“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.
