The Doubter's Companion (34 page)

RICHELIEU, CARDINAL
   Father of the modern nation state, modern centralized power, the modern secret service and a major civil building boom brought on by a glut in the dressed stone market following Richelieu's forced dismantling of defensive city walls. See:
GANG OF FIVE.

RIGHT
   See:
LEFT.

RIGHT VERSUS WRONG
   Sooner or later societies solidify to a point where the justification of existing structures becomes a social duty and public discourse is reduced to an absolutist formula which depends on the concept of right versus wrong.

The very idea of the middle ground then becomes an enemy of public order. Yet the middle ground is where change may be constructively considered. Only there can individuals embrace doubt in order to reconsider society without rejecting it.

At some level—conscious or subconscious—those who feel driven to defend right versus wrong know this does not mean that they are necessarily right. They know they are confusing the ethical concepts of right and wrong with an absolutist approach towards the practicalities of everyday life. But on their practical level of day-to-day life, in which careers, reputations and incomes are made and lost they understand that error is punished and certainty rewarded.

Ours is a society in awe of false stability and which functions by admiring power and denying reality. Even the careful legal codification of the late twentieth century—designed to protect the citizen against various forms of malpractice—can encourage the professional denial of the middle ground. If those who are expert and those who have power know that being wrong means they must be punished, then public debate is impossible. The result is an unrealistic status quo. The denial of problems becomes a duty. This illusion will hold like a well-built dam until the waters of reality rise high enough to rush over the top.

But if reality can only be applied in unexpected floods, the question of right and wrong or being right versus being wrong will always be swept away precisely when it is needed. Only a society which admires, even rewards, the admission of error can avoid this weakness by concentrating upon the middle ground.

ROTTEN BOROUGH
   An electoral area in which the representative is chosen by financial interests. A “Rotten Borough system” suggests the sytematic corruption of electoral democracy.

This initially English phenomenon involved a lord who owned all the local votes. As balloting was done in public, he could verify the way each was cast. The 1832 Reform Bill eliminated the Rotten Boroughs. During the second half of the twentieth century they re-emerged in a more sophisticated form and quickly spread throughout the West.

The 1992 American election produced a Congress which had been shaped by more than one billion dollars in funding from private interests.
¹
To suggest that corporations made these investments in order to serve the public interest would be to assume that they are run by incompetents.

The unabashedly crude way in which money shapes the legislatures of Britain, France, Canada, Italy and so on throughout the West is made doubly surprising by our determination in most cases to continue on as if this were not happening. The single example of the pharmaceutical industry, their political investments and the resulting legislation on drug patents and pricing is a blatant case of old-fashioned rotten-borough politics. The lord pays out money and then monitors how the beneficiaries vote. The borough is replaced by the legislature. Silvio Berlusconi's use of corporate money, public relations in place of policy and his own television stations and newspapers in the 1994 Italian election shows how far democracy's suicidal tendencies can carry it. And still we go on acting as people did in the eighteenth century—as if such corruption of the public weal were simply the way things always work in the real world.

That this system often manages to choose good representatives reassures us that the problem is secondary. But in the eighteenth century good people were also chosen through the Rotten Boroughs. Some of the greatest parliamentarians in the history of modern democracy sat for areas controlled by a single lord.

The problem with Rotten Boroughs is not that they eliminate personalities or
LEADERSHIP.
After all, any system can promote competent and even remarkable people. Dictatorships can do this more easily than democracies. Any absolute monarch or Führer can pick out the smartest available people and appoint them to office. The problem with Rotten Boroughs is that legislatures shaped by corruption are unable to do the job expected of them—that is, to serve the public interest. Behind a great deal of artifice and some useful policies, their principal activity is to be of service to their financial masters.

Much of our hesitation in controlling special interests comes from a sense that even if they are misusing the democratic mechanisms, to control them would put limitations on all honest citizens. But democracy was never intended to guarantee unlimited individual rights.

There has always been a division between those rights which either contribute to the public weal or at least do not harm it versus those which are negative, vicious or destructive. The line between these two categories may not be perfectly clear, but in general it can be seen.

The destructive freedoms are easily identified. We are not allowed to kill, rob, enslave or beat each other. That is, we are not allowed to infringe on the individual rights of others. Corruption of the legislature falls into the same category because the corrupter mistakes the removal of someone else's freedom for an expression of their own.

What's more, our legal system gives the corrupter comfort in his view. It ties the privilege of the corrupter to the citizen's right to freedom of speech, even though the actual effect is to limit the freedom of speech of most citizens. Thus our basic democratic rights can be deformed into a negative force. That is why democratic societies have so much difficulty dealing with those who do not respect fair freedom of speech. The Brownshirts, Blackshirts and Bolsheviks were able to use their own freedom of speech to remove that of others, at first by simply shouting them down.

The use of money—as with Berlusconi—to fund floods of advertising and television commercials is a new and more sophisticated way to shout people down. It is neither free speech nor communication. Rather it deforms public debate into
CORPORATIST
rivalry. Some of these corporatist groups may have ethical messages—human rights or ecological groups, for example. But they will always be outnumbered by self-serving special interests. In either case, what they obscure is the democratic process itself, which is not intended to be a competition between corporatist groups for control of the elected representatives.

The problem in controlling corruption is not therefore whether to put limits on freedom of speech, but how to organize society so that everyone has real access to their freedom of speech. For example, to limit the size of corporate contributions during elections, while leaving the real cost of running for office unlimited, is to put a severe limitation on free speech.

But if the electoral process were removed from the market-place entirely, then this single, across-the-board limitation would guarantee maximum freedom to all citizens and opinions. Modern communications are not necessarily the enemy of fair debate. They also make it possible for legislatures to fund all election expenses for all groups. The removal of all private funding could accomplish more than just cutting out the corporatist groups who attempt to dominate the citizenry. It could also reduce the overall cost of politics and focus public debate more on issues than on flimflam.

No doubt the special interests would respond by running their own candidates, but this would have a number of advantages. They would be identified as special interests, which is not the case today. They would be running without financial advantage, which is also not the case today. The special interests would be free to try their luck at the bar of public judgement instead of attempting to buy candidates. Finally, the common sense of the citizenry would be able to judge in a relatively clear situation which parties, policies and candidates were aimed at serving the public weal, which is not the case today.

ROUND TABLE
   An organized group of managers from leading American companies. The Round Table designs policies favourable to the corporations for which its members work, then sells them to the various levels of government.

This is not a lobby group but a corporatist organization; one of the most important in the developed world. At first glance the name of the group seems inappropriate. What possible link could there be between Arthur, Lancelot and the quest for the Holy Grail and a group of anonymous technocrats looking out for themselves and their systems? The answer is that they see themselves as the knighthood of technocracy and they claim the legitimacy of their corporatist power. See:
CORPORATISM.

S

SAT
   A system of standardized American college entry exams designed to nurture and reward functional illiteracy.

Originally used only inside North America, the Scholastic Aptitude Tests and their equivalents are spreading around the world in response to a corporatist desire for global fixed standards in specialized education. Consisting mainly of multiple choice and fill-in-the-blanks questions, the SATs are the archetypal product of a society which believes above all in the possession of facts and the rule of expertise. In spite of “substantial revisions” in 1994,
¹
the underlying premise of these tests is that to each question there is a single correct answer.

The skills they seek to measure are short-term memory and the ability to reduce knowledge to structures not unlike those of basic accountancy. They discourage thought, consideration, doubt, imagination and creativity. In sum, they reward mechanistic skills and punish intelligence. Exams of this sort are the first great barrier which students must clear in order to enter the functioning élite. Who they eliminate, who they encourage, the signals they send as to which skills society will reward, which not, have an important impact on the shape of our élites and what they think their role is.

The SATs are not simply illustrations of a crisis in our civilization. They are an active agent, thanks to their deformation of successive generations of the élites. The cry throughout a troubled West is that we need standards. Perhaps. But we don't need destructive standards. See:
WISDOM.

SCHOLASTICISM
   The dominant mediaeval school of teaching, inquiry, knowledge and argument. One of the Enlightenment's main enemies. Scholasticism was duly defeated and destroyed. It mysteriously re-emerged at the centre of power in the second half of this century.

The key to the mediaeval movement was its ability to tie up intellectual inquiry and language in an endless maze of high-quality irrelevance. In this way it protected established authority from serious examination.

The
Encyclopédie
described Scholasticism this way:

It substituted words for things; and frivolous or ridiculous questions for the great questions of real philosophy; it explained unintelligible things via barbarous terms.... This philosophy was born of the spirit of ignorance.... It reasoned from a basis of abstraction rather than of reality; it created for this new sort of study a new language. And disciples believed themselves wise because they had learnt this language. We can only regret that most scholastic authors made such a miserable use of their intelligence and that they limited their writing to such an extreme subtlety.
²

Scholasticism was launched in the thirteenth century by Thomas of Aquinas who applied Aristotelian logic to Christian purposes. In this way he managed to smother most relevant debate for a good three centuries.

The similarity of mediaeval and modern scholasticism can be seen in this statement by Frederick Copleston, a great historian of philosophy as well as of Aquinas: “The practice of starting from a revealed premise…and arguing rationally to a conclusion, leads to the development of Scholastic theology…”
³
This is precisely the method used to train contemporary technocrats in most fields. It is also the phenomenon identified by Harold Innis in the social sciences where, “…confident predictions, irritating and incapable of refutation, replaced discussion of right and wrong.”
⁴

In contemporary terms, Scholasticism creates impenetrable dialects, uses obscure language to prevent communication and separates intellectual inquiry from reality by adopting a relentlessly abstract approach. It continues to serve established power. See:
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
and
DECONSTRUCTIONISM.

SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR
   Hitler's favourite writer.

“My teacher,” the Führer said.
⁵
This appears a curious choice given that Schopenhauer avoided military service at a moment of crisis for Germany in its battle against Napoleon. He wasn't even a German nationalist. He did see himself as a follower of Plato and Kant, which indicates a taste for authoritarianism and for obscurantism, although he criticized the lack of clarity in others. There was a certain pessimistic idealism about him which is often a romantic basis for tyrannical action.

When asked why Nietzsche wasn't his favourite writer, Hitler is said to have replied, “I couldn't do anything with him.” Perhaps what he meant was that being himself as unbalanced as Nietzsche, they made an ill-suited couple for public mythology.

HEROES
rely heavily on philosophers who express romantic pessimism. Schopenhauer's attraction for Hitler may have been his overwhelming sense that evil was overwhelming the world and that the “root of all evil…is the slavery of the will.” The only solution was to turn “away from life to aesthetic contemplation and asceticism.”
⁶
Men like Hitler and Napoleon can be counted on to claim that if destiny had not forced them to become tyrants, they would have withdrawn into solitary contemplation.