The Doubter's Companion

by John Ralston Saul

  The Calvary of kings is that they must humour this flattering fiction, at the very least by saying nothing. Periodically, they will have to build up the courtier’s flagging ego by bestowing signs of personal concern upon him.

  In the case of client states this may take the form of a sumptuous state visit. Under General de Gaulle’s presidency, these events were referred to as les visites des rois nègres. Better still, the great king may ask the head of a client government to advise him on a matter of particular importance. This sort of consultation ideally takes place not in the office of the king but in the house, in order to personalize the relationship. There are other more banal and therefore less valued ways to confer a special relationship. The most common is to stand in front of cameras with the client head of government in order to say how much he or she is appreciated.

  For a full decade Washington felt obliged to maintain the fiction of Mrs. Thatcher’s special relationship with the president. In a more ingratiating style, Brian Mulroney based his entire national strategy on the fiction of his special influence over Canada’s neighbours. The word fiction is important in these cases because the great power does not, over the course of a pleasant dinner, forget its interests or alter its policies.

  The term special relationship is also common among middle-level politicians who fear defeat in an upcoming election and so invoke their president or prime minister. Also among innocent young girls when talking about the ideal liaisons they will have when they grow up. See: BANALITY and NANNYISM.

  SPEECH-WRITERS People complain that our leaders no longer read, which is an insult to their speech-writers.

  It is equally fatuous to complain that we don’t know what our leaders stand for. Their speeches are perfectly clear. The only unknown is what they actually stand for.

  We have no right to complain about this. We have insisted that we need leadership and so have reverted to the divine monarchy in which, whatever else he may be, the leader is presented in public as a symbol. Like his clothes, his words are chosen for him. Language is treated as performance, not communication. That he has not read the books his speeches quote or initiated the thoughts his speeches think is neither here nor there. Either we wish discussion and doubt or rhetoric and reassurance.

  We have chosen the latter. A leader who read and thought and spoke in more than sound bites would disturb us because he would sound undecided. He would be forcing us to listen and respond to the authentic noises of a human brain functioning in a position of responsibility.

  In order to avoid being exposed to even a hint of this through private contact with their leader, a growing number of speech-writers go on to become columnists, authors and even political candidates of a forthright type. They are then paid to think in public. Places such as the opinion pages of newspapers have become a substitute for the leader’s mind. The columnists tell us what the leaders must be thinking. This is more than a reversion to the reading of entrails. It is a further development of the courtier-based society. The leader needn’t worry about thought. Other people will pay professionals to tell the public everything that is in his mind.

  STANDARDS OF PRODUCTION The social and economic equivalent of criminal law. A counterbalance to the barbaric tendencies of blind self-interest and abstract market forces.

  Above all, standards of production are the practical expression of ethics; that is, of a civilization’s inherent right to regulate subsidiary activities.

  The purpose of these standards is to establish socially acceptable relationships between citizens. Slavery, for example, was once acceptable in most societies. In most it is now forbidden. Workplace safety, employment guarantees, pensions and so on are modern refinements on the rejection of slavery.

  An unfair advantage goes to those who refuse standards. A civilization that has established middle-class standards of production cannot compete against one that has not, just as an army that forbids the use of poisonous gas cannot fight one which uses it. A society which permits those individuals who wish to murder to do so has slipped into anarchy. As Afghanistan or Sicily or Yugoslavia have demonstrated, the absence of standards puts those who are not murderers at a disadvantage. The only difference between these murderers and those who propose a market-place deprived of standards is that one believes in corporal violence and the other in economic violence. These are intimately related forms of barbarism. They assume an elimination of practical ETHICS.

  STRAWBERRY, THE Interchangeable with the melon, this object, tasting vaguely of plastic or acidic cardboard, is offered in every hotel, restaurant and supermarket in the world every day of the year under the heading fresh fruit.

  Its qualities include:

  1. Modernity: it is principally the product of irrigation, chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

  2. Modesty: it is quite happy to live its growing life under plastic.

  3. Adaptibility: pick it green, send it on a plane around the world, it remains as unperturbed as if it were a plaster copy.

  4. Patient: it will sit eternally on a shelf and not rot.

  5. Mythological: it evokes happy songs, picnics, shortcake and cream, white wine and a hot summer sun.

  Some will argue that a real strawberry still exists, growing somewhere, full of flavour and scent and waiting to be picked. But what value has the vague romanticism of the real thing when measured against the transcendant strawberry, the platonic strawberry, which the genius of rational organization can place on every plate on request? See: WHITE BREAD.

  SUBJUNCTIVE That mood which most clearly admits to the existence of doubt.

  The importance of grammar as a reflection of civilization’s true condition can be seen in the gradual disappearance of the subjunctive from Western languages.

  What does it mean when a society eliminates the threshold of the possible en route to what is probable? Self-confidence? This must be a society which doesn’t evolve through questioning. It simply finds the right answers and acts upon them. But to believe only in the present and the future without any intervening and unruly process could also be taken for a naïvety so extreme as to constitute stupidity. Such a desire for certainty also suggests a willingness to be manipulated.

  Every tense and mood of a language has its enemies. Those of the subjunctive are public relations, propaganda, opinion polls and the religion of expertise. A civilization which rewards so generously the ability to sell illusion as if it were reality is unlikely to reward grammar which examines the uncertain ground between the two. See: DOUBT.

  SUPER BOWL In the United States more women are battered on the day of the American football championship than on any other day of the year. This should not be taken as a characteristic of football itself, which has been an important and agreeable factor in stabilizing the gonadal energy of young men for more than a century.

  The Super Bowl is relatively typical of competition used as a social value. Everyone, except the few who are best at the game, is reduced to the disembodied role of a spectator.

  Spectators do participate through some of their senses. Eyes, ears, mouths and emotions can be used to worship their substitutes. But in this process the seated are deprived of their existence as individuals capable of action. Instead, they become passive participants in the mythology of gladiatorial Heroism.

  The aim in football is to move the pigskin across the goal-line. This positive skill is unfortunately little more than the exotic spice of the game. The central characteristic, involving most of the players on the field, is that the movement of the football is halted in each play by a physical assault on its carrier. Spectators may well get excited about these repeated demonstrations of basic masculinity. The more excited they become through passive participation, the more their own active manhood may be put into doubt. In the final analysis, a guy’s got to prove his own worth by hitting someone himself. Or it may simply be that American women are unbearably slow fetchers of beer.

  SUPERIORITY Most superior people suffer from an INFERIORITY COMPLE
X. With nations—groups abstracted to resemble a person—this paradox can easily become pathological. After a few generations of defiant assertions, everyone forgets that their sentiment of superiority is based upon their fear of inferiority.

  The confusion then produced by reality’s failure to live up to mythology often brings on racism and violence. These are classic tools for those in despair who wish to banish doubt. Low levels of racism and violence may mean that an individual or a nation no longer feels the need to feel superior. They may then actually be superior. See: WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

  T

  TALENT Sylvester Stallone has stated, “I could play Hamlet if I wanted to. I just don’t want to.”1 Mr. Stallone may be understating his case. He may be able to play Lear.

  Society increasingly encourages individuals to make great claims for themselves as an act of self-affirmation. But this is to apply the ethos of the sandbox to social organization. It also suggests that the individual is being encouraged to exchange self-respect for the dream world of public relations.

  A sensible person accepts the positive things others say about him, whoever and whatever they are. However, history will make up its mind about each of us, after we’re dead. See: HEROES.

  TASTE There is no such thing as good or bad taste. As Coco Chanel pointed out, there is only taste. This suggests that moral judgements such as good and bad may have no relevance to fashion. Perhaps fashion is just fashion. To be enjoyed or ignored or, for that matter, deplored.

  In late imperial Rome, the great aristocratic pagan families were horrified by the rise to power of the lower-middleclass Christians whose churches were so plain and ugly that they were scarcely more than hovels. These rustic believers knew nothing about architectural principles and, we can surmise, had heavy accents and dressed without style. No doubt they were what those with taste would call common. Gradually, however, the aristocrats themselves followed the odour of shifting power and began to convert. Eventually the law left them no choice. It was probably a few generations before they actually thought of themselves as Christians, but in the meantime they brought taste to the church: architecture, decoration, mosaics, painting, liturgy, music. At last the bishops began to wear chasubles as magnificent as their positions. At last the language of prayer and song began to sound elegant and powerful. The beauty that resulted from the participation of the great old imperial families became an integral part of our pleasure in ourselves as civilized people. The new pagan Christian taste was quickly confused with the original Christian message of moral clarity. But those links were and remain purely imaginary.

  As Queen Elizabeth II replied, when asked how she felt about taste, “Well, I don’t think it helps.”2 True and untrue. It does not, in any ethical sense, help. It may even confuse and weaken ethical standards. On the other hand it does help us to get through the day. “For the pleasure of your eyes,” the classic Arab souk merchant will incant to draw you into his stall. And why not. We do have eyes. But not, as Ovid pointed out, for debating taste. “De gustibus non disputendum est,” which simply indicates that Coco Chanel knew her Roman poetry.

  TAXATION The only purpose of this unpleasant business is to pay for the services the citizenry require, which means taxing a sufficient percentage of the total wealth found in the state.

  Modern taxation is often described as a revolutionary change which permitted the financing of widespread public programs by limiting the rights of private property. This isn’t so. The modern tax is merely the latest administrative form of an age-old procedure. And it limits the rights of private property far less than any earlier system did.

  For most of history the collecting of taxes involved brute force. Monarchs spent the income on themselves, their aristocracy and their armies. They often rented out the tax-collecting privilege to individuals who became spectacularly rich in the process. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries those whom we would now describe as irresponsible speculators were often private-sector tax collectors.

  The taxpayer has always complained about extravagant governments, often with reason. What has changed is the definition of the citizen upon whom the money is to be spent. For the first time, most of the population qualifies as a citizen.

  It can reasonably be argued that governments, like all large corporations, waste some money. However, this only accounts for a small part of the shortfall in public funds over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Most of it can be traced to the state’s inability to tax the wealth on its territory.

  In the late 1950s, early 1960s, the large joint-stock companies carried between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of the tax burden in most Western countries. This was an effective way to raise funds and finance the state because it taxed the national wealth at a point when it could be measured as a factor of production and was gathered together in large sums. This period of theoretically high taxation did not dampen what was a time of great corporate prosperity.

  Nevertheless the managers of these corporations set about lobbying for a reduction in tax rates. Within a short time the corporations were carrying only 10 to 15 per cent of the tax burden.

  This new financial liberty did not bring new investment, growth or prosperity. Nor did the money go to the shareholders. What these funds did bring was an explosion in the quantity of managers. Pointless mergers, takeovers, splendid new office headquarters and other inflationary activities proliferated. The joint-stock companies more or less wasted the billions which tax reform had won them and thus played a role in provoking and prolonging the economic troubles of 1973.

  As the corporate contribution shrank, the burden of financing the state fell upon the rich and near-rich, which included some of the senior managers. In fact, there could never be enough money in these pockets to compensate for the lost corporate contribution.

  The rich protested loudly at the right doors, threatening to take their money elsewhere. So the burden kept on shifting. It settled increasingly on the middle classes, who, had they been willing to pay 100 per cent of their income in taxes, could still not have come up with enough to balance the public budget.

  In desperation, governments turned to various indirect sources of revenue. They started lotteries and went seriously into the GAMBLING business. They also created and increased sales taxes.

  Managers and economists said that sales taxes were a good idea because consumption was an efficient point at which to tax the national wealth. This is false for three reasons: only a small part of the national wealth passes through consumption patterns; financing trillion- and billion-dollar public operations by taxing a few cents at a time is so inefficient as to be silly; for individuals and small businesses the administration of sales taxes is time-consuming. It represents time wasted on a non-productive activity; thus the administration of sales taxes is inflationary.

  But there was nowhere else for the burden to shift because the corporate managers had carried their organizations still farther away from taxability by embracing globalization. To any attempts at serious taxation they began invoking the demands of international competition. Tax them and they’ll be gone to some land of lower taxes and cheap labour.

  What is now called the debt crisis is in good part the taxation crisis. The managers and the academic consultants endlessly repeat, sometimes accurately, that the state must cut back to deal with the debt. But the shrinkage is never enough. Besides, most cuts are not to the state but to the citizens’ services.

  That the ability to tax fairly and effectively the full national wealth has now escaped the nation state is not so serious as it at first appears. After all, the problem is fundamentally that of the individual citizen who, throughout the West, continues to believe in a basic social contract.

  Received wisdom has it that nothing can be done because globalization and TECHNOLOGY dominate. In fact a simple decision by the Group of Seven that they want their taxes and intend to collect them would be enough to force a change of direction. After all, the billion-odd citizens of
the Group of Seven represent the bulk of the consumer market for the products of the large corporations.

  Ensuring that they carry their fair tax load is a simple matter of cooperation among those who have a right to a percentage of the national wealth.

  TAYLOR, FREDERICK Founder of the Harvard Business School, management consultancy and the modern technocratic manager-led concept of capitalism. Lenin’s favourite economist, after Marx.

  TAYLORISM A management system in which workers are viewed as additional pieces of machinery.

  Invented by Frederick Taylor in 1895, Taylorism or Scientific Management was a precursor of automatized production. Ironically, it also improved the treatment of workers. They could no longer be exploited in the traditional sense because machinery must be looked after or it will break down. Taylorism also brought increased general prosperity and the workers benefited from this.

  However, their status had been fundamentally altered. The system no longer saw them as human individuals, but as elements in a system to be managed by experts.

  Taylorism was central in the rise of the United States to world power. When democracy and capitalism are cited as an explanation for America’s success, it is more accurately a reference to democracy and scientific management.

  Taylorism was also a great hit in Nazi Germany. Albert Speer, Hitler’s economics minister, was a disciple of the movement and this is one of the explanations for Germany’s success in holding out against superior Allied forces later in the war.

  Taylorism is the ultimate abstract structure. Not only can it impose itself on reality for limited periods, it is more effective in a crisis than in normal times. Speer’s approach was like a gigantic Harvard Business School case study (both the school and the case study are a Taylorist invention).