The Doubter's Companion (33 page)

PUNCTUALITY
   A characteristic of executions, religious sacrifices and bullfights.

Humans deal best with the premeditated taking of life if it is made to seem inevitable. This sort of willed inevitability quite naturally must start on time, which restores to the victim their dignity. They die with the knowledge that they have not suffered a haphazard alleyway mugging.

Devotion to punctuality in any other area suggests an obsessive, directionless or insecure personality. See:
MANNERS.

R

RATIONALIZE
   A transitive verb meaning to close, to shut down, to make redundant, to go bankrupt, to fire.

Administrative dialects seem to have been inspired by the baroque politeness of the Victorian middle-class tea-party. Reality is described through allusion and indirection. Technocrats speak as if they can only dignify their lives through verbal
PROPRIETY
.

Rationalization is to economics what bleeding was to eighteenth-century medicine. The underlying idea is that those who rationalize their activities will improve themselves through self-imposed suffering. It is particularly interesting that the élite most inspired by
REASON
should have chosen a derivative of that word in order to indicate failure. A Jungian might argue that this is an unconscious cry of despair or, more optimistically, for help. Until recently rationalization meant lying to yourself about what you are doing.

Metaphors of To Rationalize include To Restructure, To Downsize.

REALITY
   You should not, as the Washington hostess Alice Roosevelt Longworth pointed out, trust any balding man who combs his hair up from his armpit over the top of his head. Or rather, it is the considered opinion of most members of our rational élites that, in any given difference of opinion with reality, reality is wrong. See:
IMAGE.

REASON
   Whatever anyone says it means, someone will argue that it means something else. The one thing they will agree on is that reason is both central and essential to our civilization, which is curious since they don't know what it is.

One of the peculiar characteristics of key terms is that the more we apply them to the real world, the more we claim that we are not experiencing the real thing. A dictatorship of the proletariat, once installed, will never be the promised dictatorship of the proletariat. A true self-regulating market will somehow never be true or self-regulating enough. These arguments resemble the rhetoric of mediaeval scholastics. Those who use them seem to be on a mission to rescue their favourite abstract theory from its latest catastrophic defeat at the hands of reality.

With half a millennium of conscientious application under its belt, reason is regularly declared to be farther than ever from the revelation of its true meaning. But an annoying sort of commonsensical citizen might stick to her guns and repeat, whenever faced by this interminable kant, that reason is what reason does.

As the religious debates which preceded the rational debates demonstrated, if you treat all questioning of what is declared to be the central principle of society as a rejection of it, you leave no room for reasonable re-evaluation. Thus it is invariably suggested that those who question the way in which we use reason are actually calling for a return to superstition and arbitrary power. The unspoken basis of this argument is that there are no other important human qualities or that these other pretended qualities are not qualities at all. In this way we are denied access to what we know to be our own reality.

The hypothetical
DOUBT
ing citizen could suggest that reason might make more sense if it were relieved of its monotheistic aura and reintegrated into the broader humanist concept from which it escaped in search of greater glory in the sixteenth century. In this larger view it would be balanced and restrained and given direction by other useful and perhaps also essential human characteristics such as common sense, intuition, memory, creativity and ethics. In such a generous context it would be easy to see that reason on its own is little more than a mechanism devoid of meaning, purpose or direction.

The rhetorical defender of the rationalist faith will immediately question whether these other characteristics are indeed independent qualities or whether they are merely lower-case concepts which can be dangerous if let loose. But why must we reduce our options to a choice between the true God and a golden calf?

Between our periods of purist folly, we keep coming back to the idea that we are balanced creatures. That is, we can be if we try. It may be impossible for each individual to achieve equilibrium. But when the varying strengths and weaknesses of the citizenry are combined, the idea of a balanced society becomes reasonable.

Reason detached from the balancing qualities of
HUMANISM
is irrational. The promise of a sensible society lies in the potential reality of a wider balance. And in that equilibrium reason has an essential place. See:
INSTRUMENTAL REASON.

RECESSION
   “The recession is over.”

This phrase has been used twice a year since 1973 by government leaders throughout the West. Its meaning is unclear. See:
DEPRESSION.

REFERENDUM or PLEBISCITE
   Most commonly used to deform or destroy democracy, referenda casually offer a false choice—to accept a change proposed by those who have power or to refuse it. In other words, there is a single option, which is not a choice.

They are often presented as a populist tool of
DIRECT DEMOCRACY
which translates into undermining representative democracy.

They can indeed be tools of democracy, for example, if the citizens of a territory want to choose between belonging to one of two countries.

Referenda were introduced as a political tool under the French Revolution, but they came into their own under Napoleon. He used them to create something new—a populist dictatorship. Referenda resembled a democratic appeal to the people, without requiring the long-term complexities of elected representatives, daily politics and regular elections. Instead he combined his personal popularity with a highly focused appeal on a single subject. The result was that he could later claim the general support of the populace on any subject for undefined periods of time. In 1804, Napoleon used a referendum to become emperor, thus destroying democracy. Hitler did virtually the same thing in 1933 and again in 1934. In two referenda he got more power than an absolute monarch.

Those who propose the question invariably argue that a yes vote will solve problems; a no vote will bring on the apocalypse. This was as true of Napoleon as it was of the Canadian government's constitutional referendum in 1992.

All the efforts of those with the power to pose questions are concentrated on making the populace understand that they “need” to vote yes. “Necessity,” William Pitt once said, “is the plea for infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” And as André Malraux noted, “the slave always says yes.”

Even at its best, democracy is a cumbersome and often tiresome business. Nor is it surprising that the gradual conversion of political propaganda into an important profession—public relations—which runs together social, economic and political questions, should favour the Heroic referendum approach over the complex multi-faceted and slow process of electoral democracy. The result is that we are increasingly subjected to the Heroic view of government. Even legislative elections are being turned away from their normal mix of issues and personalities to the illusion that a single candidate's position on a single issue or a personality flaw is all important. Single-issue lobbyists are as devoted to converting elections into referenda as public-relations firms.

And the press quite easily fall into the plebiscite game-plan, because they find it easier to harp on about the same subject, dramatizing, hyping it in fact, than to deal with a mix of complex issues.

A new face. The reduction of debt. Immigration. Nationalization. Privatization. Free Trade. One of these is the answer to our problems. It will allow us to avoid the apocalypse. The choosing of hundreds of representatives in the context of hundreds of issues, big and small, is in this way reduced to a plebiscite. Referenda are thus anti-democratic because they lend themselves so easily to the politics of
IDEOLOGY.

REGULATION
   Economic regulation protects the
MARKETPLACE
from itself by introducing common sense. In the process it protects society.

This was how we avoided the cruel and destabilizing effects of the 1973 Depression. Unfortunately, those regulations also became an excuse for treating the crisis as less than it was. In an astonishing intellectual somersault, our élites seemed to be reassured and took to blaming the crisis on the costs of the stabilizing rules which had saved them.

This required extreme self-delusion. In any of the earlier depressions, the hurricane of social and economic disorder would have swept them out of power. As for the business leaders, and the middle class in general, most of their money and property would have disappeared in the storm. This is not to deny that over-regulation is a problem. It is. But regulations neither created nor maintained this crisis. And they are not THE problem. Among the unfortunate by-products of an ironic situation has been the encouragement of the worst characteristics in our élites. Increasingly they believe that because they still have power they must be right.

The challenge of the last twenty years—one to which we have not risen—has been to find a new way to think about economic crises. We had the right to congratulate ourselves on our success in regulating the current disaster, providing we then admitted that the disaster was real. In other words, regulation is at best a temporary harness on a force which can outlast and eventually outmanoeuvre any civilization. Regulation buys time. The question is, how should that time be used? We have wasted the last twenty years by denying reality and engaging in ideological arguments. There isn't much to be gained by assigning blame now. Even so, the Neo-conservative academics could easily be put at the top of a shame-ridden list.

Part of our problem is that the inventiveness of the marketplace quickly makes regulations irrelevant or counter-productive. The business community, their academic lobbyists and political agents react by crying out for deregulation. But then the market tends quite naturally towards a blunt and negative manner of expressing its dissatisfaction. It is not a mechanism of finely balanced human relationships. It cannot be expected to understand or to propose civilized human arrangements.

To the extent that deregulation has been conceded over the last few years, it has been disastrous for sectors as varied as banking, transportation and much of heavy industry. A more sensible approach might have been to re-examine the underlying mechanisms of regulation in order to bring them into the late twentieth century.

Duplication, unnecessary complications, administrative delay, barrier after barrier of detailed rules—all of these added up to a self-defeating maze constructed over the years, but not a force of evil. To re-establish society's real intent we needed simply to digest this accumulation of detail into new, lean and straightforward regulations.

While the ideological debate between regulation and deregulation has stretched on, our economic systems have been undermined by revolutionary changes in the marketplace. There have been endless inventions in the area of international financial speculation. And the transnational corporations have become increasingly sophisticated. Most postwar economic regulations, although complex and heavyhanded, have become marginal. With the end of the centrally administered European-based colonial empires in the early 1960s and the end of the
BRETTON WOODS
financial agreement in 1973, our systems of economic regulation became irrelevant.

The transnational corporations and the money markets have declared the era of human-designed regulations over. Now the market must reign. Because few people in the business community are paid to think about phrases such as “Western civilization,” they don't seem to realize that they are proposing the arbitrary denial of 2,500 years of human experience.

The only way to stabilize the markets in order to protect them from themselves, and in the process to protect ourselves, is to rethink how to regulate them. This means neither fortress nationalism nor anarchical internationalism. A very careful balance can exist between the two. Bilateral or trilateral economic integration pacts such as the FTA and NAFTA are not the solution. They are regional victories for partial market deregulation at the expense of social balance. International trade negotiations such as GATT probably aren't much more useful. These arrangements are part of the old-style regulations. They cannot deal with either the transnational corporations or the money markets. The European Community is a serious attempt at rethinking and reregulating a large area of human society. But it remains a regional arrangement, and so will be unable to maintain its very real standards against the attacks of the transnational corporations and the money markets.

If what we want is stability and prosperity, then we have little choice but to concentrate our imaginations and our efforts on a new and far broader version of Bretton Woods. Given the developments in technology and the disorder in international trade, this is the only sensible way to release the market-place from its own self-destructive instructs. See also:
DEPRESSION, HOLY TRINITY—LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
and
SEVENTY-THREE.

RESPONSIBILITY
   Nobody is responsible in a corporatist society. That's because the real citizens are corporations. Individuals only work for them and follow orders. It follows that individuals see themselves as chosen for victimization.