I turned the last page on this book over a week ago and needed time to let my head clear somewhat before I tackled the review. Voltaire’s Bastards is a book about the decline of our Western Civilization, how we are approaching the end of an era and some of the serious issues that confront our way of life. Saul paints a bleak picture of our current society, our language, our politics our economics and our leadership. The book was a long read, I found myself re-reading sections several times either because I didn’t get it or I couldn’t believe it. My wife and I have had several discussions about Saul’s point of view on various issues in the book, most of which have been approached with disagreement. The overall tone of the book is kind of gloomy, many problems are described in detailed, a great deal of research was performed to support the position and very few solutions are suggested. It is however an excellent catalyst for discussion which may have been his intention from the beginning.
Saul claims that our western society has been in the "age of reason" for the past 200 years and this "age" is nearing its end due to several factors such as the breakdown of our language, the perversion of democracy, the specialization of the individual and poor leadership. Some of his views on things like the economic practices of our society and the individualism approach to our lives are quite disturbing. Over all I found the book well written and well researched. As I read I found myself marking pages and underlining passages that pulled at the strings of my consciousness. Here are some of them, what do you think?
"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’."
"To this day, men who find themselves burdened by the adjective Machiavellian also find their careers severely limited. And yet the question that might be asked is: Why do so few men carry the adjective? If you were to edit the sixteenth-century references out of ‘The Prince’ and then to re-title it Power and the executive of Effective Government, the book would immediately be adopted by all contemporary management courses aimed at training businessmen, civil servants and professional politicians. It would be considered an ideal manual for the preparation of the modern world leader."
"In the nineteenth century, doctors were at the centre of political, social and cultural change. Today, a doctor tends to reach her summit when her view of the human body consciously limits itself to a single organ. Is this woman not illiterate."
"A predefined argument in which the people’s questions and answers would inescapably lead them to accept the pope’s authority. Everything lay in the advance definition of the form of the interchange between the priest and the individual. Rhetoric was the science of that form….This is precisely the method used today by the MBA or the Enarque. The modern technocrat attempts at all costs to initiate any dialogue. Thus he is able to set, in the first sentences of any exchange, the context of the theoretical discussion about to take place. In written arguments briefing books play the same role. The intended audience unthinkingly accepts the parameters laid out. It is then caught up in the coil of the resulting logic and kept busy rushing back and fourth between the questions and answers which the predefined structure imposes. In the process it feels the satisfaction produced by simply keeping up of the despair of inferiority if it does not. There is no time for reflection or consideration of the basic parameters."
"Seventy-two million Americans are illiterate, the majority of them white. This doesn’t include the functionally illiterate. One-quarter of American children live below the poverty level. Forty percent of children in public schools are from racial minorities. The whites who can afford to are slipping away into the private school system. Twice as many children are born to American teenagers as to those of any other democracy. But if you begin to add such facts as that forty million Americans do not have access to medical care, you are also obliged to wonder if the problem lies not with the population but with the elite’s, their expectations and their own education.
If Harvard, to remain with the same example, is what it claims to be and its graduates are to be found everywhere, then why are they showing no signs of dealing with their society’s terrifying problems? Were Montesquieu’s proverbial Persian to look in upon American society today, the only possible conclusion he could draw would be that never has such a magnificent elite failed so miserably and done so with such little grace, insisting as it does upon blaming the lowest end of the social scale for much of what is wrong….Or about developing a common sense line linking general with elite education. Or about evaluating why the most complex and competitive higher education systems ever seen in the history of the world do not produce elite’s capable of addressing the problems of their society."
"We are now caught in the midst of great economic and moral confusion. Public officials, appointed or elected, of the Left or the Right, are terrified to speak out against a sector which, according to universally accepted dogma, stands between us and economic collapse. Many of them believe arms production to be a weight tied around our necks. But this is an heretical and therefore secret belief. As a result armaments dominate our economies in a silent, sullen manner, without the public knowing quite what to think."
"The more the United States and Canada modernize – or rationalize – their mail delivery, the less mail they can deliver at a slower rate to fewer places, with increasing irregularity and at both greater expense and higher cost to the user…Meanwhile, in Canada, in order to cut employment costs, post offices are being closed. The postal service is being franchised to variety stores as a sideline. These offer little more than stamps. They also cut the public off from their public servants in the post office.
The question of employment is particularly interesting. Humans deliver mail. If you reduce costs by reducing employment, you undermine the systems performance. This sets in motion the spin towards shrinking services. Systems analysis doesn’t understand this because it is busy realizing that a public service is not a separate, private corporation but part of a whole which is the entire public structure. If the profitability of a service were to be measured accurately, it would have to take into account the effect of that service on the lives and businesses of the population."
"There is a whole series of governmental and paragovernmental services in which the assumptions of modern management are quite simply wrong. In education is it cheaper to keep a teacher unemployed or employed? All the costs must be calculated, not just salary. The cost to the state of that teacher’s own education, for example. And the increased value to the future economy of the education given to a child in a class of twenty, or better still ten, rather than the current thirty or forty. And the cost to the state of rampant illiteracy. All the Western nations now admit that their universal education systems are not working. They are all in structure, method and content. But education – quantity and quality – is above all the result of teaching. And teaching requires teachers, the more the better. A national education strategy may sound reassuring but without more bodies a strategy is just a strategy."
"Governments use the weapon of quantity as often as the weapon of retention in order to sell their point of view. Factual attacks from the outside can be neutralized by a volley of governmental facts. Governments and large corporations always have more material than their critics….How is the citizen to choose among so many "True" statements? The factual snow job is one of the great inventions of the late twentieth century."
"The scientific community has changed our life more in this century than any parliament, and yet it feels obliged to justify nothing."
"The New Right is even more undisciplined than the liberal middle classes, which have redefined personal freedom as the privilege not to give of themselves when it comes to protecting or advancing the public good. Throughout the West they have gradually withdrawn from public life, claiming that politics si too damaging to their private lives. These lives tend now to be devoted to careerism, travel, holidays, sport, exercise and the caressing of a private state of mind which might be described as an obsession with their personal well-being. For both the New Right and the middle-class liberals, individualism has come to mean self-indulgence. Such a childlike approach to the role of the citizen has allowed them to invert logic in a remarkable way. The public servant- Police officer, soldier, tax collector, health authority – who is paid by the citizen, now becomes the enemy of the Citizen."
"The theory is that competition draws each individual along, bringing out of him or her the best he or she has to offer. Competition and the resulting fame are thought to be among the great achievements of our rational meritocracy. They promise both self-improvement and participation.
The reality is almost the opposite. In a world devoted to measuring the best, most of us aren’t even in the competition. Human dignity being what it is, we eliminate ourselves from the competition in order to avoid giving other people the power to eliminate us. Not only does a society obsessed by competition not draw people out, it actually encourages them to hide what talents they have, by convincing them that they are insufficient. The common complaint that we have become spectator societies is the direct result of an overemphasis on competition."
"The novelist was constantly pushing at the front edge of specific knowledge and understanding. Today’s novelist, living as he usually does in the isolation of literature’s own professional box, is unable to do this. What is it that he now knows profoundly enough to be able to write about? First, he knows about writing; second, about the world of writers; third, about the writer’s inner life; and fourth, about his own practical situation, on the margins of the normal world, where he may exist in comfort or in poverty. At on extreme are those who write about writing – the university novelist and the experimentalists. At the other are those who, like Raymond Carver, refuse this self-indulgent cocoon in favor of charting their own experiences on the edge.
In neither case do we have the novelist running ahead of society, dragging everyone else behind. Walter Bagehot had already seen the problem looming late in the nineteenth century. "The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.""
