Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
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In a wide-ranging, provocative anatomy of modern society and its origins, novelist and historian John Ralston Saul explores the reason for our deepening sense of crisis and confusion. Throughout the Western world we talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet Saul shows that there has never before been such pressure for conformity. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We are obsessed with competition, yet the single largest item of international trade is a subsidized market in armaments. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about "invasive government," yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are breaking down. While most observers view these problems separately, Saul demonstrates that they are largely manifestations of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the last 400 years, our "rational elites" have gradually instituted reforms in every phase of social life. But Saul shows that they have also been responsible for most of the difficulties and violence of the same period. This paradox arises from a simple truth which our elites deny: far from being a moral force, reason is no more than an administrative method. Their denial has helped to turn the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts - "Voltaire's bastards" - whose cult of scientific management is bereft of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertainment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose peoples increasingly dwell in a world of illusion. Already known to millions of readers as the author of novels which portray the overwhelming effects of this power on the modern individual by weaving together interna
Pt. IArgument1In which the Narrator Positions Himself52The Theology of Power103The Rise of Reason384The Rational Courtesan775Voltaire's Children1086The Flowering of Armaments141Pt. IIScenes from a System That Doesn't Work7The Question of Killing1778Learning How to Organize Death1889Persistent Continuity at the Heart of Power20510In the Service of the Greater Self23411Three Short Excursions into the Unreasonable26612The Art of the Secret28013The Secretive Knight30014Of Princes and Heroes31815The Hero and the Politics of Immortality34716The Hijacking of Capitalism35817The Miracle of the Loaves394Pt. IIISurviving in Fantasy Land: The Individual in the World of Reason18Images of Immortality or The Victory of Idolatry42519Life in a Box - Specialization and the Individual46620The Stars49921The Faithful Witness53622The Virtue of Doubt577Notes587Acknowledgments619Index621
