The Doubter's Companion Read online

  When the time comes to retire from the functions of power, many collapse into a psychic crisis. They feel as if they have been ejected into a void. This is because society has not been rewarding them for their competence or their knowledge, but for their occupation of positions of power. Their very success has required a disembodied abasement of the individual. And when they leave power, the agreeable sense of purpose which it conveyed simply withers away.

  Of course, power must be wielded or there is no civilization. But in a society so devoted to power and run by hierarchies of expertise, the élites are unconsciously addicted to an abstract form of sadomasochism. This may explain why success so often translates into triumphalism and constant complaints about the incompetence of others. The underlying assumption of most civilizations, including our own, is the exact opposite. Success is supposed to produce a flowering of modesty and concern for others. See: CORPORATISM.

  ABELARD, PETER A twelfth-century pioneer of rational theological inquiry who laid the early foundations of SCHOLASTICISM and fell in love with a seventeen-year-old student. After a tempestuous love affair followed by a secret marriage, he suffered a neutralizing encounter with a knife wielded by her male relations.

  Abelard accepted the monastic life without good grace. However, in his increasingly bad-tempered dialectical teachings, he did not deal with the connection between his inquiry and his fate. See: LOYOLA and PENIS.

  ABSOLUTE Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exceptions of this statement and death, which may explain why political and economic theories are presented so seriously.

  Absolutism is a deadly serious business. If even a hair’s breadth of space is left around the edges of a theory, doubt may be able to squeeze through. The citizen may then begin to smile and wonder whether the intellectual justifications of power are really nonsense. Few within the expert élites see themselves as ideologues and yet they quite happily act as carriers of truth in whatever their field.

  Whether it reveals the dictatorship of the proletariat or the virtues of privatization, truth is ideology. Not their truths, our élites say. They are simply delivering the inevitable conclusions of facts rationally organized. Absolutism is the weakness of others. Our élites have the good fortune simply to be right. See: DOUBT, IDEOLOGY and SERIOUS.

  ACADEMIC CONSULTANTS The only place organized specifically for truth to be sought and understanding to be taught is the UNIVERSITY. In the late twentieth century some professors have reinterpreted the long-standing premise that since truth is a supreme value, it is therefore without price. If it’s so supreme, it must have a market value.

  Academics are the chief custodians of Western civilization’s memory and as such of its ethical framework. Academic independence was fought for over a thousand years, with the gradual spread of TENURE over the last century and a half constituting the final step in the protection of intellectual freedom.

  What does it mean, then, if a sizable portion of today’s academics—in particular the social scientists—sell their expertise to corporations and governments? What they have to sell, after all—their aura of independent expertise—has a real use and therefore a quantifiable value.

  When lawyers and lobbyists take up this kind of public activity it is monitored and licensed by government. Sometimes it is called influence peddling, sometimes lobbying. The social scientists escape these controls precisely because universities are thought of as independent. The question their commercial activity raises is whether a professor has the moral right to cash in on the independence of academia and on the value which society has assigned to the freedom of inquiry.

  Since the rise of the European universities early in the second millennium, there has been a gradual change in the stature of professors. At first they were priests or freelance men of knowledge whose income came directly from the students. Professors who didn’t teach what the students expected to learn were fired or chased through the streets. This had its disadvantages but kept the professors on their toes. Some, like the philosopher Giambattista Vico in Naples, did suffer in spite of their brilliance. He was a bad teacher. But Vico and his ideas nevertheless survived.

  As the power of learning grew, universities became places which those with power sought to control. Initially the churches assumed this task, so one of the central goals of the Enlightenment was to release the universities from religious control. The new democratic élites of the nineteenth century declared the universities to be the custodians of intellectual freedom. In reality this young political order financed the institutions just as the old one had and sought to impose its “standards.”

  Despite being edged with hypocrisy, the idea of academic independence was an important pillar of the new democratic nation state. Higher education gradually came to offer the basic training required by anyone who hoped to occupy a position with any power at all. In short, a university degree became a proof of membership in the ruling élite.

  With the decline of the influence of religion to an ever-narrower area—often no more than the places of worship—the whole domain of public training in ETHICS and morality was left unaccounted for. Much of that role was gradually conferred upon the universities, where it was taken over by independent thinkers and teachers. A university education became the true finishing school of the responsible citizen in a democracy.

  Most philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries earned little, expected little public respect, ran constantly on the edge of the law and were rarely employed in any regular manner. They would have looked upon the invention of the twentieth-century tenured professor as one of the great victories of the Enlightenment. They would also have been surprised to learn that an increasing number of them acted as if freedom of thought combined with secure employment and widespread respect was not enough. What the modern professors really wanted was more money. And they were willing to sacrifice all the rest in order to get it.

  In fairness, the initiative had been taken by the corrupters not the corruptees. It began seriously after the Second World War with politicians seeking out ever-more academic advisers. They weren’t paid much and they were exercising their own right to have political opinions. But as social and economic programming grew, with its inherent tendency to reduce the unlimited power of the large corporations, so those corporations began to mount a counter-attack.

  Their answer to the practical and ethical arguments being made in favour of a stable and fair society was to develop absolute truths related to the market-place. Very early on they identified the need to cultivate their own independent experts capable of delivering truth. They began funding “independent” foundations dedicated to learning. Independence and learning were intended here to mean the development of ideas that would bolster the position of the corporation. On the leading edge of this movement were the THINK TANKS which went on to produce bevies of authoritative studies and annual reports intended to legitimize higher oil prices, deregulation, lower taxes, the debt crisis or whatever was the current agenda of their private-sector funders.

  The final stage began in the 1970s when the social scientists began to notice a well-paid growth industry known as management consultancy. More and more, these academics began to think of themselves as consultants. And this was by no means limited to economists and professors of business administration.

  The corporations and their foundations were far too sophisticated to concentrate on such a narrow and direct approach. Their mandate was to redefine half a millennium of Western evolution by re-examining how citizens see themselves and their society. In order for economic revisionism to make sense, there had to be a new view of philosophy, history, sociology and culture.

  For a few years reform-minded governments competed against corporations in the race to purchase the aura of academic freedom. But most of the reform governments were gone by the early eighties and the spreading economic crisis limited the investment that public budgets could make. By then, the universities, the press and even the public seem
ed to have accepted without protest the new role of the professors.

  The ideal of academic freedom and independence has now been severely damaged. To undo the corrupt system in place may be as complex as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century battle to separate church and learning. There are some relatively simple problem areas. Should business administration be part of university education? Should a professor have the right to the ethical seal of approval of a university if he or she sells that aura in a separate business?

  Universities are now desperate for money and only too eager to prostitute themselves. Presidents and their boards accuse the departments, who do not bring in their share, of fleeing reality. But do they have the right to destroy an essential creation of modern civilization? Rectors might well answer that the public purse is starving them. And yet the worst of all possible approaches would be to go on pretending that academic consultants are the descendants of Peter Abelard at the Sorbonne, in the twelfth century, or Giambattista Vico in Naples, in the early eighteenth. See: TENURE and UNIVERSITY.

  ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE Housed in the most beautiful palace in Paris, the Academy, whose role it is to control language, has a particularly elegant cupola and internal staircase. The Perpetual Secretary occupies a wonderful apartment in the west wing, overlooking the Seine and the Louvre. The Academy also owns a large chateau and park in the Forêt de Senlis where Academicians go to relax.

  The task of the Academicians is to identify correct meaning and use, then put it in an official dictionary. This may force them to favour the truth and beauty of language over the pedestrian needs of communication. The female members of the Academy, for example, must be addressed as if they were male, because Académicien is a masculine word.

  The Academicians are self-perpetuating—that is, when one dies, they elect another—which may explain why they are called the Immortals. The chairs in the official meeting room upstairs are historic but uncomfortable. On being elected, members receive a sword after their own design. See: SCHOLASTICISM.

  ACAPULCO There are no sharks at Acapulco. The Mexican authorities are formal on this matter. If certain foreign tourists choose not to return home after their holidays, that is entirely their affair.

  Furthermore, the sharks are not attracted to the waters around Acapulco by the raw sewage the hotels recycle into the bay. Suggestions of this sort are merely proof of the anti-Mexican sentiment found among foreign intellectuals, who disguise their prejudices in self-serving principles by suggesting, for example, that Mexican journalists are regularly murdered for expressing unflattering political opinions. These individuals are not journalists. Upon investigation by the responsible judicial authorities, it is often discovered that they are money-lenders or homosexuals who have managed to get press-cards under false pretences, and have then been murdered by poverty-stricken widows, whom they have been exploiting, or by under-aged male prostitutes.

  These American intellectuals and their imitators in Canada are the same people who suggest that many Mexican workers live in cardboard shacks and that corruption is an integrated factor in the governmental system. This desire to maintain the Mexicans in a state of inferiority vis-à-vis the United States, by denigrating their accomplishments, is simply unacceptable, particularly when it is expressed with the do-gooding hypocrisy of the American élites who are themselves indifferent to the suffering of their own aboriginal peoples. See: FACTORIES.

  ACCEPTANCE SPEECH The triumph of banality over ego. See: AWARD SHOW.

  AD HOMINEM The obverse of HERO worship. Both indicate an unwillingness to deal with content.

  Public figures have complained for decades about the growing tendency to judge them by violent personal attacks, often aimed at their private lives. But as public actors have chosen to assume Heroic guises—whether majestic, saintlike, martyred, romantic or touching—so those they attempt to seduce have reacted with personalized integral vilification.

  There is nothing new about such ad hominem attacks. They were widely used for political purposes in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If public figures paid a little more attention to history, they would know that their predecessors led a much rougher life. Today they are protected by concentrated media ownership, the obsession of the large professional élites with respectable public behaviour and, in most countries, overly strict libel laws. Given that ours is a management-oriented society, we give far too much importance to the smoothness of public discourse and fear serious open verbal conflict.

  Contemporary ad hominem resembles that of an earlier period—the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was a society of courtiers constantly in pursuit of meaningless power. Court life was measured by personal details—orgasms, medals, gloves, cleavages and titles. Ad hominem fed the endless appetite for gossip which filled the salons and occupied the days of those caught up in the complex structures of the state. These were powerless people living by irrelevant criticisms in the shadow of false human gods—the absolute monarchs. That such detached ad hominem attacks have returned with a vengeance in the late twentieth century suggests that we have also returned to the courtier-based society of the great palaces, which have been transformed into the great professions and the great organizations of the public and private sectors.

  ADVERTISING A once-important word now used in ever-narrower circumstances because it is in such direct contradiction with its traditional meaning.

  Samuel Johnson said to advertise was “to inform another; to give intelligence.” Advertising was thus linked with the moral value given to knowledge. This no longer being the case, the professionals have taken to using “public relations” where they once used advertising. This phrase suggests a self-interested negotiation rather than communication. See: BAD PEOPLE and CONSUMPTION.

  AGRICULTURE See:IRRADIATION.

  AIR-CONDITIONING An efficient and widely used method for spreading disease.

  One of the keys to the revolution in architecture and planning which struck Western cities after the Second World War was the gradual realization by engineers and architects that systems of forced air could heat and cool large numbers of people in a cost-effective manner.

  This removed one of the major restrictions on the size of buildings. If windows needn’t be opened, then neither density nor height had to be limited. Once heated or cooled, the air could be endlessly recycled through buildings.

  This revolution was soon being applied in the air. Before the arrival of the Jumbo Jet, most commercial planes expelled air continually and took in fresh air, which then had to be brought to cabin temperature. With the Jumbo, fuel savings were chosen over air quality. Passengers, from first-class to steerage and smoking to non-smoking, began travelling across the Atlantic in a classless fug. Fifty per cent of the air was recycled. After a few hours in the plane, passengers began to feel as if they were breathing dead air. It was as if each airplane contained a single pair of lungs shared among three to four hundred bodies.

  By the early 1980s, standard frequent-flyer rhetoric referred to air travel as exhausting. People began to notice that working in large office towers was far more draining than in buildings where windows could be opened. Then a dramatic incident focused attention. A group of old American veterans staying in a hotel to attend a convention began to die, as if struck by a plague. It was explained that legionnaires’ disease was the result not of recycled air but of defective recycling.

  There were more common experiences which weren’t fatal. People began to expect that following one flight out of every two or three they would fall sick. Sometimes they merely caught a cold; increasingly it was a virulent strain of what was called the flu. But these flus could bring on vomiting, dangerous temperatures and exhaustion. They often killed the elderly or fragile. In fact, they seemed to come in international waves which changed character each season. Every few months there would be a mutation in the type of virulence. The planes made these flu strains instantly international. And the office towers then spread them around in
each city. What passengers didn’t know was that some airlines were cutting back further on the fresh air quota in order to save money in the hard times brought on by DEREGULATION and the DEPRESSION.

  Modern hospitals were also being built with these air-flow systems and it soon became common knowledge that hospitals were places in which you caught things. The hard-learned medical lessons of physical isolation clarified in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seemed to have been forgotten.

  Much of modern medicine is based upon controlling diseases by controlling movements. Now there were new and unexpected waves of viral diseases. Small epidemics in fact. One year it would be viral pneumonia. The next there would be a line of executives struck by ill-defined symptoms which exhausted them, sometimes for several years.

  Air-conditioning also became a clear example of the inflexibility of modern industry and of technocratic structures generally. Economics seemed to be painfully linear. Every hour of work lost to a company through sickness is also money lost. It is common during the winter in places with moderate climates to find that 20 to 30 per cent of office workers are home sick. There seemed to be no room for applied thought which used practical observation in order to re-evaluate earlier policies.

  This absurd rigidity is reminiscent of the old European colonial armies in the tropics. Well into the twentieth century British soldiers in India wore heavy clothing to protect them from the sun. In addition, a flat metal cross wrapped in cloth was placed beneath their jacket. This cross ran down the spine and over the shoulders. It was meant to stop the rays. Regiments functioned with permanently elevated levels of soldiers in hospital suffering from heat prostration. Attempts to bring in light clothing were resisted by most of the General Staff, who argued that the army would be decimated by the sun. When the change was at last introduced, and the hospital beds emptied, the Staff was amazed.