|
VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST |
|
2. The Theology of Power Some twenty years ago the democratic, industrialized, developed world began a false but ferocious internal struggle which was said to be between the Left and the Right. It was, in fact, the death rattle of the Age of Reason. The slogans assigned to the two camps in this imaginary battle were remarkably familiar. Words such as reform, socialist, social democrat and government intervention were pitted against capitalist, conservative, individualism and established values. The struggle appears to have been set off by two successive, crises. First, the loss of the Vietnam War by the United States destroyed a whole set of assumptions based upon American infallibility and accepted until then by all of the democracies. These beliefs had been in place since 1945. Although few of the democracies had supported the American Vietnam effort, they followed the greatest nation in the world in most other matters. The U.S. defeat left them -- to say nothing of the United States itself -- milling about in confusion. As they turned, the second crisis struck, in the form of an international economic failure. That depression has now been With us twenty years. We have, however, become so accustomed to our political and business leaders addressing themselves only to limited manifestations of this crisis and always in a positive way -- stimulating what they call a temporary recession or managing a Third World debt problem or waging a localized war against inflation or concentrating upon that portion of an economy which they have superficially stimulated to the point of explosion while the rest remains in profound decline - that we are never quite certain whether the depression is still with us or is on the point of disappearing. Nightly, it seems, we drop off to sleep with the vague expectation that all will be clear in the morning. Mysteriously, there is always a new explosion in the night and when we awake, the problem has been transformed into yet another limited manifestation. This depression, of proportions as great if not greater than that of the 1930s, still engulfs us. None of our governments appear to have any idea of how to end it. How could they? The essence of rational leadership is control justified by expertise. To admit failure is to admit loss of control. Officially, therefore, we haven't had a depression since the 1930s. And since most experts -- the economists, for example -- are part of the system, instead of being commentators in any real, independent sense, they contribute to the denial of reality. In other words, there is a constant need in our civilization to prefer illusions over reality, a need to deny our perceptions. Indeed, we haven't seen anything over the last twenty years which resembles the traditional profile of a depression. The reason is very simple. After the economic crisis of the 1930s, we created a multitude of control valves and safety nets in. order to avoid any future general collapse - strict banking regulations, for example, social security programs and in some places national health care systems. These valves and nets have been remarkably successful; in spite of the strains and the mismanagement of the last two decades. However, because the rational system prevents anyone who accepts legal responsibility from taking enough distance to get a general view, many of our governments, desperate and misguided, have begun dismantling those valves and nets as a theoretical solution to the general crisis. Worse still, tinkering with these instruments has become a substitute for addressing the problem itself. Thus financial deregulation is used to simulate growth through paper speculation. When this produces inflation, controls are applied to the real economy, producing unemployment. When this job problem becomes so bad that it must be attacked, the result is the lowering of employment standards. When this unstable job creation leads to new inflation,. the result is high interest rates. And on around again, guided by the professional economists, who are in effect pursuing, step by step, an internal argument without any reference to historic reality. For example, in a single decade the idea of using .public debt as an economic tool has moved from the heroic to the villainous. In the same period private debt went in the opposite direction, from the villainous to the heroic. This was possible only because economists kept their noses as close to each specific argument as possible and thus avoided invoking any serious comparisons and any reference to the real lessons of the preceding period. In general terms all this means that management methods are being mistaken for solutions and so, as if in some sophisticated game, the problem is pushed on with a long rational stick from point to point around the field. As a result we are perpetually either on the edge of a recession (never in it, let alone in a depression, whatever the indicators. say) or we are artificially flush and then manage to convince ourselves that we are flying high. The accompanying political argument had been going on for a few years before it became clear that its vocabulary didn't apply to the problem. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s, economic policies said to be of the Left in the United States, Canada, England and Germany led to the defeat of existing governments and to the election of new governments said to be of the Right. At the same time, identical policies in France, Spain, Australia and Italy were said to be of the Right and led to the replacement of their governments by those said to be of the Left. This general confusion further clouded the public's linear memory. For example, the American Right has been in power for twenty of the last twenty-four years. One of its central themes is law and order. The argument is that the American Left - the liberals, whatever that word means - is incapable of maintaining law and order. And yet for twenty years the levels of armed robbery, violent crime and murder have continued annually to grow to record highs - records both for the United States and in comparison to other Western countries. Still, the American Right persists in thinking of itself, and is thought of by its opponents on the Left, as the voice of law and order. Self-evident contradictions of this sort surround us. We talk endlessly of the individual and of individualism, for example, when any sensible glance at major issues indicates that we live in an era of great conformism. Our societies turn upon democratic principles, yet the quasi totality of our leading citizens refuse to take part in that process and, instead, leave the exercise of political power to those for whom they have contempt. Our business leaders hector us in the name of capitalism, when most of them are no more than corporate employees, isolated from personal risk. We are obsessed by competition, yet the largest item of international trade is armaments -- an artificial consumer good. We condemn arms dealers as immoral and sleazy figures, while ignoring the fact that our own senior civil servants and senior corporate leadership together are responsible for more than 90 percent of the arms traded. Never has there been such a sea of available information, and yet all organizations -- public and private -- work on the principle that information is secret unless specifically declared not to be. There is a conviction that governments have never been so strong and at the same time a sense that they are virtually powerless to effect change unless some superhuman effort is made. Or, to return to my first economic example, after a century of carefully building both self-respect among employees and job stability for them, our first reaction when faced by a depression is to move out of manufacturing into the service industries. We tell ourselves that the latter are the wave of the future -- computer software, sophisticated consulting -- when most of the jobs we actually create are at the low end of service -- waiting on tables, serving in shops, part-time, unprotected, without long-term prospects. In other words, much of the job creation of the 1980s represented a defeat for our theoretically balanced and stable societies. We tend to blame this Western schizophrenia on national interests or on ideological conflicts. The official Left would put most of our problems down to uncontrolled self- interest. as if they still had a clear idea of how to harness self-interest for the general good. The official Right would shrug its shoulders manfully, that is to say cynically. as if to imply that reality is tough. But manful cynicism is probably a disguised form of confused helplessness. And none of these contradictions have anything to do with reality. If anything, what all this tells us is that. while not blind, we see without being able to perceive the differences between illusion and reality. And so when one of these differences -- particularly the international variety, with all the accompanying mythological baggage -- appears to be resolved. there is general euphoria. which then gradually subsides without our schizophrenia being altered. This persistent displacement of responsibility causes us to lose track of the West's profound unity and. instead to swing violently between optimistic and pessimistic convictions of nationalism and internationalism. It is true that at first glance the West seems to be nothing more than a vague chimera. What is anyone to make of seventeen-odd countries spread throughout three continents and divided by language, mythology and persistent tribal rivalries? It isn't even in a place which can accurately be called the West. At second glance the binding ties between Europe, North America and Australasia can be seen in a series of fundamental shared experiences and convictions. From the Judeo-Christian imprint through the Reformation. the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the democratic and the revolutionary crises. the West was formed by a series of trials which turned into basic assumptions. And all these were themselves built upon our real and mythological assumptions about Greece and Rome. It is that West which is grouped beneath the sign of reason. Not the great and disordered empires of China and Russia. which have rolled through history upon a whole other series of experiences and assumptions. Not Japan. which is a case unto itself. Not what we call the Third World. which has been both a beneficiary and a victim of our assumptions. And it is that West which has become addicted to a particular set of illusions in order to avoid coming to terms with its own reality. *** We are now more than four and a half centuries into an era which our obsession with progress and our servility to structure have caused us to name and rename a dozen times, as if this Hashing of theoretically fundamental concepts indicated real movement. The reality is that we have not moved beyond the basic ideas of the sixteenth century which, for want of any better description, should be called the concepts of reason. This Age of Reason will soon have been with us for 500 years. With each passing day more ideas, structures and beliefs are hung upon the fragile back of those few concepts. And yet, even in their early days, they were not ideas of great breadth. What's more, from birth they were based upon an essential misunderstanding -- that reason constituted a moral weapon, when in fact it was nothing more than a disinterested administrative method. That fundamental error may explain reason's continuing force, because centuries of Western elites have been obliged to invent a moral direction where none existed. Memory is always the enemy of structure. The latter flourishes upon method and is frustrated by content. Our need to deny the amorality of reason ensured that memory would be the first victim of the new structures. We must constantly remind ourselves, therefore, that the rational idea has run as the central force through almost five centuries of Western crises. It has provided the most basic assumptions and therefore created the most basic of divisions. Reason remains the sign of Western man's conscious self and therefore of his better self. Reason is still accepted as the light which leads the way across the treacherous ground of our baser instincts. At first there was an easy conviction that all this was so -- a conviction made all the more easy by the moral baggage reason had been carrying for a thousand years. In varying ways, to varying degrees, the Greeks had identified reason (logos) as one of the key human characteristics -- the superior characteristic. Reason was virtue. Rational action led to the greatest good. Roman thinkers did nothing to undermine the conviction, nor did the Christian churches, which simply narrowed the meaning to justify their received truths. And when, in the sixteenth century, thinkers began to free us from this sterile Scholasticism, they turned for guidance back to Socrates, Aristotle and the Stoics in search of a freestanding, ethical approach. The implication is that most people -- particularly the philosophers -- were more or less agreed on what actually constituted reason. This simply isn't so, There was and is no generally accepted, concrete definition. As so often with basic concepts, they slip away when you try to approach them. And the philosophers have kept themselves busy redefining as the centuries have gone by. In truth the definitions didn't really matter, anymore than mine might. More to the point is what our civilization understands or senses or feels reason to be. What are our expectations? What is the mythology surrounding the word? One thing is clear: despite successive redefinitions by philosophers, the popular understanding and expectations have remained virtually unchanged. This stability seems to withstand even the real effects of reason when it is applied; to withstand them so effectively, that it is difficult to imagine a more stubbornly optimistic concept, except perhaps that of life after death. What's more, the renewed and intense concentration on the rational element which started in the seventeenth century had an unexpected effect. Reason began, abruptly, to separate itself front and to outdistance the other more or less recognized human characteristics -- spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but also intuition, will and, most important, experience. This gradual encroachment on the foreground continues today. It has reached a degree of imbalance so extreme that the mythological importance of reason obscures all else and has driven the other elements into the marginal frontiers of doubtful respectability. The practical effect of such a mesmerizing and prolonged solo has been to turn the last half millennium into the Age of Reason. We habitually divide this period up under a multitude of other headings: the Enlightenment, for example, Romanticism, Neo-Classicism, Neo- Realism, Symbolism, Aestheticism, Nihilism and Modernism, to name just a few. But the differences between these periods, like the difference between the school born of Bacon versus the school born of Descartes, all blend into one another when we stand back far enough to get a good look. And so Descartes's deductive, abstract arguments which prove their conclusions mathematically melt into Locke's empirical, mechanical approach which melts into Marx's determinism. In other words, since the 1620s, if not the 1530s, we seem to have merely been fiddling with details or rather, shifting from side to side to disguise from ourselves the fact that we have taken in that long period but one clear step -- away, that is, from the divine, revelation and absolute power of church and state. That very real struggle against superstition and arbitrary power was won with the use of reason and of scepticism. And it has taken all this time for reason and logic on the one hand, and scepticism on the other, to seep into the roots of Western society. After all, there was still an absolute monarch in Germany 75 years ago and in France 120 years ago; universal suffrage is in general only 50 years old; the end of official Catholic anti-Semitism less than that; the largest landowner in England is still a duke; and American segregation, a tacit but legally organized form of slavery, began to die 40 years ago, although it now looks as if black poverty amounts to much the same thing. It can, of course, easily be argued that reason still has not been absorbed into the roots of Western society. Large sections of the southern United States and of northern cities like New York and Washington, of southern Italy and of the Midlands in England and even of London, for example, have either never risen out of or have slipped back into a condition which more properly belongs to the Third World. But the evolution of whole civilizations is always full of contradictions which do not change the fundamental truths. Our ideological bickering of the last hundred years has added extremely little to the central line we have been following. Instead, a series of grandiose and dark events -- religious bloodbaths in Europe, Napoleonic dictatorships and unlimited industrial competition, to name three -- overcame Western society and seemed to do so thanks to rational methods. The original easy conviction that reason was a moral force was gradually converted into a desperate, protective assumption. The twentieth century, which has seen the final victory of pure reason in power, has also seen unprecedented unleashings of violence and of power deformed. It is hard, for example, to avoid noticing that the murder of six million Jews was a perfectly rational act. And yet our civilization has been constructed precisely in order to avoid such conclusions. We carefully -- rationally in fact -- assign blame for our crimes to the irrational impulse. In this way we merely shut our eyes to the central and fundamental misunderstanding: reason is no 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. Structure suits best those whose talents lie in manipulation and who have a taste for power in its purer forms. Thus the Age of Reason has turned out to be the Age of Structure; a time when, in the absence of purpose, the drive for power as a value in itself has become the principal indicator of social approval. And the winning of power has become the measure of social merit. Knowledge, of course, was to be the guarantor of reason's moral force -- knowledge, an invincible weapon in the hands of the individual, a weapon which would ensure that society was built upon considered and sensible actions, But in a world turned upon power through structure, the disinterested consideration of knowledge simply couldn't hold and was rapidly transformed into our obsession with expertise. The old civilization of class was replaced by one of castes -- a highly sophisticated version of corporatism. Knowledge became the currency of power and as such was retained, This civilization of secretive experts was quite naturally obsessed not by the encouragement of understanding but by the providing of answers. Our unquenchable thirst for answers has become one of the obvious characteristics of the West in the second half of the twentieth century. But what are answers when there is neither memory nor general understanding to give them meaning? This running together of the right answer with the search for truth is perhaps the most poignant sign of our confusion. It is a curious sort of confusion. Organized and calm on the surface, our lives are lived in an atmosphere of nervous,' even frenetic agitation. Hordes of essential answers By about us and disappear, abruptly meaningless. Successive absolute solutions are provided for major public problems and then slip away without our consciously registering their failure. Neither the public and corporate authorities nor the experts are held responsible for their own actions in any sensible manner because the fracturing of memory and understanding has created a profound chaos in the individual's sense of what responsibility is. This is part of the deadening of language which the reign of structure and abstract power has wrought. The central concepts upon which we operate were long ago severed from their roots and changed into formal rhetoric. They have no meaning. They are used wildly or administratively as masks. And the more our language becomes a tool for limiting general discourse, the more our desire for answers becomes frenzied. Yet there is no great need for answers. Solutions are the cheapest commodity of our day. They are the medicine-show tonic of the rational elites; And the structures which produce them are largely responsible for the inner panic which seems endemic to modern man. *** Of course, we try very hard to see this century in a more positive way; not so much more successful, as more dramatic. Meaningful. We see ourselves as victims of the disorder which inevitably follows upon the breakdown of religious and social order. In such a vacuum the collective Western consciousness couldn't help but splinter. It follows that the succession of great, all-encompassing ages -- Reason, Enlightenment, Romanticism -- had to end with an explosion. The resulting shards inevitably produced a confused age in which innumerable ideologies fought it out for control of our minds and our bodies. And, so the tale has it, Fascism, Nazism, Communism, Marxism. Socialism, Democracy and Capitalism, among others, began to manoeuvre their intellectual, military and economic armies around the West. Indeed, around the globe. By midcentury, Fascism and Nazism had been destroyed, thanks to a temporary alliance among the others. Now Communism and Marxism may be on the point of being eliminated in their turn. Capitalism and Democracy, with some Socialist tinges, reign almost supreme after a century of confused general battle. It has been the second Hundred Years' War. Unfortunately, like the first, this one has been relatively meaningless. A wasteful and superficial diversion. For example, in realpolitik terms, the Century ends much as it began. Japan is still dominant and rising in the East, Germany dominant and rising in Europe, the United States shaky but dominant in the Americas. Russia, China and Britain are, as they were, in continued decline, each held together by rubber bands of doubtful strength. And the middle powers have returned to their relative stability of 1900. Even France ends much as it began, the loss of empire being counterbalanced by the reestablishment of a central role on the Continent. This war of ideologies may have been costly in every sense, but that doesn't make it meaningful. Men are perfectly capable of inventing concrete but stupid reasons to justify killing each other. Great battles such as Crecy and Agincourt demonstrated that perfectly during the first Hundred Years' War. The vacuum which all this was aimed at filling was not, in reality, a vacuum. The structure and methodology of reason have been dominant everywhere during these struggles. In fact, there has been a great underlying unity throughout the West in the twentieth century: the superficial confusion, which we have mistaken for a vacuum, is simply the product of reason's innate amorality. The conversion of Western civilization to a methodology devoid of values -- humanist, moral or aesthetic -- couldn't have helped but launch us into unending, meaningless battles. More to the point, the struggles of the twentieth century could he characterized as perfectly unconscious, largely because the underlying force was a headless abstraction. Perhaps that explains our obsession with the strengthening of the. individual consciousness. Humans have a tendency to personalize those civilizationwide problems which escape them. In the same decade that saw the affirmation of the rational nation-state -- thanks to such things as the American Civil War, the Second Reform Bill in Britain, the decentralization of the Austrian Empire into the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, the freeing of the, serfs in Russia, the creation of Germany, Canada and Italy -- Matthew Arnold evoked in "Dover Beach" a vision of the century to come:
In such a context it hardly seems, worth delving into the rivalries between the contemporary camps. Neither Capitalism nor Socialism can pretend to be an ideology. They are merely methods for dividing ownership and income. What is most peculiar for such theoretically practical methodologies, which are also. theoretically opposed to each other, is that neither of them has ever existed, except in a highly tentative form. And even then they are invariably mixed together. Their mutually exclusive vocabularies have more to do with basic similarities than with differences. Like immature brothers, they have imposed their sibling rivalry upon us. The reality is that they are subspecies of the larger group which includes Christianity, Nazism and Communism, if .for no other reason than that all of them prosper through the cultivation of desire, as indeed does Islam. Of the great world myths, only Buddhism is centred on the reduction of desire in the individual. None of the modern ideologies can be considered great mythology. Marx, for example, although a talented analyst, compulsively proposed inapplicable ideas and inaccurate conclusions. That these ideas have had considerable superficial success doesn't make them any the less silly. In the sixteenth century, the Inquisition was a great success, and was central to the original defining of reason. And yet it made no sense at all with its belief that the best way to question people was to stretch them until their joints separated or to smash their limbs with mallets. All of Europe accepted it and trembled. The elites, even the kings, dared not protest until the worst was over. Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and, unlike Marx, delivered on his promise. This remark is not as specious as it appears. After all, one of the proofs that ideologies subsequent to the birth of reason have had little to add is that when they do gain power, their actions bear absolutely no relationship to their mythology. There has therefore never been a Communist state. They were merely old-fashioned, inefficient but authoritarian dictatorships. Critics make a great deal out of the heavy-handed, inefficient communist bureaucracies. But was there anything innately communist about them? What was there to differentiate them from dozens of other heavy-handed inefficient bureaucracies -- the late Manchus, for example, the Ottomans or Byzantium? The absence of private property is often seen as an essentially Marxist characteristic. But most feudal societies used the same idea and structure; the sole difference being that the ultimate repository of power had changed costume. A king representing God, who stood for the general good, had been replaced by a Supreme Soviet representing the Communist Party, which stood for the general good. Marxism became the dreamlike answer to a real need in Western society, but anyone of a handful of other dreams might have done just as well. Walt Disney, for example, riding in the front lines of mythology, converted America to a vision of itself in which the citizen is a viewer, the beliefs are cinematic assertions· and the leaders are character actors. And that is more relevant to real life than an imaginary ideology or system -- for example, Capitalism. After all, today's leading advocates of free enterprise and competition, the well-protected bureaucratic managers of publicly traded companies. are generally and with relative ease able to neutralize their real owners (the shareholders) and those really responsible (the directors). As for competition on the level playing field, a classic demonstration of how it works was provided by airline deregulation in the United States in the 1980s. The promised result was to be more airlines competing to fly to more places at cheaper prices. Instead, fewer airlines are now flying to fewer places at higher prices. Unregulated competition leads to oligopolies lit best and monopolies at worst. And both lead to price-fixing. This reality is erased in some people's minds because of an imaginary symbiosis between Capitalism and Democracy, which is just about as silly an idea as that of a symbiosis between Socialism and Democracy. If given a chance, both will corrupt public officials and install corporatism. The Right and the Left, like Fascism and Communism, have never been anything more than marginal dialects on the extremes of reason. They are the naive answers that one would expect from a central ideology which, in its very. heart, believes in absolute solutions. And so, despite this confusion of false ideologies, the ethic of reason has continued to spread within our· societies. Certain characteristics of that ethic, less apparent in the beginning, have seeped through into dominating positions. It has produced a system determined to apply a kind of clean, unemotional logic to every decision, and this to the point where the dictatorship of the absolute monarchs has been replaced by that of absolute reason. The development and control of intricate systems, for example, has become the key to power. The judgmental side of Descartes has come to the fore. It is answers we want -- simple, absolute answers where, in reality, there is great complexity. An obsession with the true versus the false leads us to artificial solutions as reassuring as the old certainty that the world was Oat. An obsession with efficiency as a value in itself has driven large parts of our economies into chaos. Briefing books and flowcharts have in our time become the protocols of power, just as the king's waking-up ceremony at Versailles was in the eighteenth century. Reason now has a great deal in common with the last days of the ancien regime. Reason possesses. as did the monarchy, a perfectly constructed, perfectly integrated. perfectly self-justifying system. The system itself has become the justification for the society. No one remembered in the late eighteenth century that the Church and the kings had originally developed their system of power in order to bring stability to an anarchical continent. Equally, no one seems to remember today the original purpose of the elaborate technocratic systems which dominate our lives. They were adopted in order to battle against the established forces of unfettered whims and self-interest. which used power however it suited them. Until a few years ago there was general agreement that whatever reason dictated was by definition good. Since the mid-sixties, however, there has been a growing general Sense that our systems are not working. Multiple signs of this are easily identified, but they somehow resist fitting into a pattern. The depression. The swollen armaments industry. The breakdown of the legal system. The confusion over ownership and capitalism. Random examples from an endless list. We see signs of failure, but the system provides no vocabulary for describing this breakdown, unless we become irrational; and the vocabulary of unreason is that of darkness, so we quite properly avoid it. 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 or the loss of parliamentary power to the executive -- is automatically categorized as naive or idealistic or bad for the economy or simply bad for jobs. And should we attempt to use sensible words to deal with these problems, they will be caught up immediately in the structures of the official arguments which accompany the official modem ideologies -- arguments as sterile as the ideologies are irrelevant. Our society contains no method of serious self-criticism for the simple reason that it is now a self-justifying system which generates its own logic. *** It is hardly surprising that there has ·never been such confidence as there is today within our leadership about their unity of outlook. No matter which way they turn, they find other elites to confirm the reflection of themselves and of one another. Virtually identical programs in business schools and schools of public affairs are turning out people trained in the science of systems management. The Harvard Business School case method is the most famous example of this general obsession with management by solutions, a system in which the logic will always provide support for the conclusions. hi troubled times the citizenry search for the responsible parties. When their elites are so similar, this tends to turn into a search for scapegoats. In the United States, there is a tendency now to single out Harvard. And yet, precisely the same approach reappears throughout Western educational systems, whether in the training of lawyers or political scientists or, notably, in France, in the Enarques, the graduates of the school which trains key state employees. The Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) specializes in the abstract, logical process. In a sense the training in all these schools is designed to develop not a talent for solving problems but a method for recognizing the solutions which will satisfy the system. After that the established internal logic will provide all the necessary justifications. For a good half century now it has been easy, even superficially satisfying, to say of our society that Christianity is dead and the psychiatrist is the new priest. But that is true only if you take the gossip columnist's view of civilization, a view in which character and detail are all that count. In reality we are today in the midst of a theology of pure power -- power born of structure, not of dynasty or arms. The new holy trinity is organization, technology and information. The new priest is the technocrat -- the man who understands the organization, makes use of the technology and controls access to the information, which is a compendium of "facts." He has become the essential middleman between the people and the divinity. Like the old Christian priest, he holds the key to the tabernacle out of which, from time to time, he produces and distributes the wafer -- those minimal nibbles at the divinity which leave the supplicant hungry for more. The wafer is knowledge, understanding, access, the hint of power. And the tabernacle is what it always was: the hiding place of this knowledge, the place which makes secrecy one of the keys to modern power. Finally there is the matter of absolution from personal responsibility. All religions seem to need special-case facilities to deal with the uncontrollable realities of a world which refuses to respond to their official ideology. These facilities take the form of personal-access mythology which is strapped almost arbitrarily to the side of the power structure. We have replaced the old phenomenon of sainthood with that of Herodom. As with Christianity, this has a double function. It gives the "people" something emotive, in the form of something concrete, to concentrate on. And, immobilized as all. large systems are by their abstract nature, the Saint/Hero mechanism provides a practical way for that system to actually get things done. No member of this priesthood would call himself a technocrat, although that is what he is. Whether graduates of Harvard, ENA, the London Business School or any of the hundreds of other similar places, they are committeemen, sometimes called number crunchers, always detached from the practical context, inevitably assertive, manipulative; in fact, they are highly sophisticated grease jockeys, trained to make the engine of government and business run but unsuited by training or temperament to drive the car or to have any idea of where it could be steered if events were somehow to put them behind the wheel. They are addicts of pure power quite simply divorced from the questions of morality which were the original justification for reason's strength. They may or may not be decent people. This amoral quality of our leadership is essential to understanding the nature of our times, The vocabularies of Locke and Voltaire and Jefferson have led us to judge men upon a simple scale of good and evil. A man who uses power to do evil is in theory judged to have been conscious of his acts and to be as fit for punishment as a perpetrator of premeditated murder. But the technocrat is not trained on that level. He understands events within the logic of the system. The greatest good is the greatest logic or the greatest appearance of efficiency or responsibility for the greatest possible part of the structure. He is therefore unpremeditated when he does good or evil. On a bad day he is the perfect manslaughterer, on a good day the perfect unintentional saint. What's more, the people who succeed at this kind of training are those whom it suits best. They therefore reinforce this amoral quality. Dans le royaume des coulisses, l'eunuque est roi. This form of education is not only applied to the training of business and government leaders. In fact, it is now central to almost every profession. If you examine the creation of an architect, for example, or an art historian or a professor of literature or a military officer, you will find the same obsession with details, with the accumulation of facts, with internal logic. The "social scientists" -- the economists and political scientists in particular -- consist of little more than these elements, because they do not have even the touchstones of real action to restrain them. The overall picture of the role of the architect or the officer is lost in the background, but the technocrat who sets out to build or to fight is convinced that he is equipped with the greatest good of all time: the understanding of a system for reasoning and the possession of the equipment which fulfills that system, thus providing the concrete manifestations of its logic. *** Robert McNamara is one of the great figures of this technocracy. While secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson, then as president of the World Bank, he shaped the Vietnam War, was central to launching, both the nuclear arms race and the commercialization of the arms business and was again central to creating the financial structure which led to the current Third World debt crisis. No doubt he is also a decent man, but that personal detail is irrelevant; or rather, what is astonishing about our systems is that the personal decency, or lack of it, of our leaders should have so little effect upon the impact of their actions. The way in which McNamara approached the Vietnam War was identical to the way in which be attacked the problems of the Third World while at the World Bank. The pure logic which on paper would win the war was the same logic which he applied to the massive recycling of the money deposited in the West by oil-producing companies, which in turn led to the Third World debt problem. Throughout all these disasters he acted as the quintessential man of reason while remaining true to the abstract nature of the technocrat. In fact, he is still determined to go on doing good and apparently has no understanding of what he has done. It wasn't what he intended to do. It wasn't what the charts and briefing books said would happen. As a decent man, he is no doubt baffled. Other, less intelligent, less decent technocrats would simply have rewritten the brief in order to demonstrate that their logic had always been proved correct. It may seem odd that the focus here has abruptly moved from large questions to the dissection of an individual. But Robert McNamara is a symbol of the end of the Age of Reason and, as I pick my way through the maze of the last forty years, his is one of the names which inevitably keeps recurring. The key to this examination is the avoidance of arguments limited to single sectors. What is interesting about McNamara is not what he did to boost the arms business, but the comparison between that and what he did to help Third World countries. More interesting still is the comparison between him and another key figure at the other end of the Age of Reason. Cardinal Richelieu. a contemporary of Descartes, held power in France as the King's chief minister from 1624 to 1642. In many ways he was the first modern statesman, the first individual to apply an integrated rational method to that new concept -- the nation-state. A standard reading of Richelieu -- accurate in its details -- would portray him as a devious, convoluted autocrat, while the same sort of examination would show McNamara to be a decent, honest man in search of fairness and efficiency. The wider reality is that Richelieu, in laying the foundations of the first modern state, made it possible for personal restraint and social responsibility to play central roles,. while McNamara was in large part responsible for four of the West's most important postwar disasters. Yet in the eyes of the elites he has emerged from all that as an unblemished leader of our modern times and an example to be imitated. Nevertheless, McNamara is very much a child of the Cardinal. Set side by side at a certain distance, they can hardly be distinguished from one another. Concentrated examination reveals only one important difference -- Richelieu forced his policies on France and Europe with the clear logic of a revolutionary using a new weapon, while McNamara asserted his with the confident blindness of an inbred - that is, an overbred -- aristocrat. This youthfulness of Richelieu, compared with McNamara's intellectual degeneracy, make them the signposts of the Age of Reason -- one at its opening, the other at its end, but united in a single great rational family. As for the essentials, little has changed. We began the seventeenth century in the grip of what philosophers of that time called blind logic. We end the twentieth century in the hands of blind reason; a more sophisticated version of the earlier problem. What has changed radically are the roles which those who want power must play. We have lost an unsatisfactory pyramidal system, which did have a few advantages -- functioning in a relatively public manner, for example. In its place, the management of power by the rational structures is much more absolute. This doesn't mean that all power lies with the technocrats. In fact, the absolutism and inaccessibility which they have represented from the very beginning of the Age of Reason were, and indeed remain, so unrealistic that by the end of the eighteenth century a whole new type of public figure had to be invented: individuals who could -- as Mussolini would have put it -- make the trains run on time. Napoleon was the first and is still the definitive model. These Heroes promised to deliver the rational state, but to do so in a populist manner. The road from Napoleon to Hider is direct. Indeed, most contemporary politicians still base their personas on this Heroic model. And so the breakdown of public figures over the last century has resolved itself into a large group on the rational side -- technocrats, Heroes and false Heroes -- with, on the other, a small group that resists the structural imperatives and stands for an embattled humanist tradition. Jefferson is still perhaps the greatest example of this school, but there were others. Pascal Paoli, the Corsican, creator of the first modern republic, was one of the most inspired cases and perhaps the most tragic. This same phenomenon of technocrats, and Heroes versus practical humanists plays itself out in every sector of our society. The conflict is endlessly repeated with the same imbalance and the same results. It is as true among the military and the businessmen as it is among writers and architects. The more these conflicts are examined, the. clearer it becomes that certain of our most important instincts -- the democratic, the practical, the imaginative -- are profound enemies of the dominant rational approach. This war between the reasonable and the rational is one which our civilization, as we have constituted it, is congenitally unable to resolve. If anything, the rise of more and more parodically Heroic leaders indicates that the system in place is desperately driving itself for ward according to its own logic. And endemic to that logic is the denial of all internal contradictions, to say nothing of internal wars. *** But what are Richelieu and McNamara other than isolated remains on a field of ruins? The great danger, when looking at our society, is that what we see encourages us to become obsessed by individual personalities, thus mistaking the participants for the cause. Perhaps that is why I approach this seamless web almost in the manner of an archeologist, as if engaged in a dig for some forgotten civilization -- the Age of Reason somehow become Unreason. Rational mythology has grown so thick and become so misleading that our reality -- the one in which we actually live -- does indeed seem to be dead and buried. The ground above us is strewn with collapsed columns and broken pots which indicate, despite the reassuring stories of our elites, that something is wrong. But this debris, taken piece by . piece, tells us little. And so, like a man sensible of his ignorance, I have begun in the chapters which follow by clearing away the underbrush to lay bare the obscured overall pattern. This undergrowth is made up largely of myth and of ideas, presented as if they were fact. The pattern is, in reality, not very complex. It is merely the evolution of the Age of Reason. Not a philosophical outline but an existential unfolding. Not theoretical argument but events which dovetail one into the other; the events which join Richelieu to McNamara across hundreds of years. One of the first things to emerge from this progression is a profile of the technocrats and the Heroes as they gradually become the guardians of the rational idea and then of that idea gone wrong. Given our general obsession with personality, I couldn't help but pause long enough to sketch out the typology of these modern elites and then to illustrate them with some of our recent leaders. There is a justification for this self-indulgence, It demonstrates the common methodology used by those who hold the levers of power in the West. Late as we are in the twentieth century, it is no longer possible to go on pretending that the arrival of our elites in positions of power is somehow an accident. They are precisely the people whom our system seeks out: Robert McNamara and Ronald Reagan. Robert Armstrong and Brian Mulroney, Valery Giscard d'Estaing and William Westmoreland, Jim Slater and Michael Milken, along with armies of faceless corporate presidents, These are the desired and chosen leaders. They are also the precise product which our education system sets out to produce. Like all functioning elites, ours seek to perpetuate themselves for the general good, As always, this involves the creation of an educational system. The formation process appears, at first glance; to differ from country to country, but once the common basic assumptions are dusted off. these differences disappear. Education is the one place where lofty ideals and misty mythology cannot avoid meeting the realities of crude self-interest. And so, having uncovered an historical outline. an elite typology and the basic reproductive habits of that elite, I then sought a single example which would be equally true for all nations, would be clean and neat in both its abstract conception and its practical application and would illustrate the amoral -- in fact, the darkly comic -- nature of the rational approach. By far the cleanest and neatest of examples is the inter- national arms trade. What makes it doubly interesting is that leaders as varied as Kennedy, de Gaulle and Harold Wilson were seduced by its attractions. They were then tripped up between the intentions of the arms business and its reality -- tripped up So badly that the greater their success, the more disastrous the long-term effects on their economies and on their foreign policies. The next step was to turn to a series of specialized areas -- the military, government and business -- to see whether the same general characteristics existed. The military come first because when humans undertake change -- whether in technology or organization -- they usually begin on the battlefield. This may be depressing, but that doesn't make it any the less true. Not surprisingly, therefore, the first technocrats were the staff officers. And the unprecedented violence of this century is partly a reflection of the struggle for dominance by the staff officers over the field officers, partly the result of the former's disastrous approach to strategy. The case of government is more Complex. There has been a gradual, widespread improvement in social standards, thanks in good part to the work of large bureaucracies. But the conversion of the political class into an extension of the technocracy has been a disaster. Perhaps the most damaging part of our obsession with expertise and systems has been the restructuring of elected assemblies to make them more efficient. This equation of the idea of efficiency -- a third-level subproduct of reason -- with the process of democratic government shows just how far away we have slipped from our common sense. 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. In fact, the question which arises is whether the rational approach has not removed from democracy its single greatest strength -- the ability to act in an unconventional manner. When you examine, for example, our twenty-year-old battle against inflation, you can't help but note that politicians who become devotees of technocratic logic also become prisoners of conventional solutions. It follows that the theology of power, under which the technocracy prospers, marginalizes the whole idea of opposition and therefore that of sensible change. Opposition becomes a refusal to participate in the process. It is irrational. And this trivialization of those who criticize or say no from outside the power structure applies not only to politics but to all organizations. These victories of reason made the rise of the Heroes inevitable. And the marginalization of the politicians forced them in turn to take on, at least superficially, an Heroic profile, since that was the only available approach which could win them the status they needed. The effect of this change on the politicians themselves was profound. It altered the emotional relationship they had with the public. As the role of the leader has been destabilized, so his internal drives have turned into a psychodrama far removed from public arguments over ideology and administration. In the meantime the very success of the technocrats and the Heroes was rendering powerless the law, which was theoretically their preferred tool for change and improvement. From the beginning of the Age of Reason, the law had been intended to protect the individual from the unreasonable actions of others, especially those in power. This involved regulating the proper relationship between ownership and the individual. Or between the state, the individual and the corporation. Or between defined responsibilities and the people charged with carrying out those responsibilities. In other words law attempted to regulate the application of power. But the nature of power has completely changed in our society. There has been a marriage between the state and the means of production, an integration of the elites into an interchangeable technocracy, a confusion over ownership and management in the corporations. These new structures make it almost impossible for the law to judge illegal that which is wrong. The realities of contemporary capitalism are central to our problems. Here is a term which has travelled far from the old concepts that still account for the vocabulary we use to describe the use of private property. Curiously enough, the word capitalist and all the supporting nations still seem to refer to the ownership of the means of production and to the earning of money and power through the successful working of that production. But most Western corporations are controlled by managers, not owners -- managers who are virtually interchangeable with military staff officers and government bureaucrats. There are others, of course, who also claim the robes of capitalism. Small businessmen, for example, are large in numbers and do often conform to the original concept. But they have little power or influence in our society. Far more important in the nontechnocratic business community are what used to be called speculators: bankers, brokers, promoters and others who act as if capitalism has progressed from the slow and awkward ownership of the means of production to a higher level, at which money is quite simply made out of money. The nineteenth century saw these moneymen as marginal, irresponsible parasites living off the flesh of real capitalism. Their relationship to other citizens was roughly that of the Mafia today. And yet we now treat them as if they were pillars of our society -- both socially and economically. As for the professional managers, their arrival was supposed to remove some of the selfishness from our economies. Unlike real owners, the managers were expected to be free from the logic of uncontrolled greed. Instead these employees have inherited the mythology of capitalism without having to bear personal responsibility for any of the essential risks. They have been free to apply the theory of unfettered capitalism as if it were a perfectible abstraction, nota human reality. The leaders of all these specialized areas don't just act upon the population, however. Like everyone else, they are also acted upon by general social phenomena. Even a brief look at three of these phenomena -- the myth of the secret, the obsession with individualism and the idolizing of stars -- can help to clarify the effect that reason has had on our lives. The invention of the secret is perhaps the most damaging outgrowth of the power produced when control over knowledge was combined with the protective armour of specialization. Until recently very little was considered improper to know. Today the restricted lists are endless. And yet there can't be more than two or three real secrets in the entire world. Even the construction of an atomic bomb is now part of available .knowledge. Nevertheless the imprisoning of information continues, undeterred by endless access-to- information legislation. These restrictions have been counterbalanced over the last thirty years by an apparent explosion in individual freedoms. This breakdown of social order -- rules of dress, sexual controls, speech patterns, family structures -- has been seen as a great victory for the individual. On the other hand, it may simply be a reflection of the individual's frustration at being locked up inside a specialization. These acts of personal freedom are irrelevant to the exercise of power. So in lieu of taking a real part in the evolution of society, the individual Struggles to appear as if no one has power over his personal evolution. Thus victories won for these individual liberties may actually be an acceptance of defeat by the individual. For example, never have so few people been willing to speak out on important questions. Their fear is tied not to physical threats, but to standing apart from fellow experts or risking a career or entering an area of nonexpertise. Not since the etiquette-ridden courts of the eighteenth century has public debate been so locked into fixed positions, fixed formulas and fixed elites expert in rhetoric. The nobles of that time gave themselves over in frustration to a frivolous self-indulgence, which could be called courtly egotism. It is difficult to identify any real difference between that courtly egotism and the personal freedoms which so obsess us today. The combination of a restrictive technology inside power with decorative personal freedoms outside made the rise of a new class inevitable. It was first identified by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. The celebrities. The stars. The people whose sole reason for being famous is their fame. Tennis players, aristocratic names, children of painters, movie. stars. History has always been filled with famous mistresses and actors, but their fame was measured largely by the degree to which the rays of the monarch fell upon them. Today's celebrities have fame unrelated to power. And over the last forty years they have gradually occupied large sections of the press, of conversations, of dreams. In the public imagination they have replaced the men of power who, being technocrats, are of little general interest. These celebrities serve an important public purpose. They distract in the way that monarchs once used their courts to distract. And now that they have some control over that public mythology, they are actually rising to occupy places of real power. Finally, our imagination has been radically altered in two areas by the Age of Reason. The image, which was first scratched on stone walls, then painted, printed, photographed and projected, can now be conceived as a three-dimensional whole by a computer program. In other words, after thousands of years of progress, the image has achieved technical perfection. That progress had been central to our sense of our own immortality and the completion of it has had a profoundly destabilizing effect on our sense of what we are. On top of that the undermining of universal language, in large part by the dialects of expertise, has meant that we can't turn to the word to steady ourselves. Instead, the writers and their pens, having invented the Age of Reason, are now its primary prisoners and so are unable to ask the right questions, let alone to break down the imprisoning linguistic walls of their own creation. *** Blind reason is the element which links everything together ill this general survey. What is blind reason? Perhaps it is nothing more than a sophisticated form of logic -- a more sophisticated, more profoundly integrated, better structured version of the blind logic from which the reformers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were determined to escape. Their escape was to have been made, of course, on the back of reason. In other words, we have ended up today very much where we began nearly half a millennium ago. The end of something often resembles the beginning. More often than not our nose-to-the- lass view makes us believe that the end we are living is in fact a new beginning. This confusion is typical of an old civilization's self-confidence -- limited by circumstances and by an absence of memory -- and in many ways resembling the sort often produced by senility. Our rational need to control understanding and therefore memory has simply accentuated the confusion. The end, in any case, is that part of the human experience most often mistaken for something else. Everything is at its most sophisticated, most organized" most stable. The very. sophistication of the organism marks the divorce of those ideas which were reasonably clear and simple when they were first embraced from the marvellous; remarkable structure which has been built over and around those same ideas in the course of living with them. That structure becomes the superficial celebration of the ideas, which it also invariably crushes. This simple truth is hidden from us by the reassuring sense of stability which the structure creates. But stability is the most fragile element in the human condition. Nothing seems more permanent than a long-established government about to lose power, nothing more invincible than a grand army on the morning of its annihilation. The present condition of reason is clear when the Byzantine systems of today are compared to the clear statements of Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century or, for example, of Voltaire a hundred years later in, his Philosophical Dictionary: "It is obvious to the whole world that a service is better than an injury, that gentleness is preferable to anger. It only remains, therefore, to use our reason to discern the shades of goodness and badness.'" These are the sort of words which lead us to associate reason with morality, common sense and, gradually with a personal freedom which we now know as democracy. How is it, then, that neither Voltaire nor his friends noticed the intensive use of reason by Ignatius Loyola a century earlier, when he organized the Jesuits and almost single-handedly mounted the Counter-Reformation? Loyola was delighted to find a system that would serve the authority of the pope. And Bacon, lord chancellor of England; was neither a, democrat nor particularly obsessed by morality. What he was was modern -- the ideologue of modern science and as such the most important single influence on the Encyclopedists. [2] And even Voltaire and his friends, although they made the error of thinking that morality and common sense were the natural partners of reason, also saw these three in the context of authority. They wanted a strong but fair king. They thought reason would render authority fair. How did they make such an obvious mistake? They were thinking on their feet in the heat of the action. They were responding to real needs, just as Loyola had taken charge when Catholicism was faced by a Protestant victory and Richelieu had devised the modern state as a way of defeating the warring nobles. Even William Blake, with the clarity of his mystical vision, said in Jerusalem, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." In the wake of the Encyclopedists came a raft of philosophers who adapted these basic ideas in order to suit the evolution of events. But all they did was construct an ever more elaborate structure over a falsehood. From its very beginning as an applied idea, reason has been as successful -- if not more successful -- at creating new degrees of barbarism and violence as it has been at imposing reasonable actions. As fast to invent a new breed of authoritarian leaders, whom we soon called absolute dictators, as it was to produce paragons of responsible democracy. *** This is our Western inheritance. The rest of the world, however, is locked in a struggle with other problems and other forces. That doesn't mean we are not closely linked to them. We are all inseparably linked. And we must develop policies which take those links into account. But nor does this mean that we must analyze or reform our societies solely in the light of other worlds. To do so would be the equivalent of closing down our steel industries because someone else produces cheaper steel with child labour. Our own evolution is the result of events which bear only a vague resemblance to those that shaped Africa, Asia or the Soviet Union. The Chinese, for example, looked into formal logic well before we became obsessed with it and found it less important than other things. They delved into the market economy when we were still in the Dark Ages, and therefore they do not associate it in any way with the democratic ideology. Western confusion over this led us foolishly to confuse economic liberalism in China during the 1980d with a desire for political liberalism. Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are religions still carried by strong belief, while Christianity in the West has been largely reduced to a social phenomenon. Olivier Germain-Thomas's comparison of the life inside an Indian temple with the cool emptiness of Chartres is particularly moving. "The cathedrals in my country are only memories of a culture, while in this temple everything speaks, everything is vibration, everything sings, everything is alive." And in Buddhism, the reason for thinking about the world is to escape from it, not to find an explanation for its origins. [3] As the West has closed itself ever more tightly into the self-justifying logic of its own system, we have found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the single truths of our situation. Instead the last twenty years have seen the rapid passage of a multitude of political and economic fashions, each of which was supposed to get us out of our doldrums and our internal contradictions. Most of them have involved key factors outside the West - not because of practical internationalism but as the result of a self-delusionary hope that external solutions would solve our internal problems. They have all been sophisticated versions of the great eighteenth-century financial fraud, the South Sea Bubble. None have delivered and so, in the last decade, the fashions have come and gone with even greater speed. Massive lending at home and in the Third World had no sooner failed than we were righteously preaching fiscal austerity on every street-corner of the globe. Financial deregulation had no sooner, brought a wave of national and international mergers large enough to destabilize our economies than we discovered the truth of divestment and called it rationalization. Japan has swung in our imagination from representing the golden model of the future to incarnating the unfair devil at the root of our economic difficulties and then swung back again. A decade of wild hopes attached to Chinese liberalism no sooner lay dead in Tienanmen Square than we turned with emotional relief to Central Europe. The promise of major changes and therefore of massive economic needs in the old Warsaw Pact quickly had us salivating. Here was the new and dreamed-of hinterland. Here were people who believed that our system was best. But some of these countries have never been touched by the Western evolution; some have had marginal experiences; others have been cutoff since 1939. Their imaginary expectations are at least half a century behind our real experiences. Quite apart from the economic and political anarchy which the current situation involves, they would have to deal with a whole series of other basic internal questions before any real integration into the Western structure could begin. Whatever the ongoing changes actually hold for those living in what we used to call the Soviet bloc, the Western reaction is inescapably one of relief. Here is another fashion to hypnotize us with gratifying imaginary promises. Here is room for another round of prolonged self-delusions. Here is another excuse not to address our own problems. This book is therefore about the West, that falsely geographic idea which refers to only 750 million people in a handful of countries spread around the globe. They are the countries fully in the grip of the Age of Reason. One way or another, of course, to a greater or lesser extent, that' age has penetrated everywhere on the planet. Our own problems are often mirrored in those penetrations. For example, while the technocratic leadership was presenting to us its promised solutions for the good management of democratic. societies, the same management principles were being presented in South Africa, Algeria; Morocco, Tanzania, Vietnam, and Kenya as the solution to their problems. How could technocracy have a complementary relationship with democratic societies, in which the individual weighs his freedom by the calm and regularity in which his community is managed, when it was also meant to be an intimate part of systems which eliminate or ignore democracy and individualism? How could a great leap forward in democratic management methods also be a great leap forward in efficient repression elsewhere? The answer could quite simply be that reason has nothing to do with democratic freedom or individualism or social justice. To get at the unassailable, self-serving logic of the ancien regime, Voltaire and his friends made great use of scepticism. Once they had succeeded, this scepticism, this talent for criticism, remained in the air, a far easier tool than the vigilant common sense and morality which were intended to guide man's reason. And so a new sceptical logic was born, liberated from the weight of historical precedent and therefore even more self-serving than the logic which had gone before. This scepticism became a trademark of the new elites and gradually turned to cynicism. Worst of all, as the complexities of the new systems increased, with their rewards of abstract power for those who succeeded, the new elites began to develop a contempt for the citizen. The citizen became someone to whom the elite referred as if to a separate species: "He wouldn't understand this." "She needn't know about that." "He will vote for any sort of politician if a nice package is put together." "She panics easily, so unpleasant news should be held back." The inability of governments to discuss in a coherent manner the political and economic difficulties in which we are mired today is a prime example of their contempt. *** The attitudes of our elites remain even less positive when dealing with women. This has nothing to do with and has not been changed by a century of lobbying and struggling to integrate women into the mechanisms of power. The simple truth is that they were not part of the formulation and creation of the Age of Reason. In fact, women were the symbol of the irrational. Ever since the birth of the Age of Reason, women have been perceived by the new elites to be on the losing side. Examples are legion. Richelieu can be found writing to his vacillating king about the necessity of developing "the masculine virtue of making decisions rationally." [4] Centuries later. the slow push for universal suffrage in Western democracies illustrated that nothing had changed. When the aristocracy loosened its exclusive control on society, it was in order to include the votes of the other property holders -- the middle classes. When the property holders weakened, it was to include those who did not own property. They in turn weakened, bit by bit, in order to extend the most basic civil right to the various excluded minorities members of. dissident religions were among the last to be allowed onto many voting lists. And after them the vote was extended to nonmembers of the ruling tribe -- blacks in the United States and Asians in Canada. for example. Women were not even considered during this process. Fewer than seventy-five years ago an aristocratic, well-educated, property-owning woman was considered less.6t to vote than a penniless, uneducated miner or the segregated son of a freed slave. It would therefore be a great error to assume that our society has had or has within it today the basic flexibility to allow real female participation. After all. it has been created over a period of nearly live centuries without them in mind. As recently as 1945, when the French government decided to create its revolutionary rational school of state administration, ENA, the following could be found in the introduction to the enabling legislation:
The minister responsible for these words and for the creation of ENA was Michel Debre, who went on to become prime minister in 1958. These examples are not intended to suggest that women have played no role inside the structures of power. There have been remarkable queens, heads of government and ministers, just as there have been scientists, painters, writers and so on. Today, more than ever, women are occupying positions of influence. However, in the past they have been the exceptions to the rule and were usually obliged to hold on to their power by deforming themselves into honorary men or into magnified archetypes of the female who manipulated men. It still is not clear that women can successfully become part of the established structures without accepting those deformations. What follows in this book is about the realities of Western rational civilization. It is a male reality. Women might well want to change that, but it isn't clear that the best way to do so is to shore up the existing structures by going into them. Even if they do so, it is difficult to see why women would want to claim responsibility for what has gone before. *** Throughout the West, we are led by elected and nonelected elites who do not believe in the public. They cooperate with the established representational systems of democracy. But they do not believe in the value of the public's contribution. Nor do they believe in the existence of a public moral code. What they do believe in are Heroic appeals, contractual agreements and administrative methods. This means that in dealing with the public, they find it easier to appeal to the lowest common denominator within each of us. That this often succeeds reinforces their contempt for a public apparently capable of nothing better. They do not take into account that the public, like any of its members, is in fact capable of the highest and the lowest. Citizens are limited in their public role by time and knowledge. Their days are filled with jobs and families. They have come to fear stepping beyond their areas of expertise. In spite of the complaining they may do, they harbour a remarkably durable trust in their elites. Those elites, they believe, are made up of people who have been trained and chosen to deliver the Age of Reason. The contempt with which the elites reward this trust is a betrayal of those they are pledged to serve. Or, to be more concrete, it is a betrayal of their legal employer. Cynicism, ambition, rhetoric and the worship of power -- these were the characteristics commonly found in the courts of the eighteenth century. They are the characteristics of courtiers, which is precisely what our modern and dispassionate elites have become. And courtliness is the characteristic they most encourage throughout the population. The new message of the eighteenth century wasn't complicated. It attempted simply to break the captive logic of arbitrary power and superstition with reason and scepticism. Now that same self-justifying logic has asserted itself within the new system. It took us four and a half centuries to break the power of divine revelation, only to replace it with the divine revelations of reason. We must therefore break again, this time with arbitrary logic and the superstition of knowledge. But in this maze of logic, the unforgiving extremes function with the greatest of ease. The acquisitive, the cynical, the religious fanatics of raw competition, the exploiters of society -- all of them find the tools of reason, as shaped by time, to their particular liking, And yet, to argue against reason means arguing as an idiot or as an entertainer who seeks only to amuse. The structures of argument have been co-opted so completely by those who work the system that when an individual reaches for the words and phrases which he senses will express his case, he finds that they are already in active use in the service of Power. This now amounts to a virtual dictatorship of vocabulary. It isn't really surprising that a society based upon structure and logic should determine the answer to most questions by laying out the manner in which they are posed. Somehow we must do today what Voltaire once did -- scratch away the veneer in order to get at the basic foundations. We must rediscover how to ask simple questions about ourselves. Technology and knowledge advance with great speed. That is, or can be, good. Man, however, does not change. He is as he was the day the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer decided to go on speaking out against Nazi anti-Semitism knowing that this could only lead him to a death camp. He is also as he was the day he cheered in the Roman circus, the day he crucified Christ, the day he slaughtered the unarmed Valdesians, the day he opened the first gas oven at Auschwitz, the day he tortured rebels in Malaysia, Algeria and Vietnam. In his last interview. the French historian Fernand Braudel ended by saying that although knowledge meant man had less excuse for his barbarism; he was nevertheless "profoundly barbaric." [6] There are no inherited characteristics to help us avoid repeating the actions of our parents or grandparents. We are born with the schizophrenia of good and evil within us, so that each generation must persevere in self-recognition and in self-control. In ceding to the automatic reassurance of our logic. we have abandoned once more those powers of recognition and of control. Darkness seems scarcely different from light, with the web of structure and logic woven thick across both. We must therefore cut away these layers of false protection if we wish to regain control of our common sense and morality.
|