“People become so obsessed by hating government that they forget it is meant to be their government and is the only powerful public force that have

purchase on.” — John Ralston Saul. Nedblog pointed me to this entry in At the Margin:

John Ralston Saul’s novels are not his most influential work. His nonfiction — Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), The Doubter’s

Companion (1994), and The Unconscious Civilization (1996) — constitute the most articulate and powerful indictment of modern global society ever

published. Voltaire’s Bastards is subtitled “The Dictatorship of Reason in the West,” and it is over 600 pages (including footnotes) that document how it

was possible for the promise of 18th century Enlightenment to culminate in a society so simultaneously undemocratic and ungovernable as ours. The

thinkers of the Enlightenment, according to Saul, used reason as their principal weapon in the struggle against medieval darkness. Once the revolution

was underway, however, instead of retiring reason to its normal place among the other human faculties (Saul lists common sense, creativity, ethics,

intuition, and memory), we enshrined it as our governing principle. By elevating it over other human faculties, we have succeeded in converting it to

unreason.

Basing our society on reason, Saul argues, has resulted in corporatist politics, the cult of expertise, and our highly structured lives. And it has produced

a number of interesting contradictions and anomalies. One of these is that the arms trade is the largest single industry in a world supposedly at peace.

Another is that our so-called democratic societies are governed by entrenched elites. Still another is that we elect people to grapple with our public issues

based on their personalities rather than their abilities.

Saul points out that we call ourselves a democracy but we have built no time into our lives for citizen participation: “The only way a citizen can

participate is voluntarily, which means giving up going to the bathroom, give up making love, give up sleep, give up eating dinner with your family. In

other words, we have structured citizen participation out of our society.” Note that I’m only giving you the highlights here. Saul takes 171 pages to

position himself and lay out the argument, then follows that with over 400 pages describing what might be considered the everyday atrocities of

modern “democratic” corporatist society.

Psychiatrist says Monkey Man mystery is like penis panic. Fred Lapides of Bush Wacker (which has moved here) pointed me to this update on the Monkey Man matter, to which many webloggers have blinked.

An Indian psychiatrist has compared the Monkey Man

mystery to a penis-related panic among Nigerian men 10

years ago.

Doctor Sandeep Vohra, president of Delhi Psychiatric

Society, explains the Monkey Man panic as mass delusion.

Ten years ago, groups of Nigerian men became convinced

their genitals would disappear if they touched a stranger. Ananova

A male patient’s desperate fear that his genitals will shrink and retract into his body, causing his death, is a long-recognized ‘culture-bound syndrome’ appearing in most psychiatric textbooks alongside such entities as amok, latah, piblokto, and wihtigo. Called koro, it is described as common in the Malay archipelago and southern Chinese folk belief but occasionally reported in other cultures. Often, the affected person has secured a strong physical hold on his penis by tying or clamping it. Usually, it affects a single person at a time but occasional epidemic outbreaks have been reported around the world. I used to give an entertaining talk about unusual psychiatric syndromes.

Dying Comet Gives Rare View of Space: “It was like watching an autopsy on a comet.

Comet Linear, falling toward the sun last summer, peeled off layer

after layer, revealing its structure and composition to astronomers

watching with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Yahoo!

Dying Comet Gives Rare View of Space: “It was like watching an autopsy on a comet.

Comet Linear, falling toward the sun last summer, peeled off layer

after layer, revealing its structure and composition to astronomers

watching with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Yahoo!

Dying Comet Gives Rare View of Space: “It was like watching an autopsy on a comet.

Comet Linear, falling toward the sun last summer, peeled off layer

after layer, revealing its structure and composition to astronomers

watching with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Yahoo!

Going Out With a Mobster’s Son? Follow the Code of Silence. The New York Times gives us some real mob-watch details on the morning of the season finale of The Sopranos.

For Hindus and Vegetarians, Surprise in McDonald’s Fries. A lawsuit claims MacDonald’s deliberately misled consumers in boldly proclaiming a switch to cooking its fries in “100% vegetable oil”. It’s true, but the fries are apparently seasoned with beef fat before leaving the factory. New York Times IMHO, it serves anyone right for believing anything MacDonald’s tells them. By the way, if you haven’t read the book, Robot Wisdom points to this reasonable summary of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (from the London Review of Books via the Guardian).

Reno’s Hint at Florida Race Catches Some by Surprise: “Florida and

national Democratic Party officials

today were polite but skeptical that former

Attorney General Janet Reno could raise

their chances of unseating Gov. Jeb Bush,

the president’s brother, in next year’s election.” New York Times You have to believe that the Democrats are targeting this race with all the heavy artillery they can muster. Reno’s liabilities are considerable — think about how the South Florida Cuban exile community must think of her after the Elian Gonzalez case, to start with — and she could end up a ‘spoiler’ in such an important race. New York Times

Dying Comet Gives Rare View of Space: “It was like watching an autopsy on a comet.

Comet Linear, falling toward the sun last summer, peeled off layer

after layer, revealing its structure and composition to astronomers

watching with some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Yahoo!