The Doubter's Companion
ALSO BY JOHN RALSTON SAUL
Nonfiction
Voltaire’s Bastards:
The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
Fiction
The Birds of Prey
Baraka
The Next Best Thing
The Paradise Eater
The DOUBTER’S COMPANION
A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense
JOHN RALSTON SAUL
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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First published 1994
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © John Ralston Saul
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Printed and bound in Canada on acid free paper
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Saul, John Ralston, 1947-
The doubter’s companion: a dictionary of aggressive common sense
ISBN 0-670-85536-7
1. English language - Glossaries, vocabularies, etc.
2. English language - Etymology - Dictionaries.
3. English language - Philosophy. I. Title.
PE1680.S38 1994 423'.1 C94-931855-8
For
Adrienne
Hoc esse salsum putas?
Catullus
THE GRAIL OF BALANCE
Our civilization is unable to do what individuals cannot say. And individuals are unable to say what they cannot think. Even thought can only advance as fast as the unknown can be stated through conscious organized language, an apparently self-defeating limitation.
The power of dictionaries and encyclopaedias is thus enormous. But what kind of power? The very possibility of it invites positive or negative use. A dictionary can as easily be a liberating force as one of control.
In the humanist view, the alphabet can be a tool for examining society; the dictionary a series of questions, an enquiry into meaning, a weapon against received wisdom and therefore against the assumptions of established power. In other words, the dictionary offers an organized Socratic approach.
The rational method is quite different. The dictionary is abruptly transformed into a dispensary of truth; that is, into an instrument which limits meaning by defining language. This bible becomes a tool for controlling communications because it directs what people can think. In other words, it becomes the voice of Platonic élitism.
Humanism versus definition. Balance versus structure. Doubt versus ideology. Language as a means of communication versus language as a tool for advancing the interests of groups.
This power of mere words and sentences may be particular to the West. Other civilizations are driven more by the image or by metaphysics. These lead them to treat the relationship between the oral and the written as secondary. But in the West, almost everything we need to know about the state of our society can be extracted from the relative power of oral versus written language.
The heavier the hand of the written, the more likely it is that language will have a deadened, predictable quality about it, justified by an obscure scholasticism. The whole thing then falls easily into the service of ideology and superstition. In societies such as these—such as ours—definition becomes an attempt to close doors by answering questions.
As for oral language, it is periodically unleashed as the only force capable of freeing society from the strangling effects of the written and the ideological. Like a burst of wind it opens the shuttered windows of scholasticism, blows out the dust of received wisdom and, in the phrase of Stéphane Mallarmé, purifies the language of the tribe. In those periods, dictionaries and encyclopaedias come into their own as aggressive, questioning tools which embrace doubt and consideration.
The dichotomy between the humanist and the rational is simple. How are citizens to enter into public debate if the concepts which define our society and decide the manner in which we are governed are open neither to understanding nor to questioning? If this is impossible or even difficult, then society comes to a standstill. If this immobility is prolonged, the results are catastrophic.
The way out for the citizenry is always the same. Their language—our language—must be reclaimed from the structures of conventional wisdom and expertise. Populations know from experience that that change can only come through what will seem at first to be outrageous statements, provocation and a stubborn refusal to accept the smooth, calm, controlling formulae of conventional wisdom.
The ideologies of this century have prospered through the exploitation of what amounts to modern superstitions, each of which is justified by closely argued definitions divorced from reality. Even the most horrifying of superstitious acts—the Holocaust—was the product of decades of written, intellectual justification, which the rest of society failed to destroy as an expressible option by passively allowing the arguments to stand.
Our current ideologies revolve around economic determinism. They use expert argument to turn almost any form of injustice into an inevitability. This infection of the citizenry with passivity is, in fact, what we used to call superstition. Whatever is defined as true we feel obliged to accept as inevitable. Knowledge, which we believed would free us, has somehow become the instrument of our imprisonment. How can a dictionary do other than attack such mystification?
Erasmus was perhaps the first to try to kill the modern scholastic system by questioning the power of written truths. With Adagio (1508—a collection of three thousand proverbs from classical writers) and In Praise of Folly (1509—a satire on scholasticism), he attacked with both enumeration and comedy. His apparent aim was to rediscover the simplicity of early Christianity. But beyond that he was searching for the humanist equilibrium.
The religious wars—with their roar of deftly argued hatred and violence—seemed to overwhelm his message. But Erasmus had sent out a long-term signal. He had declared himself in favour of the oral approach to language, communication and understanding. Thus Europe’s leading intellectual rejected the ideologies, both old and new.
The next major step nevertheless contradicted Erasmus. It continued in the unfortunate direction of the new rational and national powers unleashed more or less during the wars of religion. Cardinal Richelieu hired Claude Favre de Vangelas to organize the first dictionary of the Académie Française (1694—Dictionnaire de la langue française). Favre saw “elevated usage as the proper legislator of language.”1 He wanted to establish a “new High Mode” to replace Latin. The aim was to create a dictionary of absolute authority and so to fix French in place, like an exotic butterfly pinned in a display case, at a high level of politically correct rhetoric.
He was apparently unaware of Chancelier François Olivier’s maxim “The higher the monkey climbs, the more he shows his ass.”2 Indeed, each time French has attained its natural greatness over the last three centuries, it has done so by rejecting “elevated usage” in favour of clear, flexible language inspired by a burst of oral genius.
I
n any case, the great humanist purification was about to begin. Ephrin Chambers’s two-volume Cyclopaedia or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences appeared in 1728. The claims he made for his work were modest—to provide “an explication of the terms and an account of the things signified therein.” Explanation and account. He did not pretend to define truth.
Samuel Johnson began with the intent of imitating Favre de Vangelas. By nature he believed that “all change is of itself evil.” But by 1755, when his own dictionary was published, he had realized that language was either alive and uncontrollable or controlled and therefore dead.
…Academies have been instituted to guard
the avenues of…language, to retain fugitives,
and to repulse intruders; but their vigilance
and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds
are too volatile and subtle for legal restraints;
to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind,
are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling
to measure its desires by its strengths.3
Then came the great innovation. Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie appeared in seventeen volumes between 1751 and 1766.4 For the first time, an alphabetical analysis of civilization looked, not backwards but forward through innovative social ideas.5 It was a tool for change and its publication was therefore dogged by arrests and censorship. Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique, which appeared in varying forms over the same period, was even more consciously designed as a weapon of portable and flexible linguistic guerilla warfare.6 By the early twentieth century, the multi-volumed Larousse encyclopaedia was describing Diderot’s as an instrument of war.
But why war? And against what? Against a language which did not serve its civilization. A language which did not communicate. What the attack led by Voltaire and Diderot demonstrated was that the large and elegant beast of eighteenth-century society was an over-dressed and overly made-up sick animal.
The last steps in this opening up of communications and thought came with the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1718-71) and Noah Webster’s two-volume dictionary in 1828.7 Then the settling-in stage began. This was quickly succeeded by a mania for massive tomes filled with dry and sectarian definitions turned towards the past. These were in the image of a successful, self-satisfied civilization.
Flaubert poked fun at it with his little Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues (1880),8 as did Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).9 But they were prodding an unmovable and increasingly unconscious animal, slumbering in comfortable self-confidence. In the twentieth century, the tools of debate and change of the eighteenth century have become scholastic monuments to truth. Since dictionaries now define not only meaning, but decide whether words really exist, people argue over which should be included. And they turn to their Oxford or their Webster’s not to challenge themselves but to be reassured.
Today our civilization is not slumbering in unconscious self-confidence. Rather it resembles the wounded and confused animal of the eighteenth century. We are again the prisoners of scholastic rhetoric, which has blocked useful public communications by dividing our language up into thousands of closed specialist dialects. The result is the disappearance of almost any public language which could have a real impact on structures and actions. Instead we have an illusion of unlimited oral communications which are, in practical terms, a vast and murmuring silence.
Our élites interpret this situation as a confirmation of their indispensability. The citizenry, on the other hand, seem to have taken their distances from the existing structure and its languages. They react to the waves of expert truth which continue to wash over them with a sort of mute indifference.
An uninvolved outsider might interpret this as the first stages of a purification rite. Indifference is often the manner behind which humans consider change.
Given our history, it should be possible to decipher our intent. We are trying to think our way out of a linguistic prison. This means we need to create new language and new interpretations, which can only be accomplished by re-establishing the equilibrium between the oral and the written.
This is a situation in which dictionaries should again be filled with doubt, questioning and considerations. They can then be used as practical weapons of change.
Note: Words which are highlighted within the text of a definition are themselves to be found as entries.
The
DOUBTER’S
COMPANION
A
A A versus the. Indefinite versus definite. A suggestion that there is room for doubt, questioning, consideration. That an inclusive approach may be more interesting than the exclusive. That dogma or ideology are about control not truth.
In formal logic, however, A is identified as a universal affirmative. A asserts. The Sophists asserted rhetoric. Aristotle asserted with genius. Using Aristotle’s logic, Thomas Aquinas asserted on behalf of organized Christianity. On his heels, herds of scholastics—masters of mediaeval academic obscurity—set out to capture language for their own purposes.
Then the annoying thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tickled and amused, cut and thrust, and above all found ways to break through the obscurity in order to communicate. They wrote encyclopaedias and dictionaries which undermined the idea of the definite—that is, of the “definition.” But their suggestion of an indefinite and thus open language, full of possibilities, was quickly undercut by the formal logic of Kant and Hegel. With them came the assertions of the various ideologues of left and right, each with their own perfect logic. Finally, in the twentieth century, the mediaeval scholastics returned in modern dress. They invested their old philosophical domains and created new ones under the heading of social science. Empires of affirmation were created, each with a language so closed as to constitute a dialect, each bearing its own hermetic truths. Interestingly enough, the Romans, when voting, used the letter A to signify dissent. A for antiquo, I oppose. I object. A to refuse an assertion. This negative sits quite happily with alpha, as the beginning of the Greek alphabet. The act of opening. The logicians and the scholastics seem to have mistaken A for omega, the last letter, closure, the end. See: THE.
A BIG MAC The communion wafer of consumption. Not really food but the promise of food. Whatever it tastes like, whatever it is made of, once it touches lips A Big Mac is transubstantiated into the mythological hamburger.
It is, with Perrier, one of the sacred objects of the leading philosophical school of the late-twentieth century—public relations. Cynics often unjustly suggest that this school favours superficial appearances over content. Had this been the case, PR would have failed. Most people, after all, can easily recognize the difference between appearances and reality.
A Big Mac, for example, is not big. It doesn’t taste of much. It isn’t good for you. And it seems sweet. Why does it seem sweet if, as the company says, it isn’t laced with sugar?
What the philosophy of PR proposes is theoretical content (such as sex appeal, fun, individualism, sophistication, the rejection of sophistication) in the place of actual content (banal carbonated water and a mediocre hamburger). This is modern metaphysics.
Because public relations are built on illusion, they tend to eliminate choice. This is an important characteristic of contemporary capitalism. A Big Mac, like so many creations of PR, is a symbol of passive conformity. As Mac McDonald put it: “If you gave people a choice, there would be chaos.”1 See: MCDONALD, RONALD and CANNIBALISM.
À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU A work À of genius written in bed. It opens with the narrator tucked between his sheets. It is rarely read for any length of time on a mattress.
It is also rarely read, but is often talked about and has had a major impact on many people who haven’t read it, if only because of the strain of waiting for Marcel Proust to be mentioned in conversation, which can happen as many as three times in a year. The educated person may then be required to make a comment on what they have only read about.
AARON The brother of Moses. He was instructed, along with the heads of the other eleven houses of Israel, to hand over his rod. These were placed in the tabernacle. The next day Aaron’s had budded, flowered and produced almonds, which won him the position of first head priest and the perpetual privilege of priesthood for the House of Levi.
This is neither the first nor the only example of control over the miraculous—that is, the unexplained or the secret—giving power. After all, the single word “yes” from the Delphic Oracle, when asked whether Socrates was the wisest living man, convinced the philosopher of his own ignorance and set him off on the quest for truth through questioning which in turn led to his execution.
But with Aaron the concept of power through secrecy was officially integrated into the Western system. Today’s experts simply conform to this tradition. See: GANG OF FIVE.
ABASEMENT In a society of courtiers or corporatists, the question is not whether to abase or to be abased, but whether a favourable balance can be struck between the two.
Simple folk may have some difficulty mastering the skills involved, but the sophisticated understand innately how the pleasure of abasing others can be heightened by being abased themselves.
The illusion among the most skilled is that they can achieve ultimate pleasure through a type of ambition or drive, which they call competence. This causes them to rise higher and so to win ever-greater power. But what is the value of this status in a highly structured society devoid of any particular purpose except the right, for a limited time, to give more orders than are received? Courtiers used to scurry around palace corridors with much the same illusion of importance.