The Doubter's Companion Page 11

  This recrudescence of primitive mythology involves a modernization of the forces before which we must bow in submission. The gods and destiny have transformed themselves into the forces of specialist expertise and the marketplace. However it describes itself, the Homeric dictatorship is back in place.

  Language, argument, conscious choice—all fundamentals of a functioning democracy—are thus reduced to mere distractions. The anger, confusion, frustration which citizens feel today arises from the sense that their real attributes have evaporated, and that they live in a society where they are rewarded principally for their cooperation, which is to say…passivity.

  DIALECTS Formerly variations in language produced by geographical isolation, dialects are now the variations encouraged by specialists to prevent non-specialists access to their professional territory.

  For those who belong to these professional guilds or corporations, not being understood is one of their few individual powers. The rules of professionalism—often spelt out in their contracts of employment—prevent them from speaking freely. What is the one subject on which a nuclear engineer cannot be frank in public? Nuclear engineering. Thus experts are silenced in the area where they in particular have something to offer the community.

  They compensate by reconstructing their castrated individualism around the power of not communicating. The power of retention. Wilful obscurity does little for public debate. It creates a fear of outsiders who try to understand and an acceptance of ignorance in areas outside of their own dialect. If you don’t want to be interfered with, you mustn’t interfere with others. The insiders, as Vaclav Havel puts it, end up characterizing “every attempt at open criticism as naked terrorism.”3

  They would defend themselves by arguing that the explosion of knowledge has made areas of specialization too complicated for public language. But none of us really wants to know where to put the bolts on a nuclear reactor. And we don’t need to know.

  Specialist language can be dealt with in two ways. It can roll gradually, in a process of honest popularization, from the inevitable complications of the expert towards general communications. The citizens are then free to penetrate as far down the road of verbal specialization as they care to. Or the specialists can establish their dialect as a general barrier—a rite of passage—and so reduce public language to a cacophony of distracting information and opinion, none of which is related to the use of practical power.

  Isolated in these dialects, the experts cut themselves off from the collective imagination, which is what feeds each domain with ideas and energy. Like a small provincial aristocracy cut off from the metropolis by its own standards of propriety, they are ultimately victims of inbreeding. See: ORAL LANGUAGE.

  DICTATORSHIP OF VOCABULARY The moment a word or phrase begins to rise in public value, a variety of interest groups seek either to destroy its reputation or, more often, to co-opt it. In this latter case they don’t necessarily adopt the meaning of the word or phrase. They simply want control of it in order to apply a different meaning that suits their own purposes.

  Words thus are not free. They have a value. More than any commercial product they are subject to the violent competition of the emotional, intellectual and political market-place.

  Moral and ideological crusades fuel this desire for control over words. They are kidnapped for the cause and strung up like flags. Others then feel obliged to use them in order to indicate that they are in tune with the times. DEREGULATION. EFFICIENCY. FREE TRADE. GLOBAL ECONOMY. Their meaning really doesn’t matter. The important thing is not to be caught without them. And then, like transubstantiation and the dictatorship of the proletariat, their day passes, the market in their use collapses and the pressure to capture a new vocabulary reasserts itself.

  DICTIONARY Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order.

  The social stability that has settled over the West in the last half-century tempts those who define language to confuse their powers of analysis with a power to declare truth. In the disguise of description they offer prescription. This is done in a dissected, dispassionate manner as if simply reporting on use.

  Serious dictionaries give a selection of the successive true meanings of each word over the centuries. Some seem to forget definitions which they themselves have provided in earlier editions. Others give a fairly thorough selection of historic examples, but their choices contain attitudes.

  Is it true, as almost every twentieth-century dictionary asserts, that TRUTH is “consistent with” or “conformity to” or “in accordance with fact or reality”?4 Or is this an ideological position? If it is true, then how are we to explain the ability of facts to produce several truths on the same subject and the inability of some or all of these truths to conform with reality as people see it? What then is the relationship between facts and truth or facts and reality?

  Dictionaries legitimize the process which has already half persuaded citizens that language does not belong to them because it does not reflect what they see or think. Languages which do not provide the forms of meaning needed by the populace are on the road to becoming anthropological remains.

  This is not a DECONSTRUCTIONIST exercise. There is no linguistic conspiracy. Nor is language always a reflection of special interests. Nor must it be an embodiment of whatever ideology is temporarily on top. To the contrary. There are great volcanoes of linguistic energy in any society which has not become moribund. They are constantly exploding—often through ORAL LANGUAGE—in order to shatter or readjust the established order of received wisdom. If a language isn’t dead it must be an argument.

  Earlier dictionaries were passionate arguments about truth. Chambers, Diderot, Johnson and Voltaire weren’t certain they were right. But they were certain that the church scholastics who had preceded them were wrong. As the twentieth century moves towards its end, there are fewer and fewer people who believe that facts add up to truth. This means that there are fewer and fewer people who simply accept received wisdom. In that sense, our era increasingly resembles the eighteenth century. It is therefore quite natural that dictionaries should again become arenas of debate.

  DIRECT DEMOCRACY An appealing idea which has been unworkable for more than two thousand years. This makes it a favourite with political groups whose basic instincts are anti-democratic.

  Twenty-five hundred years ago in the Athenian agora and ekklesia every citizen could speak and vote on every question. This didn’t include women or slaves, but compared to any other civilization of that or later times right up to the modern era, this was the most open and participating of societies. And Athenian democracy did work. It worked better than its competitors and inspired what has come to be known as Western civilization. However, there were only 40,000 voters, 5,000 to 6,000 of whom took part regularly.

  The Athenian model could still work—in smaller towns, for example, or in specific areas such as school boards—if people were willing to commit the equivalent time and energy. This kind of PARTICIPATION would mean making politics as important in their lives as family and careers and far more important than private pleasures.

  Those who promote direct democracy talk a lot about small towns, but are not really interested in them. What they are fascinated by is the mythological theme of the small town. They like the big picture, where the undercurrent of discontent includes millions of people. They like big themes—race, language, freedom, security, debt, efficiency, individualism. These emotion-laden abstractions are almost impervious to sensible public discussion. They can be activated through the exploitation of pain. History, after all, inflicts emotional wounds on us all. The proponents of direct democracy scratch away at these in order to increase the sense that a personal wrong has been done. If these wounds can be made to bleed profusely enough, the sensible, practical nature of the population will be destabilized.

  Over the last half-century the direct democracy argument has come from an increasingly strange right wing which somehow manages to combine a romanticized version
of local nationalism with practical support for NEO-CONSERVATIVE economic policies. In other words, their language evokes a small, naturally unified group, while their policies assume that the ugliest sort of competition will hold sway and therefore be free to sweep away that group’s interests. The contradictions are so flagrant that cause and effect are lost in the confusion.

  The new Right claims the citizen is being excluded from public affairs. They are right. However, instead of coming to terms with the real causes of this exclusion, they exploit it through false populism. They condemn the slow mechanisms of public debate in large complex societies. This process of serious deliberation can’t help but be awkward and filled with doubt, lost time and errors. Yet, this inefficiency can transform itself into an expression of the public interest.

  The false populists will seize upon any moment of failure as if it were a breakdown of representative democracy. They seek to hijack it through more direct mechanisms which, because they eliminate consideration and indirection, are fundamentally judgemental and authoritarian. What they seek are more easily controllable structures.

  The REFERENDUM has always been one of their favourite tools. The complexities of the real world, long-term practical evolutions and working relationships are transformed abruptly into an abstract clarity involving a yes or a no. Technology has since added dozens of new techniques. The old Heroic rallies have grown, with the development of electronic communications, into advertising or propaganda; that is, a one-way illusion of debate. Electronic town hall meetings have been created to simulate direct democracy through televised debates with “representative” audiences who ask “populist” questions. New technology makes direct votes on endless subjects possible. We are at the beginning of a sustained push by authoritarian movements in favour of these systems. As with referenda, they make real debate almost impossible, but facilitate large emotional swings of the sort that demagogues are best at creating.

  The old-fashioned demagogues have been given a new lease on life by their marriage to technology. What they share with this communications technology is a devotion to the linear. Questions are asked, then answered. Problems are posed, then solved. And when they are not answered or solved, the conclusion is that the system has failed.

  Direct democracy seems to push the citizen forward by emphasizing the importance of casting a ballot. Of course the vote is essential to the democratic process, but it is not the purpose. Consideration, reflection, doubt and debate were the primary purpose of the Athenian agora and ekklesia, as of representative assemblies over the last few centuries. These four processes are the body of the democratic sentence. The vote is merely the punctuation. The body of the sentence, if properly expressed, makes it almost inevitable that sometimes there will be an uncertain question mark, a careful period or sometimes a determined exclamation. Without the body, these signals are clear and even exciting, but meaningless. Direct democracy is all punctuation, but denies functioning language. See: DOUBT, ELECTORS OF BRISTOL and IMAGE.

  DIVORCE The deconstruction of SEX and PROPERTY.

  Since the unification of these two non sequiturs through marriage deforms reality, separating them again several years later can’t help but be as unpleasant as any other part of the DECONSTRUCTIONIST movement. The mysteriously recurrent idea that divorce will convert contractual enemies into natural friends belongs to the fantasy genre of fiction. See: ORGASM.

  DOUBT The only human activity capable of controlling the use of power in a positive way. Doubt is central to understanding.

  The ELITEs of organized societies define leadership as knowing what to do. The citizenry are not so certain. Their response is to doubt, consider and deliberate. That is, to question, contemplate and weigh carefully.

  Most human activities are divided into three stages. The act of doubting is the second and is the only one which requires the conscious application of our intelligence.

  The first stage consists of the reality by which we are faced. This is always a confusing mixture of situations out of our control, attitudes clouded by received wisdom and a variety of cure-all solutions. The third stage is what we call decision-making. In a rational society this is supposed to be the result of having a solution produced by the correct answer. Decision-making is, in fact, an overrated business, rarely more than mechanistic. It, in turn, is followed by a minor, passive business—the management of the decision taken.

  Given our obsessions with LEADERSHIP and right ANSWERS and our fear of doubt, we have been slipping into treating this managerial stage as if it were of primary importance.

  Doubt is thus the space between reality and the application of an idea. It ought to be given over to the weighing of experience, intuition, creativity, ethics, common sense, reason and, of course, knowledge, in balanced consideration of what is to be done. The longer this stage lasts the more we take advantage of our intelligence.

  Perhaps this is why élites move so quickly to limit doubt and consideration. Those who gain power almost automatically seek to leap from reality to solution, from abstraction to application, from ideology to methodology. This is as true of contemporary rational society as it was of those dominated by religion or monarchies. Deliberation is mocked as weakness. Consideration is rushed through, if possible eliminated. The effect is to reduce the intelligence of the citizenry to received wisdom, unconscious or secretive procedures and mechanistic actions.

  Healthy democracies embrace doubt as a leisurely pleasure, and so prosper. Sick democracies are obsessed by answers and management and so lose their reason for existence. But, above all, doubt is the only activity which actively makes use of the human particularity. See: ERROR and HUMANISM.

  DUAL USE Rhetoric for the 1990s invented by the armament’s technocracy to replace TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS.

  Both phrases are designed to persuade non-specialists that arms production is an inherent part of the civil economy, which it isn’t. Although the purpose of both is identical, each is based upon a different geometric model.

  TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICSshould be seen as an equilateral triangle in which concentrated, purposeful military spending spreads out like a waterfall, to provide financing and innovation across the broad base of the civil economy. Dualuse economics, on the other hand, turns the equilateral triangle on its side, first one way, then the other. The result is that the purposeful spending of the civil economy flows like a powerful river into the military and the purposeful spending of the military like a river into the civil.

  In more sex-oriented conversations the term dual use can be replaced by a second key new rhetorical phrase—“crossfertilization.”

  “Dual use,” as John Polanyi, the Nobel chemist puts it, “is no use at all.”5 It is bad economics and bad strategy. If the direction of civil production is limited by military needs it is stymied. If the nature of armaments is limited by “market requirements,” then the basic purpose of arms and armies—to protect and to win—is weakened.

  However, the purpose of dual use is, as a close adviser to the American secretary of defense puts it, to “…move decisively towards a fully integrated industrial base to meet future U.S. economic and national and security requirements.”6 This is to include the total integration of civil and military R and D in order to produce “generic, dual-use technologies that have the potential to support both commercial and military requirements.” Military controls and standards are to be removed from arms production and replaced by the tension of the market-place. If the economic ideas being put forward here bear no relationship to reality, the strategic concepts are even more farfetched. The intent is “…to promote an arms acquisition culture that is compatible with the demands of the commercial market-place.” Wouldn’t they be more useful if they were compatible with the demands of the battlefield?

  In late 1993, early 1994, the term “dual use” abruptly appeared on the lips of every armaments expert in Germany, France, England, Russia and the United States.7 All declared that this was the solution to both t
he economic crisis and tighter military budgets. The simple fact of who is using it makes this anonymous little phrase one of the most important economic concepts of the decade. It doesn’t seem to matter that this is exactly the same policy that has provoked inflation, government debt, economic stagnation and unfocused over-arming for the last three decades under the name of TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS.

  E

  ECONOMETRICS A seductive combination of facts and faith, it is not so much a sub-category of economics as a schismatic sect.

  Economics sprouted from the same intellectual roots as WEATHER FORECASTING—rarely accurate but devoid of memory, thus cheerful about being wrong. When economists begin to confuse the well-being of humans with the proving of theories (for example, the market-place is always right or private enterprise is evil), they may actually have become a destructive force resembling maddened weathermen, who call upon the population to fight their way through a hurricane in order to reach the eye of calm at the centre.

  This manic phenomenon can be identified by the rise of untempered OPTIMISM and pessimism and is characterized by the repetition of religious formulae. Thus “the debt must be repaid” or “the recession is over” will be chanted in the way priests once repeated “the devil must be defeated” or “Christ is risen,” by which they meant “You also will rise from the dead.”

  There are many intelligent economists who, when faced by the real social needs of real people in real societies, attempt to be both practical and imaginative. The importance of imagination is that while the people and their needs are real, economics is created with illusions, which for the purposes of daily life must be treated as real. This is why large theories are so dangerous. They mistake conventional illusions for reality and so treat the people and their societies as abstractions.

  Unfortunately the practical and imaginative economists have been increasingly frustrated by the rise of econometrics, the premise of which is that society can be reduced to the elements of accountancy. And since numbers are the face of god, it follows that all will be well.