The Doubter's Companion

by John Ralston Saul

  No doubt the special interests would respond by running their own candidates, but this would have a number of advantages. They would be identified as special interests, which is not the case today. They would be running without financial advantage, which is also not the case today. The special interests would be free to try their luck at the bar of public judgement instead of attempting to buy candidates. Finally, the common sense of the citizenry would be able to judge in a relatively clear situation which parties, policies and candidates were aimed at serving the public weal, which is not the case today.

  ROUND TABLE An organized group of managers from leading American companies. The Round Table designs policies favourable to the corporations for which its members work, then sells them to the various levels of government.

  This is not a lobby group but a corporatist organization; one of the most important in the developed world. At first glance the name of the group seems inappropriate. What possible link could there be between Arthur, Lancelot and the quest for the Holy Grail and a group of anonymous technocrats looking out for themselves and their systems? The answer is that they see themselves as the knighthood of technocracy and they claim the legitimacy of their corporatist power. See: CORPORATISM.

  S

  SAT A system of standardized American college entry exams designed to nurture and reward functional illiteracy.

  Originally used only inside North America, the Scholastic Aptitude Tests and their equivalents are spreading around the world in response to a corporatist desire for global fixed standards in specialized education. Consisting mainly of multiple choice and fill-in-the-blanks questions, the SATs are the archetypal product of a society which believes above all in the possession of facts and the rule of expertise. In spite of “substantial revisions” in 1994,1 the underlying premise of these tests is that to each question there is a single correct answer.

  The skills they seek to measure are short-term memory and the ability to reduce knowledge to structures not unlike those of basic accountancy. They discourage thought, consideration, doubt, imagination and creativity. In sum, they reward mechanistic skills and punish intelligence. Exams of this sort are the first great barrier which students must clear in order to enter the functioning élite. Who they eliminate, who they encourage, the signals they send as to which skills society will reward, which not, have an important impact on the shape of our élites and what they think their role is.

  The SATs are not simply illustrations of a crisis in our civilization. They are an active agent, thanks to their deformation of successive generations of the élites. The cry throughout a troubled West is that we need standards. Perhaps. But we don’t need destructive standards. See: WISDOM.

  SCHOLASTICISM The dominant mediaeval school of teaching, inquiry, knowledge and argument. One of the Enlightenment’s main enemies. Scholasticism was duly defeated and destroyed. It mysteriously re-emerged at the centre of power in the second half of this century.

  The key to the mediaeval movement was its ability to tie up intellectual inquiry and language in an endless maze of high-quality irrelevance. In this way it protected established authority from serious examination.

  The Encyclopédie described Scholasticism this way:

  It substituted words for things; and frivolous or ridiculous questions for the great questions of real philosophy; it explained unintelligible things via barbarous terms.... This philosophy was born of the spirit of ignorance.... It reasoned from a basis of abstraction rather than of reality; it created for this new sort of study a new language. And disciples believed themselves wise because they had learnt this language. We can only regret that most scholastic authors made such a miserable use of their intelligence and that they limited their writing to such an extreme subtlety.2

  Scholasticism was launched in the thirteenth century by Thomas of Aquinas who applied Aristotelian logic to Christian purposes. In this way he managed to smother most relevant debate for a good three centuries.

  The similarity of mediaeval and modern scholasticism can be seen in this statement by Frederick Copleston, a great historian of philosophy as well as of Aquinas: “The practice of starting from a revealed premise…and arguing rationally to a conclusion, leads to the development of Scholastic theology…”3 This is precisely the method used to train contemporary technocrats in most fields. It is also the phenomenon identified by Harold Innis in the social sciences where, “…confident predictions, irritating and incapable of refutation, replaced discussion of right and wrong.”4

  In contemporary terms, Scholasticism creates impenetrable dialects, uses obscure language to prevent communication and separates intellectual inquiry from reality by adopting a relentlessly abstract approach. It continues to serve established power. See: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM and DECONSTRUCTIONISM.

  SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR Hitler’s favourite writer.

  “My teacher,” the Führer said.5 This appears a curious choice given that Schopenhauer avoided military service at a moment of crisis for Germany in its battle against Napoleon. He wasn’t even a German nationalist. He did see himself as a follower of Plato and Kant, which indicates a taste for authoritarianism and for obscurantism, although he criticized the lack of clarity in others. There was a certain pessimistic idealism about him which is often a romantic basis for tyrannical action.

  When asked why Nietzsche wasn’t his favourite writer, Hitler is said to have replied, “I couldn’t do anything with him.” Perhaps what he meant was that being himself as unbalanced as Nietzsche, they made an ill-suited couple for public mythology.

  HEROES rely heavily on philosophers who express romantic pessimism. Schopenhauer’s attraction for Hitler may have been his overwhelming sense that evil was overwhelming the world and that the “root of all evil…is the slavery of the will.” The only solution was to turn “away from life to aesthetic contemplation and asceticism.”6 Men like Hitler and Napoleon can be counted on to claim that if destiny had not forced them to become tyrants, they would have withdrawn into solitary contemplation.

  Schopenhauer also detested women which, in the Saint Jerome—”Women are bags of dung”—tradition, is a sentiment closely related to the uncontrollable feeling that evil is inundating us. It is a little simplistic but not untrue to say that men who hate women will take out their sexual problems on the world if given a chance. Romantic pessimists like Schopenhauer are thus very helpful in providing respectability for criminal acts. See: KANT, NIETZSCHE and PLATO.

  SECOND-GENERATION FERTILIZERS, HERBICIDES and INSECTICIDES Rhetoric over reality.

  For half a century the chemical industry has insisted that their agricultural aids had no side effects, indeed were harmless and simply brought prosperity. Gradually, as the result of determined campaigns funded mainly by volunteer citizens’ groups, governments began to ban certain chemicals. The public began to realize they had been lied to. At no time did the chemical industry change its tobacco-industry-style defence. But growing public concern indicated that they were no longer believed.

  In the early 1990s, a soothing phrase began to circulate: “The first generation of products were flawed, but, thanks to new research and industry initiatives, a second generation of products has been so perfected that they have no side effects and are harmless.” The originators of this sentence have not been identified. However, those not employed by the industry note that there has been a great deal of renaming and repackaging of chemical products for agriculture. Environmentally friendly words are all over the packages. The actual contents are marginally different. See: SOPHISTS.

  SERIOUS Proper to ideology, conformism, expertise, political correctness of all sorts. A form of social control. See: COMEDY.

  SEVENTY-THREE In spite of the word-games preferred by our leadership, the Western economies have been in crisis since 1973.

  Like a juggler with too many balls, we have been attempting to handle an apparently contradictory combination of slow growth, unemployment, inflation and debt. Whenever we manage to
get one or two into the air, the others fall to the ground. We bend over but by the time we get one of them back in the air, another lies at our feet. After a few years of this, the sensible conclusion might have been that we were doing something fundamentally wrong. Instead we have gone on trying to pick up the fallen balls.

  The explosive incidents of 1973 now seem little more than distant anecdotes. The oil-producing states organized themselves into an effective cartel. The price of a barrel of oil soared while supply dropped. By the early nineties, after two decades of inflation, the price of oil was more or less back where it started. The crisis of ’73 therefore ought to have been over. But depressions are usually unleashed by specific events which, although relevant to the crisis, are not the cause. They are catalysts which unite all the economic imbalances from which society doesn’t really know it suffers. That negative formula, once achieved, turns into a profound economic collapse.

  Conventional economic wisdom tracks its way out of the seventies on a curve of financial recovery into the eighties. The problems of the late eighties and the early nineties are thus disassociated from those of the seventies. But the prosperity of the eighties was neither generalized nor integrated in the social structure. It was based largely on growth in artificial or inflationary areas such as paper speculation and property speculation. Arms manufacturing was the closest we came to industrial growth. By the early nineties, it was received wisdom to think of the eighties as an unhealthy anomaly. Yet there was no tendency to draw the logical conclusion. If the eighties did not constitute a recovery, then we are still in the crisis of the seventies. See: DEPRESSION.

  SEX Despite being a common activity, demand always runs ahead of supply. This has made sex the market-driven aspect of personal relationships, running somewhere behind property in the schema of economics.

  Demand, in sex as in commerce, is an irrational mystery.

  The long-term contractual approach requires property arrangements such as marriage. In the speculative pay-asyou-go market, it is often linked to meals and entertainment. In either case sex has become the most successful bull market of the last three decades. Theoretical demand stretches so far ahead of real supply that sex has become the opiate of the people.7

  In 1992, a French court established the per-session value of sex between a husband and wife. The man had been denied intercourse for two and a half months after a doctor mistakenly daubed his penis with acid during a treatment. Damages were awarded on the basis of FF300 per missed coupling. The court was not suggesting that this was the absolute value of sex or the value of sex between that particular couple. Rather, they were ruling that, since money is our society’s only regulated reward system, sex must have an equivalent monetary value and in that particular market—a small provincial town—it was worth FF300 per session. The couple might have received ten or twenty times more had they lived in an expensive district in a major city. See: MARKET-PLACE.

  SOCRATES Deliberately misunderstood.

  Deliberately misunderstood, and yet. And yet he somehow manages to pierce these barriers of misunderstanding in order to assert his DOUBT and therefore his humanism.

  The PLATO nists continue to use him as a justification for the central contradiction in our society. They continue to argue that the higher or philosophic life must include a contempt for democracy because the citizenry are worse tyrants than a tyrant. This conviction remains at the heart of our élite education. It has been the foundation of a great variety of dictatorships over the centuries, ranging from well-intentioned left-wing reformers to ambitious right-wing colonels. And yet, there is enough force in the Socratic approach to resist these deformations of meaning, enough spirit to inspire repeatedly the idea of the citizen and of democracy.

  In this century we have seen power swing repeatedly back and forth between democracy and the tyrants while élites have served one or the other, but always with a sense of their own superiority towards and even contempt for the democratic system. This is the internal drama from which the West seems unable to free itself.

  Embittered disciples are rarely the right people to portray their master’s ideas. Plato nevertheless gives us enough information that we can draw conclusions opposed to his own. The explanation for his frankness may be that he was far from being the only living witness of the trial. If he wanted his point of view to be taken seriously, he had to provide a description of what Socrates had said and done which would ring true in Athens. As a result, from Plato’s own text it can reasonably be argued that his emotions caused him to minimize, misrepresent or ignore four key points.

  First, whatever the flaws of a democracy, Socrates would not have been permitted to teach anyone in a dictatorship. Had Socrates been a Spartan he would have been executed at the beginning of his career.

  Second, Socrates wasn’t rude to the jury or to the citizenry. He was rude to everyone. That was his method. It did not mean he considered himself of a superiority which justified contempt for lesser intellects. He simply had a foul character. He did not withdraw into intellectual isolation as to an ivory tower. He spent his life wandering around Athens annoying everyone in the city. He must have thought they were worth annoying. And yet Plato’s Socratic conclusion, accentuated by the Platonists into an ideal, turns on the need for superior and therefore isolated élites. The rational idea of the technocratic élites is a product of that deformed interpretation.

  Third, even though his conviction was a virtual certainty, Socrates stayed around for his trial in order to address the jury. He was encouraged and expected by both his friends and the authorities simply to go into exile for a while. He refused. The only sensible conclusion we can draw is that he believed in the democratic system enough to risk his life for it. Plato somehow managed to conclude that democracy should be condemned.

  Fourth, Socrates stayed around for his execution. Again, he could have easily escaped into exile after his conviction. Again, this is what most people expected, indeed hoped he would do. The Athenian legal system, unlike that of many dictatorships, was not hungry for blood. It was a flawed control mechanism which acted as a warning signal. When people crossed the line of what was considered to be bearable public decorum they were driven by the system to leave the city for a time. Socrates however chose to respect the system to the extent of letting it kill him.

  To suggest that Socrates would have participated fully for seventy years in a system that he had contempt for and rejected, and that in a final gesture of masochism he would invite the system to kill him is to suggest that he was not an intellectual master worth following. To suggest—as the Platonists do—that being old, Socrates felt like dying and therefore tricked the Athenian legal system into murdering him, not only insults his honesty, but his intellectual integrity and indeed his intelligence.

  That he had constantly cajoled the system to do better is quite another matter. Plato’s bitterness can be understood. But that should have been a matter of personal grief, not the foundation for a philosophy which betrays Socrates by favouring dictatorship. See: FREE SPEECH and ORAL LANGUAGE.

  SOCRATIC INHERITANCE, THE Our advanced education systems continue to insist that technocrats, whether for the private or the public sector, are products of the Socratic method, which they claim for themselves. But in the Athenian’s case, every answer raised a question. In our society, every question produces an answer. See: ÉLITE EDUCATION.

  SOLUTIONS An absolutist abstraction which may make more sense in chemistry or mathematics than it does in everyday life.

  The assertion that problems are terminated by being solved suggests that problems actually are solved, which can only mean that they are free-standing obstacles to a better world. Thus in medicine the illusion of a CURE obscures the reality that we are merely being treated. A more modest view might be that problems are reduced or limited or made more bearable if they are seen and treated as part of a larger phenomenon which has slipped out of balance.

  Thus inflation is never eliminated. It is
reduced and controlled by being treated as an integral part of a larger phenomenon which includes such things as production, innovation, employment, stability and growth. Those who believe that solutions eliminate problems talk of strangling inflation and put their efforts into linear mechanisms such as money supply and interest rates. Each time they reduce inflation there is a negative repercussion for production or employment or growth.

  Neither peace nor war eliminates the other. A healthy balance minimizes war by paying attention to related factors such as prosperity and stability.

  Like most absolute abstractions, the conviction that problems can be solved has a religious reverberation. It is as if solution has been mistaken for salvation.

  SOPHISTS The original model for the twentieth-century TECHNOCRAT; more precisely for the BUSINESS SCHOOL graduate and the ACADEMIC CONSULTANT.

  These fifth-century BC teachers wandered around Greece selling their talents to whomever would hire them. Their primary talent was rhetoric. They were not concerned by ethics or the search for truth. Long-term consequences, indeed reality in most forms, did not interest them. What mattered was their ability to create illusions of reality which would permit people to get what they wanted.

  SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS Great powers rarely think of themselves as having special relationships.

  What they do have are either allies or client states. Allies are countries which think as much of themselves as the great powers do. They must therefore be dealt with as equals, no matter how small or weak they may actually be. The client states think less of themselves and thus talk a great deal of their special relationship, the way courtiers once boasted of their access to the king.