The Doubter's Companion Read online

  There is nothing to prevent us from creating an effective international registering system which only accepts ships that meet agreed-upon standards. Competition could then revolve around reliability, speed and service instead of depending on the lowest possible cost, achieved if necessary by the use of slave labour. Unregistered ships could be excluded from our ports.

  But our governments suffer from an old syndrome—“If we don’t use cheap labour, other countries will.” This formula has been used over the centuries to justify everything from the slave trade and child labour to intense pollution and selling arms to all comers. It is the most banal of excuses for doing wrong.

  Our governments listen to the corporations, who quite simply have goods to ship and want to do so at the lowest possible cost. They say this is because the market-place must establish value and they believe that this can only be done through the free market, competition and efficiency. The shipping industry has proved that this is possible and shipping is central to trade and trade brings prosperity for everybody.

  That the Western fleets have been destroyed in the process and ugly systems of exploitation re-established is beside the point. Government interference would mean an artificial market-place and the return of organized sailors with middle-class pretensions. When this happened between the 1930s and 1960s sailors in the merchant marine became so rich that they could easily have been mistaken for degenerate playboys. See: FREE TRADE.

  CORPORATION Any interest group: specialist, professional, public or private, profit-oriented or not. The one characteristic shared by all corporations is that the primary relationship of individual members is to the organization and not to society at large.

  In a corporatist society, the corporation replaces the individual and therefore supersedes the role of democracy. In their own relationship with the outside world, corporations deal whenever possible with other corporations, not with individuals. The modern corporation is a direct descendant of the mediaeval craft guild.

  CORPORATISM Among the most important yet most rarely used words. Better than any other it describes the organization of modern society.

  Corporatism is the persistent rival school of representative government. In place of the democratic idea of individual citizens who vote, confer legitimacy and participate to the best of their ability, individuals in the corporatist state are reduced to the role of secondary participants. They belong to their professional or expert groups—their corporations—and the state is run by ongoing negotiations between those various interests. This is the natural way of organizing things in a civilization based on expertise and devoted to the exercise of power through bureaucratic structures.

  One of the characteristics of a strong movement within a civilization is that it persists throughout long periods of history. Each time it fails to win or hold on to power, it will submerge into the general stream of events for a time and then resurface as if from nowhere, disguised in a new, more attractive form.

  The early, practical corporatist organizations—the mediaeval craft guilds—were imitated in the organization and specialization of the Catholic religious orders. These two experiences produced the original corporatist states, the Republic of VENICE first among them. The whole concept was pushed by a growing intellectual rivalry between democracy and corporatism and a conscious intellectual movement in favour of corporatism.

  Hegel, who was treated almost as “the official philosopher” during his time teaching philosophy in Berlin (1818–31), believed that “the real is the rational and the rational is the real.” He considered “a corporative state as more rational than democracy…citizens should participate in the affairs of the State as members of subordinate wholes, corporations or Estates, rather than as individuals… Representatives should represent corporations or Estates rather than the individual citizens precisely as such.”9 It isn’t surprising that the almost social-democratic policies of Bismarck in the second half of the nineteenth century were produced out of an essentially corporatist society.

  The surface argument of corporatism has always been that democracy is inefficient, ineffective, corrupting, subject to whims and emotion. Corporatism, on the other hand, presents itself as professional and responsible. It promises to deliver prosperity by helping those who know how to do their jobs properly and in concert.

  These claims resurfaced in the 1920s in Italy. And if Mussolini’s cumbersome corporatist structures didn’t function, corporatism itself did. In both Italy and Germany the relationships which were able to work quite happily under a dictatorship were those between expert groups. Even the academic community worked away happily on the theoretical structures of this new anti-parliamentary national contract.

  Since 1945 we have downplayed the corporatist aspect of both the Nazis and the Fascists. Instead we have demonized those two regimes into simple manifestations of evil. Such false simplification obscures the fact that they were proposing—or rather reproposing—a complete and complex alternate to democracy.

  The Second World War was about many things, but at its heart it was a battle between two concepts of civilization—the one based on individualism and democracy, the other on corporatist authoritarianism. Theoretically the democratic individualists won. Yet since 1945 corporatism has advanced with even greater strength and now has a real hold on day-to-day power. Somehow we seem to have lost World War II after all.

  The first superficial corporatist resurgence came in the form of endless social contract negotiations during the 1960s and 1970s. Unions, management organizations and governments sat down to do deals in order to ensure the smooth functioning of society. This was presented as a new efficient form of government tailored to the new complex industrial state. Parliaments were seen as too cumbersome and inefficient to deal with their problems. Mediation and arbitration became greatly admired skills. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that these were precisely the arguments used by Mussolini. The new efficient process reached its chaotic conclusion in Britain, where elected governments of both the Left and the Right were held to ransom and eventually destroyed by these interest groups.

  Meanwhile the professionalization of the national élites was reaching a complexity never before seen. Each group and sub-group, public and private, was educated and organized in a self-protecting manner. Their ethos was defined according to their specialist purpose. Since the end of World War II people with education and position have seemed to become their professions.

  The old corporatist idea has re-emerged with sparkling new sophistication. It had learned from the heavy-handed attempts of the 1930s not to attack democracy itself but to attack the function of politics and the inefficiency of the system. Organizations which actually speak for the interests of groups now actively present themselves as the defenders of populism.

  The success of such senior executive organizations as the American ROUND TABLE and the Canadian Business Council on National Issues in shaping national policies by speaking out as if in the national interest is remarkable. They are taken by many to be more disinterested than the people’s elected representatives, yet all they have done is develop policies which serve their interests, dress them up in disinterested arguments, then use their money and their access to public authorities to press their agenda.

  The force of their arguments is so great that elected officials who oppose them have often ended up sounding interested. More precisely, the interests of the citizenry have come to be treated as if they were romantic self-interest. The interests of the corporatist groups are now reported as if they were the measure of effective social action.

  The practical effects of such a change can be seen throughout society. A disturbing example is the apparent powerlessness of the elected authorities before the disorder brought on by deregulation of the financial sector.

  More all-encompassing has been the rapid growth of ARMAMENTS production and sales between 1960 and 1990. In this period of peace arms became the most important industrial good sold in the world. Those
who oppose this lunacy tend to talk about the military industrial complex. Thus, by sticking to old-fashioned myths of capitalism and conspiracy, they miss the key point. The production and sale of these goods is almost entirely the result of cooperation between public and private professionals employed in several sectors (corporations)—senior bureaucrats, senior executives, senior officers and university economists.

  A less dramatic but more insidious illustration has been the change in the legal status of the corporation. The JUDGEs have bit by bit given corporations the status of the individual. Once it has been decided, in a society structured around law, that corporations are people, then mere individuals are at such a disadvantage that they have little choice but to become corporations.

  That is why the rational élites tend to see themselves primarily as a part of their corporatist group. But this also explains the rise of the personal corporation. Why would individual citizens feel that operating through the structures of a personal corporation gave them an armour-plated defence unless they lived in a corporatist society?

  A final example illustrates the inevitable death of disinterested public policy in a society dominated by corporatist groups. The insane can play no useful role in such an efficient society. Over the last twenty years their position has seriously declined back towards the assumptions of the nineteenth century. As James Hillman points out, “criminality and psychic breakdown” are once again being confused. “The poor, the misfits, the ill, the crazy and the criminal are again held in the same compounds, like the hospices in the Middle Ages.” In Idaho the mentally ill are regularly jailed and fingerprinted before being examined. “The largest de facto mental hospital in the United States is the Los Angeles County jail…” Thirty-six thousand of its prisoners are mentally ill.10

  The methods of Ross Perot are those of the classic populist corporatist. He continually attacks the constituted democratic system and claims a direct link with the citizenry—a link which he says can be expressed through direct consultations in REFERENDA. He claims that he is attacking democracy on behalf of the people, yet he promises to govern through a National Advisory Panel of one hundred—a group of leading, expert citizens who represent the spectrum of interests; that is to say, of self-interests. The man he has most hated was President Bush, whose career had been built upon serving various interest groups.

  But perhaps the purest example of a corporatist political success is the Italian businessman-politician, Silvio Berlusconi. From a complex financial background, which includes the now illegal P2 Lodge, he captured newspapers, television stations and publishers to represent the interests of his companies. He then created a political party made up in good part of his employees and used his various interest groups to run a highly successful political campaign in the general elections of 1994.

  President Clinton, who can make serious claims to have reinvolved the citizenry, at first glance seems to operate in a very different world. And yet he is obliged, in order to govern, to make heavy use of lobbies and interest groups.

  These groups function as almost independent states. The large banks and industrial corporations are so complex that their presidents are often reduced to glorified princes who read what is written for them, travel in a cocoon, fulfilling predetermined activities. It is perhaps in Germany that this isolating process has gone farthest in creating potentates parallel to the state.

  The question which the various democratic systems will have to address over the next decade in order to survive is whether they can draw the members of the hundreds of corporatist groups out of their structures. So long as they continue to define themselves by their expertise, the democratic system cannot function. And there can be no question of society turning its back on these enormous élites. There is no second string of citizens to replace them. It is a question of convincing the individual that their primary obligation is to society as a whole.

  Corporatism has been for some time the only real threat to democracy. That explains why our corporatist élites never discuss it.

  COSMETIC SURGERY Cosmetic perjury.

  COURTIERS Instantly recognizable. Unchanged throughout history. These individuals live in the half-light, chasing power without purpose. Prestige without responsibility. They travel in the shadow of those who have responsibility.

  There are more courtiers in Western society today than perhaps at any other time in any other society. More even than in imperial China. It isn’t simply the crowds of WHITE HOUSE STAFF or their equivalents around the presidents and prime ministers of other countries who count in this class. There are the lawyers, consultants, PR experts, and opinion-poll experts. They exist throughout the public and the private sectors and yet are no more than a superficial decoration.

  A corporatist society itself turns every technocrat who wishes to succeed into a courtier. Such highly structured systems find it almost impossible to reward actions over methods. And the corporation excludes the idea of individual responsibility. They are breeding grounds for those who seek power through manipulation.

  The popular image of the courtier involves elaborate court dress. But the Jesuits were the most successful manipulators of power and they appeared in an anonymous uniform, similar to that of our discreet contemporary technocrats.

  CRITICISM, POLITICAL Favourite reply of those in authority to those who question their actions: “It’s easy to criticize.” Alternate reply: “Anyone can criticize.” This is often followed by: “And what would you have done in my place?” by which is meant “if you’re so smart.” A more complex variation is: “You have to be TOUGH to do the right thing. Leadership isn’t a popularity contest.”

  These denigrations of criticism have become such a generalized chorus that we often feel embarrassed, even guilty, when the need arises to say something negative.

  Yet those we criticize chose freely to seek positions of authority. We are the raison d’être of the entire system. We are also the employers of those in public office and in the public service. Why should we accept from them a discourse which suggests contempt for us and for the democratic system?

  What’s more, it is not easy to criticize. It is extremely difficult. We have to question experts and insiders in areas in which we are not expert. This involves constantly out-guessing them, because they keep back much of the information we need in order to decide what we think. The problem is that any facile idiot with a bit of power can avoid giving an honest reply by putting on an important air and protesting that criticism is easy. See: BANALITY.

  CRITICS Delightful people. Perceptive. Fair. Disinterested. Even-handed. Charming.

  In the unlikely case that one of them should mistakenly dislike something, the creator of that book, play or film should be intelligent enough to accept with good grace that even Solomon can be wrong. But he remains Solomon. See: CRITICS, BAD.

  CRITICS, BAD Extremely rare. When, from time to time, they slip into the ranks of CRITICS, specific uncontrollable characteristics are usually responsible. For example, in the field of literature:

  1. They have written a book on the same subject and theirs is better.

  2. They have not written a book on the subject but as experts in this area—more often than not TENUREd professors—had they done so theirs would have been better. It is that desire to make it better which has delayed theirs and not, as cynical outsiders might imagine, the comfortable and banal life of academic continuity.

  3. They are academics who, whatever their literary ambitions, own the subject in question. Specialization does not mean, as the eighteenth-century thinkers imagined, the communicating of knowledge. Rather, it means control over knowledge. If the writer of a book successfully communicates, he is untrustworthy and therefore not serious.

  4. They are about to publish a book on any subject. The purpose in reviewing someone else’s book is to sell their own. This is most easily done by attacking the book under review in order to advance their own intelligence.

  5. They are drunks, don’t d
rink but should, didn’t have time to read the book or, worst of all, review for money. Reviewing is paid less than Third World factory labour and any reliance on it for income may unbalance the mind.

  CROISSANT Islamic symbol of paradise in the shape of a quarter moon. As an act of religious denigration during the Turkish invasion of Europe, Austrian bakers reduced the croissant to a breakfast bun.

  In 1683 the Turks were laying siege to Vienna for the second time. Inside the walls life went on as best it could. The town bakers, as always, worked through the night until one evening, in the silent darkness, they heard the sounds of tunnelling under the walls. They gave the alarm, the Muslims were foiled and the city saved, as well as Christendom. The authorities honoured the bakers by commissioning the creation of a symbolic pastry. It was known as a Wiener Kifferl.

  This Austrian specialty gradually made its way to Paris; perhaps in the kitchen of one of the Austrian/Spanish princesses who became queen of France. Over the centuries it slowly metamorphosed into a symbol of Parisianism. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century victories of political centralization carried the croissant, along with the rather stark northern accent, a certain type of education, a particular interpretation of history and a taste for WHITE BREAD throughout the nation, where they were waved in an insulting manner as the flags of Parisian superiority over the heads of provincials. Before long, French men and women everywhere had convinced themselves that the croissant and, failing that, sticks of tasteless white bread, were their quintessential breakfast.

  With the internationalization of culture as a symbol of nationalism, francophiles around the world took to eating croissants with enthusiasm. Among them were the Islamic élites from Morocco through to the Middle East, who tended to be educated—depending on colonial patterns—in either Paris or London. These habits have continued, but for most of them it is France which has fulfilled their idea of Western culture. As a result they have joined with well-to-do Americans, Latin Americans and Japanese who with every nibble at their croissants au beurre feel they are indulging in the inconsequential pleasures of Parisian life, when in fact they are joining with the Austrians in the denigration of their own religion. See: DESSERT.