Eva remarked:
> Should we not first analyse what's wrong with the ideologies we have
> so far?
John Ralston Saul's book, _The Unconscious Civilization_, was on the
Toronto Globe & Mail bestseller list for somthing like a year and a
half, yet I don't recall that anyone has mentioned or quoted him on
this list.
Chapter 5 begins:
On the day that you or I achieve a stable condition of
equillibrium, those arounds us who have been less fortunate will
draw one of two conclusions. Either that we are dead or that we
have slipped into a state of clinically diagnosable delusion. And
to live in delusion is to live in the comfort of ideology.
I don't see much difference between the inevitability of the communist
utopia and the inevitability of the capitalist global utopia, nor
between Mussolini's relationship with the corporatist interests and
that of congress and parliament to those same interests. I've said
occasionally (and nobody laughs or seems to get it) that the cold war
is over and the bad guys won. Not that the Commies were the good guys
and the 'Muricans the bad, but that the two ideologies in putative
conflict were each dominated by a common mechanistic, corporatist and
inhumane view of society. Economic determinism was once held up as
the immoral and damning tenet of the Reds but, so soon as the
capitalist bloc was freed of the balance of the Soviet one, economic
determinism emerged from the shadows as the alleged ideological core
of democracy. George Bush said, in is innaugural address,
We know how to secure a more just and properous life for man on
earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections.
and Saul quotes
The liberal government in Canada declared in its 1995 foreign
policy statement -- as if it were an obvious truth -- that "human
rights tend to be best protected by those societies that are open to
trade, financial flows, population movements, information and ideas
about freedom and human dignity."
The egregious inaccuracy of these assertions aside, look at the order
of priorties: free markets, trade and financial flows come first.
Saul's book (originally the 1995 CBC Massey Lectures) "analyzes what's
wrong with the ideologies we have so far". He doesn't like what he
sees and neither do I.
- Mike
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The Unconscious Civilization
John Ralston Saul
House of Anansi Press, 1995
ISBN 0-88784-576-2
Paper, C$13.95
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