Voltaire’s Bastards

Voltaire’s Bastards November 10, 2015

John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards is about Voltaire. He turned the tools of irony and ridicule he learned to use from Jonathan Swift during an English exile, “into unbeatable populist weapons.” Criticisms of Voltaire from professional philosophers don’t really touch him; he didn’t want to construct a philosophy but to change society, and so he concentrated on six freedoms: “of the person (no slavery), of speech and the press, of conscience, civil liberty, security of private property and the right to work.”

More fundamentally, Saul argues, he invented public opinion: “By addressing himself to the citizenry and not to the rulers and other thinkers, he invented modern public opinion. By successfully establishing the new ‘acceptable’ vocabulary for all civilized men, he forced even those in power to fight on his terms. He was a one-man guerrilla army and, as he put it, ‘God is not on the side of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.’”

More broadly, Saul’s book is about the theology of power that is embedded in modern conceptions of Reason. The ascendancy of Reason is the ascendancy of Voltaire’s skeptical children, not true heirs but bastardized acolytes of abstract reason: “To get at the unassailable, self-serving logic of the ancien régime, Voltaire and his friends made great use of scepticism. Once they had succeeded, this scepticism, this talent for criticism, remained in the air, a far easier tool than the vigilant common sense and morality which were intended to guide man’s reason. And so a new sceptical logic was born, liberated from the weight of historical precedent and therefore even more self-serving than the logic which had gone before.”

Reason, Saul claims, is pure form and structure, but in the modern world it has “swollen into an ideology” and “become a dogma, devoid of direction and disguised as disinterested inquiry.” Most of our problems arise from misconceptions and misuses of Reason, but our elites refuse to take the blame and instead scapegoat Unreason. Saul observes, “Like most religions, reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created.”

At base, Saul argues, we appeal to reason without really knowing what we’re talking about: “The implication is that most people — particularly the philosophers — were more or less agreed on what actually constituted reason. This simply isn’t so. There was and is no generally accepted, concrete definition. As so often with basic concepts, they slip away when you try to approach them. And the philosophers have kept themselves busy redefining as the centuries have gone by.” Yet the appeal to and of reason excludes every other source of human insight: “Reason began, abruptly, to separate itself from and to outdistance the other more or less recognized human characteristics — spirit, appetite, faith and emotion, but also intuition, will and, most important, experience.” When we “assign blame for our crimes to the irrational impulse, we display our misconception of reason itself, which is “no more than structure.”

Those Voltarean elites are another theme of the book: “Never before in history have there been such enormous elites carrying such burdens of knowledge. This success story dominates our lives. Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated. The possession, use and control of knowledge have become their central theme — the theme song of their expertise.” Saul argues that the power of the elites doesn’t depend on the success of their schemes so much as “on the effectiveness with which they control its use.” When elite schemes fail, the solution is seen as “a more determined application of rationally organized expertise.”

Elites control by controlling/manipulating the uses of language: “Language — not money or force — provides legitimacy. So long as military, political, religious or financial systems do not control language, the public’s imagination can move about freely with its own ideas. Uncontrolled words are consistently more dangerous to established authority than armed forces. Even coercive laws of censorship are rarely effective for more than short periods in limited areas. . . . The wordsmiths who serve our imagination are always devoted to communication. Clarity is always their method. Universality is their aim. The wordsmiths who serve established power, on the other hand, are always devoted to obscurity. They castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.” Under the control of Reason’s elites, “language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it.” This leaves us without the capacity for anything more than superficial self-assessment: “Our society contains no method of serious self-criticism for the simple reason that it is now a self-justifying system which generates its own logic.”

The dominance of Reason’s elites leaves everyone else speechless: “never have so few people been willing to speak out on important questions. Their fear is tied not to physical threats, but to standing apart from fellow experts or risking a career or entering an area of nonexpertise. Not since the etiquette-ridden courts of the eighteenth century has public debate been so locked into fixed positions, fixed formulas and fixed elites expert in rhetoric. The nobles of that time gave themselves over in frustration to a frivolous self-indulgence, which could be called courtly egotism. It is difficult to identify any real difference between that courtly egotism and the personal freedoms which so obsess us today.”

Thus, for instance, “we haven’t had a depression since the 1930s. And since most experts — the economists, for example — are part of the system, instead of being commentators in any real, independent sense, they contribute to the denial of reality.” The absence of depression has less to do with the economic realities on the ground than with the elites’ ability to control our official language. They cannot admit that they have failed because their power depends on their claims to expertise. 

Saul is an equal-opportunity offender. The claim that the American right is the law-and-order wing of American politics is accepted by anyone. Yet after twenty years of right-wing ascendancy (he was writing in 1993) “the levels of armed robbery, violent crime and murder have continued annually to grow to record highs — records both for the United States and in comparison to other Western countries. Still, the American Right persists in thinking of itself, and is thought of by its opponents on the Left, as the voice of law and order.”

In the name of Reason, Voltaire’s bastards have created a world driven by what Saul calls a “theology of pure power”: “The new holy trinity is organization, technology and information. The new priest is the technocrat — the man who understands the organization, makes use of the technology and controls access to the information, which is a compendium of “facts.” He has become the essential middleman between the people and the divinity. Like the old Christian priest, he holds the key to the tabernacle out of which, from time to time, he produces and distributes the wafer — those minimal nibbles at the divinity which leave the supplicant hungry for more. The wafer is knowledge, understanding, access, the hint of power. And the tabernacle is what it always was: the hiding place of this knowledge, the place which makes secrecy one of the keys to modern power. Finally there is the matter of absolution from personal responsibility. All religions seem to need special-case facilities to deal with the uncontrollable realities of a world which refuses to respond to their official ideology.”

Saul knows that his broad-brush polemic won’t satisfy philosophers or social scientists. But it’s bracing, and rightly highlights the religious character of modern anti-religion.


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