Voltaire's bastards: The dictatorship of reason in the West [Hardcover]

When the Age of Reason swept away the priests and courtesans of the feudal world, did a better society take its place? John Ralston Saul has doubts. A former Canadian oil executive-turned-novelist and amateur philosopher, Saul believes the "rational society" that emerged has created unprecedented levels of state violence and social disintegration that are now collapsing in on themselves. In his landmark book Voltaire's Bastards, Saul argues that the 20th century, which saw the final victory of pure reason in power, would shock and upset Voltaire and other thinkers of the 18th century who led the fight against feudalism. "Were Voltaire to appear today, he would be outraged by the new structures," he writes.

Voltaire's Bastards is the first volume in a best-selling trilogy that won international acclaim with its sweeping frontal assault on the tenets of Western thought. Saul, husband of Governor General of Canada Adrienne Clarkson, argues that the Age of Reason, now nearing 500 years old, displaced medieval society with a reason-based state-corporate structure in which there are no values--and power became the new religion. Reason without values left the citizenry confused and yearning for meaning, Saul writes, and the new ideology was exploited by the ambitious to seize and justify power. "Knowledge became the currency of power," he says. "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." Saul's answer is simple: rigorous skepticism. He argues that those who hold power fear nothing more than criticism and being doubted. "The secret… is that we must alter our civilization from one of answers to one which feels satisfaction, not anxiety, when doubt is established.… Our desperate need is to unify the individual through questions." --Alex Roslin --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Known for his novels of international intrigue, Saul in his first work of nonfiction delivers a passionate jeremiad on the follies of our age. Reason, he argues, has run amok; instead of the enlightened utopia envisaged by Voltaire, the modern West is a soulless machine run by technocratic elites that promise efficiency but create disasters. The author targets the insane waste of our "permanent war economy," the perils of nuclear power, the co-optation of democracy by vested interests, the news media's focus on false events and manufactured celebrities, the "personality politics" of presidential campaigns. He critiques the Harvard Business School's management teachings, profiles such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Robert McNamara and Charles de Gaulle, flunks our colleges for failure to reward creativity and imagination. He blames novelists from James Joyce onward for "rendering literature inaccessible" and divorcing fiction from social concerns. He roams freely through history, politics, theology, art and film, challenging his audience on every page. This wonderfully provocative inquiry, a work of bold sweep and originality, may nonetheless leave some readers wondering whether misplaced faith in reason underlies all the ills discussed.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Saul locates the source of many of the contemporary world's problems in a perversion of reason. He argues that while Voltaire had hoped to use reason as a tool to overthrow outmoded and harsh customs, his successors instead employed reason as an instrument of social control. The will of the people was unimportant to such acolytes of reason as Napoleon, who argued that uninformed popular opinion must be regimented through the supposed dictates of reason. The result of these misguided efforts at rational planning have been the horrors of modern warfare and the depredations of industrialism. Saul attributes such varied phenomena as the arms race, the "star system," and the rise of bureaucracy to hyperrationalism. Saul, a popular novelist ( The Paradise Eater , LJ 11/1/88), has a vivid style that makes his book enjoyable reading, but a clear sense of what he means by reason never emerges. Is it anything more than a catchphrase for whatever the author dislikes?-- David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

JOHN RALSTON SAUL likes Voltaire, dislikes his alleged bastards. He holds that Voltaire and other Enlighteners tried to use reason in the service of humanism, but that they were mistaken, and reason took over. The bastards are the technocrats of today, in business, government - in all elites. By "reason," he means applied logic, or method set free from common sense, moral instinct, memory - even from reasonableness.

This at least is the ostensible topic, but Voltaire's Bastards is really John Ralston Saul on almost everything human, mostly in the last four centuries: a creditably humanistic undertaking.

Saul is well versed in military history and the contemporary arms trade. One of his best examples of technocracy is the triumph of staff officers over field officers. On such matters he is at his fullest and most convincing.

But there's a risk of earning Saul's condemnation if one praises him where he has special knowledge. He is a great denouncer of specialization. He complains about specialists' dismissal of the common-sense opinions of other people (such as Saul), and about the reluctance of many of us to form opinions when we think that we don't have enough information.

His numerous topics include: official secrets, trade secrets, speculators, comic books, overuse of law, the rise of managers as against owners, scientific secrecy at the expense of the environment, use of cheap and unprotected labour abroad, the mistaken esteem for the "service sector" of the economy, the Jesuits, celebrities, Cardinal Richelieu, television, art history (denunciation of the profession, with Saul's own outline of the history of art), the novel, the unjust depreciation of "category fiction" (he's written a few thrillers himself), MBA schools, the history of Corsica (well told), public opinion, the drowning of public parliamentary debate in administrative detail (a particularly worthwhile point), the beginnings of public garbage collection in Paris, all of religion (by no means confined to the last four centuries), Jefferson (a favourite of his), Napoleon (not), debt crises (from Solon the Athenian to the present), French vignerons, Robert McNamara (a villain and fool on several fronts).

His international range is admirable. Most people's generalizations about the modern age draw primarily on one country for examples, whereas Saul has a lot of information about Britain, Canada, France, and the United States, and quite a bit about several other countries.

Saul is hard to please. For all his objections to what he calls "structure," he characteristically presents as common sense his disapproval of floating exchange rates and his approval of the previous Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates: a structure if there ever was one, and the work of technocrats.

His own language is touched by technocracy: for example, "driven" (meaning caused), "ongoing," "parameters," "nonresponsible" (meaning unaccountable), "positive" (meaning good), and that vague verb "involve."

Some of his rhetoric is feeble: there's a lot of "simply" and "quite simply" and phrases like "ever larger." His sometimes strained images and metaphors suggest a certain cruelty or at least a taste for the grotesque, though he is always trying to make serious points: courtesans, courtiers, eunuchs, and technocrats are essentially the same, he says, and so are inflation and flatulence.

Often this book induces despair, as if any participation in power would be a surrender to "structure." Interestingly, it is dedicated to Maurice Strong, "who taught me that a sensible relationship between ideas and action is possible." We could have benefited from an elaboration of this. The only fairly recent politician who gets much praise from Saul is de Gaulle. But he also shows how de Gaulle was a leader in the government-instigated arms trade, in the French nuclear structure, and in confirming the position of the ENA, the school for high civil servants that is as much a nest of technocrats as the equally hated Harvard Business School. He might have discussed the interesting mixture of success and failure in the life of this brilliant military thinker, who had imagination, historical memory, and other qualities Saul admires.

Voltaire's Bastards makes me think of a Biblical sentence: "Therefore it became a proverb, Is Saul also among the prophets?" No one is quite sure what this meant. Did it invite the answer "No" or "Yes"? King Saul had happened upon a "company of prophets" and began to rave prophetically with the rest of them. He had previously been known as a regular guy.

King Saul is not remembered as a prophet, but still, "the spirit" had touched him in some measure. The right answer to the proverb's question seems to be the same the notorious technocrat Giscard d'Estaing gave to the Gaullist regime: "Oui, mais...."

What then of this long rant in praise of "common sense"? Is John Ralston Saul also among the prophets? As an anti-technocrat, he is not the equal of Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, or George Grant, but this is a rich and versatile book. Gerald Owen(Books in Canada) -- Books in Canada

Argues that the rationalist political and social experiments of the Enlightenment have degenerated into societies dominated by technology and a crude code of managerial efficiency. These are societies enslaved by manufactured fashions and artificial heroes, divorced from natural human instinct.

John Ralston Saul is Canada’s leading public intellectual. Declared a “prophet” by Time magazine, Saul has received many awards and prizes, including Chile’s Pablo Neruda Medal. He is president of PEN International, and his thirteen works have been translated into twenty-two languages in thirty countries.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.