in the "slow, tedious grind of representative democracy."
It's rare to encounter a thinker who so unflinchingly engages the largest generalizations about our lives together, and even rarer to find one able to sustain a plausible argument in favor of rethinking, in some cases even rediscovering, our fundamental assumptions.
The Unconscious Civilization seems to me markedly more satisfactory than Saul's 1992 bestseller, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, which deals with similar subject matter, often to telling effect, but far less coherently than his Massey Lectures.
In The Unconscious Civilization, Saul succeeds in synthesizing the unease that many of us have felt but have been unable to clearly articulate about the present era, with its deification of the marketplace, ruthless "downsizing" of the public sphere and its transformation of erstwhile citizens into badly educated consumers adrift in the fantasies of malls and cyberspace. If you've ever felt the slightest doubt about some authoritative figure telling us, in tones of adamantine confidence, that we've got to cut health care and post-secondary education, wipe out the debt instantly, lower taxes, obey the dictates of the globalized market, and start up Windows 95 all in one fell swoop, John Saul's pretension-puncturing common sense will be a welcome antidote.
What makes these lectures stand out - apart from their conversational accessibility, lightly worn erudition and conceptual brilliance - is that Saul comes about as close as anyone in attaining an often-claimed but seldom-achieved goal, namely, transcending the conventional boundaries of Left and Right.
He's not hostile, as Marxists often are, to the capitalist marketplace, but unlike private-sector fundamentalists, he's suspicious of current marketplace ideologies "and of our passive acceptance of whatever form globalization happens to take." Once the notion is challenged that "the economy" is the category to which we ought to subsume all other human interests, considerable space is opened for actual thinking, rather than merely reciting the current tepid verities.
Much of what Saul thinks will strike many as heresy, and perhaps nowhere will this seem more the case than when he proposes to resurrect the individual's relationship to government.
"The most powerful force possessed by the individual citizen is her own government," Saul asserts. Dissenting from those who would demonize the public sphere, Saul counters that "the individual has no other large organized mechanism that he can call his own....Government is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good. Without this greater interest the individual is reduced to a lesser, narrower being limited to immediate needs."
Arguing against both those "who talk about individualism as if it were a replacement for government," and "others who see it as the enemy of government," Saul asks, reasonably enough, "How then could individuals possibly replace government? In a democracy they are government. This myth of the triumphant, unattached individual is pure romanticism."
Saul is perceptive about the fine points as well as the broad strokes.
His scathing criticism, for instance, of the current corporate obsession with "aligning basic education with the needs of the job market" tallies with everything I've experienced in two decades of classroom teaching. "What the corporatist approach seems to miss is the simple role of higher education - to teach thought," Saul reminds us. "A student who graduates with mechanistic skills and none of the habits of thought has not been educated. Such people will have difficulty playing their role as citizens." Amen.
It's not enough to say that this is an uncommonly good book about the common good. The Unconscious Civilization is a kind of intellectual last chance for both young geniuses and old hedgehogs everywhere. Notwithstanding Saul's praise of doubt, I've seldom felt so certain that this is a book that one must read.
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