The Doubter's Companion

by John Ralston Saul

  One of the restaurant’s principal functions is to host birthdays. At this very moment, thousands of waiters and waitresses around the world are standing over slightly embarrassed clients and singing “Happy Birthday” to them in English. These employed choirs invariably substitute, wherever the words “dear Cathy” or “dear Sue” ought to be sung, the universal words “to you.”

  They resemble the professional mourners who not very long ago were regularly hired to weep at funerals. But why is it that they exclude the client’s name? It is often spelled out in sugar on the cake the waiters are carrying and, if their singing were merely a commercialized gesture intended to satisfy the customer, then chanting out the name would be an easy way to earn more satisfaction and therefore more money.

  But this is not an individual celebration. Given our inability to deal with DEATH, these singing waiters are the new professional mourners. The birthday client is being drawn into the great public process of continuity to which each of us belongs. The song “Happy Birthday” has evolved into an incantation sung endlessly throughout the West and beyond, in the way that the Christian mass once constantly echoed in Latin over the born, living, dying and dead twenty-four hours a day.

  When Senator Benigno Aquino was murdered in suspicious circumstances on his return from exile to Manila in 1983, the Filipino government attempted to deal with national and international outrage by holding an inquiry. Mrs. Imelda Marcos was called to give evidence because her husband was suspected of direct or indirect involvement. Her appearance happened to fall on her fifty-fifth birthday. Everyone in the courtroom rose to sing “Happy Birthday.”

  HAPPY FAMILY The existence and maintenance of which is thought to make a politician fit for public office. According to this theory the public are less concerned by whether or not they are effectively represented than by the need to be assured that the PENISes and vaginas of public officials are only used in legally sanctioned circumstances.

  The production of children is a basic animal function which involves no intellectual or ethical skills. The successful raising of children and the long-term maintenance of a contented marriage are mysteries so impenetrable that they have kept generations of poets, playwrights, novelists and social scientists continuously employed.

  The relationship of marriage and children to the application of public policy is an even greater mystery. Nothing in history indicates that happily married leaders have been wiser, more humane, courageous, effective or intelligent, any more than personal moderation or respectability in themselves have led to good government. The list of happily married liars, thieves, cowards and monsters in public office is as long as that of the admirable drunkards and humane philanderers. The private lives of most first-class leaders seem to have been catastrophic.

  Our modern insistence on a balance between private respectability and public policy therefore has nothing to do with leadership. Not only is it irrelevant to the democratic process, it may even be aggressively anti-democratic. Either the leader is an effective representative of the citizen’s interests or he is a lifestyle model. If the latter, then we have slipped back into the traditional religious and dictatorial archetypes of noble sacrificial heroes, vestal virgins, wives of Caesar, saintly kings and virgin queens. In a democratic society, these are false standards which can’t help but put the wrong people in office.

  HAPPY HOUR A depressing comment on the rest of the day and a victory for the most limited Dionysian view of human nature.

  HARD WORK The work ethic remains a popular explanation for the success of the West. This doubtful argument relies heavily on comparing humans to insects such as ants. Above all, the work ethic has a feel about it of low-level morality aimed at the poorer end of society.

  There are lots of poor in the world who work all the time, often with great skill, and remain poor. On the other hand, large deposit banks, although non-productive, have been among the most profitable institutions over the last half-century. Their executives continue to work relatively short hours. The executives of large, publicly traded corporations work longer hours than the poor. And they compete with each other—not with other corporations—to work ever harder, by spending more of each day at their desks processing paper and developing relationships. This benefits their reputations and their careers. There is no proof that it has an effect on productivity or profits for the corporation.

  Entrepreneurs are quite different. They usually have to work very hard in order to create their enterprise in order not to have to work hard later on in their lives. In other words, they create in order not to work.

  To the extent that the West has succeeded, it is probably the result not of work but of innovation—not just technological, but social, intellectual, political, verbal, visual, acoustical, even emotional. In order to innovate some have spent a great deal of time thinking and experimenting, perhaps more than any other civilization in history.

  Technological innovation in particular continues as if we were on an unstoppable roll. Yet our structures do not as a rule reward either thinking or innovation. And they don’t reward physical hard work. What they do favour is a narrowly defined type of intense labour best described as white-collar slogging. See: INDOLENCE.

  HARVARD SCHOOL OF BUSINESS See: CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS and TAYLORISM.

  HELL The abolition of hell has created major problems in the maintaining of a general ethical standard. The eighteenth-century philosophers condemned the threat of hell as a cynical device used against the less powerful. But they regretted the loss of hell’s real purpose, which was to deal with serious crimes, particularly those of the powerful and rich.

  Voltaire in his dictionary noted that, “As soon as men lived in society they must have noticed that some guilty men eluded the severity of the laws. It was possible to punish public crimes. But how could you put a brake on the secret variety. Religion alone could provide that brake.”1

  The philosophers believed that law and disinterested administration would take care of this problem. However, the more complex and sophisticated the laws became, the more they actually protected the powerful. And once administration had been raised to the level of a moral value, those with power began to convert unethical behaviour into administrative regulations.

  For example, it is common for senior managers to increase their income by a quarter to a third through what are known as “benefits.” This is legalized fraud. It is common to hide serious errors in the public service behind security regulations. This also is legalized fraud. (See: DENIAL.) It is common to justify poverty and exploitation through reference to the rules of COMPETITION. (See: HOLY TRINITY—LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY.) The Encyclopaedists were already concerned about this in the eighteenth century. “The means for enriching oneself can be morally criminal even though permitted by law; it is against natural law and against humanity that millions of individuals are denied the necessary in order to feed the scandalous luxury of a small number of comfortable citizens.”2 Again the philosophers assumed that rational reform could solve this problem. And there have, indeed, been improvements. But recently the pendulum has begun to swing back. And this time exploitation is justified not by divine right or class privilege, but by expertise and law.

  We have failed to replace hell with a viable code of ethics. That is because we slipped into a rational approach to society when we had intended to follow the road of HUMANISM.

  HEROES An illusion of leadership.

  The modern Hero is the descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte. With the development of communications technology it has become possible to sell Heroic attitudes as being more important than actual heroism.

  The Hero is the rational substitute for democratic leadership. To bypass the genuine complexities of the public place, technocratic expertise has been allied with the distracting excitement of leadership on horseback. By the late twentieth century this Napoleonic image had been refined to such attitudes as film-inspired Reaganite war stories, talking TOUGH, selling the leader’
s “character” via the mechanism of public relations and confusing the idea of the Hero with that of the celebrity.

  Given that one of the roles of the Hero and the FALSE HERO is to distract the citizenry from their role, appearances are of primary importance. From 1800 to 1945 these false populists dressed up in military uniforms. This was the Napoleonic model, even though few of them were soldiers. After Hitler and Mussolini, the uniform was no longer possible.

  A period of confusion followed as a new model was sought. It began to emerge in the 1980s through a blending of the B-movie actor with the entrepreneur. The need was for the concentration of a one-tone character role. The tough, decisive general was thus transmogrified into the tough, decisive businessman. The military uniform into the heavy, expensive, dark, double-breasted suit.

  Reagan and Mulroney were early attempts at this image. It was perfected in Italy by the new prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, former nightclub singer, wearer of five-centimetre heels, owner of a hair transplant, who advanced in public behind permanent make-up, even when greeting starving children rescued from Rwanda. He was, of course, an entrepreneurial Hero and wore the appropriate suit.

  HISTORY A seamless web linking past, present and future.

  Contemporary Western society attempts to limit history to the past, as if it were the refuse of civilization. Individuals who hold power tend to see history only as mythology which can be manipulated to distract the citizenry, but is not useful in itself.

  Among the different humanist areas of education, history has nevertheless survived best the pseudo-scientific reduction of non-scientific learning to theoretically objective standards. The other cornerstones of humanism—literature and philosophy—have been severely damaged by the drive to quantify and objectify everything in sight. Intellectual accounting is not a synonym for thinking. Driven by this vain search for objectivity, literature and philosophy have come to resemble the obscure and controlling scholasticism of the Middle Ages.

  If the historical approach has been able to resist these trends, it may be because power structures require a comforting background of mythology and mythology requires a sweep of civilization. Thus, history is welcome as a superficial generalization viewed in a hazy distance.

  Our technocracy is frightened by the idea that ideas and events could be part of a large flow and therefore less controllable than expertise would like to suggest. For them, history is a conservative force which blocks the way to change and to new answers. In reality, history only becomes an active force when individuals deform it into a weapon for public manipulation. By that very process it ceases to be history.

  The twentieth century has been dominated by a catastrophic explosion of ideologies of which communism and fascism have been the most spectacular. NEO-CONSERVATISM is a recent minor example. The fleeting success of these ideologies has been made possible in part by the denial of history—or rather, by freezing history into narrow bands of logic, the sole purpose of which is to justify a specific ideology.

  This does not mean that history becomes a beacon of truth when it is separated from ideology. History is not about truth but about continuity, and not about a limited dialectic but about an unlimited movement. To the extent that ETHICS remain in the foreground, history cannot be grossly deformed. The ethics which Western civilization has attempted to push forward for two and a half millennia are scarcely a secret. If anything, they have remained painfully obvious as one set of power structures after another has sought to marginalize or manipulate them. It is in this context that ideology most typically seeks to fix our attention on a single, conclusive pattern which can be presented as inevitable and which therefore carries a deformation of ethics.

  These destructive experiences illustrate the value of history as a guarantor of both stability and change. It is neither a conservative nor a revolutionary force. Instead, history is a constant memory and its value lies in our ability to make it a highly conscious part of our lives. In an age which presents abstract analysis—a method that denies continuity and memory—as the sole respectable method of exercising power, history is perhaps the sole intact linear means of thought. See: HUMANISM.

  HOBBES, THOMAS He was right about one thing—there is a solid relationship between authoritarianism and the difficulty humans have in dealing with their FEAR of DEATH.

  What Hobbes put forward in Leviathan in the seventeenth century—that democracy was disorder and that societies could only function with strong leaders who used their subjects’ fear of mortality—has turned into a recurring theme. Whenever we hear a pessimistic description of humanity or a call for strong LEADERSHIP or an obscuring vision of our approaching conversion into dust, we are hearing echoes of Hobbes’s anti-democratic arguments.

  We, the citizen guarantors of our own democracy, have taken to using a language which suggests that there is every reason to be pessimistic about our ability to choose policies and leaders wisely, to control our impulses and to participate intelligently in our civilization. This pessimism brings us back repeatedly to a perceived need for leaders, by which we seem to mean strong leaders—people who will run things for us. Curiously enough these self-destructive impulses also seem to be an integral part of a society which, more than any other in history, has been carefully constructed so that each of us can avoid facing the reality of our own upcoming death.

  We are all familiar with the concept of the enemy within. Our tendency is to go on imagining that a good citizen is one who remains vigilant, ever on the lookout for the authoritarian enemy. But we have ourselves become that enemy by forgetting the implications of our own arguments.

  HOLY TRINITY—CHRISTIAN A pre-alchemist alchemist concept developed by early Christian administrators to soften the hard-edged simplicity of straight monotheism.

  The three-in-one/one-in-three mystery of Father, Son and Holy Ghost made tritheism official. The subsequent almost-deification of the Virgin Mary made it quatrotheism. Twelve Disciples as semi-deities then made it sextusdecitheism. Finally, cart-loads of saints raised to quarter-deification turned Christianity into plain, old-fashioned polytheism. By the time of the Crusades, it was the most polytheistic religion ever to have existed, with the possible exception of Hinduism. This untenable contradiction between the assertion of monotheism and the reality of polytheism was dealt with by accusing other religions of the Christian fault. The Church—Catholic and later Protestant—turned aggressively on the two most clearly monotheistic religions in view—Judaism and Islam—and persecuted them as heathen or pagan.

  The external history of Christianity consists largely of accusations that other religions rely on the worship of more than one god and therefore not the true God. These pagans must therefore be converted, conquered and/or killed for their own good in order that they may benefit from the singularity of the Holy Trinity, plus appendages.

  HOLY TRINITY—POST-CHRISTIAN So far Nietzsche has been wrong about GOD. We have not managed to become Him in His place. Instead we have replaced God with a yet more abstract divinity based upon pure rational power.

  Reason rose out of the generous humanist promise of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by climbing over the bodies of HUMANISM’s other constituent elements—common sense, intuition, creativity, memory and ethics. These elements, which by limiting reason make it positive, were not simply struck dead. They were converted into the enemy of the new divinity.

  In their place a post-Christian Holy Trinity was installed. Organization or structure replaced the Father, TECHNOLOGY displaced the Son and the Holy Ghost gave way to information. The new priesthood was made up of technocrats. As the etymology of the word “technocrat” indicates, from the beginning they were to be specialists in power. Masters of structure. Modern courtiers. They would control the use of technology as if it were a natural extension of themselves, which it is not. And they would stand guard over information, each specialist category dispensing its specialist knowledge as it saw fit.

  This is the underlying tru
th of our society. There are other factors. Complications. Reasons for optimism. But this is our basic religion.

  HOLY TRINITY—LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY The main tenet of faith in the last quarter of the twentieth century has been the promise of a rational paradise reached through devotion to competition, efficiency and the market-place. In this fashionable and remarkably intolerant Holy Trinity, the role of the Father is taken by competition, of the Son by efficiency and of the Holy Ghost by the market-place.

  If these three mechanisms could be presented with both their strengths and their flaws, they would be valuable tools in a stable society. Treated as absolutes they quickly drag society into a confused and dangerous state where conventional wisdom is reliant on our denial of what we know to be wrong.

  As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization—our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity—to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists.