The Triumph of the Technocrats
Camille Paglia, The Washington Post, 6 September 1992
John Ralston Saul is a Canadian writer whose four novels of international intrigue include The Birds of Prey and The Paradise Eater, set in Bangkok. His practical experience has been extensive: he managed an investment firm in Paris and served for 10 years with the Canadian government oil corporation. Saul also has a doctorate from King's College, London; his thesis was on Charles de Gaulle.
Voltaire's Bastards, Saul's first published work of nonfiction, is an ambitious 600-page meditation on modern culture, tracing the roots of our troubled political, economic and intellectual systems back to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Despite its frequent overstatements, ponderous format and excessive bleakness, Voltaire's Bastards is a rich, rewarding, highly original book that casts a fresh perspective on all aspects of public life. There are innumerable brilliant insights. Even when he gets his facts wrong - as sometimes happens in his rushed survey of literary and artistic history - Saul is suggestive and stimulating.
Saul argues that democracy is subverted by the dominance of rational systems of control that are essentially unreformable. The modern science of administration is king. Capitalism has been transformed; it is not the owners, the stockholders, but their amoral, faceless hirelings, the managers, who have unbalanced and bled the marketplace at no risk to themselves. The West is obsessed with a frenzied, sterile quest for ultimate efficiency: "Our obsession with expertise" has produced a master caste, technocrats who are consummate mediocrities. Whether in corporations or government, they are merely "number crunchers,' 'highly sophisticated grease jockeys" with "a talent for manipulation,' who keep the machine humming. Our elites, like sycophantic 18th-century courtiers, stand for nothing but "cynicism, ambition, rhetoric, and the worship of power."
Saul's blistering indictment hits a great variety of targets - though not, regrettably, American academe, where self-propagating, overpaid technocrat-administrators are strangling education in a way that exactly proves his points. His account of the origins and influence of the Harvard Business School is fascinating: The founding Harvard deans were admirers of Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose theories of "Scientific Management" for industrial reorganization were also adopted by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, and by Albert Speer in Nazi Germany.
The business schools and schools of public policy in America and Europe enshrine "abstract, logical process" and an "obsession with structures." Their students become "addicts of pure power," without goals or vision. The economic transition from manufacturing to a top-heavy service sector has exacerbated social problems. Nearly three-quarters of business-school graduates go on to cushy nonmanufacturing jobs like consulting and banking. They avoid Pittsburgh and Birmingham, where the factories are, and settle in "the great centres of postindustrial self-gratification," like New York and London. Saul thinks this steering of top managerial talent away from nuts and bolts experience is a major cause of our industrial decline.
In some of the most startling material of his book, Saul argues that the modern, discreet, ruthless administrative style was created by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, who was wounded by a cannonball passing between his legs. Though he claims religion is dead and comes perilously close to demonizing Catholicism, Saul is at his best in his comparison of the arbitrary investigative method of the Inquisition to that of today's police-state torturers. He makes clever connections: Descartes, pillar of the Age of Reason, was educated by the Jesuits.
But Saul tries too hard to build a case against the last five centuries, when in fact the trends he identifies are also discernible in antiquity. For example, his cold, cynical company man is Caesar of Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra or the Creon of Sophocles' Antigone. And the amoral style of interrogation Saul claims was invented by the Inquisitors is already evident in Pontius Pilate's treatment of Jesus.
Voltaire's Bastards would be stronger with some consideration of the evolution of commercial and political bureaucracies in Mesopotamia and Egypt, which would demonstrate that the negative principles Saul isolates are universal and intrinsic to civilization and its discontents. The book also lacks sustained attention to the Greco-Roman origins of Western logic as well as to the complex status of reason in medieval theology. Even the presentation of post-Enlightenment culture suffers from a curious blankness about Romanticism, which Saul rarely mentions but which powerfully critiqued Western institutions and ideology from within.
Saul is superb, however, on military history, which is glaringly absent from the overliterary world-view of poststructuralism. With a novelist's instinct for historical sweep, he presents the staggering development of the arms trade, which has distorted and impoverished the world economy. Secondly, he shows how this "Armada complex" is a direct result of the victory of staff officers over field officers in the past two centuries, a phenomenon that led to the carnage of World War I.
Although he is unfair to Napoleon, whom he blames for inaugurating the pattern of godlike hero that would produce Hitler but that again has ancient precedents. Saul's profiles of military men from Lord Kitchener to Gen. William Westmoreland are models of quick-take psychological astuteness. There are dramatic juxtapositions, such as a wonderful comparison of Cardinal Richelieu to Robert McNamara, against whom Saul levels devastating charges of incompetence.
The last chapters of Voltaire's Bastards feel like an awkwardly appended coda. Saul zips through 500 years of literature and art, flinging out opinions from the fruitful to the bizarre. The current crisis in literary criticism, perfect grist for his mill, is passed over with a few disparaging remarks about deconstruction. Popular culture is treated in a dismissive, harrumphing way all too familiar these days. The discussion of Christian images ignores Protestant iconoclasm. But the book ends with a thrilling celebration of the revolutionary power of clear, simple language against the "professional obscurantism" of the establishment. I was moved and inspired by Saul's vision of the writer as "faithful witness."
Despite huge leaps, frustrating repetitions and organizational uncertainty, Voltaire's Bastards is a vigorous, continuously interesting re-reading of the principal issues of our time. Its enormous cast of characters includes Machiavelli, Marie Antoinette, Walt Disney, James Baker and T. Boone Pickens. Massively grounded in hard fact, the book unintentionally exposes the flimsiness and amateurism of New Historicism, a recent fad in literary criticsm influenced by Michel Foucault that finds imperialism under every doormat. Saul's intricate analysis of the cold, mechanical operations of Western institutions and policy-making is informed and convincing where that of the careless, culture-bound Foucault was not. Voltaire's Bastards should be required reading for graduate students in the humanities. It would break through interdisciplinary barriers without the posturing and clichés of poststructuralism.
After so dire a picture of western culture, we might expect some concrete proposals for reform. But Saul insists, perhaps to our disappointment, that the writer's mission is "questioning and clarifying," not providing solutions. In this, he has certainly succeeded. Rejecting the exhausted stereotype of Left versus Right, he opens up new lines of inquiry and creates new constellations of meaning. With his sophisticated international perspective and blunt freedom from cant, Saul offers a promising persona for the future: the intellectual as man of the world.
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