Saul - Voltaires bastards: the dictatorship of reason in the West

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VOLTAIRES BASTARDS

JOHN RALSTON SAUL s philosophical worksVoltaires Bastards, The Doubters Companion, The Unconscious Civilization, and On Equilibriumhave had a growing impact on political thought in many countries. His five novels, including the international bestseller The Birds of Prey, deal with modern power and its clash with the individual. In The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World, Saul confronts the dominant ideology of globalization. Like his non-fiction, his novels have been translated into over a dozen languages.

His work has received many national and international awards, including the Governor Generals Literary Award, the Premio Lettarario Internazionale in Italy, and Chiles Pablo Neruda Medal in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Nerudas birth.

Saul was born in Ottawa and studied at McGill University and Kings College, London, where he obtained his Ph.D.

Voltaires Bastards

The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

JOHN RALSTON SAUL

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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1992
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1993
Published in this edition, 2009

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Copyright John Ralston Saul, 1992

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For

MAURICE STRONG

who taught me that a sensible relationship
between ideas and action is possible.

Ecartons ces romans quon appelle systmes;
Et pour nous lever descendons dans nous-mmes.

V OLTAIRE

Contents

ARGUMENT

SCENES FROM A SYSTEM THAT DOESNT WORK

SURVIVING IN FANTASY LAND

The Individual in the World of Reason

PART I

Argument

Reason is a narrow system

swollen into an ideology.

With time and power it has

become a dogma, devoid of

direction and disguised as

disinterested inquiry.

Like most religions, reason

presents itself as the solution

to the problems it has created.

I n moments of great passion, the mind tends to be flooded with a warm vision of the person in our arms. We are unlikely, at that point, to be analyzing their flaws, real or hypothetical. Even less likely if lying in darkness. As for the possible product of our intercourse, only the most peculiar lover would be fretting, while in the act, over whether such a child might or might not be an appropriate and worthy creation.

Voltaire and the other thinkers of the eighteenth century could be criticized, with the facility of hindsight, for the passion with which they embraced reason. But they lived in societies still ruled by the demeaning vagaries of court life. All of them had been thrown in jail or risked it simply for expressing their opinions. In most countries justice still used torture as an official method of interrogation and the condemned faced a variety of brutal punishments; being broken on the wheel, for example. This and other tools of arbitrary power constituted a social form of darkness. The philosophers of Europe, England and America threw themselves into the arms of reason, convinced that birth would be given to new rational elites capable of building a new civilization. This love affair was fertile to the point of being miraculous and society was subsequently reformed for the better beyond what any of these thinkers had imagined.

And yet the exercise of power, without the moderating influence of any ethical structure, rapidly became the religion of these new elites. And their reforms included an unparalleled and permanent institutionalization of state violence. This was accompanied by a growing struggle between democratic and rational methods, with the rational increasingly at an advantage.

Were Voltaire to reappear today, he would be outraged by the new structures, which somehow deformed the changes for which he struggled. As for his descendants our ruling elites he would deny all legal responsibility and set about fighting them, as he once fought the courtiers and priests of eighteenth-century Europe.

It is difficult now to reconstruct the impact that Voltaire had on his times. He was the single most famous individual of the eighteenth century. In spite of neither being a philosopher nor having an integrated philosophy, he set the Western agenda for much of the nineteenth century. His life was filled with contradictions. On the negative side, he was consumed by social and financial ambition. A product of the middle class, he wasted a good part of his life trying to win acceptance from the aristocracy and attempting to succeed as a courtier. The son of a provincial businessman, he made a fortune out of farming, manufacturing and the money market, but in the process was involved in endless ugly scandals and lawsuits. On the other hand, he was driven by an uncontrollable belief in social reform. And he alone of the eighteenth-century Western writers knew how to carry that argument into the public place.

Two unforeseen catastrophes forced him to favour the positive side of his character. In 1726 he was thirty-two years old and imprisoned in the Bastille for the second time. The authorities offered him freedom if he would go into exile. He went to England for two and a half years and was thus exposed to the country where men think free and noble thoughts. In fact, he returned to France exaggerating the virtues of England as a way of encouraging change at home.