The dictatorship of reason

In this enormous book John Ralston Saul offers his explanation of why our civilisation is going off the rails - a huge subject which he treats with great passion.

His analysis is essentially historical. The foundations of the modern world grew out of the shaping forces of the Enlightenment, best typified by the life and figure of Voltaire. The attempt to replace a feudal, illogical, cruel and outdated regime with a more just and progressive one focused on the need to pass everything under the Ockham's razor of reason. In the context of the eighteenth century , rational analysis was a tool of humane reform. However, Saul maintains that the processes of the last two and a half centuries have perverted the dynamics behind reason.

The movement from illogical, feudal social institutions to the systematically organised institutions of today was developed by restructuring the professional training of military officers in pre-revolutionary France. Saul is particularly good at outlining how military structures have been taken on by every modern institution so that we have created technocrats who see truth only in facts and have no vision of social or moral responsibility. The staff officer of the eighteenth century has spawned the faceless executive of the large corporation.

Saul's aim is to show how the values that are publicly proclaimed are an inversion of what is actually practised. This is typified most graphically by the military complex who point to world peace since 1945 but are responsible for the deaths of 1,000 soldiers and 5,000 civilians every day of the year in the Third World. Saul powerfully points up the stranglehold that arms manufacturers have on Western economies. He attributes the collapse engendered by the OPEC oil price rise in 1973 to the need the US had to sell arms to the Shah of Iran - who had to raise his oil price in order to afford them. Since then inflation and recession have been continuous: the winners have been the arms manufacturers and the oil companies, the losers the rest of the world, ourselves included.

Participation is Saul's key to mastering the inhuman institutions that control us; an actively participatory democracy that can overthrow the tyranny of the anti-democratic 'expert', the bureaucrat whose vision of humanity is profoundly pessimistic. As he writes:

'Jefferson put it that men by their constitution were naturally divided into two parts - those who fear and distrust the people versus those who identify with the people and have confidence in them. Our civilisation has increasingly put those who fear and distrust in power over us. Those who have confidence have always argued that consciousness is the the key to improvements in the human condition. But power structures have always treated consciousness in the citizenry as a danger which must first be lulled, then channelled towards the inoffensive

'The changes which might help us deal with our own difficulties can be easily listed: re-establish the division between policy and administration, and end the cult of the Hero; widen the meaning of knowledge; end the alliance between barbarism (the generals, heroes, stars, speculators) and technocracy; denigrate self-interest, meaningless power, cynicism, rhetoric; and for that matter, simply change our elites. But the void in our society has been produced by the absence of values. And values are not established by asserting issues. The constant base needed to supply values is the result of methodical participation.'

The book took ten years to write. It is stronger on criticism than creative alternatives but is nevertheless impressive in its scope and analysis, particularly of the arms trade and the impact of television on our consciousness. Although we love to think so, we do not live in 'the best of all possible worlds'