The Doubter's Companion Page 6

  5. Burdened by the laziest élite of any developed nation; people who have made their fortunes by selling off the country’s resources and by working for more energetic foreigners. They are most comfortable on their knees, admiring those from larger countries who have purchased them.

  6. A country where 95 per cent of the land is north of the major cities, which causes its urban inhabitants to treat their hinterland as an embarrassing and backward region, while pretending that they themselves are situated hundreds of miles to the south, somewhere between New York and FLORIDA.

  CANNIBALISM A few years ago over dinner in St. Tropez, a retired colonial doctor in his nineties began recounting his experiences with cannibals in the Cameroons. He had been twenty-one. We were up on a terrace looking across the great bay with the lights of other towns ringing the shore.

  His account turned entirely on the administrative problems which the phenomenon produced. Was it a crime? By whose law? Who was to be punished? A whole village would have consumed the body. Were they therefore, in European terms, accomplices to the murder? This was his first colonial job and he had been left as the sole civil authority over hundreds of square miles. In this district the villages were isolated from one another.

  I eventually interrupted to ask what seemed to me a key question. How did they cook their humans? The doctor stared at me as if he didn’t understand.

  “Grilled or boiled?” I asked again.

  With an energetic enunciation of contempt—the sort of energy which was common in language before electronics cooled it—he replied, “Boiled of course! Boiled!”

  Sensible civilizations, which have not been deformed by urban fashions, are unanimous about the healthiest way to cook meat. Some may grill it after it has been boiled. But all will boil it. This removes excess fats and other unhealthy enzymes as well as tenderizing the flesh. Only the most basic savages grill or barbecue their meat. Interestingly enough, this universal early human understanding has been confirmed by contemporary chemists who have discovered that the grilling process causes a molecular rearrangement which is bad for the eater and may contribute to cancer.

  According to the colonial doctor, no particular religious or social mythology was involved in these incidents except that villagers did not eat their own. But if they were short of food and a stranger happened to travel through the area, they might well kill him and boil him. In the course of each year two or three cases would be brought to his attention and each of these led to interminable complications. See: CROISSANT.

  CAPITALISM A concept which has moved beyond the stage of sensible discussion.

  Capitalism can be a useful social tool or a weapon of unabashed human exploitation. Which it will be depends entirely on the way it is regulated. Capitalism itself contains no ethical values. Those who use it decide by their actions whether it is a force of good or evil.

  Each economic system does tend to be more at home in certain circumstances than in others. Capitalism is happiest in a non-democratic society.

  Not that any old dictatorship will do. Two types in particular can be disastrous. The first is the bureaucratic sort, when a nation is dominated by a state religion or ideology, as in the former Soviet Union. Second are the personalized dictatorships, where all financial dealings must run through the hands of the dictator, his family and friends.

  Capitalism thrives in the evolved authoritarian dictatorship. There the streets are calm, dissent is discouraged, disorder repressed. Little time is wasted over politics, debates, elections and tiresome, inefficient legislatures. For decades at a stretch the same ministers and policies remain in place. The firm hand all of this suggests must, however, be benevolent. Individuals must have the freedom to make money and spend it as they wish, believing that so long as they don’t challenge the system, they will be permitted to live out their lives in peace, keep their wealth and pass it on to their children.

  The glory days of the Industrial Revolution came in England before a series of parliamentary reforms had created anything resembling a fairly elected assembly. With the rise of mass democracy during the late nineteenth century, the capitalist system began to stall, then decline, and has never recovered. In France, capitalism’s greatest moments came under two benign dictators: Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon; in Germany it prospered happily under Kaiser Wilhelm.

  In the United States the capitalist system was first established under slavery. Its moment of glory came in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, when the workforce was flooded by immigrants who either were not yet citizens or were still politically passive. Slavery still functioned in its legal form of segregation. Capitalism complained a great deal from 1932 to 1968; the period during which public participation was most evenly spread and government paid most attention to the needs of the whole populace. It regained a sense of optimism during the 1970s and 1980s when voter participation fell to 50 per cent in presidential elections and far lower in those for Congress. This period coincided with a rise of public disgust for the political process, a decline in labour-union membership and intense deregulation.

  Capitalism was reasonably content under Hitler, happy under Mussolini, very happy under Franco and delirious under General Pinochet.

  This is not what the early philosophers of capitalism had expected. The tempering of man by commerce as imagined by Adam Smith and David Hume has not happened. The once-popular view that democracy blossomed thanks to the rise of capitalism can now be seen in perspective. Their parallel rise isn’t one of cause and effect, as their ongoing difficult relationship continues to demonstrate.

  These misunderstandings aren’t surprising. Remarkable men writing in the eighteenth century were trying to guess what the new economic whirlwind would bring. We now have the advantage of experience.

  Even Max Weber in the early twentieth century was convinced that bureaucratic capitalism, along with public bureaucracy, would be forces for efficiency, speed and precision. We now know that he was wrong. The large corporations use their structures and their wealth to protect themselves from their own failures, but they are ineffectual when compared to smaller owner-managed companies.

  These visible experiences have been clouded for us by the self-serving public relations of the business schools, which continue to feed the structures, and the kidnapping of people like EDMUND BURKE and Adam Smith by the NEO-CONSERVATIVE ideologues. They present Smith as an apostle of unrestricted trade and unregulated markets. In fact his was a relatively moderate, balanced position which included public regulation to curb the excesses of capitalism.

  We can now see how some of the miscalculations were made. For example, many of those who imagined the new American Republic had the Venetian Republic in mind as a model. They saw VENICE’s economic organization as a solution to their problems. They scarcely bothered with its underlying principles which excluded such elements as individualism, a responsible citizenry, free speech and democracy. It was an almost perfect CORPORATIST dictatorship.

  The great American philanthropist industrialists—such as Carnegie and Rockefeller—were in some ways naïve descendants of the Venetian tradition. They seemed to promise a society led by economic daring. Alongside their economic infrastructures, which became those of the nation, they left wonderful monuments to culture. But their sort of robber BARON leadership, no matter how creative, undermined the possibility of a citizen-based state.

  What these experiences indicate is that democracy and capitalism are not natural friends. That doesn’t mean they must be enemies. But if allowed free run of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which after all is not a natural state. Democracy was a gradual and difficult creation against the stated desires of the natural sectors of power (authoritarian, military, class). It requires constant participation and can only be maintained by the toughness of its citizenry.

  A functioning democracy nevertheless needs to create wealth. It therefore needs some ba
lance of capitalism. By carefully defining the limits permitted to that phenomenon, responsible government can allow the process of wealth creation to succeed. This doesn’t mean that democracy can create ethical capitalism. That would be to impute values where none exist. Democracy can, however, lay out rules of procedure which are based in ethics. Capitalism is then surprised to discover that it can produce wealth within the rules of the democratic game, providing that they are perfectly clear and designed with the creation of wealth in mind. See: CORPORATISM and FREE.

  CARLYLE, THOMAS There is a certain pleasure to be had in picking out unpleasant individuals from the past and blaming them for whatever has since gone wrong. Unfortunately this is an inadvertent way of embracing the Heroic or Great Man view of HISTORY.

  As the nineteenth century advanced, so the battle between the forces of democracy and dictatorship gathered strength and they repeatedly engaged each other. Thomas Carlyle’s role was to round up all the anti-democratic ideas careening about in a society dependent on great men—ideas largely inspired by the Napoleonic adventure—to make an integrated theory of civilization. On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History appeared in 1841, the year Napoleon’s body was brought back to Paris in triumph.

  Carlyle’s concept had an enormous impact. He had packaged what the anti-democratic elements in society had been trying to express. He was not the first to evoke the Great Man theory. Hegel preceded him. Friedrich Nietzsche, Léon Bloy, Max Weber and Oswald Spengler followed close behind. But it was Carlyle who neatly wrapped up the whole theory in an intellectually respectable yet populist manner.

  For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense, creators of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world.1

  One of Carlyle’s most effective tricks was to roll famous dead poets, philosophers and martyrs together with generals and dictators into a single Heroic class. In his chapter on Dante and Shakespeare he insists that “in man there is the same altogether peculiar admiration for the Heroic gift, by what name soever called…”2 Twice he speaks of Napoleon while discussing Dante. They are part of the same Heroic family.

  Of course the Florentine poet was a genius who made an important contribution to our civilization. But Dante never sought craven worship from others. He would have detested Carlyle’s fawning attitude. There is nothing worshipful in the way he wrote of the famous dead men he met in The Divine Comedy.

  In Carlyle’s analysis of Napoleon, the Great Man’s flaws are treated as mere “smoke and waste.”3 This contrasting of the Hero and his weaknesses is central to our contemporary “personality” debates. And it continues to play its role as a mechanism for removing the citizen’s sense of his or her right to judge their leaders on matters of importance.

  To me, in these circumstances…‘Hero-worship’ becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.4

  Conventional wisdom has it that the last world war liberated us from these sorts of Heroic attitudes. But even a cursory examination of contemporary political debate reveals that we are still caught up in Carlyle’s dream of Heroic leadership.

  That word —LEADERSHIP— can be found in every sentence which addresses the state of our civilization. Leadership. The lack of leadership. The need for leadership. The cause of our problems. The solution to our problems.

  Carlyle was an anxiety-ridden man. He lost his Calvinist faith as a young man and spent the rest of his life desperately looking for something or someone to give himself to. He hated his own uncertainty and feared above all to doubt. In his thirties he was already writing “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action” and action required an authoritarian figure to lead the way. Action to what purpose was not a question he asked. That was the responsibility of the Heroes who would take him and us in hand and lead the way: “I say find me the true Könning, King or Able man and he has a divine right over me.”5

  The philosophers who propose Hero-worship are men filled with self-loathing and fear. They worship power and the men who wield it. Carlyle is hardly a name present in our daily conversation and yet it was he with his disturbed psyche who most successfully inserted into modern society our fear of doubt, worship of action and need for Heroic leadership. See: HEROES.

  CHICAGO SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS A great centre of contemporary SCHOLASTICISM. The economists working there and produced by it are as important to the stagnation of useful thought as the Schoolmen of the University of Paris were at the height of the Middle Ages.

  Like that of the Paris scholastics, their mastery of highly complex rhetorical details obscures a great void at the centre of their argument. They also share a tactical genius for exporting their conceptual definitions to less important centres around the world. The result is a pleasing symphony of international echoes imitating their calculations and cadences and so confirming their correctness, even when their policies bring economic disaster. The percussion section of Chicago’s orchestra is the Nobel committee for economics. Each golden medal is like another congratulatory parchment presented at the end of an elaborate theological debate.

  But what of content? There isn’t much. What of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman? These minor Thomists preach little more than inevitability and so counsel passivity.

  What they call libertarian economics is a remarkable revenge of the scholastics on the men of the Enlightenment, who had theoretically destroyed them. Peel away the tangle of intellectual leaves from the Chicago School and what remains is a great clockmaker god who has set the world ticking. But the conclusion of the Enlightenment was that god’s indifference left humans free to organize the world as they wished. Chicago has so deformed this idea as to invert it. The great clock has been turned into an absolute, all-encompassing system. Better than an ideology, the world is its own absolute economic truth. We must remain passive before its majesty.

  This is a denial of Western experience. It is nonsense which simply comforts the power slipping increasingly into the corporatist structures.

  Strategic thinking can save a great deal of time wasted over tactics. A large number of America’s economic problems, and those of the West, could be solved by shutting down the Chicago School of Economics.

  This would not prevent the academics employed there from preaching their essentially anti-social and amoral doctrines. They would be gathered up with delight by the hundreds of imitation Chicago Schools. The purpose of closure would be simply to disentangle a tendentious ideology from its unassailable position within contemporary power structures. The same sort of liberating shock treatment was applied to European civilization in 1723 when the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was disbanded. The effect was to set free the ideas of the Enlightenment. See: BRETTON WOODS, DEPRESSION, FREE TRADE, GROWTH and REGULATION.

  CHILDREN See: FACTORIES and WAR.

  CITIZEN The individual is essentially a citizen.

  This is a reality inherited from Athens. We have little choice but to accept it since democracy cannot function in any other way. It is possible to hop along in a one-legged manner with citizens voting from time to time but refusing to participate and being denied most of their obligations. The result is a superficial, even dishonest, system and a population constantly dissatisfied with itself.

  If the ind
ividual is not first a citizen, then the obligations and privileges which go with that status are effectively lost and the person ceases, to all intents and purposes, to be an individual. See: SOCRATES.

  CIVILIZATION The single and shortest definition of civilization may be the word LANGUAGE.

  This is not to suggest that images or music are of lesser importance. It is simply that they have more to do with the unconscious. They are somehow part of metaphysics and religion. Civilization, if it means something concrete, is the conscious but unprogrammed mechanism by which humans communicate. And through communication they live with each other, think, create and act. See: DOUBT.

  CLASS Although class has never existed in North America and is a thing of the past in Europe, there are large numbers of exclusive travel agencies which organize paying weekends in English country houses as guests of the baronet and rent out piani nobile in Italian palazzi. These and the profusion of romantic chateau hotels remind us that in an egalitarian society today’s duchess is tomorrow’s landlady. And as Mrs. Simpson demonstrated, today’s landlady may well be tomorrow’s duchess. Everyone has an equal right to inequality. The basic rule for men seeking social promotion through marriage is to ignore titles, manners and houses until they have established clearly whether the lady is sweeping her way down the stairs or up.

  CLAUSEWITZ, CARL VON Clausewitz is to military strategy what DESCARTES is to philosophy—an excuse for those who hold power to treat as inevitable that which mediocrity and received wisdom cannot overcome.

  This nineteenth-century strategist is often blamed by twentieth-century generals and military commentators both for the advent of total war and of war used as a continuation of civil policy. That Clausewitz recommended neither would seem to suggest that they feel the need for a scapegoat to justify strategies which, in the absence of purpose and shape, have mistaken administrative structures, technology and prolonged violence for resolution.