Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul - Excerpts

[Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. John Ralston Saul.
1992. Vintage, New York. ISBN 0-679-74819-9]

EXCERPTS

Reason is a narrow system swollen into an ideology. With time and power it has become a dogma, devoid of direction and disguised as disinterested inquiry. Like most religions, reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created.

Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated. The possession, use and control of knowledge have become their central theme – the theme song of their expertise. However, their power depends not on the effect with which they use that knowledge but on the effectiveness with which they control its use. Thus, among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solution to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized belief. The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application. The illusion is that we have created the most sophisticated society in the history of man. The reality is that the division of knowledge into feudal fiefdoms of expertise has made general understanding and coordinated action not simply impossible but despised and distrusted.

The essence of rational leadership is control justified by expertise.

Our business leaders hector us in the name of capitalism, when most of them are no more than corporate employees, isolated from personal risk.

… reason is not more than structure. And structure is most easily controlled by those who feel themselves to be free of the cumbersome weight represented by common sense and humanism.

Solutions are the cheapest commodity of our day. They are the medicine-show tonic of the rational elites.

Neither Capitalism nor Socialism can pretend to be an ideology. They are merely methods for dividing ownership and income.

This absence of intellectual mechanisms for questioning our own actions becomes clear when the expression of any unstructured doubt – for example, over the export of arms to potential enemies or the loss of shareholder power to managers of the loss of parliamentary power to the executive – is automatically categorized as naïve or idealistic or bad for the economy or simply bad for jobs.

Efficient decision making is, after all, a characteristic proper to authoritarian governments. Napoleon was efficient. Hitler was efficient. Efficient democracy can only mean democracy castrated.

All in all the building of weapons has become the most important source of make-work projects in the late twentieth century. Neoconservatives may condemn Franklin D. Roosevelt's WPA projects, but at least they kept the countryside clean and were reasonably cheap.

… there has been a gradual undermining of the idea of a general social consensus. All of this has been fueled by a slavish devotion to the rational certitude that there are absolute answers to all questions and problems.

More often than not, the problems of a state relate to the refusal of local elites to do their job – that is, to provide competent leadership and to protect the interests of the population as a whole. This includes improperly managing resources, failing to adjust to changes in technology or simply losing interest in leadership and management. Exploiting the pleasures of power without assuming the accompanying responsibilities is the most common means by which established elites inadvertently destroy their own nations.

Governments and large corporations always have more material than their critics. That is one of the privileges of power. They also have access to captive research institutes and bevies of "independent" professors, who are kept on contract to provide supportive studies and statements. How is the citizen to choose among so many "true" statements? The factual snow job is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century.

When faced by questioning from non-experts, the scientist invariably retreats behind veils of complication and specialization. Of course it is complicated. But there is no other profession in which the sense of obligation to convert the inner dialect into the language of man is so absolutely absent. Through this form of secrecy the scientist makes it impossible for the citizen to know and to understand and therefore to act, except in ignorance.

Whatever the constitutions of the nations may say, the reality today is that judges and courts are more important legislators than the elected representatives. This is the third element in the decline of the elected assemblies. Just as parts of the representative's power have gone to the executive and to the administration, so another part has gone to those who argue and apply the law. As the lawmakers have declined, the law itself has grown into a seamless structure. Like administration, it has become both a substitute for policy and a body behind whose back policy can be made.

The fixation of most eighteenth-century thinkers on inviolable legal codes was produced by two factors: their desire to end the intolerable rule of arbitrary, absolute authority and their belief in some sort of social contract. Their assumption was that this contract would automatically encapsulate and defend acceptable social standards.

… at the heart of justice must be the citizens' belief in the laws they obey and their collaboration with the authorities. The actual statutes do not exist because everyone would act in a criminal manner without them. They are there to lay out general social standards and, above all, to deal with a small minority who have always rejected responsible behavior. There is an assumption in any social contract that the constituted elites are protectors – for better or worse – of that social agreement. The idea that a civilization could function with its elites as the principal abusers of the contract is impossible. And yet that is precisely what we have.

A real belief feels to the believer to be a natural state and does not respond to questioning. That is one of the reasons we have so much difficulty dealing with the Islamic world. They don't want to discuss fundamentals. They are not interested in a rational analysis. They believe the way we once believed. Not only do we find this incomprehensible and frustrating, we also find it troubling, because their certainty is a reflection of our own past.

… the free market may be a good, bad, or insufficient idea, but, in any case, it is just a crude commercial code. Now it is regularly equated with or given credit for or even precedence over the freedom of man. But the freedom of man is a moral statement on the human condition, both in the practical and in the humanist sense. To equate it with a school of business is to betray a certain confusion.

Heroic leaders always encourage the people to dream, as if the capacity to dream were a positive political attribute. In truth, it has more to do with unleashing our fears, which then swell into the limitless realms of fantasy.

The Westerner's inability to mind his own business shows a lack of civilization. Among his most unacceptable characteristics is a determination to reveal what he thinks of as himself – his marriages, divorces and children; his feelings and loves. The European likes to think of that as an American characteristic, but the difference between the continents is merely one of degrees. Any man or woman produced by the Judeo-Christian tradition is dying to confess – unasked, if necessary. What the Buddhist seeks in the individual is, first, that he understands he is part of a whole and therefore of limited interest as a part and, second, to the extent that he tries to deal with the problem of his personal existence, he does so in a private manner. The individual who appears to sail upon calm waters is a man of quality. Any storms he battles within are his own business.

In a world devoted to measuring the best, most of us aren't even in the competition. Human dignity being what it is, we eliminate ourselves from the competition in order to avoid giving other people the power to eliminate us. Not only does a society obsessed by competition not draw people out, it actually encourages them to hide what talents they have, by convincing them that they are insufficient. The common complaint that we have become spectator societies is the direct result of an overemphasis on competition.