How the Experts Turned Voltaire on His Head
Christopher Hitchens, New York Newsday, September 1992
In the former Soviet Union, dissenting intellectuals were very often incarcerated in mental hospitals for harboring what were called "reformist delusions." Commenting on this practice, one Russian was heard to say that actually many of these dissidents were mad because, "after all, if they were sane they wouldn't challenge the KGB." If you can appreciate the beauty and logic of this joke, you will appreciate John Ralston Saul's critique of impure reason. Surveying the way we live now, and anatomizing the disappointments and disillusionments of modern life, he has decided to take the axe to the root and to challenge the assumption that our method is one of rational choice.
Voltaire's Bastards is a long and very dense book but one that is buoyed by insights and fundamental questioning. Why, to take a simple characterization of Saul's, are the "experts" so often wrong? They think that they have weighed and calibrated and analyzed everything, according to value-free and scientific procedures, but they bring us war and meltdown and pollution and famine. The most that calamities such as these accomplish is the firing of one lot of experts and the hiring of another set, which is why, as Saul mordantly notes, a man such as Robert McNamara can only be promoted after each successive managerial techno-failure.
Voltaire, of course, would not have recognized this depraved version of rationalism. His entire style and methodology consisted of doubting all forms of power and authority, whether secular, spiritual or intellectual. What I think Saul means to say is that utilitarianism - the supposedly unsentimental application of cost / benefit analysis - has deposed the alliance between reason and justice, and has made logical calculation into something shortsighted and self-serving.
Describing the methodical abuse of medicine by Nazi physicians who allowed themselves to perform "scientific" experiments on living fellow humans, Robert Jay Lifton originated the term "doubling," which illuminates the psychic process by which quite ordinary people deceive themselves. Such self-deception did not, alas, evaporate with Nuremberg. Millions of skilled workers and salesmen in the civilized world are, as Saul points out in a lengthy passage, absorbed full time in the manufacture and distribution of armaments, all of them destined to end up in the parts of the world where they are least needed and will do the most harm.
What do these educated and sensitive people tell themselves they are doing all day? Does the question even come up? Or do the comforting accoutrements of flow diagrams, technological spin-offs and hard currency expert earnings succeed in keeping awkward questions in a separate compartment?
Technocracy and specialization supply ready alibis for those who are just doing their jobs. And again, the misfit always seems, or can be made to seem, irrational. Nothing is more logical, when you think about it, than Catch 22. When Yossarian, in Joseph Heller's novel, is asked by exasperated authority, "What if everybody thought like you?" he sounds crazy when he gives the only possible answer: "In that case I'd be a damn fool to think any other way."
Along with this comes a new priesthood of people who believe that "knowledge" is power, and for that reason seek to keep the knowledge to themselves. As Saul puts it: "The invention of the secret is perhaps the most damaging outgrowth of the power produced when control over knowledge was combined with the protective armor of specialization. Until recently very little was considered improper to know. Today the restricted lists are endless. And yet there can't be more than two or three real secrets in the entire world."
One might object here that the pre-Voltairean world wanted to keep from the vulgar even such open secrets as the availability of holy writ in the vernacular and the fact that the earth is a sphere. Still, the adaptation of that exclusive mentality to technological streamlining no more counts as progress than teaching a cannibal to operate a food processor. And the alienation between even educated people and their "leaders" is an aspect of this dysfunction. "The fractured individual offers himself or herself periodic tranquilizers," writes Saul, but "the citizen expects his political leaders to take no tranquilizers."
Only by challenging our self-definition as logical and rational creatures and demonstrating the superstition that lies beneath it can Saul engage us in this long and sustained meditation on the corruption of science, the emptiness of education, the vacuity of politics and the innumerable ways in which we teach ourselves to bear with greater stoicism the pain of others.
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