The new Age of Reason is illusion and lies
Andrei Navrozov ,The European, 15-18 October 1992
One of the best things about this book, and perhaps the most unexpected, is that it has been published at all. The paradox of a constricting intellectual universe is that a writer who wants to anatomise the very process of constriction is usually crushed before he can produce a 600-page tome. Like a physician during the plague, he dies of the disease while struggling to find the cure.
The cultural malaise diagnosed here became epidemic when the intellectual, social and ethical values of the Age of Reason, of which the American Declaration of Independence is a textbook example, were rendered obsolete by the changing relationship between the individual and the political institutions of democracy.
"All men are created equal," but if some of them have control of missile launchers, when in 1776 each had only a gun, such equality is illusory. "Inalienable Rights," which to Voltaire or Locke would have had the revolutionary significance of the freedom of dissent or self-government, may well include, in modern times, the right to medical insurance.
"The pursuit of happiness" is a worthy ideal, but to the French philosophes or the American rebels it meant restraining or throwing off "absolute despotism", while today it may mean no more than shopping at Chanel. Mass communications and modern weapons of mass coercion, the uncontrolled growth of corporate institutions and the diminished importance of the individual, have conspired to render the innovations of the Protestant Reformation and the French Enlightenment less and less applicable to 20th-century reality.
Instead of keeping pace with science, Western social thought has been dragging these innovations along, virtually unreformed, ever since the American Revolution. As early as the 1850s, John Stuart Mill had warned that their force to guide mankind was "well-nigh spent, and we can expect no fresh start until we again assert our mental freedom."
This is precisely the reformation which Saul urges the West to attempt: except where Mill anticipated, Saul confronts us with what we know from experience and newspaper headlines. Today even a political innocent is aware of the chasm separating the expectations of the electorate and the actual policies of the state, and of the cynicism with which unelected government or bureaucratic or corporate elites view the principle of accountability.
Roaming a vast historical terrain, Saul concentrates on the "bastardisation" of the Age of Reason, and the attendant hypocrisies of democracy, in the past 50 years. We have become "Voltaire's Bastards" because the "self-evident truths" of the Age of Reason, which nobody has bothered to make newly relevant to modern society, are nowadays little more than a respectable ideological cover for the usurpation of all real power by the unelected elites.
The social forms that Saul outlines are in many ways as bleak and in some ways more frightening than the ones sketched by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. "Whatever the ongoing changes actually hold for those living in what we used to call the Soviet bloc," he remarks, "the Western reaction is inescapably one of relief...Here is another excuse not to address our own problems."
The recurrent theme of this book is that for at least half a century the West, deaf to reality because it lost the ear for individual utterance, has become a conceited inept, passive imperium of its own delusions of permanence and grandeur. by smothering the would-be critic with institutional love, and the would-be dissenter with corporate hatred, it has severed the link with the Age of Reason that made the West master of our universe, champion of our knowledge and guardian of our morality. What remains is self-satisfaction, illusions and lies.
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