Written for the right reason
Bryan Appleyard, London Times (UK), 26 December 1992
Robert McNamara is, John Ralston Saul says, a man of honour. His career has been founded upon the belief that "the application of reason, logic and efficiency will necessarily produce good." In McNamara's own mind he is probably a modern Richelieu or Bismarck, in Saul's he is a kind of diplomatic Norman Wisdom, a well-meaning fool whose actions "have resulted in uncontrollable disasters from which the West has not recovered."
McNamara started the arms race, precipitated the failure of Vietnam and created the Third World debt crisis. It is a proud record that puts him at the head of Saul's long list of blunderers who have been dazzled and hypnotised by a conception of rationality that is ineffective and, frequently, lethal.
The reason before which the incompetent rationalist technocrats prostrate themselves is a perversion of the reason of the Enlightenment. What the technocrats mean by reason is the objective application of expertise and analysis to the facts and to the future. Such a definition has certain implications: it excludes values, it simplifies and it creates hermetic sodalities of expertise. Furthermore, this reason is anti-democratic: the voice of the people will clearly get in the way and, from the perspective of the technocrat, will probably be wrong.
For Saul this is almost precisely the opposite of what Voltaire and Jefferson meant by reason. Their reason was explicitly soaked in values and, in the cast of Jefferson, entirely founded upon a faith in the will of the people. Similarly, modern technocracy has turned the Enlightenment concept of happiness on its head. Jefferson meant the pursuit of basic material comfort in a prosperous, well-organised society. We, however, mean an isolated, hyper-individualistic state in which we have access to a vast superfluity of gratifications - nothing to do with society and nothing to do with basics.
Armed with these mutant offspring of the Enlightenment, we have made a mad and incompetent world, the description of which forms the main body of Saul's book. He covers politics, diplomacy, the military, the arts, literature, painting and almost everything else, in each case providing a grim, though lucid and entertaining, anatomy of perversion.
Inevitably in such a huge catalogue, there are moments when one pauses in stunned disagreement. I can, for example, understand why he scoffs at the absurd high culture status accorded to ballet and opera, but he is simply wrong to dismiss the arts themselves as "dead."
One further criticism is that Saul mocks terms such as right and left, and is in favour of political open-endedness. But, in reality, his own prejudices are everywhere. He takes it for granted, for example, that his reader endorses freer abortions as a progressive development. I do not.
But, before the overwhelming rightness of what Saul is attempting here, these are trivialities. The broad outline of his thesis - that we live in an era of corrupted Enlightenment ideals - is, for me and, increasingly, for many others, unarguable. Something fundamental has gone wrong and Saul has found a large and engrossing way of expressing that failure.
Equally, the application of his thesis is generally convincing. Affairs such as Third World debt do demonstrate the way collective insanity can be disguised as reasonable behaviour. Honourable men like McNamara took logical decisions within a system, but did not have the perspective to see that the system itself was crazy. Similarly, the system of the worldwide arms bazaar runs perfectly rationally within its own terms, but it is out of control. Nobody can stop making weapons and nobody can stop buying them and everybody has perfectly sound reasons.
Saul's specific point here is that perverted reason, with its insistence on its freedom from values, has created the deadly concept of the virtuous system. In the absence of any real perspective and with the imposed necessity of amorality, the system becomes the only good. Defending and serving the system - whether it be the financial markets, the civil service or the business methods taught at Harvard - becomes the standard by which people judge their effectiveness. They fail to notice that not one of these systems is working.
Saul has a perfectly good reason for not providing the answer to all this. He believes in the damaging futility of our modern demand for answers, so he would be justified in writing an onslaught and no more. But he does, in his conclusion, outline a few positives. He wants, for example, doubt to be welcomed rather than excluded from debate. He wants us to search for questions not answers. We must end the cult of the Hero and "denigrate self-interest, meaningless power, cynicism, rhetoric, and, for that matter, simply change our élites." Who, in the last analysis, can argue with any of that?
The greatest virtue of this book is its over-ambition. Saul has been many things, including a historian and novelist; but he is not an academic and refuses to be a specialist. So he wanders into any specialist domain he likes and hurls amiable abuse. This is fun, true and necessary. If he and we few others are even half right, it may be the West's last chance.
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