I have re-read John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards. But because I haven’t read it since it first came out in the early 90s, it was more like reading it for the first time.
For those who haven’t read it, Saul basically says that reason (rationality) has become un-moored from common sense, democracy, and purpose.
I think purpose is probably the core of the argument. Organizations, including government, parliaments, and so on, have become rational and forgotten the purpose of their existence.
Saul eviscerates the military—slow, ponderous, capable of winning only with overwhelming force, and usually not even then. Full of rational mediocrities and controlled by staff officers who squash any field officer capable of initiative or of winning battles without vast waste of men and material.
He eviscerates the arms trade–weapons sold for less than it costs to make them, non-capital goods that make up the largest manufacturing sector in the world, and completely irrational from the point-of-view of both the economy (guns being the paradigmatic drain on the economy) and from winning wars; selling weapons to everyone and their mother means your enemies know their weaknesses, something you should be trying to avoid.
He eviscerates the take-over of of cabinets and parliaments by the bureaucracy on one hand and the Prime Minister or President’s private advisors. “He who controls the briefing books controls the decisions,” and “…perhaps Ministers’ primary responsibility should be to decide on policy, not take prime responsibility for running a department they don’t and can’t run. That job is for bureaucrats.” (paraphrased).
He goes on to eviscerate economic management by bureaucrats, and the decline of capitalism, to note that every major improvement in human welfare (like, oh, sewage control) was opposed by the majority of owners. He eviscerates the confusion of actual capitalists with managers, rentiers, financiers, and landlords (despised by traditional capitalists).
On and on it rolls.
This is a fairly old book now. The examples are drawn from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. It is interesting that Saul states even then that the western world is in a concealed depression, and notes precisely when things went wrong (68-72).
It’s also somewhat infuriating. For a number of years, I found it difficult to read contemporary books on economics and politics because they would make me angry. I had echoes of that feeling reading Voltaire’s Bastards–I am, after all, old enough to remember, say, Reagan and what a disaster he was.
But I think the prime takeaway is really about purpose. Rationalization and reason do not provide purpose. They are tools to enact purposes decided other ways. When they become masters, they become about process. So we declare that corporations exist only to make a profit, which is deranged. We forget that armies exist to win wars (and deter wars from even happening), not to fumble around. We treat military officers as bureaucrats, which they cannot be if they are to win wars, because bureaucrats are shitty field officers (yes, yes, logistics, but those people should not be in charge).
Rationalization removes purpose. The economy exists to provide for the needs of people. Corporations were created to do things that increase the public good, making a profit is necessary but is not their purpose. Parliaments exists to debate policy, which they pretty much never do and cabinets are the prime policy making instrument, exactly because they are elected.
Saul’s evisceration of rational experts runs against the grain of our age, but is convincing. He notes how well rational bureaucracy did work, but notes how it has decayed and been corrupted. The “experts” have become corrupt, incompetent, or both. Yes, the economy has been fucked since the early 70s, and no, we haven’t fixed it. Incompetent? Corrupt?
Why not both?
This is a cry for purpose, for prudence, and for real democracy where elected officials (and not just two or three ministers, plus their staff) make actual decisions. It is a scream for a change in the role of ordinary citizens, for an end to secrecy, for treating citizens like adults (as opposed to infantalizing them).
It is an evisceration of the idea that reason by itself works. Reason is a tool, only one among many. It is not useful in all places and times, and it cannot provide purpose, ethics, or morality.
Reading this book made me angry in a very personal way, because I grew up and was educated by the remains of the last generation who believed in purpose: The organization had a job and that job was to do something. This extended even to mundane crap like insurance, the old timers believed in careful actuarial work and underwriting because they believed the company had a duty to be able to pay out benefits to people who were in trouble–someone whose breadwinner had died, who would be in poverty if the company failed.
Purpose. Government should see to it that its citizens are healthy, prosperous, and ethical. Militaries exist to win wars quickly and decisively. Parliaments are to debate what society should do. Bureaucracies exist to carry out those decisions. Capitalists? Their role is to produce more capital, which is not money, but real productive capacity.
Voltaire’s Bastards isn’t a short book, and while Saul is erudite, it isn’t a very pleasant book to read.
But it’s a book worth reading.
Seas of Promethium
I think Saul was being a bit coy in attributing it all to an overemphasis on reason per se. Much of this “babarous intrumentalism” is essentially a ploy to railroad the discourse away from questions of “should we” toward questions of “how should we”–or in more lawyerly terms, away from constitutional questions toward statutory ones.
Mark Twain’s old bette noire “whether the war be just, we are in it” applied to everything.
Synoia
It is difficult to look back and claim “things were better back then,” because one’s perspective is different, and perhaps tinged with cynicism or one is older and perhaps wiser.
I remember socialism in the ’60s in the UK. It was ‘what is” and when young one have no way to compare “what is” with “what could be.”
I can relate one very personal tale. The newspapers were full of comments about “bolshie workers” and “workers strife,” and strike were a regular occurrence. Never do I recall any article told from the worker point of view.
I went to University, worked summer jobs, most in construction with a large contingent of East Enders and Irish around London, and finally graduated. I believed and believe to this day, all the people I worked with worked hard, diligently, and were agreeable. I still had no view and no opinion of manager-worker relations.
As my first job after graduate, I worker at a computer bureau, learned programming, and was assigned to a high priority payroll system, the basis of a service the owning Bank (National Westminster or NatWest) was selling to its customers.
The system was incomplete, it was January, and our two person team task was tax reporting, which did not exist, and had to be completed by April 5th, because that was tax reporting day in the UK.
Machine time for testing was sparse, so we did some testing and coding in the week, and at the weekends worked from Friday Morning to Sunday night continuously.
A 40 Hour work week , followed by 48 hour work weekend.
At first we were paid 48 hours overtime. The were were told the Bank’s rule weere only 8 hours paid overtime in 24 hours, so we were paid for 24 hours overtime and accumulated 24 hours of vacation or comp time.
The next week we were told that comp time could only be take while the project was current, and our project ended March 31st. Effectively we were now working for 48 hours over the weekend and being paid for 24.
At that announcement, I had an epiphany. I wondered what management had done to the make the worker in the UK difficult and strike prone.
It was management who cause the industrial unrest, and the workers were reacting to management’s bad behavior, but the workers received all the blame.
I cannot look back at the period and satte with certainty that “Things Were better Then.” They were different – and I don’t believe “Tings Have Got Better,” but I do not have any measurement to indicate “Tings Have Got Worse.”
I can say with confidence that “Things Have Changed.”
I can also say, with confidence, that Attlee’s Government changed the health system in the UK for the better (instituted the NHS. Wilson’s Government, which acquired huge swaths of failing UK industry, appears to have done little or noting to reform management/labor relations.
Now to the point: John Ralston Saul may write well or may not, has a different perspective from myself, but I doubt that he uses and objective measures for his book.
Measurement is the key. For example: The UK NHS has better Infant Mortality and Longevity rates than the US’s health system, for about 50% of the US’ costs, and that is ignored by people in the US preaching “Private Industry Does It better.”
No measurement, no science, just warranted opinion without facts.
EmilianoZ
I would say the technocrats do have a purpose. That purpose is the welfare of the 1%.
nihil obstet
By the 70s, the right successfully relocated purpose from social goals to individual goals. If you pursue your individual goal, the invisible hand will guide the outcome to be the greatest freedom for all. As Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society; there are individual men and women, and there are families.” And as Galbraith said, “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
Meanwhile, enough people have come to believe in individualism only that they have forgotten group purposes.
Hairhead
Well, well, Ian, there’s a reason we agree on so much. I read “Voltaire’s Bastards” when it first came out and agreed with just about everything in it. And yes, it is an INFURIATING book.
It is no wonder that the US and other Western nations cannot seem to “do” anything anymore (eg – interstate road system, trip to the moon, establishment of Medicare in Canada), but merely spend all of their time reacting to problems caused by an economic system designed to create ever-larger piles of money controlled by ever-fewer people.
Whatever happened to the “greater good”?
Hugh
“Organizations, including government, parliaments, and so on, have become rational and forgotten the purpose of their existence.”
I think the absence of agency is important. It is not organizations, government, and parliaments that have forgotten their purpose, but the elites who run them who have. Also their forgetting is deliberate, self-serving, and self-enriching.
“Rationalization and reason do not provide purpose. They are tools to enact purposes decided other ways.”
This is exactly right. Our elites treat the economy as if it were the engines of the sun: autonomous, the result of natural, unchangeable processes over which we have little or no control, rather than a human construct whose purpose, as you say, is to provide for our needs as individuals and as a society.
A case can be made that things started going wrong around 1968. I have pointed out before that the income share of household income in the US of the bottom 80% peaked in 1968 at 57.4% (Top 20% = 42.6%) You can argue whether this was fair in that the average income of someone in the top 20% was a shade under three times the average income of someone in the bottom 80%. That’s another issue. The point is in 1968 the differential in the share of total household income between the bottom 80% and the top was +14.8%. Fastforward to 2014, the last year for which we have data, the income share of the bottom 80% has shrunk to 48.8% (Top 20% = 51.2%) or a -2.4% differential. That is over the course of the last 46 years there has been a 17.2% swing between top 20% / bottom 80% income shares, and someone in the top 20% on average makes a shade under 4 times what someone in the bottom 80% on average makes.
And this is only a partial picture because a lot of income of the .1% doesn’t get reported. Also this is income. It does not look at debt levels in the bottom 80% or accumulating and compounding wealth in the top 20%. These make the level of inequality much, much worse.
Antifa
As I read Voltaire’s Bastards again this week, all I could think of was the ultimate in pure reason — Artificial Intelligence, machines that run by rote algorithm, machines that learn by doing what we do until they can replace us at our jobs. Millions of us.
And I’m wondering if it will be an AI unit or a human that finally asks the simple question, “What is the purpose of doing this?”
If an acceptable answer is, “It’s what we do” or “It’s how we do things” that is not machine intelligence. That is not even intelligence. It is just machine.
EmilianoZ
Carroll Quigley also has some interesting things to say about rationality in “The evolution of civilizations”. It’s a short book, very general. He doesn’t go much into details so it’s sometimes hard to understand what he means. IIRC, he says something like: in the age of decline, the populace generally becomes irrational, but rationality can also be used to further confuse people (in the educated classes?). One example he gives from ancient history is the mathematical sects of the Pythagoreans. Unfortunately he doesn’t provide much details so I dont know what’s his beef with the Pythagoreans. I think he did say they were elitists and pro-oligarchs (Plato as well I think).
One important distinction Quigley makes is between the words “scientific” and “rational”. In everyday language they’re often used interchangeably, but there are fundamental differences. In the end, science has to describe reality. Rationality can be completely unmoored from reality. Rationality is just a method for logical and coherent speculation. Once you accept a set of premises (however ridiculous) you can have a rational discussion just about everything, even religion.
In our current times, the archetype of a discipline that is rational but unscientific is Economics. I wonder if Quigley would say that economics is an example of rationality used to confuse people. There is really a purpose. That purpose is the welfare of the 1%. But that purpose cannot be stated. It must be disguised as the rational theory of the Markets. There it becomes something totally impersonal, completely “natural”. Economics is just a giant fig leave with a thick patina of rationality.
I’ve often wondered about the technocrats: do they know what they’re really doing (serving the 1%)?. I think that deep down they do know. But they don’t care. Rationalizations provide them a fig leave to hide their greed not from themselves but from us.
Jill
I agree with EmilianoZ. The oligarchy has a purpose. It just has a bad purpose. If there was no purpose, their actions and the actions of their appointed minions would be a lot more random. The outcome of their decisions would not always go in the same direction. Yet their actions only tend towards one direction at all times.
There is a very good example of just such a phenomena described by Bruce Dixon in Black Agenda Report. He writes: “…The Democratic party platform is nothing but a list of promises, and while Democratic platform promises to one percent are generally honored, promises made to the 99% in Democratic party platforms are pretty much worthless.
Take the Democratic party platform of 1992, the year Bill Clinton was elected. It promised targeted jobs programs to reduce inner city unemployment, the building of affordable housing, funding of urban mass transit, measures to begin weaning the economy off fossil fuels. It promised a peace dividend, the investment of some of the former Cold War military budget into the civilian economy to create jobs and opportunities. It pledged new environmental protections and committed Democrats to rolling back carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2000. Every bit of this was garbage. On the other hand, the one percent were promised the end of welfare, so that millions would be thrown out onto the low wage labor market, and NAFTA. Those were among the promises that were kept.”
I do notice that meaning in general has been stripped out of everyday life. I don’t think that was accidental. Real meaning and having a good purpose expose the shallow and false replacements we have been given by our propagandizers. The more we fight for true meaning and living a good life, the less control the powerful can exert. (Not to mention that these are goods in themselves!)
Mark
I too read Saul’s book and had found it thought provoking to say the least. However all the talk of Courtiers and Courtesans left me somewhat dumbfounded later at the sight of Saul sitting on a velvet throne as the spouse of the Governor General of Canada in all the regal aplomb. I never had the same opinion of him and certainly would never read his book a second time.
Some Guy
A good summary Ian. My only irrelevant quibble would be that I did find it enjoyable to read, only that you couldn’t try to do too much at once.
One trend I find these days that ties in with Saul’s theme is the ubiquity of generic language. Hospitals become Health Centres, gyms become fitness centres, offices become workplaces etc. etc.. Always specificity, historical meaning and brevity are sacrificed for verbosity and empty generic terms.
Anything local, anything historic, anything specific must be flattened in the name of reason, and on it goes.
Senator-Elect
Wonderful review and great comments! I will have to read the book.
More of us need to ask ourselves, our bosses, our politicians what the point of our hard work, constant restructuring of organizations and pursuit of ECON 101 ideals is.
We have become too caught up in jigging and rejigging the process rather than producing better outcomes, whatever that takes. Here, economists come in for more criticism. They turn a debate about outcomes into a debate about process or mechanisms: we can’t touch the market or we won’t have optimal efficiency. Instead, we should tell them the society we want to see and they should give us the options for getting there. Like engineers, they should just respond to our desire to get there from here. But as it stands, they tell us that we are wrong to want to go there and that only one road is even possible.