The Doubter's Companion (30 page)

The twentieth century has produced a qualitative change in this written-oral tension. There is now more free-floating knowledge, information and opinion than we could ever know what to do with. We are drowning in information which, being unlimited, without shape and rarely of applicable relevance, has itself become a form of control.

For the first time knowledge is not power. Instead public language has become a disordered distraction. The centre of power has moved to a second language which is made up of a myriad specialist dialects. It is not powerful because it is functioning language—it isn't—but because each dialect is attached to a mechanism of practical power.

This scholastic language doesn't mind being obscure, ineffectual, meaningless or boring. It has none of the pretensions of real language. It is simply the instruction manual of the corporatist system. Irrelevance as a language of general communication is what gives it power.

Meanwhile the first level of language floods out through satellites beaming five hundred television channels and information highways delivering endless quantities of information. The effect is to solidify the division between language and power. The very quantity of what is being delivered reduces the citizen to the role of passive receiver and so makes language unusable as an effective weapon against power.

This is one of the explanations for the return of inevitability in public affairs on a scale unseen since Solon and Socrates began to break down the passivity imposed by the gods and destiny of Homeric myth.

It seems now as if the progress in writing materials has bypassed linguistic utility, at least for the moment. For the first time, not controlled but an uncontrolled written language has become a force for human passivity.

Many of us feel a certain innocent pleasure when we are absorbed in this maze. Millions more every year dive into their personal electronic screens and swim like eager minnows through the shapeless sea of information as if the ability to swim were in itself a victory or a power.

The very idea of power prospering from uncontrolled instead of controlled passivity is truly something new. The traditional idea that some sort of freedom and control over those in power can be achieved by reverting to a simple oral language simply doesn't work when modern communications systems are drowning us in an oral language which has no practical relationship to power.

But true oral language is not simply spoken. It is also tied to a certain use. For a start it is aggressive and inquisitive. This Socratic model has perhaps finally come of age.

The point is not to plunge into quantities of information or to be absorbed into majestic highways of information. To the extent that the information and activities involved are facilitated then so much the better. But this is the illusion of language. It is little more than information gathering, like a municipal employee picking up litter with a pointed stick.

Oral language is more properly an individual expressing concern. It can be practically applied by emulating that annoying old man who arrived early every morning in the market-place in order to begin upsetting as many people as he could by asking endless blunt questions. See:
SOCRATES.

ORGASM
   The most common emotive experience, sometimes shared, sometimes not.

Although the orgasm is technically a muscle spasm related to the reproductive process, human imagination relies upon its status as a conscious emotional act. According to the World Health Organization there are 100 million of these every day, making it thousands of times more common than birth and death.
³
For those who do not see themselves as having replaced
GOD
, it is a workmanlike replacement for a religious experience. Samuel Johnson defined it as a “sudden vehemence,”
⁴
which may be why the orgasm has become the last refuge of twentieth-century individualism. See:
PENIS.

P

PANIC
   A highly underrated capacity thanks to which individuals are able to indicate clearly that they believe something is wrong.

The managerial approach, so dominant in our society, does not include the possibility of error. It depends on sequential expert solutions. If there is a problem, the relevant expert will suggest an adjustment. Panic here can only mean that a situation is out of control; that is, the individuals who are meant to be managed are individually out of control.

Given their head, most humans panic with great dignity and imagination. This can be called democratic expression or practical common sense. Managed control, on the other hand, can be termed structural ideology; that is, an ideology not of content but of form. See:
CONTROL.

PARTICIPATION
   Democracy is built and maintained through individual participation, yet society is structured to discourage it.

And ours is the most structured of civilizations. Forty-hour work weeks. Work breaks calculated to a minute. Weekends measured for recuperation. Various specific leaves for sickness and giving birth. Set holiday periods. Official days of celebration or mourning. When it's all added up and the time to eat, copulate, sleep and see families is included, twenty-four hours have been accounted for.

The only built-in space of time for individual participation is a fixed period for voting, which probably averages out to an hour a year. The only time society formally organizes extended participation is over matters of violence. (Military service or when a judge orders convicted criminals to do public service.)

Why is the function which makes democracy viable treated as if it were expendable? Or rather, why is it excluded by being reduced to a minor activity requiring the sacrifice of time formally allotted to other things?

Nothing prevents us from revising the schedule to build in four or five hours per week for public participation. Our failure to do something like this is a statement either about the state of the democratic ethic or about the real nature of power in our society. See:
CORPORATISM
.

PEACE DIVIDEND
   One of those amusing little phrases used for about twelve months by people in the know.

Like “the
WAR ON DRUGS,”
   “the recession is over” and “peace in our time,” this term belongs in the short-term Utopia category.

What with disorder in the former Soviet
B
loc and fear that a major cut-back in
ARMAMENTS
production might cause more economic problems, it has since been decided that there will not be a peace dividend after all. No one has actually announced this change in plans. To do so would suggest that the citizenry remember what they have been told. The peace dividend has simply disappeared from the lips of everyone in the know. Better not to tax the populace at large with the complexities of continuity, and just get on with the next amusing phrase. See:
DUAL USE.

PECTORAL MUSCLES
   Every young man should have two large ones. The question is what to do with them thirty years later when they transmogrify into breasts.

PENIS
   All organized societies are dedicated to controlling the use of this remarkable instrument. Yet the cultures of these same societies, whether through fiction, film, advertising, social mythology, even jokes, are devoted to praising the penis as innately uncontrollable.

This contradiction can be seen most clearly among elected officials, in particular presidents and prime ministers, who are far more potent than the average citizen. Careful calculation of the time spent by Presidents Kennedy and Mitterrand in corporeal activity will confirm that, once meals and sleep are deducted, little more than an hour and a half per week remained for the governing of their respective countries. In spite of the republican and democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the modern leader has inherited the all-powerful penis of the old divine monarches, itself inherited from such interfering gods as Apollo and Zeus.

Elected leaders are so potent, in fact, that we feel obliged to insist upon their remaining semi-chaste—that they limit themselves to monogamous sex, preferably with the bride of their youth, particularly if she resembles their mother. It is a proof of our progress that the Greeks never gained such control over their gods. This is a modern adaptation of the old Egyptian rule that the only safe way to produce an heir was to marry the Pharaoh to his sister.

The practical philosophical point seems to be that semen expended in other than a legally sanctioned vagina bleeds public policy to death. See:
SEX.

PESSIMISM
   A valuable protection against quackery.

Of greater use to the individual than scepticism, which slips easily into cynicism and so becomes a self-defeating negative force. Pessimism is a conscious filter which disarms ideologues and frees us to act in a practical manner.

The only dangerous pessimist is the one who has power, is optimistic about himself and pessimistic about those he governs. Imprisoned as our society is by rhetoric, these public pessimists are increasingly hard to identify. They can be identified by their tendency to go on constantly about solving problems, finding solutions, creating prosperity, winning wars and ending crime; yet the more optimistic their rhetoric, the more pessimistic their real actions.

The healthy pessimist moderates his public actions with self-doubt and listens carefully for the reverberations in society which can be translated into sensible opportunities. Élites who are optimistic about themselves and pessimistic about the governed are ready to be changed.

PHILOSOPHY
   Is either about language or thought. Or both. But language is about public communication and it has been some time since the philosophers communicated with a quantity of people large enough to be called the public. Language is either public or it is an expert's dialect, which is a far lesser thing. Philosophy cannot be a lesser thing since it leads the way in examining and encouraging thought. What value could thought have if no one but a few professionals could think it? It would be little better than an instruction manual for a VCR.

Surely language and thought are about reality. And so are humans. How then could philosophy be about language and thought if its obscurities cut it off from reality and so from the people it is meant to serve?

Philosophy has not been so locked into the padded cell of internal references for internal reference's sake since the era of the mediaeval scholastic strait-jacket. Yet it remains central to understanding the strengths inherent in Western civilization. Amplified by history and literature, philosophy must be a tool of realism which repeatedly permits us to rediscover ourselves and shed the linguistic obscurantism of whatever power structure is in place. In doing so, we alter or shed the structure itself.

Philosophy's flight from reality has paralleled the rise of expertise and professionalism. This began seriously at the very moment that the ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers—who had spent much of their lives fuelling public debate by striving after clarity and communication—were becoming a central part of political experiment. In Germany, in their shadow, a more private and obscure philosophical approach was emerging.
IMMANUEL KANT
was more than a genius. He was the first great modern
SCHOLASTIC
. The liberating philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had struggled with ideas outside of the universities. With Kant philosophy was dragged back inside where the scholastic tradition could reassert itself.

Two centuries later it can reasonably be asked whether philosophy is any more than one more among thousands of professions. At its worst it resembles accountancy, with professors of the history of philosophy mistaken for philosophers and busy limiting their profession to the arranging of ideas in plus and minus columns.

Language depends on the use of mutually agreed-upon terms—not because they represent truth, but because they provide a medium for communication. However if the terms and phrases have been so elaborated by specialists that they are mutually agreed upon only by the experts, then they are no longer a medium for communication but a dialect for exclusion.

In some areas—the sciences, for example—the maintenance of a truly common language is more difficult than others. There is a strong temptation in philosophy to invoke this clause of unavoidable complexity. But the counter-argument is that philosophy must be what it has always been; that is, central to the reality of our civilization. That means it must remain within the terms of real communication.

For example, the return in force during the 1980s of the discredited nineteenth-century
laissez-faire
approach to society happened as if its disciples were presenting a new truth. The philosophers were under an obligation to help everyone understand that what was being proposed was a return to a specific past which included a well-documented philosophical history. The installation in the late twentieth century of a
CORPORATIST
structure within the democratic states has come without any public debate, thanks in part to being disguised in a new vocabulary. Why were the philosophers unable to explain this? The memory of corporatism as a tool of fascism is, after all, only fifty years old. And why have they been absent from the debate which has transformed so much of popular democracy into a system eager for anti-democratic Heroic leadership disguised as false populism?

These three examples are not minor political incidents. They are no less important than the Lisbon earthquake or a profusion of corrupt courtiers or the laws restricting religious belief which brought the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries out into the public place. These are some of the major events which make our time what it is and yet philosophy remains virtually absent from the scene.

PLATO
   Brilliant novelist. Accomplished humourist. In spite of which he wasn't as much the author of Socrates as he would have wished.