How might the world look if denied the benefits of Saul’s reviled Structure, Efficiency and the Rule of Law? Might it not, in its inevitable dysfunction and deprivation, be one of endlessly contending factions impervious to the needs and rights of others? Might it not be the nightmarish world implied by the theories of de Sade, Schopenhauer and Freud, the sort of world, in fact, described by Sarah Chayes in her recently published book “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security” [2015]? The world of Chayes’ book, the world of contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan as well as of various African nations [Egypt, Nigeria, Tunisia, etc.] is a realm devoid of civil order, a realm given to the primitive pursuit of unrestrained self-interest. Among government officials, their bureaucrats, the judiciary, the police and the military, into the public square where merchants hawk their goods, graft and extortion are the norm rather than the exception. Chayes recounts how a simple attempt to deposit money in a bank in Afghanistan entailed the payment of a bribe! Such corruption on the one hand renders Western aid to these nations utterly futile. Funds just seem to disappear. On the other hand it incites many of those victimized to join radical groups such as the Taliban in response to the apparent hopelessness of their plight. As usual in such situations the truly innocent are those who simply try to maintain their humanity in a world rife with Evil. While Chayes, a former journalist and now social activist, clearly wrote her book in an attempt to help those so victimized, one can’t help but notice how life seems to unfold in civilizations which have never committed to the rational, Law and Order constraints of the European Enlightenment. In spite of the protestations of our “intellectuals,” people don’t need Capitalist Ideologues to convince them to behave out of an unscrupulous self-interest. It seems to happen quite naturally. Indeed it happens exponentially more often in those societies without Saul’s reviled “structure,” those societies where the possibility of legal repercussions is less and less likely. Of course the Moral Relativists of the Left, while excoriating the abuses of the “power elites” of such societies, will inevitably excuse even the vilest behavior of the “oppressed” as a justifiable response to their condition. To these connoisseurs of “compassion,” exploding bombs in public market places or school yards is a perfectly understandable response to material deprivation. Justine Trudeau and Barack Obama have in fact expressed that very sentiment. But in “Terror and Liberalism” [2003] Paul Berman renounces the tendency of many of his “progressive” peers to refer to such responses as “rational,” in essence calling into question the relativism of his very own ethos. In future blogs I shall cite dozens of former “progressives” who have moved to what I would call the “conservative” center, those who, like Berman, have come to see the sentimental vision of the species of Saul and his ilk as utterly absurd.
Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” is about the decline into savagery of a bunch of British kids stranded on a remote island. Its about what happens to people when released from the Rule of Law. How valid does Ralston Saul’s deconstruction of the European Enlightenment seem given the anarchy and relentless human suffering of those regions of the globe which failed to experience such an Enlightenment? Much of Asia and Africa, having never succumbed to the blandishments of a Locke or Voltaire, having no traditional allegiance to the rationally sanctioned principles of Democratic Governance, was beleaguered throughout the 20th Century by the scourge of Totalitarianism with its disdain for basic human rights. The political dysfunction which has plagued South America, as Niall Ferguson points out, is a product of the failure of both Spain and Portugal to commit to those rationally defined principles and institutions so ardently pursued by the philosophers and ultimately the governments of both France and England. Yet in the insane asylum that is the “progressive” contemporary West, citing the incontestable evidence of history, invoking the Rationalism of the European Enlightenment as the key to genuine civilized progress, is seen not as an attempt to improve the human condition but rather as a veiled expression of White Supremacism. It was as a result of this very dementia that Ralston Saul was moved to declare that the Holocaust was in fact the inevitable result of a world governed by Reason!