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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 16, 2001
Public intellectuals
"I sometimes feel that European and North American aggressivity towards Arabs over the last half-century has had less to do with Middle Eastern politics and more to do with an almost psychotic attempt to forget that it was the Christian civilization and no other which massacred six million Jews." This is not a random quotation from John Ralston Saul's new book of musings On Equilibrium. I have pointedly selected it as a topical example of the man's mind at work. Do I need to explain that the Nazis and not "Christian civilization" perpetrated the Holocaust? That Christianity played no part in the Nazi ideology which was radically and actively anti-Christian? It would perhaps be tendentious to add that Palestinians and most of the other Arabs who continue to dispute Israel's right to exist sided spontaneously with those Nazis in World War II. It is the sort of thing I don't think I would have to tell my reader but would have to explain to Mr. Saul. Yet I doubt he would be listening. From page one to page 329 he proceeds in a stream of consciousness that has no argumentative "brakes". He ignores he refuses to debate even the most obvious objections in his way. By the end of his romp he has appropriated to himself a monopoly on common sense ethics imagination intuition memory reason and finally normal behaviour . It is a breathtakingly pompous display. This is his weakness as a writer and thinker. His latest like his four previous contributions to popular philosophy is a kind of scrap book of tit-bits from his leisure hours from his desultory progress through newspapers and paperback "greats" seeking anecdotes and references to reinforce a rather dreary left-liberal worldview. It has no other detectable point beyond making an exhibition of its author's self-imagined erudition and wit. His faults as a reader and researcher are laid out in fairly extensive and remarkably pretentious footnotes. For instance the Islam on which he pronounces with casual familiarity is founded on a perusal of N.J. Dawood's translation of the Koran in "Penguin Classics". Like the Arberry Pickthall and Sale translations before it the book is a bowdlerized version that smoothes over all the hard bits that would tend to repel a modern Western reader while emphasizing the soft sentimental flights of fancy that appeal to the market for "eastern mysticism". Someone who actually needs to know what the Koran says would soon have got Ahmed Ali's much more scholarly and rigorous translation into his hands. I could go on like this for many pages but promise not to. It is the same story when we turn to Sophocles and Euripides to Plato and Aristotle to everything through Kant and Hegel that Mr. Saul assimilates into his macram?. One moment we have a quote from another softcover creampuff of a Penguin translation. But the next like a suspicious university term paper we may suddenly get three paragraphs of well connected reasoning only to find through the notes that the argument has been lifted holus-bolus from a treatise by Charles Taylor. It is in other words a post-modern and "non-linear" form of reasoning he pursues in which the subject can be changed the moment a point is made and invariably before it can be considered. By page 10 we have a conspectus of Plato the Stoics Marcus Aurelius St. Augustine Descartes Adam Smith Tom Paine German Romanticism and Samuel Taylor Coleridge compressed into a record 16 lines. "My aim here is not to produce a list of certainties and then demonstrate truth Mr. Saul explains. It is instead to produce meaningless lists of bafflegab. And yet, there is a detectable advance in coherence from the earlier scrapbooks, from Voltaire's Bastards forward. It would be uncharitable to attribute this to the superior secretarial services the author now enjoys in Rideau Hall. One senses from the outset a mild tension or urgency, where before he was remorselessly flip. There is a kind of noblesse oblige, as if his retainers had been summoned to his private study, to receive their instructions in the maintenance of a house that is disintegrating at alarming speed. What is disintegrating is the left-liberal worldview. In passages of breaking news in the second chapter, and echoed thereafter, Mr. Saul discovers that global consumerism is eating away the foundations of our democratic institutions. (Hold the press!) The book posits that a more thoroughgoing secular relativism may still save the day. It is what the author means by the Equilibrium" of his title. He equates civilization itself with this secular relativism this sober middle way between any two things he happens to be sneering at in the moment. With a new-found interest in the minutiae of state he is able to associate for instance agricultural marketing boards with the essence of civilization expressed in e.g. Mesopotamian irrigation schemes. In every place where he makes a practical point it is to resist those untrammelled individualist forces that threaten to overwhelm us. (Yet in the cause of moderation he now discovers he is a supporter of qualified free trade.) He utters warnings only to his credit he is entirely free of bright ideas for fixing any of the problems he describes. But this is because he makes clear that his prescription would be federal government intervention in almost every case. It is what makes his critique of individualism so shallow. He is incapable of examining the society itself as a kind of co-operative organism even when it is not regulated by bureaucrats; of grasping that so many of our "collective achievements" emerge spontaneously from individual acts. He decries "corporative" society for the third consecutive book without knowing what the word means and fancies "society" as some sort of machine dependant upon the oil and grease of government patronage and regulations. He uses emotive abstractions like the word "democracy" whenever he is stuck for a phrase. The result is a kind of "lateral thinking" that slips and slides off the coffee table. In the past I have described John Ralston Saul as an intellectual fraud and poseur as a merchant of "be^tises" as a French reviewer once indelicately put it. The book under review gives no reason to change this judgement. But I would not have taken the trouble to chastise were Mr. Saul merely one of the myriad hanging from the teat of the Canada Council. Instead he is accepted by the media and even some parts of academia in this country as a major "public intellectual". He is celebrated by our prime minister as an inspiration to the Canadian state. This is a dreadful state of affairs. * I turn in something approaching relief to Made for Happiness: Discovering the Meaning of Life with Aristotle by another Canadian Jean Vanier. This son of our greatest governor general who has made an international reputation for his work with the developmentally disabled did his doctorate on Aristotle at the Institut Catholique of Paris under the tutelage of several of the more impressive French neo-Thomist minds. On the subject he expounds he is not a flake. In the lucid and accessible translation of Kathryn Spink the book amounts to an exhilarating commentary or tour through the Nichomachean Ethics with side-journeys into other parts of Aristotle's ethical corpus and through the Aristotelian tradition in both ancient and modern worlds. Mr. Vanier links this with the modern and contemporary European traditions of Christian existentialism and "personalism" -- but there is nothing merely academic in anything he writes. At no point does he forget the testing questions: how should we live what should we do? In his works on ethics and politics Aristotle created a model or schema of human psychology but unlike modern psychological schools he did not use it to explain (or worse excuse) human behaviour. He tried to get inside human impulses and motivations for the purpose of putting them to work; of helping men become self-possessed and good; of helping them to adapt their animal desires and individualism to the highest comprehensible good. And not merely "the good of society" but The Good full stop. This is what made him the boilerplate or floorplan for Christian ethical thinking in the High Middle Ages; and what makes him relevant to our lives still. Among the book's merits is the almost effortless way in which Mr. Vanier shakes down our parochialism by explaining how different the world looked to a person standing at Athens in the 4th century B.C. And yet how constant the human "soul" or psyche that comes down the ages. For those who have tried to read Aristotle for themselves the last chapter on "The Shortcomings and Value of Aristotelian Ethics" is a wonderful opportunity to retrieve your bearings. Let it not be said that Canadians have no business writing about the most important things. Jean Vanier has once again shown what is possible when you come from this country. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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