BOOK REVIEW: John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, Penguin, 1997.

I remember as a graduate student reading Fullbright’s ‘The Arrogance of
Power’ and saying ‘Yes, yes’ aloud right through the book. I’ve been doing that
again (mostly) with this one.

You can add the name John Ralston Saul to those of Noam Chomsky, Ivan
Illich, Franz Fanon (and who else?) on your list of the key late 20th century
‘global conspiracy theorists’ – people who are visionary seers/prophets who have
unorthodox views and make outrageous pronouncements on this and that, but with
whom you have to broadly agree. Because they operate outside the conventions of
fixed ideologies, they’re able to see the broader picture, and see more deeply
into the nature of things.

The Unconscious Civilization – the 1995 Massey Lectures – was written in an
oral style by Canadian freelance intellectual, essayist and novelist John Ralston
Saul. His thesis is disarmingly simple: in the long line of history’s
totalitarianisms, we can now add undemocratic ‘corporatism’. Our society, he
argues, is only superficially based on the individual and democracy.

The sweep of Saul’s generalizations is breath-taking. For example, he says
those who claim to have read Adam Smith generally haven’t, otherwise they
wouldn’t have developed a naïve notion of a nexus between free markets and
democracy. In the West we have come to believe that democracy was born of
free-market economics. Not so: ‘Both democracy and individualism have been based
on financial sacrifice, not gain…. You can have poor democracies. And you can
have prosperous dictatorships’.

Increasingly, power and legitimacy in Western nations lie with special
interest groups and big decisions are made by/between these groups. Note, for
example, the remarkable growth in the lobbying industry, which has as its sole
purpose the conversion of elected representatives and senior civil servants to
the particular interest of the lobbyist. IOW, lobbyists are in the business of
corrupting the people’s representatives and servants away from the public good,
says Saul.

The transnational or the very large national corporations are really
reincarnations of the seventeenth-century royal monopolies. Corporatism hasn’t
any substantial notion of ‘common good’. They are now driven by bottom-line,
cut-back economics, not concern for the well-being of customers/consumers. A
classic example is the (unnamed) tobacco company which knew back in the 1960s
that smoking was hazardous to human health, but decided to remain quiet about it.
Then there’s the international arms traffic – the largest international trade
good of our day – resulting in the deaths of 75 million people killed by war over
the past 35 years. Then there’s the worldwide depletion of fish stocks, the lack
of desire by steel companies to cut down pollution, state-run lotteries aimed at
the less fortunate and less educated… The list goes on and on.

Saul is particularly – and repeatedly – caustic about universities teaching
political science and management. They thus become the slaves of corporations. He
is scathing about the current corporate obsession with ‘aligning basic education
with the needs of the job market’. ‘What the corporatist approach seems to miss
is the simple role of higher education to teach thought,’ he reminds us. ‘A
student who graduates with mechanistic skills and none of the habits of thought
has not been educated. Such people will have difficulty playing their role as
citizens.’ The key task of universities is to encourage us to seek knowledge
without the pacifier of ideological certainties and to pursue the public good
without believing it has to be synonymous with self-interest.

Government after government, from the Left to the Right, has been elected on
a platform of job creation, but the reality is that they have no idea of what to
do. Why? Because jobs are one of the last steps on the production chain. The
marketplace these days is into job elimination – the result of ruthless
‘downsizing’, ‘outsourcing’, mergers, privatization, and the uncritical
acceptance of technological ‘advances’.. So-called political ‘common sense’
(balanced budgets, lowering taxes, linking with the globalized market, selling
off publicly-owned utilities etc.) might fit in with the Taylor’s ‘scientific
management’ efficiency theories, but are they ‘effective’ (a better word, he
says) – or, more importantly, humane? ‘[These are] the things which technocrats
are incapable of — risk, thought, doubt, admission of error, research and
development, long-term investment, commitment to concrete places. … An
obsession with efficiency prevents growth and stymies capitalism.’ But worse:
‘Corporatism… is profoundly tied to a mechanistic view of the human race. This is
not an ideology with any interest in our commitment to the shape of society or
the individual as citizen.’

If it makes someone rich it must be O.K. eh? Take international currency
trading: a trillion dollars float around the speculative world every day. It’s a
great way for a few to get very rich – playing with money that doesn’t really
exist. And it doesn’t make any jobs. Or look at education: if the only meaningful
value of something is its economic value then is education less valuable than
golf balls?

Back to the key paradox: knowledge has not made us conscious. Instead, we
live in illusory worlds where languages are highly technical and therefore cut
off from most people’s reality. The special interest groups who run the world
have invented special vocabularies to obfuscate everything. In a society where
knowledge is power, information is currency. Many are systematically being denied
access to this currency. ‘This is knowledge reduced to ignorance. The more
knowledge is limited to a single corner, the more ignorant the expert’

And both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are different political configurations of
self-interest. Saul is not overly hostile to the theories of the left or right,
but in practice, he says, they can’t avoid being dehumanizing.

Saul’s essential plea is that we resurrect the individual’s relationship to
government. ‘The most powerful force possessed by the individual citizen is her
own government,’ Saul writes. ‘The individual has no other large organized
mechanism that he can call his own . . . Government is the only organized
mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the
public good.’ ‘The individual’s rights are guaranteed by law only to the extent
that they are protected by the citizenry’s exercise of their obligation to
participate in society. Rights are a protection from society. But only by
fulfilling their obligations to society can the individual give meaning to that
protection.’

Saul is enamoured by the Socratic notion of the individual as citizen. To
combat the evils of corporatism we must revitalize citizen-based democracy.
Citizens should control the thinking about ‘goods’ in their societies. Swallowing
massive deceptions have produced an ‘unconscious civilization’. His ultimate
solution? ‘Practical humanism is the voyage towards equilibrium without the
expectation of actually arriving there. … To begin with, there is Socrates’
initial voyage — towards knowledge without the expectation of finding truth.’
‘The problems we face are not of incomprehensible complexity…Nothing in our
current crisis is untouchable because of the great mystic forces of
inevitability.’

I read this comment somewhere on the Web: ‘It’s not enough to say that this
is an uncommonly good book about the common good. The Unconscious Civilization is
a kind of intellectual last chance for both young geniuses and old hedgehogs
everywhere. Notwithstanding Saul’s praise of doubt, I’ve seldom felt so certain
that this is a book that one must read.’

If you want to pursue Saul’s ideas further read his 1992 bestseller,
Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, which deals with
similar subject matter.

My assessment. First, to be picky, the book is replete with hy- phenated
words in the middle of lines. Penguin Books has obviously been downsizing and
dispensed with on-paper proof-readers!

More seriously, as a Jesus-follower I object to Saul’s caricatures of the
Judeo-Christian God (‘God is strong, good and kind, therefore we must torture
you’). Since Jesus, our ideas about God have been radically rewritten. So of
course Saul doesn’t talk about Jesus Christ at all (except to note that he failed
as a manager-of-twelve). Here he too may be guilty of using language as a weapon
to distort reality (the very thing he accuses just about everyone else of doing).

Further, ‘We know the good but do not practise it (Euripides)’. ‘Nothing is
more certain than that men are, in a great measure, governed by interest’ (David
Hume). Right. Christian theology is candid at this point. We are creatures made
in the image of God. But we choose selfishness and evil. (The fundamentalists are
generally right about sin; the liberal humanists are right about our inherent
worth: but let’s keep these both together).

He does the same with management theory. As a consultant to the corporation
called the church (and sometimes to secular businesses) I’d say we’ve moved a
long way from Taylor’s efficiency model – at least in theory. Certainly,
bottom-line constraints drive most of the big, multinational corporations, but
there are plenty of middle-level businesses (and Christian denominations) which
attempt to be more humane.

A ‘too clever by half’ intellectual can enjoy the luxury of offering
brilliantly generalized ideas. But, sir, what are we actually supposed to do
about the corporation? Awareness-raising,, encouraging citizens to be
ideologically-free radical thinkers is good, but such conscientization should
lead to some appropriate action/s. Saul is weak at this point. Any prophet can
slaughter sacred cows like the Chicago School of Business, the medieval church,
the pseudo-science of economics etc. when/where/how is the rubber to meet the
road?

Some key quotes:

# If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.

# Cicero: ‘He who does not know history is destined to remain a child’.

# Socrates was executed not for saying what things were or should be, but for
seeking practical indications of where some reasonable approximation of truth
might be. He was executed not for his megalomania or grandiose propositions or
certitudes, but for stubbornly doubting the absolute truths of others.

# 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.

# In general, democracy and individualism have advanced in spite of and often
against specific economic interest. Both democracy and individualism have been
based upon financial sacrifice, not gain. Even in Athens, a large part of the
7,000 citizens who participated regularly in assemblies were farmers who had to
give up several days’ work to go into town to talk and listen.

# Whenever governments adopt a moral tone — as opposed to an ethical one —
you know something is wrong.

# Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the
argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves. William Pitt, House of Commons,
18 November 1783.

# Criticism is perhaps the citizen’s primary weapon in the exercise of her
legitimacy. That is why, in this corporatist society, conformism, loyalty and
silence are so admired and rewarded; why criticism is so punished or
marginalized.

# The Third World debt crisis is now $1.5 trillion…

# Every day currency traders move $1 trillion around the world. Money
markets, unrelated to financing real activity are pure inflation. The unregulated
money markets have now given us over twenty years of crisis, instability,
gratuitous speculation and no real growth.

# ‘We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy and things are getting worse’
(James Hillman and Michael Ventura).

# The cost of the managerial superstructure is now far too heavy for the
producing substructure.

# It seems to me that a sensible list of the human qualities would run as
follows: common sense, creativity or imagination, ethics (not morality),
intuition or instinct, memory, and, finally, reason. …these qualities cannot be
defined usefully, but only as abstractions, which they are not. … These
qualities are the basic tools of humanity. In more aggressive verbiage, they are
our weapons for use in what can only be described as a constant war against
ideology.

# The virtue of uncertainty is not a comfortable idea, but then a
citizen-based democracy is built upon participation, which is the very expression
of permanent discomfort. The corporatist system depends upon the citizen’s desire
for inner comfort. Equilibrium is dependent upon our recognition of reality,
which is the acceptance of permanent psychic discomfort. And the acceptance of
psychic discomfort is the acceptance of consciousness

# The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the
legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a
denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and
our denial of the public good.

# Socrates: ‘Let no day pass without discussing goodness.’

# No Western population has been asked to choose corporatism, let alone
demanded it. It simply creeps up on us, a bit more every day… It would be
impossible for the corporatist structure ever to reward or admire criticism.

# The money used to produce a 20 second spot for McDonald’s would finance
hours of television programming. Propaganda is therefore the purpose. Content is
the frill or decoration.

# And Socrates again: ‘If I say I cannot ‘mind my own business’ you will not
believe that I am serious. If on the other hand I tell you that to let no day
pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear
me talking and that examining both myself or others is really the very best thing
a man can do and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living,
you will be even less inclined to believe me. Nevertheless, gentlemen, that is
how it is.’

Rowland Croucher

March 1999