-Caveat Lector-
from alt.conspiracy
-----
As always, Caveat Lector.
Om
K
-----
<A HREF="aol://5863:126/alt.conspiracy:510957">The Unconscious Civilization
</A>
-----
Subject: The Unconscious Civilization
From: Rowland Croucher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Mon, Mar 29, 1999 3:00 PM
Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
BOOK REVIEW: John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, Penguin,
1997.
I remember as a graduate student reading Fullbright's 'The Arrogance of
Power' and saying 'Yes, yes' aloud right through the book. I've been
doing that again (mostly) with this one.
You can add the name John Ralston Saul to those of Noam Chomsky, Ivan
Illich, Franz Fanon (and who else?) on your list of the key late 20th
century 'global conspiracy theorists' - people who are visionary
seers/prophets who have unorthodox views and make outrageous
pronouncements on this and that, but with whom you have to broadly
agree. Because they operate outside the conventions of fixed ideologies,
they're able to see the broader picture, and see more deeply into the
nature of things.
The Unconscious Civilization - the 1995 Massey Lectures - was written
in an oral style by Canadian freelance intellectual, essayist and
novelist John Ralston Saul. His thesis is disarmingly simple: in the
long line of history's totalitarianisms, we can now add undemocratic
'corporatism'. Our society, he argues, is only superficially based on
the individual and democracy.
The sweep of Saul's generalizations is breath-taking. For example, he
says those who claim to have read Adam Smith generally haven't,
otherwise they wouldn't have developed a naïve notion of a nexus between
free markets and democracy. In the West we have come to believe that
democracy was born of free-market economics. Not so: 'Both democracy and
individualism have been based on financial sacrifice, not gain.... You
can have poor democracies. And you can have prosperous dictatorships'.
Increasingly, power and legitimacy in Western nations lie with special
interest groups and big decisions are made by/between these groups.
Note, for example, the remarkable growth in the lobbying industry, which
has as its sole purpose the conversion of elected representatives and
senior civil servants to the particular interest of the lobbyist. IOW,
lobbyists are in the business of corrupting the people's representatives
and servants away from the public good, says Saul.
The transnational or the very large national corporations are really
reincarnations of the seventeenth-century royal monopolies. Corporatism
hasn't any substantial notion of 'common good'. They are now driven by
bottom-line, cut-back economics, not concern for the well-being of
customers/consumers. A classic example is the (unnamed) tobacco company
which knew back in the 1960s that smoking was hazardous to human health,
but decided to remain quiet about it. Then there's the international
arms traffic - the largest international trade good of our day -
resulting in the deaths of 75 million people killed by war over the past
35 years. Then there's the worldwide depletion of fish stocks, the lack
of desire by steel companies to cut down pollution, state-run lotteries
aimed at the less fortunate and less educated… The list goes on and on.
Saul is particularly - and repeatedly - caustic about universities
teaching political science and management. They thus become the slaves
of corporations. He is scathing about the current corporate obsession
with 'aligning basic education with the needs of the job market'. 'What
the corporatist approach seems to miss is the simple role of higher
education to teach thought,' he reminds us. 'A student who graduates
with mechanistic skills and none of the habits of thought has not been
educated. Such people will have difficulty playing their role as
citizens.' The key task of universities is to encourage us to seek
knowledge without the pacifier of ideological certainties and to pursue
the public good without believing it has to be synonymous with
self-interest.
Government after government, from the Left to the Right, has been
elected on a platform of job creation, but the reality is that they have
no idea of what to do. Why? Because jobs are one of the last steps on
the production chain. The marketplace these days is into job
elimination - the result of ruthless 'downsizing', 'outsourcing',
mergers, privatization, and the uncritical acceptance of technological
'advances'.. So-called political 'common sense' (balanced budgets,
lowering taxes, linking with the globalized market, selling off
publicly-owned utilities etc.) might fit in with the Taylor's
'scientific management' efficiency theories, but are they 'effective' (a
better word, he says) - or, more importantly, humane? '[These are] the
things which technocrats are incapable of -- risk, thought, doubt,
admission of error, research and development, long-term investment,
commitment to concrete places. ... An obsession with efficiency prevents
growth and stymies capitalism.' But worse: 'Corporatism… is profoundly
tied to a mechanistic view of the human race. This is not an ideology
with any interest in our commitment to the shape of society or the
individual as citizen.'
If it makes someone rich it must be O.K. eh? Take international currency
trading: a trillion dollars float around the speculative world every
day. It's a great way for a few to get very rich - playing with money
that doesn't really exist. And it doesn't make any jobs. Or look at
education: if the only meaningful value of something is its economic
value then is education less valuable than golf balls?
Back to the key paradox: knowledge has not made us conscious. Instead,
we live in illusory worlds where languages are highly technical and
therefore cut off from most people's reality. The special interest
groups who run the world have invented special vocabularies to obfuscate
everything. In a society where knowledge is power, information is
currency. Many are systematically being denied access to this currency.
'This is knowledge reduced to ignorance. The more knowledge is limited
to a single corner, the more ignorant the expert'
And both 'Left' and 'Right' are different political configurations of
self-interest. Saul is not overly hostile to the theories of the left or
right, but in practice, he says, they can't avoid being dehumanizing.
Saul's essential plea is that we resurrect the individual's relationship
to government. 'The most powerful force possessed by the individual
citizen is her own government,' Saul writes. 'The individual has no
other large organized mechanism that he can call his own . . .
Government is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that
level of shared disinterest known as the public good.' 'The individual's
rights are guaranteed by law only to the extent that they are protected
by the citizenry's exercise of their obligation to participate in
society. Rights are a protection from society. But only by fulfilling
their obligations to society can the individual give meaning to that
protection.'
Saul is enamoured by the Socratic notion of the individual as citizen.
To combat the evils of corporatism we must revitalize citizen-based
democracy. Citizens should control the thinking about 'goods' in their
societies. Swallowing massive deceptions have produced an 'unconscious
civilization'. His ultimate solution? 'Practical humanism is the voyage
towards equilibrium without the expectation of actually arriving there.
... To begin with, there is Socrates' initial voyage -- towards
knowledge without the expectation of finding truth.' 'The problems we
face are not of incomprehensible complexity...Nothing in our current
crisis is untouchable because of the great mystic forces of
inevitability.'
I read this comment somewhere on the Web: 'It's not enough to say that
this is an uncommonly good book about the common good. The Unconscious
Civilization is a kind of intellectual last chance for both young
geniuses and old hedgehogs everywhere. Notwithstanding Saul's praise of
doubt, I've seldom felt so certain that this is a book that one must
read.'
If you want to pursue Saul's ideas further read his 1992 bestseller,
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, which
deals with similar subject matter.
My assessment. First, to be picky, the book is replete with hy- phenated
words in the middle of lines. Penguin Books has obviously been
downsizing and dispensed with on-paper proof-readers!
More seriously, as a Jesus-follower I object to Saul's caricatures of
the Judeo-Christian God… ('God is strong, good and kind, therefore we
must torture you'). Since Jesus, our ideas about God have been radically
rewritten. So of course Saul doesn't talk about Jesus Christ at all
(except to note that he failed as a manager-of-twelve). Here he too may
be guilty of using language as a weapon to distort reality (the very
thing he accuses just about everyone else of doing).
Further, 'We know the good but do not practise it (Euripides)'. 'Nothing
is more certain than that men are, in a great measure, governed by
interest' (David Hume). Right. Christian theology is candid at this
point. We are creatures made in the image of God. But we choose
selfishness and evil. (The fundamentalists are generally right about
sin; the liberal humanists are right about our inherent worth: but let's
keep these both together).
He does the same with management theory. As a consultant to the
corporation called the church (and sometimes to secular businesses) I'd
say we've moved a long way from Taylor's efficiency model - at least in
theory. Certainly, bottom-line constraints drive most of the big,
multinational corporations, but there are plenty of middle-level
businesses (and Christian denominations) which attempt to be more
humane…
A 'too clever by half' intellectual can enjoy the luxury of offering
brilliantly generalized ideas. But, sir, what are we actually supposed
to do about the corporation? Awareness-raising,, encouraging citizens to
be ideologically-free radical thinkers is good, but such
conscientization should lead to some appropriate action/s. Saul is weak
at this point. Any prophet can slaughter sacred cows like the Chicago
School of Business, the medieval church, the pseudo-science of economics
etc. when/where/how is the rubber to meet the road?
~~
Some key quotes:
# If economists were doctors, they would today be mired in malpractice
suits.
# Cicero: 'He who does not know history is destined to remain a child'.
# Socrates was executed not for saying what things were or should be,
but for seeking practical
indications of where some reasonable approximation of truth might be. He
was executed not for his
megalomania or grandiose propositions or certitudes, but for stubbornly
doubting the absolute truths
of others.
# People become so obsessed by hating government that they forget it is
meant to be their government
and is the only powerful public force that have purchase on.
# In general, democracy and individualism have advanced in spite of and
often against specific
economic interest. Both democracy and individualism have been based upon
financial sacrifice, not
gain. Even in Athens, a large part of the 7,000 citizens who
participated regularly in assemblies were
farmers who had to give up several days' work to go into town to talk
and listen.
# Whenever governments adopt a moral tone -- as opposed to an ethical
one -- you know something
is wrong.
# Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is
the argument of tyrants, it is the
creed of slaves. William Pitt, House of Commons, 18 November 1783.
# Criticism is perhaps the citizen's primary weapon in the exercise of
her legitimacy. That is why, in this corporatist society, conformism,
loyalty and silence are so admired and rewarded; why criticism is
so punished or marginalized.
# The Third World debt crisis is now $1.5 trillion…
# Every day currency traders move $1 trillion around the world. Money
markets, unrelated to financing real activity are pure inflation. The
unregulated money markets have now given us over twenty years of crisis,
instability, gratuitous speculation and no real growth.
# 'We've had a hundred years of psychotherapy and things are getting
worse' (James Hillman and Michael Ventura).
# The cost of the managerial superstructure is now far too heavy for the
producing substructure.
# It seems to me that a sensible list of the human qualities would run
as follows: common sense,
creativity or imagination, ethics (not morality), intuition or instinct,
memory, and, finally, reason. ...these qualities cannot be defined
usefully, but only as abstractions, which they are not. ... These
qualities are the basic tools of humanity. In more aggressive verbiage,
they are our weapons for use
in what can only be described as a constant war against ideology.
# The virtue of uncertainty is not a comfortable idea, but then a
citizen-based democracy is built upon
participation, which is the very expression of permanent discomfort. The
corporatist system depends
upon the citizen's desire for inner comfort. Equilibrium is dependent
upon our recognition of reality,
which is the acceptance of permanent psychic discomfort. And the
acceptance of psychic discomfort
is the acceptance of consciousness
# The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the
legitimacy of the individual as
citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing
imbalance which leads to our
adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.
# Socrates: 'Let no day pass without discussing goodness.'
# No Western population has been asked to choose corporatism, let alone
demanded it. It simply creeps up on us, a bit more every day… It would
be impossible for the corporatist structure ever to reward or admire
criticism.
# The money used to produce a 20 second spot for McDonald's would
finance hours of television
programming. Propaganda is therefore the purpose. Content is the frill
or decoration.
# And Socrates again: 'If I say I cannot 'mind my own business' you will
not believe that I am serious. If on the other hand I tell you that to
let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects
about which you hear me talking and that examining both myself or others
is really the very best thing a man can do and that life without this
sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined
to believe me. Nevertheless, gentlemen, that is how it is.'
Rowland Croucher
March 1999
--
Shalom! Rowland Croucher ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
JOHN MARK MINISTRIES - resources for pastors/leaders
(Bookroom, library, and worldwide F.W.BOREHAM Trading Post)
WEBSITE (2000+ articles, 1000+ links) - http://www.pastornet.net.au/jmm
LIST: email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Subject-line: Subscribe)
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
