Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“VOLTAIRE’S BASTARDS – The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” by John Ralston Saul (first published in 1992)

By now, I think every literate person is aware of the phenomenon known as the “intellectual bestseller”. Every two or three years there will appear a non-fiction book (usually a fat one) which is praised by all the pundits in the better newspapers and magazines and which, we are told, will totally change our views on life, the universe and the meaning of everything. The book can be about politics, economics, history, science, philosophy, religion, sociology or any of the big topics. So people who aspire to be intellectuals buy it in their droves. And then they try to read it. And often, tiring of it after a chapter or two, they put it on the bookshelf and think wistfully that they might get around to reading it some other day. But they rarely do.

For there is a widely-understood thing about intellectual bestsellers. Often they are bought more than they are read. I am thinking of books such as Margaret Wertheim’s Pythagoras’ Trousers, published in 1995, about the reprehensible masculine bias in the study of science; or Thomas Piketty’s 2013 blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a very theoretical take-down of capitalism. A man of my acquaintance has been crawling his way through it, chapter by chapter, for the last two or three years; but most potential readers haven’t made the effort. Perhaps the pioneer of the bought-but-not-read intellectual bestseller was Stephen Hawking’s quite slim A Brief History of Time, published in 1988. Even though Hawking famously included only one equation, in order not to put off the general readership, many who bought A Brief History of Time were at once repelled by its theoretical physics and did not get past the first chapter. It has the reputation of being the world’s most famous unread book.

Back in 1992, the big intellectual bestseller was John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards – The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. The fat paperback copy I read has a back-cover blurb in which it is praised by everyone from the London Times to Christopher Hitchens and Camille Paglia. John Ralston Saul is a Canadian “public intellectual” (God, I hate that pompous term) and polymath. Bilingual, he writes in both English and French and is a long-time student of American, Canadian, French and British life and politics. He has written six novels (mostly before he produced Voltaire’s Bastards) and eleven non-fiction works (mostly after Voltaire’s Bastards was published). But Voltaire’s Bastards is still the book for which he is best-known internationally. If you want the private details, you might also like to know that his wife is a former Governor-General of Canada.

I had meant for some years to read Voltaire’s Bastards, but only recently did I get around to borrowing my son-in-law’s copy and making my way through its 585 pages of small print (before its 50-plus pages of end-notes and index). I am now convinced that it is one of those books that many people never finish. To give a quick and glib summary of it, I would say that it has an excellent central argument, makes very many wise points, but is also too damned long, goes windily rhetorical in places, sometimes says very silly things and occasionally is guilty of factual errors, especially in the matter of history.

So after the verdict of the court, here in detail is the evidence.

John Ralston Saul’s essential argument is that reason and ridicule, as they were used by Voltaire and other men of the Enlightenment, were wonderful tools for bringing down autocracy, absolute monarchies and clericalism. But unfortunately reason and ridicule can be harnessed to any cause. Reason becomes a mere logical framework detached from any public good as it pushes relentlessly towards its logical comclusions. (Without being too immodest about it, this is a line of thought I have often expressed – see my postings The Unreason of Pure Reason and my re-hash of it as Limits of Reason.) Reason is not of itself a value or way towards a sane morality. Reason is only as good as its premises. Reason, as Saul sees it in the modern world, leads to specialisation disconnected from most people’s everyday lives or needs. In his view, specialization has created the age of technocrats who flatter their superiors by appealing to “reason”. He frequently uses the term “courtiers” to characterise such technocrats, bending to powerful politicians like the toadies at the court of Versailles who once bent to an absolute monarch. Thus Saul is able to attack furiously the likes of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger, advisers to American presidents whose logical and rational schemes led to disaster. Incidentally, Saul is an equal-opportunity critic, lacerating equally American, Canadian, British and French systems and politicans. For some English-speaking readers, his intimate knowledge of French politics may lead to references that seem a little obscure. In a dizzying five pages (Chapter 2, pp.98-103) Saul manages to take down Jacques Chirac, Giscard D’Estaing, Harold Wilson, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and a few others.

Saul has a particular horror of schools of business and administration that encourage only one particular (logical, rational, but essentially immoral) way of looking at society and economics. He criticises the Harvard Business School, the London Business School and the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration, whose graduates he calls “Enarques”. In his view, these institutions churn out bureaucrats, businessmen, politicians, lobbyists, British MPs seeking “directorships” and “special advisers” to governments, all of whom tend to favour monetarism and neo-liberalism without any regard for the common good. So long as their theories conform to the framework of “reason”, they can ignore genuine civil service. But when organizations have no real purpose, they tend to decay. As he says at the beginnng of Chapter 10 (p.234): “So long as there is a clear belief in the purpose of an organization, those responsible will find a sensible way to run it. But if the heart of belief is only in structure, then the whole body will gradually lose its sense of direction and then its ability to function.”

In his chapter on the arms industry (Chapter 6), he argues that armaments have become the largest industry in the world, not because of defence, but because “reason” says their manufacture provides employment and arms are excellent capital goods for export.

“This warping of war from a tool of last resort, theoretically aimed at improving a state’s non-military position, into a twin-headed monster of abstract methodology and cathartic bloodletting, is one of the most unexpected children of reason. In some ways it is linked to the killing of God and his replacement by both the Hero and the modern military planner… It is difficult to think of another era in which individuals have so carefully turned their backs upon the evidence of their own continuing violence by treating each dark event as if it were somehow unexpected – or the last of its kind. And they have done so in the midst of our millennium’s most violent century.” (Chapter 7, p. 178) (I underline the last part of this quotation to note that it contradicts the thesis of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature – reviewed on this blog – which claims that violence declined in the 20^th century.)

Elaborating on the matter of war in Chapters 8 and 9, he further argues that the professionalisation and rationalisation of armies in the 18^th century led directly to the deadlocked bloodbath of the First World War. He claims that the only winning strategies were conceived and carried out by mavericks who were not overly influenced by staff colleges. Again, “reason” doesn’t work.

So the rest of this very long book winds its way through various effects of the misuse of reason and the rise of specialised technocrats.  The public relations industry  specialises in “myth-making”. It creates images of decisive or admirable political leaders to beguile the public while the technocrats can get on with the real agenda (Chapter 11). Governments indulge in unnecessary secrecy about policies which should be known to the general public, and scientists often collude in this unnecessary secrecy. (Chapters 12 and 13 – in which Saul of course references the nuclear power industry.) Real democracy is suborned by specialists in the legal system (such as America’s Supreme Court), where lawyers, in effect, make laws rather than elected legislators. Powerful corporations are able to influence the law, leaving the general populace more sceptical of both the legal system and the political process (Chapter 14). In response to such widespread public disillusionment, there is a hunger for “heroes”, who will bypass the political process and fix everything up – in other words, an opportunity for demagogues (Chapter 15). (I wonder what Saul would have to say if this book were written in the age of Donald Trump).The professionalised managerial class has taken over, and corrupted, capitalism by disconnecting it from real entrepreneurial capitalists who produce real goods for a profit. Instead, the managers look at the bottom line and chase illusory profits based on speculation rather than the sale of real goods. Corporations do not take risks the way real entrepreneurs do. Meanwhile, service industries  create artificial needs and lead to core things (health, education, welfare) being underfunded (Chapter 16). The monetary system is manipulated by corporations and their “profits” are made by buy-outs of other companies and not by producing real profits or benefits for the community at large. (Chapter 17).

Saul’s central thesis is sound. Flawed “reason” and specialisation have created many of the modern world’s problems. This is true even if Saul often wanders off track and appears to introduce matters that are not strictly connected with his central thesis, or perhaps with his areas of expertise. (His take-downs of modern art and the modern novel – in Chapters 18 and 21 – seem peevish rather than informed).  I find myself nodding in agreement with many of Saul’s views, including the following assertion:

“One of the specialist’s most successful discoveries was that he could easily defend his territory by the simple development of a specialised language incomprehensible to non-experts… The new specialised terminology amounts to a serious attack on language as a tool of common understanding. Certainly today, the walls between the boxes of expertise continue to grow thicker. The dialects of political science and sociology, for example, are increasingly incomprehensible to each other, even though they are examining identical areas. It is doubtful whether they have any separate existence from one another. In fact, it is doubtful whether either of them exists at all as a real subject of expertise.” (Chapter 19, p.475)

As I read this, I think of all the verbose, obfuscating gobbledegook which has passed for literary criticism in the postmodern era, clearly devised by people determined to claim a special expertise while repelling those who are not initiated into their verbal codes.

I also applaud Saul’s views when, in Chapter 19, he argues that the lauded “indivdualism” of modern society is really consumer-driven conformism which never takes on social responsibility or challenges the political and economic status quo. “Individualism” now means falling back into private “lifestyles”. Further, pop culture figures who are said to be “rebels” are no more than inciters of such self-absorption. Saul lines up a list of “rebels” from Arthur Rimbaud to Elvis, and remarks: “These romantic victims – the Heroes of individualism – exude an ethos of rebellion. And yet, when you look at the contemporary lifestyles which are built on that rebellious mythology, you discover that they are profoundly conformist.” (Chapter 19, p.481) Quite so. And in Chapter 20 he rather labours the point that “stars” have become the focus of media attention rather than serious journalism – another diversion from the public good.

But now I come to my quarrels with Voltaire’s Bastards. First, a slightly nit-picking quarrel with some of Saul’s statements related to history. I have often found that big, fat books like this one, which aim to present an all-embracing thesis on history and life, will err in some of the fine details. In the matter of history, Saul makes sweeping and sometimes silly statements.

He clearly has a thing about the Jesuits, whom he mentions negatively a number of times, and makes the extraordinary claim (Chapter 5 pp. 108-109) “A unified Western elite, using a single system of reasoning, was precisely what [Ignatius] Loyola [founder of the Jesuits] set out to create in 1593. Thanks to his extraordinary invention, the Jesuits constituted the first international intellectual system” which Saul says “linked itself inextricably to nationalism”. Really? Was Christianity itself not an “international intellectual system”, or does Saul exclude religion from being intellectual? For that matter, wasn’t medieval Scholasticism an “international intellectual system”? As for the “nationalism” bit, Saul condemns Cardinal Richelieu for creating what he sees as the first modern, rationalised nation state. This seems to be part of a general animus towards Catholicism (seen especially in Chapter 18, where Saul goes apoplectic about church art). His interpretation is eccentric to say the least. Surely it was the the Protestant Reformation that broke up Europe’s international consensus, encouraging nation states separated from Rome. Indeed if anyone first set up a rationalised nation state in Europe, it was Henry VIII.

 There are other minor historical distortions. Repeatedly Saul credits Thomas Jefferson as the man who attempted to devise the best system of government, but ignores the fact that the sympathies of the slave-owning Virginian gentleman did not extend to the whole human race. In Chapter 11 (p.275), Saul blandly tells us that President Francois Mitterand was in the Resistance during the war, failing to mention Mitterand’s preceding service to the Vichy (collaborationist) regime – a matter of controversy and public knowledge in France before Voltaire’s Bastards was written. Equally blandly, he tells us in Chapter 12 (a chapter condemning state secrets) that “given that there are no real secrets, those betrayed by [Soviet spy Kim] Philby are, to all intents and purposes, as important as those of each citizen.” (p.299)  Again, I can only ask – Really? Or perhaps, for the purposes of polemic, Saul is simply acting dumb about the consequences for many people of Philby’s espionage. The most egregious howler is in Chapter 18 (p.455), where Saul spends a whole paragraph on Marie Antoinette’s saying “Let them eat brioche [cake]”, discoursing upon it as an example of the flippant attitudes typical of an uncaring monarchy. Clearly he accepts this as an historical fact, but the idea that Marie Antoinette ever said such a thing has long since been proven to be pure fiction.

Okay, those are all minor and relatively trivial quibbles with Voltaire’s Bastards, a bit like pointing out that many of this 30-year-old book’s topical references are now inevitably dated. But there are more major problems with this overlong text. Consider this key statement from Chapter 5, (p.135):

 “At the heart of our problem lies the belief in the idea of single, all-purpose elites using a single all-purpose methodology. We have developed this in search of a social cohesion based on reason. Certainly there is an essential need to find common ground on which an integrated moral view can be built. Without that society can’t function. But a society which teaches the philosophy of administration and ‘problem solving’, as if it were the summit of learning, and concentrates on the creation of elites – whose primary talent is administration – has lost not only its common sense and its sense of moral value but also its understanding of technical advance. Management cannot solve problems. Nor can it stir creativity of any sort. It can only manage what it is given. If aked to do more, it will deform whatever is put into its hands.”

Repeatedly, as here, Saul sets “common sense” against “reason”, but then has a hard time telling us what exactly “common sense” is, apart from a vague idea of community good will and solidarity. I am irresitably reminded of that ringing opening to Rene Descartes’ Discours de la Methode, where Descartes says “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagee..” or in English  “Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.” Good sense, or common sense, is really a very shaky concept, and means very different things to different people. How is it defined? What norms does it set out? Regrettably, on this matter, in the last chapter of Voltaire’s Bastards, Saul is reduced to vague generalisations about the need for scepticism in the face of technocrats and an acceptance that there are no definitive answers to the problems that beset us and – oh yes! – that we must use our “common sense”. This is not exactly a programme for anything, and comes as a limp conclusion after the previous 500-plus pages.

There is a similar problem in Saul’s dissection of individualism, right though he is about some things. In Chapter 19 (p.467), he asks a rhetorical question and answers it: 

“What is real individualism in the contemporary secular state? If it is self-gratification, then this is the golden era. If it has to do with personal public commitment, then we are witnessing the death of the individual and living in an age of unparallelled conformism. Specialization and professionalism have provided the great innovations in social structure during the age of Reason. But they have not created the bonds necessary for public cooperation. Instead they have served to build defensive cells in which the individual is locked.”

Again, this argument reminds me of another canonical work. In his The Duties of Man, Guiseppe Mazzini said that the declared “Rights of Man” of the French Revolution had opened to us all the liberal freedoms, and had allowed us to live as individuals. But unfortunately there were fewer “Duties of Man” to bind society together. Society was atomised. This is essentially what Saul says too. Mazzini’s solution was to promote the notion of the nation to which we should pledge our loyalty. As it happened, and in no way the radical republican Mazzini’s fault, this turned out to be a disastrous suggestion because, like “common sense”, the “nation” can mean different things to different people. Years later Mazzini’s idea was picked up by Italy’s Fascists, who had quite a different concept of what the nation was. But at least Mazzini had suggested a solution. Saul suggests none. To read the last chapter of Voltaire’s Bastards is to hear much hot air escaping from a punctured cushion. We are left on the cold, hard floor where we started.