Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul

5/5

Sometime in my early-20s I was overcome by the sense that modern society and its expectations were an insult to the intelligence of the average person. To get by on a day-to-day basis at work, school, or any other social setting it was important to play dumb and not ask too many questions. I’m sure many people feel like this today too, for novel reasons that I can’t even being to comprehend. Around that time, I discovered Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, a sweeping critique of our rationally irrational modern society. It’s no exaggeration to say that it forever changed the way that I look at the world. It’s a relatively obscure text by a Canadian philosopher, but periodically over the years I’ve met a few who told me the same.

Voltaire's Bastards is a general survey of the evolution of Western culture since around the start of the Enlightenment. The premise, as the title suggests, is that instrumental reason has become unmoored from its original purpose as a tool to undermine irrational forms of power. It has now evolved instead into a force for tyranny and irrationality unto itself. Modernity first emerged when people developed new standards of quantification and reasoning to first judge and then fight back against arbitrary systems of power like monarchies and priesthoods. That was very good, initially. But over centuries, the data-crunchers and peer-recognized experts wound up creating their own priesthoods. Today there are multinational corporations, NGOs, Ivy League universities, and states that are collectively far more powerful than the Catholic Church which Voltaire denounced. These institutions have built their own self-justifying structures of reason and rationality to control, and not infrequently tyrannize, the average person. It’s a tyranny that never announces itself, and can feel so natural that it is often not clear to see.

We tend to think of reason as a good thing, and when it is in its correct place and context, it certainly is. The problem arises when people create systems justified in terms of reason that are themselves unquestionable, that operate as judges of their own success, and which everyone else must then operate under. If you want an example of this you can think of the metric of economic GDP, which politicians and societies as a whole are compelled to drive higher and higher at any cost, because a caste of economists once concluded that this figure correlates with general economic wellbeing. The irony is that even things like oil spills or nuclear waste leakages that objectively make the planet a worse place for human beings can still drive up GDP, since they are expensive to clean up. Getting people to do totally pointless work that contributes nothing to society and drains their own enjoyment of life can likewise be made to look perfectly healthy on a balance sheet. Arms sales look great in terms of GDP figures, even if the arms are then used to kill innocents and sow hatred. But GDP is just one famous and relatively well-interrogated example of this. The problem is that our entire society has been built into siloes that run on flawed or even wholly arbitrary success metrics, that, in themselves, are completely “rational.”

During the Vietnam War, Ford Motor Company executive turned Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara created elaborate, self-justifying metrics to determine what type of military policies would result in a war that is “won.” He used the same type of thinking that he applied to optimizing car production at Ford to a grave issue of human life and death that played out in the distant Vietnamese countryside. The questions of why the war was being fought, what the actual inputs and outputs of his models were, and what victory and defeat meant, were by their nature outside the scope of the model and not fit for consideration. McNamara was the ultimate technocrat, and people like him, with the same blinders, have effectively built the modern world. When there are social catastrophes like failed wars and corporate bankruptcies, no one ever seems to be held responsible because all parties involved have plausibly determined that they’re just bureaucrats running big self-rationalizing systems like those that McNamara helped create.

At the same time, this class of management bureaucrats also engages in a lot of self-congratulation and stolen valor to justify their exalted positions in society. People who describe themselves as daredevil arch-capitalists today, like corporate CEOs, are almost always capitalists in name only. Real capitalists, love them or hate them, are people who take personal risks with their money and livelihood. They have skin in the game, and the decisions they make tend to be refined and strengthened accordingly. CEOs don’t take any such risks, they get paid big salaries and win either way. As such, many of them don’t even seem to care if they build anything lasting or not. On a personal level, why should they? I think a lot of contemporary hatred for the capitalist that many feel today, and that I have certainly felt, is actually the misplaced hatred of the bureaucrat, or priest.

If you’re annoyed or mystified by academic writing, just keep in mind that it’s a defense mechanism by a class of experts intended to protect their siloed field from outside scrutiny and to keep this whole charade going. There are analogous ideological forcefields in other sectors too, all created for the purpose of preventing outsiders from seeing that what the people inside the walls are doing is literally useless to society. This is not an evil conspiracy, it’s just a logical response to incentives. This practice has been encouraged over generations to the point where it seems completely normal to the average participant. I used to not understand and even feel somewhat insulted by the fact that I’d never been given an education that allowed me to decode this type of academic arcana. I assumed that since it was so convoluted it must be expressing some kind of treasured knowledge that could only be expressed this way. In reality, it’s almost always nonsense. This is why contemporary pundits who are sometimes equally clueless, but at least speak in plain language to people, have become popular with the rise of the internet and emancipated publishing.

Voltaire's Bastards goes well beyond institutional analysis to talk about how this tyranny of rationalization has impacted art, religion, and pretty much every other sphere of modern life. I’m not going to go over all of it, but the book shows how a blind commitment to reasoning within arbitrary parameters can effectively make us the slaves of our own tools. Ralston Saul is not against reason per se, of course, but argues that without its placement in a proper place, as a tool used to achieve positive ends that are justified outside of closed systems, it will destroy the human goods that it was originally meant to protect. We need to first step back and decide what we want as human beings, and then use reason as one among many tools to help lead us there, not simply to reason ourselves into circles that we can never escape. If Voltaire saw the ends to which his arguments had been taken today, he would likely be the first to revolt against them. This is a long book and that means an investment of time, but I can’t recommend it enough. If you want to see a practical application of its themes, go read David Graeber’s classic essay, On Bullshit Jobs. I once worked in a call center and can tell you that nothing has never ever resonated with my experience more powerfully.