The Unconscious Civilisation
ABC Massey Lectures
By John Ralston Saul
Penguin, 1995. 208 pp.
A Truly Civil Society
Boyer Lectures
By Eva Cox
ABC in booklet form or from the ABC web site.
Review by Gerry Harant
Since their broadcast on the ABC, a book version of the Canadian Broadcasting Commission's Massey Lectures, titled The Unconscious Civilisation, by John Ralston Saul is making the rounds of small-l liberals. And so it should.
Saul analyses current "western" society in terms of its suppression of community values, its acceptance of corporate standards, its concepts of letting "the market" make decision which are, or should be, rightly the concerns of the community. Written in clear language, the five lectures traverse a wide spectrum of issues and describe what Saul describes as "the hijacking of Western Civilisation".
Economics, he says, has replaced, on the popular, academic and political levels, the previously inherent concern for the public good, and falsely poses the individual against the society in which he or she lives. Reading the lectures gives you a warm inner glow, a feeling that you have discovered yet another exposition showing how right you were all the time.
In a way, it is a chilling read. Saul lives in Canada, half a world away from Australia; yet the description he gives of society would not be one whit different if it were written in an Australian urban environment. This puts paid to any notion that, in our global system, things would be greatly improved if we were to replace any current local politicians by some other politician.
Saul arrives at his analyses by insisting that ideology in the abstract is to blame for our decline. With gay abandon he repeatedly names in the one breath fascism, Marxism, corporatism etc, but resolutely exempts himself from this list. Yet he admits that what improvements were, from time to time, achieved under capitalism were the result of people acting in concert, even if some of their ideologies, like Chartism are long outdated; and Saul's ideal of the "common good" is as much an ideology as any other.
Unfortunately, the left also harboured the notion that our commitment is "rational"; we even followed the notion of "scientific socialism". Some still do. This means we make science our touchstone, by which we legitimate our ethical commitment — hardly rational when science and scientists have proved incapable (apart from a handful of notable exceptions) of withstanding the lures and pressures of an irrational ruling class and when the vast majority of present-day scientists work either in "defence" and/or for monopoly capitalists. What is needed is a Marxist analysis of science, not a scientific analysis of Marxism.
But I digress. Saul is of course not the first to criticise the ideology behind the econo-rats. Eva Cox, in her 1993 Boyer Lectures was, in fact, far more specific about how, in the Australian context, Thatcher's dictum "There is no society" is being enforced on us.
Indeed, re-reading her text shows how far the rot has progressed in even those short years; her wish-list of social improvements reads like an almost ridiculous utopia, although it could easily have been implemented under a Whitlam-style reformist government.
Both these critiques carefully steer clear of "conspiracy theories" and simply accept the apparent domination of ideology over decision-making processes as a "sign of the times".
However, while certainly many decisions, such as the current expansion of uranium mining or the duplication of pay TV, make little economic sense, and while the "greed is good" concept has been around for a long time, it is clearly no coincidence that precisely the same concepts of privatisation, downsizing and destruction of community values should emerge at identical times with identical results not only in "western" "democracies", but all over the globe.
Nor do we have to think up complex fantasies in explanation. The same half-dozen privatisation agencies, such as Price Waterhouse, KPMG Peat Marwick, Arthur Anderson, are acting in this country as they are everywhere else, "advising" governments at our expense on why they must flog off our property, and then following this up in "assisting" the sales of our assets.
We also know that the IMF and the World Bank insist that underdeveloped countries dispose of their assets such as water, electricity and communications to transnationals to qualify for "aid".
While this strategy dates back to the early '80s, when western capitalism decided to put real expansion and entrepreneurship in the "too hard" basket and replace it by ripping off the people's hard-won assets, this very public process has been hidden from people. As in Australia, they either believe that they can control their destiny by electing the right politicians, or — even worse — see that what is being imposed on us as a law of nature.
Authors like Saul and Cox, though undoubtedly well intentioned, treat the ideologies put forward by capitalists and their apologists as if they were the actual causes of repressive policies, when in fact they are afterthoughts to an exertion of class power.
What we get from their books, at best, is a feeling of self-satisfaction at having known what they say all along. We also get a feeling of impotence because their prescriptions, which are to work harder at what we have been doing anyway, are clearly insufficient.
To quote Saul: "It is therefore a matter of inserting the citizen as citizen into the system in whatever way we can. And then letting the mechanism of criticism combined with high levels of involvement take effect." Against which I can only report the story of Little Red Riding Hood, who, when the hunters caught up with the wolf, called out from the inside "Don't kill the beast — I'm trying to reform him from within!"
In previous capitalist crises, people found it hard to comprehend the apparently mysterious and impersonal forces of oppression. This time round, we can identify and expose them. This is of increasing importance, as the divide-and-rule policies of the ruling class, aided by nuts like Pauline Hanson, once again guide the people's righteous anger into channels of race hatred and false consciousness.