This was posted to the Camus list today by Matt Lamb. I thought it might be
germane to the discussion here.
-k
------
>Will the challenge of this century for democraty , freedom of countries
>and culture be to resist the power of money and
>megacorporations?
>
>Philippe
>From a lecture by John Ralston Saul:
I do think that the last 12 months have been key months in the beginning
of the end of something. It doesn't mean we're turning a corner to something
good, it just means we're turning a corner, it's up to us to decide what
that corner is going to be like, and where it's going to lead us.
Globalisation
We could be here for all I know to celebrate the glory of
globalisation: it's possible, maybe another kind of globalisation. I'm sure
there are rooms, sadder rooms these days, but rooms filled with people who
are theoretically celebrating that glory. They're going to be doing it in a
small town in Switzerland in a few days where they all gather together to
celebrate the glories of globalisation once a year.
And we'd be celebrating in that case the end of the nations, that
governments were finished with that terrible interference that governments
have in the freedom of men and women. We'd be talking as if the destruction
of the power of government was in victory for the citizens - a bit of logic
which has always somehow escaped me, since governments are in fact the only
structure of power which citizens actually have.
In those conversations, it's as if all nations, all nationalism when
organised was murderous. As if all governments were somehow either the
government of Serbia, or about to become the government of Serbia. And
therefore we should all celebrate the end of them so that we can all indeed
go to the beach and not have the serious conversation and just go to the
beach when we're not making money, or trying to, or being unemployed.
This whole approach towards the end of a nation as a victory for
citizens rests on an essential misinterpretation of what the individual is,
of what individualism is. It completely puts aside the real understanding of
what an individual is, of what individualism is, which is to say a
responsible job for the citizens, responsible individualism.
Individuals working together as citizens inside nations, the democratic
citizen.
In its place there is a very narrow, uninteresting definition of the
individual, which was refined in the 19th century - and it existed before
that - which says that the individual is somebody who exists only because
they're ultra self-interested, and they only act out of self-interest and
therefore out of competition with each other, whether that competition is
for money or with guns or whatever.
It's as if we're all, as a poet said, the servants of greed. When the
poet wrote that the phrase he was of course talking about a much smaller
group of society. It goes without saying that in a society that doesn't
believe in the democratic nation, this kind of individualism will be
passive, it will be a tributary, a passive tributary of the economic forces
which apparently are leading society, in fact inevitably leading society. In
fact everything important will seem to be inevitable, and only the
unimportant things will be left in our hands.
Globalisation has been presented to us, sold to us for 25 years now,
because that's when it first 25 years ago got a hold of a government.
Happened to be the Chilean government interestingly enough. It has been sold
to us as something which is and will be inevitable.
Now it's curious because those same people are the people who keep
saying democracy has been winning, there's more and more democracy in the
world, thanks to globalisation. But how can you have democracy if
everything's inevitable? What's the point in voting, what's the point in
choosing?
I mean if everything's inevitable why would we waste our time in being
citizens? I mean if everything's inevitable let's just get some nice sort
of, you know, not too nasty dictator to look after things! Look after the
detail since everything's going to happen anyway, and all we're doing is
negotiating half percentage points of the directions that we're going to
take. It's not worth not going to the beach if that's all democracy is.
Personally speaking it's a very tiring idea, this idea. If you live in
a democracy, it's very tiring to be always surrounded by great and high
abstract generalisations which are in fact the most banal and naïve cliches
dug out of second rate movements of the late 19th century.
And one ends up inevitably in arguments which are, excuse me for using
the world like this - "Manichean", you know, in an old philosophical
movement where there's good and evil and good is defined by the people of
power inevitably.
What is good? Good is being free. What is free? Free is not having a
government, it's not having regulations. What is cowardly? What is evil?
What is wanting to be protected? Obviously if you want to be protected
you're cowardly, you're afraid of freedom. You see the logic, the Manichean
logic, and what it leads to is what I would call the hypnotic clarity of
false choices.
Democracy
Democracy isn't about abstract false clear choices. Democracy is
extremely complex, it is extremely concrete, it's about constantly choosing,
finding, developing practical options within the common good. Constantly
searching for how to express in a practical way the common good, not in some
grand way, some grand and absolute way, but in a very comfortable way. How
can the common good be put in place?
We constructed democracy over a period of 250 years, the modern version
of it, we constructed it inside the nation station. There's all sorts of
horrible things that happened inside all of our nation states. Fortunately
most of the developed countries have managed to put a lot of those behind us
now, those ugly things.
But the positive thing that we were doing was developing the idea of
the citizen, developing the idea of a common good, developing the mechanisms
of democracy. And so if you remove power from the nation and put it in the
global arena without compensating for that power taken away from the nation,
will the equivalent power for the citizen also be transferred to the
international level. If you transfer the power without the power of the
citizen, then you're not weakening the nation, that's really a secondary
thing. You're weakening democracy.
Superficially it's true there's never been so much democracy in the
world, there's never been so many governments calling themselves democratic.
The reality is year by year over the last couple of decades we have actually
been weakening the reality of the democracy.
There have been some good stories, some happy stories, there's been
movement in the environmental area for example, but one looks at the basic
mechanisms of power in fact democracy, on the big questions, has been
weakened over the last 25 years. Battle after battle won over the last 200
years has been reversed in the last 20 years, or is in the process of being
reversed.
The very fact that anybody could believe that a democratic society
could be led by economics, by self-interest, by definition demotes the
citizen and their civilisation to little more than decoration. What that
means in practical terms is that since 1945 we put in place around the world
we put in place in the international arena, dozens and dozens of
international treaties, hundreds of international treaties - but the only
ones which are really binding are the economic treaties.
So what we've done is taken the economic power out of the nations and
put it at the international level. And we've left all the other powers, the
binding powers, inside the nations, which means we've put all the other,
non-economic powers at a severe disadvantage.
And that's why we're finding today that democracy feels as if it's been
turned on its head, as if it has no teeth, as if it has no power, as if it
only can react, because we've engaged in (since we elected a number of
governments, all of us), we've engaged in a form of almost unconscious
suicide by allowing these enormously important powers to escape from our
hands to the international arena without before, let alone at the same time,
getting equivalent binding powers for the common good at the international
level.
The result is disequilibrium, the disequilibrium which we're living at
the moment. The result is an artificial creation of instability, the
instability which we're living.