The Doubter's Companion (14 page)

7. And all of this has been worsened by a determination to treat our ills with the symptoms of the disease.

Depressions do eventually come to an end. Sometimes this takes a decade. It can just as easily take five. Usually they burn themselves out like fires, consuming in the process both the problems that started them and much of society's fabric. Sometimes this fire takes the form of war, sometimes poverty and ruin. Recovery is then based upon rebuilding and is dependent upon the willpower of the citizenry. The depression of 1973 will end, but so long as we deal with it through abstraction, denial and desperate positivism, the phenomenon will go on mutating, shifting and re-emerging. See:
REGULATION
and
SEVENTY-THREE.

DEREGULATION
   The airline industry fought for this privilege. It was a necessary freedom, they said, to strengthen competition, thus strengthening companies, which would lead to the creation of more companies, and that to more flights flying to more places, leading to overall lower prices for the consumer.

The result has been competitive chaos, leading to continuous bankruptcies, leading to a constantly shrinking number of companies, leading to less real competition and therefore to fewer flights to fewer places at higher prices. Between 1990 and 1993 the American companies alone lost $11 billion.
²

It should be noted that two events in this deregulatory period ought to have guaranteed success for the industry. After two peaks in oil prices, the real cost of fuel has steadily fallen. And the explosion in mass tourism over the last fifteen years has led to a massive increase in the number of passengers.

The air carriers tried to save themselves from the catastrophic effects of deregulation by concentrating on executive travel. The technocracy was growing, wanted to fly to do business, and had to pay full fare because that is the way large organizations work. The result was an ever-expanding third or middle class of travel called Business or Executive. The increased cost of sending businessmen on this class was assumed by their shareholders and was therefore a dead weight on the general economy.

The effects of deregulation on personal travel were particularly negative. During the years of regulation, travel had been relatively simple for the passenger. And simplicity is a real form of efficiency. There were two classes; most people, including most corporate employees, used Economy class. There were some bargains, principally aimed at family tourism which was planned well in advance.

The collapse of real competition under deregulation led to those forms of false competition typical of oligopolies. There was an explosion in the area of special deals, promotions and packages. The result was a travel jungle which continues to waste the traveller's and the airline company's time. This has led to a confusion of money-losing promotions aimed at winning the loyalty of customers, who see fewer and fewer reasons to be loyal in a disordered market.

Free-air-mile plans have been among the most costly aspects of this false competition. Of course, they aren't free.

The companies have to cover the costs by charging more per ticket to their paying customers. The principal beneficiaries of this system are the various technocrats—particularly the corporate executives—whose flights are paid for by their companies, a pleasant fact which does nothing for competition or an increased choice of destinations. Quite the contrary. The more the executives get personal free air miles, the more the airlines must charge for the Business-class tickets bought by the corporations. This system doesn't increase paid-for travel, cuts into the profits of both the airlines and the corporations who use them and involves complex management costs.

The overall effect of special deals and bonuses has been to reduce competition to the level of the old “free glass at the gas station” routine. But passengers don't want free glasses, bigger meals, special tags, cards, waiting-rooms or even toothbrushes. What they want is a simple way to fly to the maximum number of places with the maximum choice of flights in acceptable comfort and dignity with minimum fuss at a reasonable price. This is a description of real competition which experience has now demonstrated can only be produced by thoughtful and tough
REGULATION.

DESCARTES, RENÉ
   Gave credibility to the idea that the mind exists separately from the body, which suggests that he didn't look down while writing.

The credible certainties Descartes sought were not of the body, but of method. His obsession with doubt was not to explore the unknown, as Socrates might have put it, but to remove doubt. To answer absolutely.

In this he and Francis Bacon were on exactly the same track. Bacon's scientific attitude was a source of power. These two profoundly modern intellectuals both claimed to have escaped the
a priori.
Each, in his own way, is the inspiration for the modern technocracy whose
a priori
truths are disguised by theoretically neutral methods. See:
GANG OF FIVE.

DESELECT
   A passive but transitive verb which indicates that an individual has been
RATIONALIZED.

DESSERT
   Years ago the wonderful Yvonne of the restaurant Tante Yvonne, rue Notre Dame des Victoires, in Paris, was asked to name the greatest dessert. She replied instantly.

“
Chichis
! The second stand on the left coming out of Marseille.”

Chichis
are made of chick-pea flour and water with a little orange-flower extract added for taste. The batter is squeezed out of a large pastry bag into a vat of boiling oil in a great curl resembling a very long sausage. It is then drained, rolled in sugar and cut into four pieces. If you buy four, the leftover tail-piece (the
bada
) is thrown in. The four
chichis
are individually wrapped in brown paper cones. The
bada
is not.
Chichis
are cooked to order, so on a Sunday afternoon there is a long line-up, particularly at the second stand on the left, which, after the recent arrival of a new stand, is now the third. See:
MONARCHS.

DESTINY
   The product of mysterious inevitability and human passivity, both presented as unshakeable tenets of something which can't quite be identified.

A half-century ago the idea of destiny seemed moribund, except among communists and a dwindling group of religious believers. Now, carried aloft by the natural truths of
ECONOMICS
and the linear logic of
CORPORATISM,
destiny once again determines our lives.

Some 2,500 years ago the joint dictatorship of destiny and divine will was first broken by Athenians like Solon and Socrates. Their specific enemy was the Homeric mythology under which the shape of men's lives was decided in advance. At best or worst they might be marginally altered if the gods intervened. The great contribution of the Athenians was to argue that humans could, within the limits of a larger reality, continually re-create their own destiny. They couldn't do this from nothing or in spite of everything or in isolation from the world, but they could act. Their destiny was not sealed from birth. Western civilization begins with that conviction. The idea of the conscious, responsible individual is born with the defeat of fate and passivity.

Two and a half millennia later, the largest and most sophisticated élite ever to have existed—some 30 per cent of our populations—in possession of more knowledge than the élites of earlier history could have imagined, have convinced themselves and their civilizations that the Athenians were wrong, after all. Most things are inevitable. They were wrong. We were wrong. We've wasted 2,500 years.

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.