The Doubter's Companion

  PECTORAL MUSCLES Every young man should have two large ones. The question is what to do with them thirty years later when they transmogrify into breasts.

  PENIS All organized societies are dedicated to controlling the use of this remarkable instrument. Yet the cultures of these same societies, whether through fiction, film, advertising, social mythology, even jokes, are devoted to praising the penis as innately uncontrollable.

  This contradiction can be seen most clearly among elected officials, in particular presidents and prime ministers, who are far more potent than the average citizen. Careful calculation of the time spent by Presidents Kennedy and Mitterrand in corporeal activity will confirm that, once meals and sleep are deducted, little more than an hour and a half per week remained for the governing of their respective countries. In spite of the republican and democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the modern leader has inherited the all-powerful penis of the old divine monarches, itself inherited from such interfering gods as Apollo and Zeus.

  Elected leaders are so potent, in fact, that we feel obliged to insist upon their remaining semi-chaste—that they limit themselves to monogamous sex, preferably with the bride of their youth, particularly if she resembles their mother. It is a proof of our progress that the Greeks never gained such control over their gods. This is a modern adaptation of the old Egyptian rule that the only safe way to produce an heir was to marry the Pharaoh to his sister.

  The practical philosophical point seems to be that semen expended in other than a legally sanctioned vagina bleeds public policy to death. See: SEX.

  PESSIMISM A valuable protection against quackery.

  Of greater use to the individual than scepticism, which slips easily into cynicism and so becomes a self-defeating negative force. Pessimism is a conscious filter which disarms ideologues and frees us to act in a practical manner.

  The only dangerous pessimist is the one who has power, is optimistic about himself and pessimistic about those he governs. Imprisoned as our society is by rhetoric, these public pessimists are increasingly hard to identify. They can be identified by their tendency to go on constantly about solving problems, finding solutions, creating prosperity, winning wars and ending crime; yet the more optimistic their rhetoric, the more pessimistic their real actions.

  The healthy pessimist moderates his public actions with self-doubt and listens carefully for the reverberations in society which can be translated into sensible opportunities. Élites who are optimistic about themselves and pessimistic about the governed are ready to be changed.

  PHILOSOPHY Is either about language or thought. Or both. But language is about public communication and it has been some time since the philosophers communicated with a quantity of people large enough to be called the public. Language is either public or it is an expert’s dialect, which is a far lesser thing. Philosophy cannot be a lesser thing since it leads the way in examining and encouraging thought. What value could thought have if no one but a few professionals could think it? It would be little better than an instruction manual for a VCR.

  Surely language and thought are about reality. And so are humans. How then could philosophy be about language and thought if its obscurities cut it off from reality and so from the people it is meant to serve?

  Philosophy has not been so locked into the padded cell of internal references for internal reference’s sake since the era of the mediaeval scholastic strait-jacket. Yet it remains central to understanding the strengths inherent in Western civilization. Amplified by history and literature, philosophy must be a tool of realism which repeatedly permits us to rediscover ourselves and shed the linguistic obscurantism of whatever power structure is in place. In doing so, we alter or shed the structure itself.

  Philosophy’s flight from reality has paralleled the rise of expertise and professionalism. This began seriously at the very moment that the ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers—who had spent much of their lives fuelling public debate by striving after clarity and communication—were becoming a central part of political experiment. In Germany, in their shadow, a more private and obscure philosophical approach was emerging. IMMANUEL KANT was more than a genius. He was the first great modern SCHOLASTIC. The liberating philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had struggled with ideas outside of the universities. With Kant philosophy was dragged back inside where the scholastic tradition could reassert itself.

  Two centuries later it can reasonably be asked whether philosophy is any more than one more among thousands of professions. At its worst it resembles accountancy, with professors of the history of philosophy mistaken for philosophers and busy limiting their profession to the arranging of ideas in plus and minus columns.

  Language depends on the use of mutually agreed-upon terms—not because they represent truth, but because they provide a medium for communication. However if the terms and phrases have been so elaborated by specialists that they are mutually agreed upon only by the experts, then they are no longer a medium for communication but a dialect for exclusion.

  In some areas—the sciences, for example—the maintenance of a truly common language is more difficult than others. There is a strong temptation in philosophy to invoke this clause of unavoidable complexity. But the counter-argument is that philosophy must be what it has always been; that is, central to the reality of our civilization. That means it must remain within the terms of real communication.

  For example, the return in force during the 1980s of the discredited nineteenth-century laissez-faire approach to society happened as if its disciples were presenting a new truth. The philosophers were under an obligation to help everyone understand that what was being proposed was a return to a specific past which included a well-documented philosophical history. The installation in the late twentieth century of a CORPORATIST structure within the democratic states has come without any public debate, thanks in part to being disguised in a new vocabulary. Why were the philosophers unable to explain this? The memory of corporatism as a tool of fascism is, after all, only fifty years old. And why have they been absent from the debate which has transformed so much of popular democracy into a system eager for anti-democratic Heroic leadership disguised as false populism?

  These three examples are not minor political incidents. They are no less important than the Lisbon earthquake or a profusion of corrupt courtiers or the laws restricting religious belief which brought the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries out into the public place. These are some of the major events which make our time what it is and yet philosophy remains virtually absent from the scene.

  PLATO Brilliant novelist. Accomplished humourist. In spite of which he wasn’t as much the author of Socrates as he would have wished.

  Socrates and Aristotle remain the martyr and the genius of the Western intellectual tradition. However, it was Plato who—like St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas for Christianity—acted as the general manager charged with shaping our understanding of the past and therefore our expectation of what we might be able to do in the future.

  The democratic citizenry in Plato’s model could only be a childlike mass incapable of evolved—that is, disinterested—thought. And thus incapable of looking after the public good, because dominated by superstition, prejudice and fear. The enlightened aristocracy of Knowers that Plato prescribed as the solution to the citizenry’s flaws is the élite which our rational corporate society has persisted in producing.

  Given Plato’s success in locking his argument into place, it isn’t surprising that today, as in Athens, democracy works to educate and create the sort of élites who do not believe in democracy.1 In fact, the Platonists have always taken themselves so seriously that they miss Plato’s fictional and ironic talents. They have interpreted him as being more severe about the weaknesses of the populace than he actually was.

  As for Plato’s intellectual position, it did not spring entirely out of cool philosophical musing. It was
partly the product of his reaction to the Athenian treatment of Socrates. What Plato retained from his master’s tragedy was that Athens’ greatest thinker had been unjustly accused under a democratic system and had responded with a defence speech which Plato interpreted as showing contempt for the 501 jurors who represented the citizenry. They in turn convicted him. This was the searing emotional drama which determined the slant of Plato’s theories.

  Bitterness. Contempt. A desire for revenge. These are tricky components in the construction of a philosophy—particularly if the writer is a genius with an important contribution to make. The greater the genius, the more likely it is that he will be able to redefine these destabilizing factors as if they were disinterested theory.

  The result of Plato’s successful absorption of his master’s ideas is that there are a lot of Platonists around who think of themselves as having a Socratic approach to life. The key to this may be that the former is presented as a state of being and the latter as an attitude or a method. To the extent that Plato invented Socrates, this confusion is perhaps not surprising.

  But the messages are quite different, even opposite. We can only imagine that Plato worked hard to make his master’s mind appear to be one with his own. He must have been restrained by some combination of Socrates’ penetrating genius, which could control a posthumous scribe; Plato’s own genius which, however bitter, held him to a reasonably faithful reconstruction; and perhaps most important, the presence in Athens of an audience which also remembered what Socrates had said and done.

  In spite of the obvious and profound differences, our own civilization seems unable or unwilling to see these two men as separate entities. Yet it is the Platonic tradition which has fed the corporatist, technocratic, anti-democratic ideology. The humanist, citizen-based, democratic movement has been nourished by SOCRATES.

  PLATOON A film which confirmed its director, Oliver Stone, as the legitimate heir to Leni Riefenstahl. As in TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, false mythology is created making nonsense of reality without seeming to use manipulation or propaganda.

  Platoon presented itself as the first attempt to reconcile Americans with what had happened in Vietnam by telling the everyday truth of how soldiers experienced the war. It was indeed constructed to heal the still-suppurating wound inflicted on the greatest nation in the world by its defeat in open combat at the hands of a small, poor, Third World country.

  Stone’s method was built upon a deceptively simple dramatic conflict. His platoon was made up of a young, naïve and well-intentioned officer who commanded young, wellintentioned soldiers, including the naïve hero, Chris. The source of power in the group was a blondish, pale, beautiful, gentle yet strong and wise sergeant. These people all believed in the American dream and saw themselves as victims of injustice. The source of power in their company was also a sergeant—a senior staff sergeant. However, he was dark-skinned, cynical, scarred and cunning. The first represented the American ideal; the second was the devil. To be more exact, the second represented a constant in American history—the traitor, Benedict Arnold in modern dress, the man who believes that men of principle are weak, the force of evil within each person and therefore within the nation. His cynicism and crude interpretation of reality enable him to trick others into temporarily betraying the American dream.

  The film rises through two successive apocalypses. The first ends with the Christ sergeant being abandoned to a swarm of Viet Cong while the company rises above him in helicopters in the care of the devil sergeant. It is a false resurrection. A betrayal. We last see the good man who died for them on his knees with his arms out as if on a cross.

  In its final culmination of apocalyptic violence—a confused night of smoke, explosion, light and sound—the platoon is defeated without the Viet Cong becoming visible. They remain vague shadows in the trees. They can not appear. In Stone’s mythology America is neither fighting Vietnam nor defeated by it. America is struggling to defeat the enemy within itself. The great and good people are attempting to cast out the devil. The early morning reveals a wasteland of bodies, some half-alive. One is the devil sergeant, another the naïve hero. He executes the devil, thus freeing America.

  The film ends with his rising from the disaster, again in a helicopter. In voice-over, Chris reflects as he is evacuated:

  Looking back, we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves—and the enemy was within us.... The war is over for me now, but it will always be there—the rest of my days.... Be that as it may, those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and meaning to this life.

  This is the true resurrection.

  Stone has vaporized the defeat by converting it into the caricature of a morality play about a civil war. The wound of defeat was converted into a cathartic experience in which the American dream persisted.

  Art heightens MEMORY. As Riefenstahl demonstrated, propaganda can erase it, as well as any sense of ethical reality. Stone’s visual manipulation literally exorcised the public’s memory of failure and of responsibility. In the aftermath of Platoon, other films, such as The Hill, were made, reflecting this new perception, and slowly the general manner in which the whole war was treated softened and became positive.

  POLITENESS A mechanism of control distinguished by urbane, smooth, courteous, refined and other agreeable mannerisms of social intercourse. We are conditioned to think of this control in classic Marxist terms as a phenomenon of vertical class structure. Those divisions still exist with their paraphernalia of the said and the unsaid—the said being about control, the unsaid about power.

  But in a CORPORATIST society the real class divisions are horizontal. Thousands of specialist groups—public, private, interested, even disinterested—are spread throughout society like inaccessible volcanoes sending up little puffs of smoke as their official communication with the outside world. This is corporatist politeness: the solutions, the answers, the truths all swathed in the expert DIALECT of the particular class. A second, more complex level of dialect is used inside the volcano as the equivalent of the old social “unsaid” with all its assumptions of rightfully held power.

  An obsession with polite or correct public language is a sign that communication is in decline. It means that the process and exercise of power have replaced debate as a public value.

  The citizen’s job is to be rude—to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of DOUBT. Politics, philosophy, writing, the arts—none of these, and certainly not science and economics, can serve the common weal if they are swathed in politeness. In everything which affects public affairs, breeding is for fools. See: PUNCTUALITY and VOLTAIRE.

  POWER, PUBLIC The single purpose of power is to serve the public weal.

  There’s nothing new about this. The Encyclopaedists said it clearly in the eighteenth century:

  The aim of all government is the well-being of the society governed. In order to prevent anarchy, to enforce the laws, to protect the citizens, to support the weak against the ambitions of the strong, it was necessary that each society establish authorities with sufficient power to fulfil these aims.2

  Do those who gain power, administrative or political, understand this? Is the system in which they labour designed in order to make this possible? Does the “sophistication” required to succeed in contemporary technocratic systems turn power into the sort of self-justifying goal which rewards courtesanage rather than the service of the public weal?

  These are simple questions which have been asked many times over the centuries. Each time the reply is of vital importance to the lives of those whose society is at stake.

  PRAETORIAN GUARD See: WHITE HOUSE STAFF.

  PRIVATE LIVES The private lives of public people may be considered private only so long as they don’t trade on them to advance their public careers.

  If an individual presents himself to the public for election as a happily married
father of three, then he has made his weekend with a secretary or his visit to a prostitute of either sex a matter of public interest. If he makes a point of drinking milk in public, then the public will want to know whenever he gets drunk. If he buys his suits at Wal-Mart for the cameras, then proceeds to holiday on rich men’s yachts, he will be photographed with telephoto lenses. But if he were to present himself to the public for election as a believer in specific policies, he might well be judged on those while his genitals, interesting though he himself might consider them, would be forgotten by those not directly concerned as being of little relevance to the public good. He would probably even be able to fall down drunk in public from time to time without anyone much caring so long as the interests of the citizenry were being looked after. See: AD HOMINEM.

  PRIVATIZATION

  1. Ideology.

  2. A way to finance political parties.

  Privatization makes friendly lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers, bankers and investors rich. They then make contributions to their benefactor’s party, give jobs to defeated or retiring candidates, enrich the private lives of politicians with travel and entertainment and, in certain cases, fill their on- or off-shore bank accounts.

  3. Sometimes a sensible thing to do.

  There are new areas of development in which the public interest is served by public involvement. When that area is well established it may be a good idea to transfer it to the private sector so that the public can concentrate on new areas of development. This suggests that capitalism is not very good at substantial risk when it involves long-term investment. It also suggests that the private sector owes a debt of gratitude to the citizenry who have been willing to risk their painfully accumulated shared wealth in order to encourage innovation.