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VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST |
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22. The Virtue of Doubt The desert begins above the tree line in both North Africa and the Arctic. There is a certain obligatory clarity in these places where every individual has an unimpeded view. The severity of the heat or cold combines with the dryness to make these expanses of sand, rock and snow seem barren. To he exact, they are tightly strung. Life does prosper, but only by seizing its moment blade of grass by blade of grass at the specific time and place that each blade is available to he seized. I was travelling a few years ago across the western end of the Sahara, the Rio d'Oro, in the protective hands of a guerrilla group known as the Polisario. They were then at the height of their war against the Moroccans and were given to sweeping out of the desert in their stripped-down, four-wheeled camels in the razzia style, fighting exactly the way the R'gibat tribe had for more than a millennium. We were caught early one evening by a sudden, massive downpour. The seven of us were below ground in a covered dugout camouflaged in the middle of a dry riverbed. The ceiling was made of odd bits of lumber and mortar cases covered over by sand. It was the first rain in several years. The water ran across the desert like a wave across a paved surface towards the lowest ground and surrounded our little mound with a rising torrent which began to flood through the small exit. I suppose I would have been trapped down there, the only six-foot-two Celt ever to drown in the middle of the Rio d'Oro. However, the old R'gibat in charge got us up through the hole in time and out into a turbulent darkness. They managed to start the two Land Rovers before the motors were immersed and made a run for the dry bank with the rifles, mortars and the rest of us in a tangled mass behind. At sunrise the next morning the barren sand was covered with sprouting plants. By midday the ground was laced with full-grown vines several metres long which flowered while we lunched under heavy wool blankets stretched between the Land Rovers to protect us from the sun. Fruit and gourds followed the flowers. By day's end they were ripe. The next morning the gourds were dry seedpods, dormant, waiting to he blown and buried until several years later another storm would come. The same thing happens in the Arctic during the brief summer of unbroken sunlight. Not so fast, of course, because there the real extreme is the cold. But the plants complete in a few weeks the cycle which would have taken months elsewhere. They manage this in the few inches of tundra which the sun unfreezes and the result is an explosion of colour and fragrance. The people who belong to these places are integrated with the extremes. Their civilization is taut. The slightest error is fatal, even with the addition of Western machinery. When a snowmobile or a Land Rover breaks down, the occupants' options are usually measured in hours. There are no rescues from boats overturned in the Arctic Sea. A moment's inattention can turn an innocent walk into a shapeless, lost eternity, in which death arrives rapidly. These are not romantic civilizations or to be imitated, any more than any other. However, their dependence on the constant mastery of detail is hypnotizing to the Westerner. Or, rather, it is inconceivable. As is the attention they pay to everything that surrounds them. When the adaptability to circumstances of a desert dweller is compared to that of the typical urban Western adult, the latter seems very set in his ways. I stayed recently with an Inuit hunter in a settlement on a small island north of the Arctic Circle. He lived in a basic Western-style house built by the government. The entrance was through an unheated porch stacked with frozen seal and whale meat. In the kitchen a thawed piece of raw caribou lay on a board on the floor in case anyone wished to slice off and nibble a bit. The first time I came in the hunter was repairing a hook. He spoke no English and had not been to school, but slipped across the room to show me the complex video he and his friends had just shot and acted in. That stretch between Stone Age culture and the nonchalant exploitation of the latest technology is startling. But then the most striking things about these desert civilizations are their sophistication and their restraint. They are highly conscious cultures. Westerners float half awake through a padded world. The mechanisms and significance of most events escape us. There is no fault in that, except that we too easily accept such scandals as poverty among us. What's more, in general we occupy the world's temperate and rich zones so that the phenomenon of choice is neither a privilege nor a special event. It is a matter of course. There is little choice of that sort among desert peoples. Instead there is the taut line of their civilization, which can be seen in something as simple as the care with which people move. Slowness is only in part a response to heat or cold. Above all, the movement is conscious. The Inuit are as clear on this as the R'gibat. I remember being slowed by a young woman in the Arctic who pointed out that my enthusiasm and -surface energy would be misunderstood. If people in Igloolik, the village where we were, saw me moving so fast, they would think there was an emergency and, if no emergency, that I was deranged. Careful action does not necessarily equate with reflection. However, the sort of outsiders who are attracted to the desert -- not passersby like myself -- tend to resemble each other. They seem to be seeking ways to strip off the padding of their own societies. Some are attracted by a false notion of romanticism, but they don't stay long. Those who remain tend to flex their consciousness and take an unromantic pleasure in doing so. You see this in the way they move, in their eyes, in a different cadence of speech. They seem to be attempting to reconstitute themselves as a whole being, including the rational, but also the emotive and what could be called the spirit or the soul. This would have made sense to Socrates -- man as a trinity of intellect, spirit and appetite; the latter two essential but subordinated to 'coherent thinking. The modern intellectual may find it difficult to equate the Socratic view with these minimalist efforts, which often have no verbal expression. Fulfilment without footnotes must belong to a lower order, fit only for sociological or anthropological study. Yet knowledge in these extreme places can quite easily take on its real meaning of understanding. The Socratic conviction that all virtues were forms of knowledge therefore holds firm, as does the result -- "No man willingly does wrong." This is the opposite of our elites. They often justify doing wrong because they do know. And this rational sophistication convinces them that structural inevitabilities must be accepted. In this curious inversion of the original Socratic intention, the sensible man is now one who understands that he must make do with the realities of the world, no matter how unfortunate. And so he is stuffed with knowledge, world weary and ready to accept the worst. This seems far removed from Dante's launching of the humanist dream through virtue and knowledge. Even the most generous of observers would be hard put to discover any relationship between our modern elites and his model. There is, however, a link with the desert civilizations. And what Dante described was not an unrealizable ideal. The sixteenth-century architect Andrea Palladio believed that through his buildings man could reconstitute himself as a whole -- history would be one with the future, nature with mathematical proportions, the soul with the public facade. "The city is nothing more than a great' house and the house a small city." His buildings were to balance the beautiful with the useful, his interiors coordinated with the exteriors through a projection of the internal structure onto the facade. [1] In spite of his unifying, integrating themes, he saw himself as a rational architect. But that merely tells us how different the optimistic expectations of reason were from the divisive reality which even then was in preparation. *** Apart from their self-assurance, the most common characteristics of our elites are cynicism, rhetoric and the worship of both ambition and power. These were also the characteristics of eighteenth-century courtesans. The assumption is that world-weary cynicism demonstrates intellectual superiority. In reality it indicates neither intelligence, experience nor accuracy. If anything, it demonstrates mediocrity and an inability to profit from experience. To be world weary is to be willing to go on repeating old mistakes. We are now at one of those rare moments in history when the entire elite -- military, governmental, business and university -- will have an opportunity to prove that they are better than they seem. For the last three decades they have attempted to deal with baffling economic problems by spinning the wheels of military production, both for a nuclear arms race and for international weapon sales. The result is that our economic problems have not been solved. In the process, however, the Western industrial and financial infrastructure has become addicted to these artificial consumer goods. The worst thing about the addiction is that no one, not even the elites who provoked it, knows precisely how great the dependency is. The financing mechanisms, research priorities and production methods stretch far beyond apparent missile and tank contracts into every corner of the economy. With the end of the Cold War, the justification for this economic option is gone. There is a popular assumption spread throughout the media that arms production will drop radically. But there is a difference between the reduction in stockpiled weapons and the shutting down of production. Nothing has been devised to replace the latter. A precipitous drop of even 10 percent would probably provoke massive industrial shudders. More than that would send the financial mechanisms of the West into shock. So far the reaction of the elites has been to ignore the problem. Their rhetoric for recovery concentrates on the ideology of market forces. Even a casual observation of reality indicates that they are confused and so far have devoted themselves to delaying tactics. The probable outcome will confirm them in their world-weary cynicism. The rise of uncountable new nationalist forces and at least two dozen unstable nations on the European continent will provide fresh arms markets as distrust and violence spread closer and closer to the Western enclave of stability. This will also justify new Western arms. They will have to be new because the threat will be of a nature different than that produced by superpower rivalries. Existing weaponry has no economic value. Our addicted structures require new production. And so, as the old nuclear-missile heavy-tank arsenal is reduced, a new conventional arsenal will be built. To get through the confusion of the next few years our elites will need all of their rhetorical skills, providing streams of new answers before any serious questions are asked. They have begun by claiming the fall of Communism as a victory for Western methods, variously described as capitalism, the free market, individualism or democracy. This is not unlike the Jesuits' interpretation of the Lisbon earthquake as a judgment of God. After all, at least half the Soviet failure was the inheritance of centuries of Russian imperialism. The other half was the result of the uninhibited application of rational methods which came from the West. Our civilization of sophists and pharisees will be fully tested by the next decade. And yet the rise of nationalism fits comfortably into rational methodology. After all, the nation-state received a first great boost thanks to its youthful and passionate marriage with reason -- an embrace arranged in the early 1600s by a cardinal and an absolute monarch. Somehow, in preparation for this event, the rational method had already been severed from any humanist roots by Loyola, who demonstrated that reason was an unfettered weapon. The humanist dream is still with us, promising man as the measure of man, aesthetic values and moral virtue, but these have become marginal ideals, unattached to the realities of power. We began the seventeenth century in the grip of blind logic and we end the twentieth in the hands of blind reason, a sophisticated version of the former. Spirit, appetite, faith, emotion, intuition, will, experience -- none of these are relevant to the operations of our society. Instead we automatically assign blame for our failures and crimes to the irrational impulse. Our sense of man as a whole being -- that is, our conscious memory -- has been so fractured that we have neither any philosophical nor practical idea of how to hold our public and corporate authorities responsible for their actions. Deprived of our stabilizing humanist roots, we are horrified to discover that the perfectly natural emotive resources needed to deal with our civilization easily degenerate into base sentiment. Our society was largely conceived by courtesans. They have therefore defined the idea of modernism in a way which reinforces their skills. And so we find ourselves almost automatically denigrating the forces of which they disapprove as being retrograde, inefficient, imprecise, simplistic -- indeed, unprofessional. It isn't surprising that like most aging religions, reason is able to get away with presenting itself as the solution to the problems it creates. Nor that for the first time in Western history the courtesans don't need to change when they win power, that power having been designed in their image. After four and a half centuries of turning in circles around the same solutions, we have eliminated all practical memory of what came before. We are now as alone with our age as any civilization can be. There are no solid references to give us direction, no active contradictions. In effect we are now in our own past. *** This rootless wandering is perhaps the explanation for the hypnotic effect which the idea of efficiency has upon us. Deprived of direction, we are determined to go there fast. And so we apply this minor subproduct of reason to our economies, administration, arts and even to our democratic process. We confuse intention with execution. Decision making with administration. Creation with accounting. On the dark plain where we wander, totems have been erected, not to indicate the way, but to provide hopeful relief. That of efficiency is one of the highest, a freestanding moral value. It is difficult in this context to keep in mind that the essence of civilization should tend towards consideration, not speed. The easy answer is that decision making must be decoupled from administration; the former being organic and reflective, the latter linear and structured. But in a civilization which has mistaken management techniques for moral values, all answers are a trap. Electronic communications further complicate the situation because they flourish on speed, formula truths and the appearance of change, which can be achieved simply by revolving the formulae. The new international news networks pride themselves on the immediacy with which they deliver enormous quantities of information. But as the Iraq campaign demonstrated, this seems to blur still further the line between reflection and action. The efficient delivery of undigestible quantities of information leaves the public little room to be more than a spectator. The rational advocacy of efficiency more often than not produces inefficiency. It concentrates on how things are done and loses track of why. It measures specific costs without understanding real costs. This obsession with linear efficiency is one of the causes of our unending economic crisis. It produces the narrow logic which can demonstrate that arms production is the key to prosperity. Worst of all, it is capable of removing from democracy its greatest strength, the ability to act in a nonconventional manner, just as it removes from individuals their strength as nonlinear beings. *** I am invariably struck when dealing with members of our elites by their profound pessimism. Above all, they are pessimistic about the human character. They consider it unlikely that the average individual will work hard enough or recognize beauty or vote for the best policies or even obey in a suitable manner. They take as a given that this individual cannot or will not understand the complexities of whatever responsibilities fate has thrust upon someone who has expertise and power. This is particularly obvious today in what calls itself the Right. In fairness it should be said that the elites in general have been increasingly pessimistic about us for some time. The ideology-bound Left certainly felt that it knew what the people needed and would provide it for them. More moderate reformers have been somewhat the same and particularly devoted to the idea that the laws of the people could be administered in the most minute detail. At first glance the New Right seems quite different because it makes a point of praising individualism and attacking bureaucracy. However, this is a false debate. The question in their minds is not bureaucracy, but which bureaucracy. Wherever the Right holds power, the administrative elites of the large corporations and the financial sector grow. And those of government do not shrink. Programs aimed at social well-being are simply cut, while those which benefit the private administrations and certain categories of personal fortunes grow. The arrival in force of the New Right is perhaps the inevitable result of the rational state gradually implementing the corporatist idea. How could a civilization devoted to structure, expertise and answers evolve into other than a coalition of professional groups? How, then, could the individual citizen not be seen as a serious impediment to getting on with business? This has been obscured by the proposition of painfully simplified abstract notions which are divorced from any social reality and presented as values. These are drawn in general from the Book of Revelations and other reserves of false mythology. For example, the ideal of the rugged individual opening up the American West is still applied as an essential truth to ten million citizens living in the small area of New York City, as if ten million bulls should and could be squeezed into a china shop. In reality there is now a desperate need among technicians, manipulators of systems and profiteers to destroy any remaining evidence that Western society could function on the basis of humanist cooperation. Our elites need to be pessimistic about us in their own best interests. The establishment of self-interest as the prime driving force of the human character is the key to their approach. We are now crossing one of those difficult moments in history when any sensible approach seems unexciting and ineffective, while the forces of self-interest and structure appear tempting and unstoppable. What hope can the singular considerations of an individual have when this rhetoric of false individualism is being shouted loud by those in power, leaving humanism. with no mythology apart from that of the fringes? What hope there is lies precisely in the slow, close-to-reality enquiry and concern of the humanist. But first he, and perhaps more hopefully she, must stop believing that the accomplishments of the last few centuries are the result of rational methods, structure and self-interest, while the failures and violence are those of humanity and sensibility. In spite of the rhetoric which dominates our civilization, the opposite is true. *** Jefferson put it that men by their constitution were naturally divided into two parts -- those who fear and distrust the people versus those who identify with the people and have confidence in them. Our civilization has increasingly put those who fear and distrust in power over us. Those who have confidence have always argued that consciousness is the key to improvements in the human condition. But power structures have always treated consciousness in the citizenry as a danger which must first be lulled, then channelled towards the inoffensive through the mechanisms of language, mythology and structure. Societies either roll on blindly to disaster or they find the inner strength to stop themselves long enough to find ways for reform from within. That was the meaning of the great Athenian pause, when Solon was brought forward and encouraged "to shake off the burdens." They believed, as he wrote, that "the public evil enters the house of everyman, the gates of his courtyard cannot keep it out." The changes which might help us to deal with our own difficulties can be, easily listed: reestablish the division between policy and administration, for example, and end the cult of the Hero; widen the meaning of knowledge; end the alliance between barbarism (the generals, Heroes, stars, speculators) and technocracy; denigrate self-interest, meaningless power, cynicism, rhetoric; and, for that matter, simply change our elites. But the void in our society has been produced by the absence of values. And values are not established by asserting issues. Victory over one issue or another is wonderfully orgasmic and quickly slips away. The constant base needed to supply values is the result of methodical participation. The individual gains his powers and responsibilities by being there. But we have no widespread belief in the value of participation. The rational system has made us fear standing out in any serious way. Participation produces, but is also the product of, practical values and common sense, not expertise and reason. The secret, then, is that we must alter our civilization from one of answers to one which feels satisfaction, not anxiety, when doubt is established. To be comfortable with panic when it is appropriate. If ours is the advanced civilization we pretend it is, there should be no need to act as if all decisions were designed to establish certainties. Grandiose issues should not need to be reduced to the simplistic state of for or against and then decided in a set period. This invariably means structuring public debate as a conflict between the rational and the irrational, in which common sense is reduced to a sort of Menshevik annoyance to be crushed between the two hard rocks of abstraction." The historical process," Michael Howard has said, "through the very challenges it poses and the responses it evokes, itself creates the morality of mankind. " [2]The true characteristics of civilization, after all, include taking one's time to work out what is to be done. Why, then, are we constantly bombarded with political, economic and social ultimatums? A civilization of answers cannot help but be a civilization of swirling fads and facile emotions. What is to be done? What is to be done? For so long now so many people have been answering. Some with the power of life and death. Some with the desire to use that power. Some jocular salesmen of ideas. Some populist, elitist, sincere, income driven. So many answers. So many truths. What a disease this desire to answer has become, rushing through our veins like rats scurrying for truth in the endless corridors of expertise. If the Socratic question can still be asked, it is certainly not rational. Voltaire pointed out that for the Romans, sensus communis meant common sense but also humanity and sensibility. It has been reduced to only good sense, "a state half-way between stupidity and intelligence." We have since reduced it still farther, as if appropriate only for manual labour and the education of small children. That is the narrowing effect of a civilization which seeks automatically to divide through answers when our desperate need is to unify the individual through questions.
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