The Doubter's Companion (2 page)

Flaubert poked fun at it with his little
Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues
(1880),
⁸
as did Ambrose Bierce in
The Devil's Dictionary
(1911).
⁹
But they were prodding an unmovable and increasingly unconscious animal, slumbering in comfortable self-confidence. In the twentieth century, the tools of debate and change of the eighteenth century have become scholastic monuments to truth. Since dictionaries now define not only meaning, but decide whether words really exist, people argue over which should be included. And they turn to their Oxford or their Webster's not to challenge themselves but to be reassured.

Today our civilization is not slumbering in unconscious self-confidence. Rather it resembles the wounded and confused animal of the eighteenth century. We are again the prisoners of scholastic rhetoric, which has blocked useful public communications by dividing our language up into thousands of closed specialist dialects. The result is the disappearance of almost any public language which could have a real impact on structures and actions. Instead we have an illusion of unlimited oral communications which are, in practical terms, a vast and murmuring silence.

Our élites interpret this situation as a confirmation of their indispensability. The citizenry, on the other hand, seem to have taken their distances from the existing structure and its languages. They react to the waves of expert truth which continue to wash over them with a sort of mute indifference.

An uninvolved outsider might interpret this as the first stages of a purification rite. Indifference is often the manner behind which humans consider change.

Given our history, it should be possible to decipher our intent. We are trying to think our way out of a linguistic prison. This means we need to create new language and new interpretations, which can only be accomplished by re-establishing the equilibrium between the oral and the written.

This is a situation in which dictionaries should again be filled with doubt, questioning and considerations. They can then be used as practical weapons of change.

Note
: Words which are highlighted within the text of a definition are themselves to be found as entries.

The

DOUBTER'S

COMPANION

A

A
A
versus the. Indefinite versus definite. A suggestion that there is room for doubt, questioning, consideration. That an inclusive approach may be more interesting than the exclusive. That dogma or ideology are about control not truth.

In formal logic, however, A is identified as a universal affirmative.
A
asserts. The Sophists asserted rhetoric. Aristotle asserted with genius. Using Aristotle's logic, Thomas Aquinas asserted on behalf of organized Christianity. On his heels, herds of scholastics—masters of mediaeval academic obscurity—set out to capture language for their own purposes.

Then the annoying thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tickled and amused, cut and thrust, and above all found ways to break through the obscurity in order to communicate. They wrote encyclopaedias and dictionaries which undermined the idea of the definite—that is, of the “definition.” But their suggestion of an indefinite and thus open language, full of possibilities, was quickly undercut by the formal logic of Kant and Hegel. With them came the assertions of the various ideologues of left and right, each with their own perfect logic. Finally, in the twentieth century, the mediaeval scholastics returned in modern dress. They invested their old philosophical domains and created new ones under the heading of social science. Empires of affirmation were created, each with a language so closed as to constitute a dialect, each bearing its own hermetic truths. Interestingly enough, the Romans, when voting, used the letter A to signify dissent. A for antiquo, I oppose. I object.
A
to refuse an assertion. This negative sits quite happily with alpha, as the beginning of the Greek alphabet. The act of opening. The logicians and the scholastics seem to have mistaken A for omega, the last letter, closure, the end. See:
THE
.

A BIG MAC
   The communion wafer of consumption. Not really food but the promise of food. Whatever it tastes like, whatever it is made of, once it touches lips A Big Mac is transubstantiated into the mythological hamburger.

It is, with Perrier, one of the sacred objects of the leading philosophical school of the late-twentieth century—public relations. Cynics often unjustly suggest that this school favours superficial appearances over content. Had this been the case, PR would have failed. Most people, after all, can easily recognize the difference between appearances and reality.

A Big Mac, for example, is not big. It doesn't taste of much. It isn't good for you. And it seems sweet. Why does it seem sweet if, as the company says, it isn't laced with sugar?

What the philosophy of PR proposes is theoretical content (such as sex appeal, fun, individualism, sophistication, the rejection of sophistication) in the place of actual content (banal carbonated water and a mediocre hamburger). This is modern metaphysics.

Because public relations are built on illusion, they tend to eliminate choice. This is an important characteristic of contemporary capitalism. A Big Mac, like so many creations of PR, is a symbol of passive conformity. As Mac McDonald put it: “If you gave people a choice, there would be chaos.”
¹
See:
MCDONALD, RONALD
and
CANNIBALISM.

À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU
A work À of genius written in bed. It opens with the narrator tucked between his sheets. It is rarely read for any length of time on a mattress.

It is also rarely read, but is often talked about and has had a major impact on many people who haven't read it, if only because of the strain of waiting for Marcel Proust to be mentioned in conversation, which can happen as many as three times in a year. The educated person may then be required to make a comment on what they have only read about.

That literature could mean, as the French novelist Julian Gracq once complained, books more talked about than read indicates the extent to which language today may be used more to obscure and control than to communicate. See:
ORAL LANGUAGE.

AARON
   The brother of Moses. He was instructed, along with the heads of the other eleven houses of Israel, to hand over his rod. These were placed in the tabernacle. The next day Aaron's had budded, flowered and produced almonds, which won him the position of first head priest and the perpetual privilege of priesthood for the House of Levi.

This is neither the first nor the only example of control over the miraculous—that is, the unexplained or the secret—giving power. After all, the single word “yes” from the Delphic Oracle, when asked whether Socrates was the wisest living man, convinced the philosopher of his own ignorance and set him off on the quest for truth through questioning which in turn led to his execution.

But with Aaron the concept of power through secrecy was officially integrated into the Western system. Today's experts simply conform to this tradition. See:
GANG OF FIVE.

ABASEMENT
   In a society of courtiers or corporatists, the question is not whether to abase or to be abased, but whether a favourable balance can be struck between the two.

Simple folk may have some difficulty mastering the skills involved, but the sophisticated understand innately how the pleasure of abasing others can be heightened by being abased themselves.

The illusion among the most skilled is that they can achieve ultimate pleasure through a type of ambition or drive, which they call competence. This causes them to rise higher and so to win ever-greater power. But what is the value of this status in a highly structured society devoid of any particular purpose except the right, for a limited time, to give more orders than are received? Courtiers used to scurry around palace corridors with much the same illusion of importance.

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.