The Doubter's Companion

by John Ralston Saul

  With half a millennium of conscientious application under its belt, reason is regularly declared to be farther than ever from the revelation of its true meaning. But an annoying sort of commonsensical citizen might stick to her guns and repeat, whenever faced by this interminable kant, that reason is what reason does.

  As the religious debates which preceded the rational debates demonstrated, if you treat all questioning of what is declared to be the central principle of society as a rejection of it, you leave no room for reasonable re-evaluation. Thus it is invariably suggested that those who question the way in which we use reason are actually calling for a return to superstition and arbitrary power. The unspoken basis of this argument is that there are no other important human qualities or that these other pretended qualities are not qualities at all. In this way we are denied access to what we know to be our own reality.

  The hypothetical DOUBTing citizen could suggest that reason might make more sense if it were relieved of its monotheistic aura and reintegrated into the broader humanist concept from which it escaped in search of greater glory in the sixteenth century. In this larger view it would be balanced and restrained and given direction by other useful and perhaps also essential human characteristics such as common sense, intuition, memory, creativity and ethics. In such a generous context it would be easy to see that reason on its own is little more than a mechanism devoid of meaning, purpose or direction.

  The rhetorical defender of the rationalist faith will immediately question whether these other characteristics are indeed independent qualities or whether they are merely lower-case concepts which can be dangerous if let loose. But why must we reduce our options to a choice between the true God and a golden calf?

  Between our periods of purist folly, we keep coming back to the idea that we are balanced creatures. That is, we can be if we try. It may be impossible for each individual to achieve equilibrium. But when the varying strengths and weaknesses of the citizenry are combined, the idea of a balanced society becomes reasonable.

  Reason detached from the balancing qualities of HUMANISM is irrational. The promise of a sensible society lies in the potential reality of a wider balance. And in that equilibrium reason has an essential place. See: INSTRUMENTAL REASON.

  RECESSION “The recession is over.”

  This phrase has been used twice a year since 1973 by government leaders throughout the West. Its meaning is unclear. See: DEPRESSION.

  REFERENDUM or PLEBISCITE Most commonly used to deform or destroy democracy, referenda casually offer a false choice—to accept a change proposed by those who have power or to refuse it. In other words, there is a single option, which is not a choice.

  They are often presented as a populist tool of DIRECT DEMOCRACY which translates into undermining representative democracy.

  They can indeed be tools of democracy, for example, if the citizens of a territory want to choose between belonging to one of two countries.

  Referenda were introduced as a political tool under the French Revolution, but they came into their own under Napoleon. He used them to create something new—a populist dictatorship. Referenda resembled a democratic appeal to the people, without requiring the long-term complexities of elected representatives, daily politics and regular elections. Instead he combined his personal popularity with a highly focused appeal on a single subject. The result was that he could later claim the general support of the populace on any subject for undefined periods of time. In 1804, Napoleon used a referendum to become emperor, thus destroying democracy. Hitler did virtually the same thing in 1933 and again in 1934. In two referenda he got more power than an absolute monarch.

  Those who propose the question invariably argue that a yes vote will solve problems; a no vote will bring on the apocalypse. This was as true of Napoleon as it was of the Canadian government’s constitutional referendum in 1992.

  All the efforts of those with the power to pose questions are concentrated on making the populace understand that they “need” to vote yes. “Necessity,” William Pitt once said, “is the plea for infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” And as André Malraux noted, “the slave always says yes.”

  Even at its best, democracy is a cumbersome and often tiresome business. Nor is it surprising that the gradual conversion of political propaganda into an important profession—public relations—which runs together social, economic and political questions, should favour the Heroic referendum approach over the complex multi-faceted and slow process of electoral democracy. The result is that we are increasingly subjected to the Heroic view of government. Even legislative elections are being turned away from their normal mix of issues and personalities to the illusion that a single candidate’s position on a single issue or a personality flaw is all important. Single-issue lobbyists are as devoted to converting elections into referenda as public-relations firms.

  And the press quite easily fall into the plebiscite game-plan, because they find it easier to harp on about the same subject, dramatizing, hyping it in fact, than to deal with a mix of complex issues.

  A new face. The reduction of debt. Immigration. Nationalization. Privatization. Free Trade. One of these is the answer to our problems. It will allow us to avoid the apocalypse. The choosing of hundreds of representatives in the context of hundreds of issues, big and small, is in this way reduced to a plebiscite. Referenda are thus anti-democratic because they lend themselves so easily to the politics of IDEOLOGY.

  REGULATION Economic regulation protects the MARKETPLACE from itself by introducing common sense. In the process it protects society.

  This was how we avoided the cruel and destabilizing effects of the 1973 Depression. Unfortunately, those regulations also became an excuse for treating the crisis as less than it was. In an astonishing intellectual somersault, our élites seemed to be reassured and took to blaming the crisis on the costs of the stabilizing rules which had saved them.

  This required extreme self-delusion. In any of the earlier depressions, the hurricane of social and economic disorder would have swept them out of power. As for the business leaders, and the middle class in general, most of their money and property would have disappeared in the storm. This is not to deny that over-regulation is a problem. It is. But regulations neither created nor maintained this crisis. And they are not THE problem. Among the unfortunate by-products of an ironic situation has been the encouragement of the worst characteristics in our élites. Increasingly they believe that because they still have power they must be right.

  The challenge of the last twenty years—one to which we have not risen—has been to find a new way to think about economic crises. We had the right to congratulate ourselves on our success in regulating the current disaster, providing we then admitted that the disaster was real. In other words, regulation is at best a temporary harness on a force which can outlast and eventually outmanoeuvre any civilization. Regulation buys time. The question is, how should that time be used? We have wasted the last twenty years by denying reality and engaging in ideological arguments. There isn’t much to be gained by assigning blame now. Even so, the Neo-conservative academics could easily be put at the top of a shame-ridden list.

  Part of our problem is that the inventiveness of the marketplace quickly makes regulations irrelevant or counter-productive. The business community, their academic lobbyists and political agents react by crying out for deregulation. But then the market tends quite naturally towards a blunt and negative manner of expressing its dissatisfaction. It is not a mechanism of finely balanced human relationships. It cannot be expected to understand or to propose civilized human arrangements.

  To the extent that deregulation has been conceded over the last few years, it has been disastrous for sectors as varied as banking, transportation and much of heavy industry. A more sensible approach might have been to re-examine the underlying mechanisms of regulation in order to bring them into the late twentieth century.

  Dupli
cation, unnecessary complications, administrative delay, barrier after barrier of detailed rules—all of these added up to a self-defeating maze constructed over the years, but not a force of evil. To re-establish society’s real intent we needed simply to digest this accumulation of detail into new, lean and straightforward regulations.

  While the ideological debate between regulation and deregulation has stretched on, our economic systems have been undermined by revolutionary changes in the marketplace. There have been endless inventions in the area of international financial speculation. And the transnational corporations have become increasingly sophisticated. Most postwar economic regulations, although complex and heavyhanded, have become marginal. With the end of the centrally administered European-based colonial empires in the early 1960s and the end of the BRETTON WOODS financial agreement in 1973, our systems of economic regulation became irrelevant.

  The transnational corporations and the money markets have declared the era of human-designed regulations over. Now the market must reign. Because few people in the business community are paid to think about phrases such as “Western civilization,” they don’t seem to realize that they are proposing the arbitrary denial of 2,500 years of human experience.

  The only way to stabilize the markets in order to protect them from themselves, and in the process to protect ourselves, is to rethink how to regulate them. This means neither fortress nationalism nor anarchical internationalism. A very careful balance can exist between the two. Bilateral or trilateral economic integration pacts such as the FTA and NAFTA are not the solution. They are regional victories for partial market deregulation at the expense of social balance. International trade negotiations such as GATT probably aren’t much more useful. These arrangements are part of the old-style regulations. They cannot deal with either the transnational corporations or the money markets. The European Community is a serious attempt at rethinking and reregulating a large area of human society. But it remains a regional arrangement, and so will be unable to maintain its very real standards against the attacks of the transnational corporations and the money markets.

  If what we want is stability and prosperity, then we have little choice but to concentrate our imaginations and our efforts on a new and far broader version of Bretton Woods. Given the developments in technology and the disorder in international trade, this is the only sensible way to release the market-place from its own self-destructive instructs. See also: DEPRESSION, HOLY TRINITY—LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY and SEVENTY-THREE.

  RESPONSIBILITY Nobody is responsible in a corporatist society. That’s because the real citizens are corporations. Individuals only work for them and follow orders. It follows that individuals see themselves as chosen for victimization.

  RICHELIEU, CARDINAL Father of the modern nation state, modern centralized power, the modern secret service and a major civil building boom brought on by a glut in the dressed stone market following Richelieu’s forced dismantling of defensive city walls. See: GANG OF FIVE.

  RIGHT See: LEFT.

  RIGHT VERSUS WRONG Sooner or later societies solidify to a point where the justification of existing structures becomes a social duty and public discourse is reduced to an absolutist formula which depends on the concept of right versus wrong.

  The very idea of the middle ground then becomes an enemy of public order. Yet the middle ground is where change may be constructively considered. Only there can individuals embrace doubt in order to reconsider society without rejecting it.

  At some level—conscious or subconscious—those who feel driven to defend right versus wrong know this does not mean that they are necessarily right. They know they are confusing the ethical concepts of right and wrong with an absolutist approach towards the practicalities of everyday life. But on their practical level of day-to-day life, in which careers, reputations and incomes are made and lost they understand that error is punished and certainty rewarded.

  Ours is a society in awe of false stability and which functions by admiring power and denying reality. Even the careful legal codification of the late twentieth century—designed to protect the citizen against various forms of malpractice—can encourage the professional denial of the middle ground. If those who are expert and those who have power know that being wrong means they must be punished, then public debate is impossible. The result is an unrealistic status quo. The denial of problems becomes a duty. This illusion will hold like a well-built dam until the waters of reality rise high enough to rush over the top.

  But if reality can only be applied in unexpected floods, the question of right and wrong or being right versus being wrong will always be swept away precisely when it is needed. Only a society which admires, even rewards, the admission of error can avoid this weakness by concentrating upon the middle ground.

  ROTTEN BOROUGH An electoral area in which the representative is chosen by financial interests. A “Rotten Borough system” suggests the sytematic corruption of electoral democracy.

  This initially English phenomenon involved a lord who owned all the local votes. As balloting was done in public, he could verify the way each was cast. The 1832 Reform Bill eliminated the Rotten Boroughs. During the second half of the twentieth century they re-emerged in a more sophisticated form and quickly spread throughout the West.

  The 1992 American election produced a Congress which had been shaped by more than one billion dollars in funding from private interests.1 To suggest that corporations made these investments in order to serve the public interest would be to assume that they are run by incompetents.

  The unabashedly crude way in which money shapes the legislatures of Britain, France, Canada, Italy and so on throughout the West is made doubly surprising by our determination in most cases to continue on as if this were not happening. The single example of the pharmaceutical industry, their political investments and the resulting legislation on drug patents and pricing is a blatant case of old-fashioned rotten-borough politics. The lord pays out money and then monitors how the beneficiaries vote. The borough is replaced by the legislature. Silvio Berlusconi’s use of corporate money, public relations in place of policy and his own television stations and newspapers in the 1994 Italian election shows how far democracy’s suicidal tendencies can carry it. And still we go on acting as people did in the eighteenth century—as if such corruption of the public weal were simply the way things always work in the real world.

  That this system often manages to choose good representatives reassures us that the problem is secondary. But in the eighteenth century good people were also chosen through the Rotten Boroughs. Some of the greatest parliamentarians in the history of modern democracy sat for areas controlled by a single lord.

  The problem with Rotten Boroughs is not that they eliminate personalities or LEADERSHIP. After all, any system can promote competent and even remarkable people. Dictatorships can do this more easily than democracies. Any absolute monarch or Führer can pick out the smartest available people and appoint them to office. The problem with Rotten Boroughs is that legislatures shaped by corruption are unable to do the job expected of them—that is, to serve the public interest. Behind a great deal of artifice and some useful policies, their principal activity is to be of service to their financial masters.

  Much of our hesitation in controlling special interests comes from a sense that even if they are misusing the democratic mechanisms, to control them would put limitations on all honest citizens. But democracy was never intended to guarantee unlimited individual rights.

  There has always been a division between those rights which either contribute to the public weal or at least do not harm it versus those which are negative, vicious or destructive. The line between these two categories may not be perfectly clear, but in general it can be seen.

  The destructive freedoms are easily identified. We are not allowed to kill, rob, enslave or beat each other. That is, we are not allowed to infringe on the individual rights of others. Corruption of the legislature falls into the same c
ategory because the corrupter mistakes the removal of someone else’s freedom for an expression of their own.

  What’s more, our legal system gives the corrupter comfort in his view. It ties the privilege of the corrupter to the citizen’s right to freedom of speech, even though the actual effect is to limit the freedom of speech of most citizens. Thus our basic democratic rights can be deformed into a negative force. That is why democratic societies have so much difficulty dealing with those who do not respect fair freedom of speech. The Brownshirts, Blackshirts and Bolsheviks were able to use their own freedom of speech to remove that of others, at first by simply shouting them down.

  The use of money—as with Berlusconi—to fund floods of advertising and television commercials is a new and more sophisticated way to shout people down. It is neither free speech nor communication. Rather it deforms public debate into CORPORATIST rivalry. Some of these corporatist groups may have ethical messages—human rights or ecological groups, for example. But they will always be outnumbered by self-serving special interests. In either case, what they obscure is the democratic process itself, which is not intended to be a competition between corporatist groups for control of the elected representatives.

  The problem in controlling corruption is not therefore whether to put limits on freedom of speech, but how to organize society so that everyone has real access to their freedom of speech. For example, to limit the size of corporate contributions during elections, while leaving the real cost of running for office unlimited, is to put a severe limitation on free speech.

  But if the electoral process were removed from the market-place entirely, then this single, across-the-board limitation would guarantee maximum freedom to all citizens and opinions. Modern communications are not necessarily the enemy of fair debate. They also make it possible for legislatures to fund all election expenses for all groups. The removal of all private funding could accomplish more than just cutting out the corporatist groups who attempt to dominate the citizenry. It could also reduce the overall cost of politics and focus public debate more on issues than on flimflam.