The Doubter's Companion Page 4

  The Reagan/Bush partnership took this illusion a step further and turned the arms “business” into a make-work program. Around the world more people followed suit. Arms were soon the single most important element in international industrial trade—some $900 billion per year. Research and Development (R and D) everywhere came to be dominated by military imperatives.

  The third and current phase began with the fall of the Soviet Bloc. Something called the PEACE DIVIDEND raised its head briefly only to evaporate. Governments began to act as if the principal reason for building weapons was to save jobs.

  Early in 1994 the most important American advocate of a new policy was nominated as Secretary of Defense. William Perry, a quiet technocrat, became the new-model McNamara. The ideas advancing behind him are presented in such an inoffensive, number-crunching way that few people have noticed them. This third stage involves total integration of the civil and military economies under a concept called DUAL USE, which subjects defence needs to market forces.

  We are distracted from this by various international disarmament successes which amount to little more than a yearend clear-out in a cosmetics store. The old lipstick is swept from the shelves into the garbage or is sold off at knockdown prices in provincial markets. This makes room for the new consumer models.

  The end result of our three-step, three-decade evolution has been the inversion of the meaning of the word armaments. What for thousands of years was a non-productive necessity of warfare has been dressed up as a productive necessity of both job creation and technological innovation. Where the public ownership of arsenals had once given some guarantee that weaponry would relate to defence and attack, the privatization of production puts the requirements of national protection on the back burner. In other words, the only way to reduce expenditures while ensuring the production of the right quantity of the right weapons without international proliferation would be to reverse the current policy: establish a monopoly of state production and openly assume the costs of defence.

  ARMPITS See: REALITY.

  ASPEN INSTITUTE A supermarket of conventional wisdom for middle-level executives.

  Corporate life, particularly for those not on the fast track, has all the bureaucratic pitfalls of directionless boredom. To distract these confused but loyal servants from what Thoreau called their “lives of quiet desperation,” they are periodically shipped off to rest camps where, over the period of a few days, they are taught important things which can change their lives, their company, the world. Failing that, the experience may help them to hold on a bit longer. See: BUSINESS CONFERENCES.

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  1. A by-product of fiction which combines the dramatic methods of the romance novel with those of the adolescent adventure story.

  2. A product of Heroic mythology usually written by a false Hero.

  3. A celebration of the author’s moral weakness.

  4. Exhibitionism by someone too old to take his clothes off in public.

  5. An obscuring of the author’s actions behind his emotions and subjective state.

  6. A plea by the author to be accepted as he is; that is, an excuse for his actions; that is, an attack on ETHICS. See: BIOGRAPHY.

  AWARD SHOW Mechanism by which the members of a given profession attempt to give themselves the attributes of the pre-modern ruling classes—the military, aristocracy and priesthood—by assigning various orders, decorations and medals to each other.

  These shows are a superficial expression of CORPORATISM. As with the pre-modern classes, their awards relate principally to relationships within the profession. Each time the words “I want to thank” are used by someone being decorated, they indicate a relationship based on power. The awards have little to do with that corporation’s relationship to the outside world—what you might call the public—or for that matter with quality. See: BALLROOM.

  B

  BABEL, TOWER OF Multilingualism remains the source of movement and growth in a civilization.

  The ability to fill the house of reality, intellect and imagination with different furniture is a great pleasure and a great strength. The strengths of comparison and of contradiction. The ability to draw on the originality or strengths of one to enrich another.

  But for this to happen, writers and intellectuals must play their role, carrying words, images, emotions and ideas back and forth between languages. Unilingualism is one result of the acceptance by writers of professionalism. As they embrace the related idea that creativity is a sufficient justification for writing, so many become lost in the worship of a single tongue. The only status worse than this involves seeing themselves as the professional voice of a culture or a nation.

  The laziest intellectuals have been produced by the four or five dominant cultures of the West. They claim that it is hard to write well if you speak more than one language, a problem which Dante, Voltaire and Tolstoy do not seem to have encountered. More recently they have taken to complaining that a similar unilingual sectarianism has sprung up among smaller linguistic groups who feel threatened. At both levels the writers are guilty of betraying their obligation to communicate.

  Today more senior bureaucrats and business executives are multilingual than writers. The corporatist élites are therefore inheriting by default the right to decide what will be in the language of our international agendas, whether they deal with politics, business or culture. See: CORPORATISM and DIALECTICS.

  BABY SEAL A superior form of animal life which holds animistic power over the European imagination.

  Many civilizations have wrapped themselves in skins to assume the qualities of a particular animal. Chiefs, warriors, indeed European kings have often worn the hides of courageous or powerful beasts such as the lion, the wolf or the buffalo. Rabbits and hyenas do not attract them.

  The principal characteristics of the baby seal are the purity of its whiteness, a face eerily reminiscent of the infant child and its lack of intellectual pretension. Since Europeans seem to admire their own intelligence and have never developed a religious fetish for brown, grey or black seals, it can only be assumed that they identify with this animal’s infantile whiteness.

  The adoration of the infant seal is a reminder that colour is more than artifice. Other species, usually endangered, have mobilized a limited élite in their defence. Only the baby seal—always in ample supply—has moved millions of people of all ages and backgrounds. These people believe in the absolute value of the life of each member of that particular species.

  To the question “Surely all animals, like all humans, are equal?” the answer is that of Napoleon the pig. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”1

  The same English man, woman, child whose eyes fill with tears before the photograph of a baby seal is indifferent to the genetic manipulation of the sacred chicken whose entrails decided public policy for our ancestors. Science, for the sole purpose of producing larger breasts, has created physically challenged birds, who could make a living in a topless bar had they not been left so top heavy and with so little brain that they can’t walk let alone dance. And what of the French, who weep for the baby seal over dinners of artificially swollen goose livers. The divine goose of our Greek heritage has a large wooden tube shoved down its throat and is force-fed to death to produce foie gras. In defence of the Italians, it must be said that by locking young calves in pens so small that they become bloodied invalids, they have turned their backs on the Old Testament temptation of the Golden Calf. They have rejected idolatry in favour of fegato alla Veneziana.

  But a nagging doubt remains that idolatry is idolatry whether a calf or a seal is worshipped. The important thing for the adored one is to establish the difference between being god and being food or clothing. The baby seal has succeeded in doing this and may therefore be a great deal smarter than it looks.

  BACON, FRANCIS The English Cartesian. See: DESCARTES.

  BAD NEWS Those who have power always complain that journalists are only intere
sted in bad news. “But if the newspapers in a country are full of good news, the jails are full of good people.”

  Elsewhere, bad news comes as light relief from the unrelenting rightness of those with expertise and power. They insist that they are applying the correct and therefore inevitable solution to each problem. And when it fails they avoid self-doubt or a public examination of what went wrong by quickly moving on to the next right answer. Bad news is the citizen’s only available substitute for public debate.

  BAD PEOPLE In public life bad people, like bad money, drive out good. Only a constant effort by the citizenry to favour service over ambition and, in policy, balanced complexity over manipulative simplicity can draw the good forward.

  It is far easier to gain and hold power for those who seek only power. Self-interest is not constrained by the distracting difficulties of trying to serve the public good. Unless society has a respect for public service so strong that it amounts to an unwritten obligation, a large number among those who present themselves will be the unreasonably ambitious and the emotionally damaged seeking to work out their INFERIORITY COMPLEXES and other problems in public.

  This difficulty has always been with us. In his definition of Fatherland, Voltaire complained that “he who burns with ambition to become aedile, tribune, praetor, consul, dictator, cries out that he loves his country and he loves only himself.”2 Yeats returned to the subject in “The Second Coming”—“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” What is this lack of conviction?

  Relatively well balanced, disinterested people make an important private sacrifice by giving time to the general good. They also have trouble believing that their contribution could be important. This is not false modesty. The energy of political ambition is like a tornado which clears out those who don’t have it. The particular problem of our courtier-ridden society is that its standards are those of pure power and of money.

  In 1993 the departing director of the French secret service, Claude Silberzahn, laid out for his agents their three principal areas of work. The first two were the rise of “ethnic intolerance” and the “extraordinary and frenetic quest for money in all its forms…by the political and economic élites, as if money had no smell…when often it is dirty, doubtful and illicit.”3 This atmosphere repulses most people.

  More balanced citizens may have strong convictions about the public weal and public service. But they are less likely to be obsessed by the exercising of power. The Federalist Papers, in arguing for the new American constitution, argued for checks and balances which would neutralize the power of factions and so draw the best citizens out into the public process. But the ultimate checks and balances are not constitutional. They are the approval and disapproval of the citizen. So long as we reward raw ambition and the skilful manipulation of power, we will continue to draw those whose interest is self-interest. See: BANALITY and CARLYLE.

  BALANCE See: HUMANISM.

  BALLROOM There are four architectural periods:

  Pre-1850: Situated one floor above ground level (the piano nobile) in a palace, chateau or large house. Vaulted ceilings were succeeded by flat painted ceilings. Used for dancing. A mainstay of the Jane Austen–Leo Tolstoy novel.

  1850–1945: Situated on the ground floor of hotels and commonly decorated with classical columns and gold leaf. The floors were sprung for dancing, but they are now most often used by businessmen’s lunch clubs to listen to speakers or for charity functions. A fixture of Edith Whartonesque fiction.

  1946–1970: Situated on the fortieth floor (the penthouse) where they revolve. These rooms are decorated with oil-based materials in primary colours. They are usually empty. Sometimes used in feature films to depict modern life.

  Post-1970: Situated in hotel basements beside the garage. These cement rooms seat 2,500 people when all the partitions are folded back. They are used for BUSINESS CONFERENCES and AWARD SHOWs. Thanks to the division of society into thousands of specialized groups, they are always full. The basement ballroom has replaced the opera house, which itself replaced the royal palaces as the place in which the élites legitimize themselves. They exist in a post-literate vacuum. See: CORPORATISM.

  BANALITY The political philosopher Hannah Arendt confused the meaning of this word by introducing in 1961 her brilliant but limiting concept, “the banality of evil.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s a minor political figure, Brian Mulroney, released the term by demonstrating that it could also reasonably be understood to mean the evil of banality. See: CARLYLE and SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS.

  BANKERS Pillars of society who are going to hell if there is a God and He has been accurately quoted.

  All three Western religions have always forbidden the collection of interest on loans. When Samuel Johnson defined the banker in the eighteenth century his status was clear: “One that trafficks in money.”4 Their venal sin of usury continues to sit high on lists of scriptural wrongdoing, which raises the question of why bankers—the money-market sort excluded—tend to be frequent church-goers. The respect in which they have increasingly been held over the last two centuries has paralleled the growth of economics based on long-term debt, which has spread into every corner of society, from governments and corporations to the poor. The more money owed, the more the lender is respected, so long as the borrower intends to pay it back.

  But what effect does this have on the moral position of bank employees? Few modern bankers are owners. Except through their salaries they do not profit from interest payments. Are they or are they not among the damned? Perhaps they should themselves be seen as victims of usury, having little choice but to lend their lives to the usurious process in order to feed their families. Yet for the borrower, these employees are the human face of usury.

  The clearest situation for bankers would be if God didn’t exist. They would then be morally home-free and could go to church in a more relaxed frame of mind. See: DEBT.

  BARONS: ROBBER, PRESS, ETC. Individuals operating in spite of—or perhaps thanks to—a severe inferiority complex transformed into megalomania.

  As Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller demonstrated, the robber variety can find some inner peace through the semi-physical therapy of having people make and do things. A select few may even come to resemble the sort of mediaeval barons who bullied King John into signing the Magna Carta. The press sector offers less scope for improvement. Devoid of practical therapeutic tools, it leaves the mentally unstable to pontificate publicly while using their power to bully others into silence. So long as the widespread ownership of newspapers prevents them from limiting the public’s general freedom of speech, these unhappy individuals provide others with the welcome distraction of colourful comic relief. See: INFERIORITY COMPLEXES.

  BEES In his Philosophical Dictionary Voltaire points out that bees seem superior to humans because one of their secretions is useful. Nothing a human secretes is of use; quite the contrary. Whatever we produce makes us disagreeable to be around.5

  The bee’s social organization also invites comparisons. If the queen were to be removed and the drones were able to convince the worker bees to go on working while they stepped in as MANAGERs, what would happen to our supply of honey?

  BIOGRAPHICAL FILMS Since attention to historical detail ruins filmed drama, the essential property of biographical cinema is that it improves in quality by not telling the truth.

  These films, whether describing the lives of American presidents or criminals, French generals or Russian kings, are among the major beneficiaries of the “big lie” idea. As a result they have helped to create a modern mythology which erases the Western idea of intellectual inquiry and returns to the pre-intellectual tradition of mythological gods and heroes. This is the context in which portraits of John Kennedy, James Hoffa, Al Capone, Napoleon and so on can most easily be understood.

  BIOGRAPHY Respectable pornography, thanks to which the reader can become a peeping tom on the life of a famous person.

  Biogra
phy has increasingly replaced the novel as the most popular form of serious reading. While in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel provided the reader with a reflection of him or herself, today the biography encourages the gratuitous pleasures and self-delusion of voyeurism. See: AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

  BIRTH CONTROL PILL Responsible for a sense of loss and even failure among people who came of age in the 1960s, the birth control pill produced a twenty-five-year-long holiday from reality. For the first time in history, sex had no consequences. It was what it felt like. Nothing more.

  Then a rising tide of new venereal diseases appeared, culminating with AIDS. And part of the feminist movement began to argue that the pill reflected a male desire for convenience, while another part replied that it gave women control. They no longer had to berate men to take precautions. And suddenly, like a ghost from the past, the condom was back. For the rest of their lives the sixties generation will live in an atmosphere of regret—some over the good times lost forever, but most because they didn’t take advantage of a once-in-eternity opportunity. See: ORGASM.

  BLOOD (1) A mythological and almost always invisible liquid.

  Apart from a banal utility as the fuel of life, its real value lies in what is called the blood line. Purity of line justifies all actions which are dependent on paternity, tribalism and nationalism. Blood lineage makes certain groups better lovers, others more individualistic, others more honest, others quite simply nicer. It fuels their creative genius. Makes them courageous and inspired warriors.