The Doubter's Companion

by John Ralston Saul

  HUMANISM An exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.

  We are capable of freedom because we are capable of seeking the balance which integrates us into the world. And this equilibrium in society depends upon our acceptance of DOUBT as a positive force. The dignity of man is thus an expression of modesty, not of superior preening and vain assertions.

  These simple notions are central to the Western idea of civilization. They are clearly opposed to the narrow and mechanistic certainties of ideology; those assertions of certainty intended to hide the fear of doubt.

  Modern humanism appeared in Italy in the fourteenth century with Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. It was given philosophical form in the second half of the fifteenth century. Among those who reimagined its shape were Pico della Mirandola, who in his Oration on the Dignity of Man has God tell Adam: “I have placed you at the centre of the world so that from there you may see what is in it.”

  Most specialists devoted to the HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY now describe humanism in highly technical terms as a movement which revived classical Greek and Roman texts and devoted itself to detailed studies of language and definition and translation. In this way they reduce a revolution to their own level of modern SCHOLASTICISM. But the original humanists were, above all, set on attacking the original scholastics. They sought out the classical texts not in a scholastic desire to study the past, but with a determination to use classical ideas against oppressive mediaeval rhetoric.

  The humanist path was filled with writers seeking new ways to communicate with larger audiences in clear language. And the element of doubt was always there. In the early sixteenth century, Erasmus seemed often to stand alone as a moderate voice attempting to hold the religious extremists, Catholic and Protestant, back from their desire for blood. The same belief in balance which carried Erasmus could be found in the Enlightenment. Yes, these eighteenth-century thinkers spent a lot of time defining concepts. What interested them, however, was not proving they were right, but being in tune with reality.

  As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, it became obvious that a new wave of ideologies was going to reject doubt as a weakness, as ignorance, as irresponsibility; indeed as subversion. Perhaps this explains why the ideology of REASON and its various minor manifestations, such as Marxism and Capitalism, have so easily swept humanism off centre stage. They have all the fears of uncontrolled ideas and so use their absolutism to manipulate certainty and force with ease. Balance, on the other hand, requires care and time and, of course, the embracing of uncertainty. Humanism’s seeming weakness in the face of ideology is not surprising. Narrow certainty always appears to have a short-term advantage over balance and doubt.

  The curious thing about ideologies is that their promise, being eternal and all-encompassing, is therefore impossible, and therefore provokes constant short-term emergencies. In order for the day to be saved, the citizen must react with passive acceptance. Passivity is required because it is believed that the individual, left to act freely in a crisis, will do the wrong thing.

  For the humanist, short-term problems are not a crisis. They simply represent reality with all its complications and contradictions. And the citizen’s reaction to reality is not expected to be passive, for the simple reason that human nature is neither a problem nor something to be feared. “We’re not interested in a world,” as René-Daniel Dubois puts it, “in which to be human is a weakness.”3 Human nature is a positive force to the extent that it is in balance.

  But a balance of what? What is this equilibrium the humanists seek?

  A reasonable list of human qualities might include: ETHICS, common sense, imagination or creativity, memory or history or experience, intuition and reason. The humanist tries to use all of these. But what does it mean to be in balance?

  The Athenians didn’t know about the structure of the atom, in which several poles are held in a self-maintaining equilibrium, not by what we would call either a physical or a logical structure but by tension. The tension of complementary opposites. Our qualities, seen as a whole, resemble an atom. The moment one quality is cut free from the others and given precedence over them, this imbalance will bring out the winner’s negative aspects.

  Thus ethics in power quickly turn into a religious dictatorship. Common sense couldn’t help but subside into pessimistic confusion, as if wallowing in the mud. Creativity into anarchy. Memory into the worst sort of monarchical dictatorship. Intuition into the rule of base superstition. And reason, as we have seen over the last half-century, into a directionless, amoral dictatorship of structure.

  But if imbalance, which we call ideology, can so easily sweep balance aside, has humanism ever been anything more than a marginal refuge for idealism? That, of course, isn’t a question. It’s an answer structured as a question and it reflects the standard ideological approach towards humanism.

  It is undoubtedly easier to believe in absolutes, follow blindly, mouth received wisdom. But that is self-betrayal. The question is not whether we could ever achieve a humanist equilibrium, but whether we are attempting to achieve it. Better that than to seek the imprisoning imbalance of ideology.

  We’ve always known that it was easier to run Sparta than Athens. Sparta had all the advantages of an enormous ancillary slave population, a society based on military obedience and the absence of debate. It was harder to be Athenian and in the end they themselves failed even by their own standards. But they succeeded for a long time and those standards still mark our path. We have added to them, embroidered upon and improved them. It isn’t that we have progressed. But we have progressed in our knowledge of how we ought to act. Much of the time we fail to act up to our own standards. We fail ourselves. But if we know that, then we can also find ways to save ourselves. That is the essence of humanism.

  I

  IDEOLOGY Tendentious arguments which advance a world view as absolute truth in order to win and hold political power.

  A god who intervenes in human affairs through spokesmen who generally call themselves priests; a king who implements instructions received from God; a predestined class war which requires the representatives of a particular class to take power; a corporatist structure of experts who implement truth through fact-based conclusions; a racial unit which because of its blood-ties has a destiny as revealed by nationalist leaders; a world market which, whether anyone likes it or not, will determine the shape of every human life, as interpreted by corporate executives—all of these and many more are ideologies.

  Followers are caught up in the naïve obsessions of these movements. This combination ensures failure and is prone to violence. That’s why the decent intentions of the Communist Manifesto end up in gulags and murder. Or the market-place’s promise of prosperity in the exploitation of cheap, often child, labour.

  There are big ideologies and little ones. They come in international, national and local shapes. Some require skyscrapers, others circumcision. Like fiction they are dependent on the willing suspension of disbelief, because God only appears in private and before his official spokespeople, class leaders themselves decide the content and pecking order of classes, experts choose their facts judiciously, blood-ties aren’t pure and the passive acceptance of a determinist market means denying 2,500 years of Western civilization from Athens and Rome through the Renaissance to the creation of middle-class democracies.

  Which is ideology? Which not? You shall know them by their assertion of truth, their contempt for considered reflection and their fear of debate.

  IMAGE In a society devoted to illusion, the image assumes three more or less dangerous forms.

  There is the image that the creator knows to be untrue but expects to convince the public is true. This is the straightforward lie and can be dealt with because it is precise. A pin stuck in at the right moment and it deflates or explodes.

  There is the image that the creator knows to be untrue and does not expect to fool the public
; just to distract or disorient them. This can be dangerous because it suggests that meaning does not matter. It is increasingly common, feeds off technology and makes mockery of the idea of civilization and language.

  Finally there is the image in which the creator comes to believe. Whether the public is taken in or not, this is the most dangerous sort because it involves the denial of reality by those who have a direct impact on reality.

  In all three cases the image has the advantage of appearing and therefore appearing to be true. For example, in surveys of lie-perception levels, 75 per cent of those questioned will pick out an average lie when they hear it; 65 per cent when they read it; and 50 per cent when they see it.1

  The reason that revolutionary change is often tied to ORAL LANGUAGE is that this remains the most accurate means of real communication. We have great difficulty disbelieving what we see. This is one of the great risks in a society increasingly dependent on electronically manipulable images. See: PROPAGANDA.

  INAUGURATION GALA Religious ceremony in which each newly elected president of the United States is consecrated as the most famous person in the world. This coronation of the leader of celebrities is now more important than the formal swearing-in ceremony the next day, with its boring speeches and endless parade of nobodies.

  The inauguration gala of President Clinton and his consort on January 19, 1993, was a flawless example of this ceremony. Ten thousand people paid a thousand dollars each to be there in gowns and black tie. The entire proceedings were beamed live to the nation, indeed to North America and, by the new international American networks, around the world.

  Those stars laying on their hands included the actresses Goldie Hawn and Sally Field, in mini-skirts split up the side, marching out arm in arm to declare to the president-elect that they were there to speak on behalf of the mothers of America. Michael Jackson spoke for American children, with a crowd of them dancing behind him. Finally, Barbra Streisand, the high priestess of stardom, in a combination appearance as the Declaration of Independence and the Statue of Liberty, spoke and sang on behalf of America as a whole, its mythology, individualism, freedom, Los Angeles and New York. “I pray for your stamina. I pray for your health.”

  Attentive courtiers noted that in the course of the evening the president-elect cried seven times. They followed suit.

  On June 19, 1981, Nancy Reagan had cried only once when Frank Sinatra sang lyrics in her honour during the inaugural gala. But neither of these emotional moments matched that at the end of John Kennedy’s gala (also staged by Frank Sinatra) when the president-elect went on stage to declare: “I’m proud to be a Democrat, because since the time of Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic party has been identified with the pursuit of excellence and we saw excellence tonight.”2

  That Jefferson might have understood excellence to mean singers and actors glorifying a new president in the manner of a royal fête at Versailles under Louis XIV may have come as a surprise to anyone who persisted in identifying the third president with a modest, republican public demeanour. In any case, Kennedy reworked the Jefferson line a short time later when receiving Nobel prize winners at the White House. See: LEADERSHIP.

  INDIVIDUALISM The exercise through public participation of our obligations to the body of the citizenry.

  INDOLENCE An important newspaper BARON has devoted himself to exposing this word. He explains that the cause of poverty throughout the world is indolence. Ten per cent of Americans would not be on food stamps if they simply used their initiative and worked harder.

  He was saying this at the DAVOS conference in Switzerland just the other day. People have apparently become perfectly happy to while away a comfortable existence on stamps and social-welfare frauds. If they had only followed his father’s advice, they’d have “stuck it to the bastards” and become really rich. This image of hundreds and hundreds of millions of millionaires sticking it to each other, there being no longer any other category of citizen to stick it to, is so all-inclusive that there is no need for others to concern themselves with this word. See: MYRMECOPHAGA JUBATA.

  INEFFICIENCY The divorce of the function of an operation from its purpose.

  Sometimes the standard rhetoric which equates inefficiency with government bureaucracy is perfectly accurate. Yet it would be hard to imagine operations more efficient than most state-owned utilities. They deliver water and energy, collect sewage and garbage, maintain transport infrastructures and generally make the lives of tens of millions of people possible in a relatively smooth and invisible manner.

  Which is more inefficient, behind the times, conservative in its investment policies, yet wasteful in its rewarding of executives: the German State railway system or the French textile industry? The American post office or the aeronautics firms Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas? EDF (the French State electrical power corporation) or much of the West’s private and deposit banking sector, which has repeatedly bankrupted itself over the last three decades through extravagant and unprofessional lending? The Canadian national medicare system or the American private system which, before attempts began to reform it, left forty million people without protection and cost a fortune to both corporations and individuals?

  It cannot be argued in a non-ideological manner that inefficiency is a matter of public versus private ownership. Competition can help to discourage unnecessary bureaucratic waste, but the market-place also creates waste through its notoriously short memory, difficulty thinking more than a few months ahead and a chronic weakness for fashion, which like the shapes of shoe-heels can come and go abruptly.

  The underlying cause of waste in both sectors is loss of direction. This in turn can be traced to a disconnection between the manner in which an operation functions and its purpose. The greater the disconnection, the greater the inefficiency.

  The purpose of an army is to discourage wars or win them. Yet officers easily become distracted by management imperatives, internal power structures, class divisions and the prestige attached to stockpiles of armaments. As a result they tend to disfavour those officers who are competent strategists (and who favour the use of uncertainty) while promoting courtiers who delight in management, power structures, class and arms stockpiling, but cannot win wars.

  Waste and confusion in the automobile industry can be traced to a similar obsession with management. Much of the instability and gross wastefulness in the financial sector over the last two decades can be traced to amnesia as to their role in the economy—the financing of infrastructures and production.

  These errors are often justified by a blunt, even barbaric, ideology which insists that the purpose of society is the maximization of profit. That is to deform a narrow but useful mechanism into an absolute yet abstract god. The obsessive pursuit of profit is a prime example of divorcing function from purpose and therefore an invitation to inefficiency and waste. See: NATIONALIZATION.

  INFERIORITY COMPLEX The most dangerous characteristic in a public figure. It feeds aggression and contempt towards others.

  Alfred Adler explained early in this century that we all suffer from a sense of inferiority.3 The important question is therefore to what degree is it felt? There is no particular rule as to which child will suffer from an uncontrollable sense of inferiority. It can just as easily be a rich kid who goes to private school, inherits seven million dollars and ends up a press baron, as a poor child of doubtful lineage and nationality born on the Austro-German border.

  Individuals whose primary drive stems from their feeling of inferiority are a threat to the public interest. Not only do they tend to seek power in search of self-affirmation, their insecurity actually helps them to achieve it. Once there, they seek to demonstrate the inferiority of those under them. Their sense that they have been wronged justifies the substitution of their own emotional satisfaction for such fundamentals as the public weal and ethics.

  These people fall into three broad categories. There are those who seek to win the love of important people. They can be found to
day where they have always been—clinging to the coat-tails of those who have more power than themselves. As a result they may become known for brief periods as the one who has the ear of the one who has power. Then they slip away, forgotten. At a higher level, there are those who seek to win positions where they themselves must be loved. Both of these types are the essentially craven—the natural courtiers, courtesans and quislings. The most important love they can feel is unleashed by access to power. The effect is to confirm them in their contempt for others and themselves.

  The third type seeks revenge for the humiliation of their birth and circumstances. Once in power they bluster and bully, talk about the need for toughness, show contempt for others, and consciously humiliate them. This punishment is justified by the conviction that the victims deserve to suffer because they are not strong or competitive or successful enough to resist.

  The most destructive holders of power often combine these three categories.

  Those who are ruled by their own sense of inferiority use their obsessional talents to manipulate the insecurity in others. That is how they come to power. This very success confirms them in their contempt for others and allows them to claim that you can always succeed by appealing to the worst in the general public.

  INSTRUMENTAL REASON A clever justification for a real problem.

  Philosophers from Max Weber on have gazed upon what appear to be the equally beneficial and catastrophic effects of reason when applied, and have been filled with confusion and despair. If the catastrophes outweigh the benefits and reason is thus judged a failure, the only option might well be a return to superstition and arbitrary power.

  In thinking this way philosophers have turned themselves into victims of their own logic. After all, it was they who argued in the first place that the choice was between the dark ages and reason; that there were no other options.

  The discomfort brought on by their artificial, stark logic seems to have provoked them to split reason into two. If reason once applied did not work, then the problem, or so the argument goes, was not reason itself but a lesser, concrete form called instrumental reason.