Extracts from :
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992) by
John Ralston Saul
Chapter 19 Life in a Box — Specialization and the Individual
Entire ebook source:
http://isohunt.to/torrent_details/7809838/Voltaire-s-Bastards-1992
The rise of the professional was therefore intimately linked — throughout the Industrial Revolution, the accompanying explosion of inventions and the growth of the middle classes — with Western man’s assertion that he was a responsible individual. He was responsible to the degree that he was competent. Thus the value of individualism was pegged to the soaring value of specialization. By becoming better at what he did, each man believed that he was increasing his control over his own existence. He was building his personal empire of responsibility. This was both the measure of his worth and the sum of his contribution to society as a whole.
The assumption seemed to be that this new professionalism would lead to bodies of expertise joining together in a sort of populist meritocracy. The first large-scale manifestation of this idea came in the 1920s, in a horribly twisted form, with the rise of corporatism, which then turned into Fascism. This should have been interpreted as confirmation that the historic line from Athens and the gilds was nothing more than myth. The events of the 1920s and 1930s were not isolated incidents. Corporatism reappeared in the 1960s in such places as the British union movement, the American business group known as the Round Table and its imitative Canadian equivalent, the Business Council on National Issues. The last two can claim to have set much of their countries’ contemporary economic and social agendas. The banding together of citizens into interest groups becomes corporatist, that is to say dangerous, only when the interest group loses its specific focus and seeks to override the democratic system. In the case of the British unions and the North American business councils, their every intervention into public affairs has been intended to undermine the democratic participation of individual citizens.
These three examples are part of a growing trend. They also demonstrate one of the ways in which the real effect of increasing professionalism has been to isolate the individual. The professional did indeed find that he could build his personal empire; but curiously enough, the more expert he became, the more his empire shrank. As this happened the individual found himself in an increasingly contradictory position. On the one hand, because he was a virtually all-powerful retainer of information, expertise and responsibility over a tiny area, his cooperation was essential to others who, although within his general discipline, were themselves experts in other tiny areas. Obviously the cooperation of the whole group, with each other and with society as a whole, was also essential to the general population. On the other hand, as these tiny areas of absolute responsibility proliferated, each individual was more securely locked in his confining cell of expertise.
Inevitably he became increasingly powerless in society as a whole. The philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had thought they were building the foundations for a civilization of Renaissance individuals. The result has been the exact opposite.
While our mythology suggests that society is like a tree with the ripening fruits of professional individualism growing thick upon it, a more accurate image would show a maze of corridors, blocked by endless locked doors, each one leading in or out of a small cell.
This confusion is hardly surprising. Although the roots of our problem go back four centuries, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that all the relevant terms which describe the situation came into being or, pushed by changing structures, took on their current meanings. To specialize, for example, was an old verb which had traditionally been used in the way we now use to highlight. Only in 1855 did it come to rest on its modern meaning — to make narrower and more intensive. As part of this change, the word specialization had been coined in 1843 by John Stuart Mill and specialist by Herbert Spencer in 1856.4
The realization that knowledge and expertise, as applied by rational societies, undermined the individual instead of reinforcing him, began to dawn on people the moment this professional ethic formally entered the language. Spontaneously, yet more new words began to appear in order to provide a language for protest. Individualisme, the most important of these, appeared first in French, then in English. At its heart was a refusal of the burgeoning vocabulary that surrounded and imprisoned the professional. Individualism was created around the principle of a self-centred feeling or conduct. In other words, the conviction grew that the only way to develop individual qualities was to reject society.
The words of Charles Bonnet, who first identified the modern individual with his invention of the term individualité in 1760, show to what extent the purpose of individualism in a rational society was from the very beginning, social refusal and self-indulgence: “I am a being who feels and is intelligent; it is in the nature of all feeling and intelligent beings to wish to feel or to exist agreeably, and to wish to love oneself.”5
In other words, if participating in society involves the emasculation of the individual, then individualism has no option but to base itself on the abdication of responsibility.
Faced by the power of a whole civilization bound up in structure, the true individual flees. He refuses the rational dream of a world in which each man is an expert and therefore only part of a man. What he resents is not so much that he has been turned into a cell in the social body. Rather, he finds it unacceptable that each cell has little knowledge of the whole and therefore little influence over its workings. Judge Learned Hand, then a Harvard graduating student, spoke of this modern malaise to his classmates on their convocation day in 1893:
Civilization implies specialization, specialization is forgetfulness of total values and the establishment of false ones, that is Philistinism. A savage can never fall into this condition, his values are all real, he supplies his own wants and finds them proceeding from himself, not from an estimate of those of others. We must in practice be specialists; the division of labour ordains us to know something of one subject and little of others; it forces Philistinism down our throats whether we like it or not.6
Hand spent his life on the bench attempting to bring his assumption of morality and common sense to bear on his judgments. He wanted to link his own specialization to the outer world. For that he was respected and treated as the greatest magistrate in America. He was not, however, named to the Supreme Court. It could be argued that, despite the best will in the world from those who are in what we call positions of responsibility, the system invariably manages not to reward those who succeed in communicating between boxes without respecting established structure.
While Judge Hand and a few other exceptional men have appealed to the citizen to reach beyond the limitations that society imposes, it is hardly realistic to expect each citizen to maintain such a level of individualism. The problem is the same as that created by the exceptional public standards which Jefferson set. In the best of all possible worlds, every man and woman will try to attain them. But to pretend that we shall all succeed would be pure hypocrisy.
The more understandable and common reaction of the citizen-expert is defensive. He attempts to turn his prison cell into a fortress by raising and thickening the walls. This padded box may be a cell, but it is also a link within some larger process and is therefore essential. He alone understands and controls the workings of his own box. His power as an individual consists of the ability to withhold his knowledge of cooperation. In other words, “information” is the currency of a society built upon systems. Once a man has given out his information, he has spent his capital. He therefore doles it out with care. He trades his information for that of others. When threatened, he refuses cooperation — for example, by exaggerating difficulties or inventing them or moving slowly or offering misleading information. The only real power of expertise lies in retention. The more self-confident the individual, the less likely he has been to choose an isolated and well-defended box. Even so, as Marshall McLuhan put it: “The expert, as such, is full of insecurity. That is why he specializes in order to obtain some degree of confidence.”7
One of the
specialist’s most successful discoveries was that he could easily defend his territory by the simple development of a specialized language incomprehensible to nonexperts. The explosion in terminology over the last fifty years has left the languages of the West reeling. There is a general mistaken belief that these words have come largely from the English-language pool. This has permitted many people to attribute the breakdown of general communications in their societies to the imperial domination of English or, inversely, to the inability of such languages as German, French and Spanish to modernize.
But the expert-inspired explosion in vocabulary has happened to an equal degree in every Western language. The social sciences alone have flooded French, German, Italian, and, of course, English, with countless dialects. Subject after subject and profession after profession have now had the general understanding of their functions ripped out of the public’s hands by the experts.
The example of philosophy actually verges on comedy. Socrates, Descartes, Bacon, Locke and Voltaire did not write in a specialized dialect. They wrote in basic Greek, French and English and they wrote for the general reader of their day. Their language is clear, eloquent and often both moving and amusing. The contemporary philosopher does not write in the basic language of our day. He is not accessible to the public. Stranger still, even the contemporary interpreter of earlier philosophy writes in inaccessible dialect. This means that almost anyone with a decent pre-university-level education can still pick up Bacon or Descartes, Voltaire or Locke and read them with both ease and pleasure. Yet even a university graduate is hard pressed to make his way through interpretations of these same thinkers by leading contemporary intellectuals such as Stuart Hampshire. Why, then, would anyone bother trying to read these modern obscurings of the original clarity? The answer is that contemporary universities use these interpretations as the expert’s road into the original. The dead philosophers are thus treated as if they were amateurs, in need of expert explanation and protection.
The new specialized terminology amounts to a serious attack on language as a tool of common understanding. Certainly today,
the walls between the boxes of expertise continue to grow thicker. The dialects of political science and sociology, for example, are increasingly incomprehensible to each other, even though they are examining identical areas. It is doubtful whether they have any separate existence one from the other. In fact, it is doubtful whether either of them exists at all as a real subject of expertise. However, they have occupied traditional areas of popular concern and set about walling off these areas from each other and, of course, from the public. The wall between these two false sciences and that of the economists is thicker still. The architect and the art historian each uses a dialect so distant that the lack of common systems of argument suggests they are separated from each other, to say nothing of from the economist, not by a dialectical difference but by different languages. And yet St. Peter’s was built by painters.
An expert in one language, a German anthropologist, for example, is in many ways better equipped to communicate with the equivalent French anthropologist than with a German MBA. At first glance this might suggest that some wonderful international language is developing. Not at all. These new dialects are not healthy additions to any of our languages. They are rhetoric used to obscure understanding. If ever international integration raises the specter of specialist competition, they will obscure their language further in order to prevent that kind of communication.
The expert argues that none of this is so. He claims that his expanded language has paralleled an expanded understanding in his area. But this understanding is limited precisely to fellow experts in that area. Ten geographers who think the world is flat will tend to reinforce each other’s errors. If they have a private dialect in which to do this, it becomes impossible for outsiders to disagree with them. Only a sailor can set them straight. The last person they want to meet is someone who, freed from the constraints of expertise, has sailed around the world.
The purpose of language is communication. It has no other reason for existence. A great civilization is one in which there is a rich texture and breadth and ease to that communication. When language begins to prevent communication, that civilization has entered into serious degeneracy.
The primary instigators of obstruction are the very people who should have been devoted to the increasing of communications — the professors. They have turned their universities into temples of expertise, pandering to modern society’s weakness for exclusivity.
Maurice Strong has gone so far as to say that “the inter-disciplinary, linear, synthesis abilities are better outside of universities than in.” The American historian William Polk believes that universities should now be called multiversities, because their training is at the heart of what divides society rather than seeking to unite it.8 They — the custodians of the Western, intellectual tradition — now devote themselves to the prevention of integrated thought. Because professors both train society’s youth and catalogue current events — whether political, artistic or financial — they have become the official guardians of the boxes in which the educated live.
This obsession with expertise is such that the discussion of public affairs on a reasonable level is now almost impossible. If an engineer who builds bridges doesn’t want interference from outside his domain, and a nuclear engineer feels the same about his responsibilities, then neither is likely to question the other’s judgment. They know precisely how questions from any nonexpert would be treated by an expert — the same way they themselves would.
Their standard procedure when faced by outside questioning is to avoid answering and instead to discourage, even to frighten off the questioner, by implying that he is uninformed, inaccurate, superficial and, invariably, overexcited. If the questioner has some hierarchical power, the expert may feel obliged to answer with greater care. For example, he may release a minimum amount of information in heavy dialect and accompany it with apologies for the complexity, thus suggesting that the questioner is not competent to understand anything more. And if the questioner must be answered but need not be respected — a journalist, for example, or a politician — the expert may release a flood of incomprehensible data, thus drowning out debate while pretending to be cooperative. And even if someone does manage to penetrate the confusion of material, he will be obliged to argue against the expert in a context of such complexity that the public, to whom he is supposed to be communicating understanding, will quickly lose interest. In other words, by drawing the persistent outsider into his box, the expert will have rendered him powerless.
• • •
The contempt for the citizen which all of this self-defence through exclusivity shows is muted by the fact that the expert is himself a citizen. He or she considers it his right to treat his own area of expertise as exclusive territory. That, he believes, is what makes him an individual.
What is more, he knows that
only the greater middle classes are divided up and isolated in boxes of specialization. The mass of the citizenry is not. He also knows that the mass,
although no longer a lumpen proletariat or even an old-fashioned working class, is nevertheless caught up in work and family. These tens of millions of people maintain a tradition of belief in the good intentions of their rational elites. This is the result, in part, of the simple reality that most people do not have the time to seriously question their experts. Even if they find the time, they are not equipped with either the obscure vocabulary or an understanding of the obscure structures necessary to do so successfully. And even if they do persist, the rhetorical replies of expertise can only be taken as reassurance.
The experts exploit this trust with the active cynicism of frightened men. What frightens them is, in part, their own loss of individualism as a result of being caught up in the structures of rational society. The mass of the population, while not directly imprisoned by these structures, is entirely dependent upon the resulting manner in which society runs. There is also a relatively small percentage of the population that is rich enough to stay on the outside, along with the less powerful and the less educated. To the extent that they need or want things from society, even they are dependent. But it is the great middle classes who are trapped entirely within — the upper middle, middle middle, and lower middle. They are the functioning elite and yet must work for their living. They are the great creation of the Age of Reason and even where they do not constitute a majority, they dominate Western society. They are prisoners of their own expertise and as a result have been slipping into an ever more inarticulate state when it comes to their role as individual citizens.
During working hours a man’s obligations to his employment function force him to restrain his views on this, his area of expertise. He is also silent on other people’s areas of expertise. After all, the aim of structure is smooth functioning, not public criticism. And the expert’s desire not to be criticized by those outside his box restrains him in turn from criticizing them. When he leaves his office/function at the end of the day, he is theoretically free. In reality, were he to engage in independent public comment on his area of expertise, while on his own time, he would find himself in serious trouble with the system that employs him. Such comment would be considered a form of treason. In many cases, his contractual employment conditions specifically prevent him from off-hours independent involvement in his area of expertise. His employer has the exclusive use of his knowledge. In effect, the employed expert has no individual rights over his own competence, except that of changing employers. This could hardly be considered an important right, particularly since any attempts to speak out as an individual expert will saddle him with a reputation as a difficult individual, making it virtually impossible to find employment elsewhere.
What we have, then, is an educated, reasonably prosperous, responsibly employed middle class that is virtually censored or self-censored when it comes to most of the responsibilities of the individual citizen. The obvious exception to this is the right to cast a secret ballot. On the other hand, the breakdown of society’s traditional limitations — including most integrated religious and social beliefs — leaves all the members of this enormous middle class at liberty to use their free time however they wish, providing they don’t interfere with the functioning of the system. They are also absolutely free to spend their money on whatever they want, again providing they do not challenge structures.
The obvious solution for the middle classes has been to deal with the terrible frustrations of their silent, controlled, boxed-up real lives by spending their spare time and money as steam-release devices — that is, to compensate for a relevant straitjacket with irrelevant freedoms. This is what we now call individualism — an immersion in the imaginary waters of self-gratification.
But for today’s middle classes, more than frustration is at stake. Their need is also to forget that the individual’s real powers have been castrated by his or her own expertise. This amnesia can only be produced by pretending that superficial expressions of individualism mean something.
Under the old despotic regimes, substantive nonconformism was treated as an attack on the interests of the regime. It was a capital crime. In the democratic nations of the twentieth century there aren’t many capital crimes. Instead, substantive nonconformity is treated as irresponsible and unprofessional — forms of conduct in which no responsible citizen would wish to engage. To do so would be to endanger a safe position inside a box. But the middle-class male and now the middle-class female are products of an educational and social system which tells them that a successful life requires the penetration of an expert’s box and the occupation of as much space as possible within and for as long a period of time as possible. Sensibly enough, few would risk losing that. This fear of acting in an irresponsible manner has struck a death blow to public debate among educated citizens.
