Remembering Giulio Giorello

Following John Ralston Saul's tweet,

we would like to add our tribute to Giulio Giorello with a translation by Laura Ferri Forconi of his foreword to "I Bastardi di Voltaire - La Dittatura della Ragione in Occidente" / "Voltaire's Bastards - The Dictatorship of Reason in the West"

 

Ah, the halcyon days of rational liberty!

Theobald Wolfe Tone,

Irish revolutionary, 1793

1 - Rusty declares

Secrecy, raison d'état, marriage between reason and nationalism, amorality and the abolition of personal responsibility - is all this the Wonderful New World that a few centuries of applied rationalism have bestowed on us? John Ralston Saul seems to believe it is, and to convince the readers, he guides them with no hesitation into a labyrinth of structures originally envisioned to guarantee individual freedom, but ending up, instead, by erasing it. In order to explain this apparent paradox, we might draw on Agatha Christie's Sad Cypress and Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent as useful examples. The two novels belong to the crime story genre, but could rather be classified as belonging to that sub-genre to be called judiciary, because it focuses on procedures which take the defendant first to court and then, possibly, to the gallows. The protagonist of Sad Cypress disconsolately comments about the members of a court that they do not come to judge the defendants' inner natures, their characters, but to evaluate proofs of facts, and he laments that facts are a real disaster. The main character in Presumed Innocent addresses the same kind of court, saying that they do not have to reveal why there has been a crime, a victim, and suffering - after all, human beings can keep their own motives buried inside themselves - but they, as a court, should at least take the responsibility to try and ascertain what has actually happened. The two novels were respectively written in the 1930s and in the 1980s. Half a century apart from each other, they reiterate the old notion that to obscure people's character (i.e. their inner world) is the condition sine qua non for an objective knowledge of 'facts' (which constitute the outer world in which we find ourselves to act as personae, that is as masks). In Presumed Innocent there appears better awareness: proofs can indicate different directions. Members of a court may be obliged to take decisions about things that nobody seems to know or is prone to reveal. But they cannot give up. If truth cannot be discovered, what hope is there that justice will be ensured?

In Agatha Christie’s time there was always a Hercule Poirot capable of putting things straight between ascertained facts, illumined by Method and the world of life programmatically expunged by any court of Reason.

However, as we know, Poirot is dead. In his absence, Rusty, the hero full of doubts in Presumed Innocent, is the one who has to inform the reader of the circumstances according to which facts depend on interpretations. And all this brings us back to the ‘character,’ the inner nature that procedural reason pragmatically ignores. But that is the way things are. Therefore, Rusty, the alleged quester of truth, cannot but recognize himself as the officer of the only system universally accepted to distinguish injustice from reason, a bureaucrat of the good and the evil. He acts not in view of truth, but only for the stability of the structure. He says that he has a job to do  - the duty of accusing, judging, punishing has always existed; it is one of the big wheels that turn at the basis of whatever we do, and, he concludes that he does his own part.

 

2 - A Celt in the desert

Also Rusty’s mask is one of those worn by today’s technocrat, the person who regularly couples art and power, and who, in order to be able to do so, must possess an inclination towards abstract structures, combined with an aggressive personality. So writes the Author of this volume in chapter 5. But let John Ralston Saul speak for himself:

I was travelling a few years ago across the western end of the Sahara […]. We were caught early one evening by a sudden, massive downpour. The seven of us were below ground in a covered dugout camouflaged in the middle of a dry riverbed.[…] It was the first rain in several years. The water ran across the desert like a wave across a paved surface towards the lowest ground and surrounded our little mound with a rising torrent which began to flood through the small exit. I suppose I would have been trapped down there, the only six-foot-two Celt ever to drown in the middle of the Rio d’Oro. However, the old R’gibat in charge got us through the hole in time and out into a turbulent darkness […] At sunrise the next morning the barren sand was covered with sprouting plants. (Voltaire’s Bastards, p. 449)

Those who want to know more about this excursion may refer to chapter 16 where the Author invites to discover “the Virtue of Doubt.” Then, for those who come from a civilization prone to impose itself on the whole world as the (only) civilization, here is the task that any desert has to fulfill; whether it is made of the sand of the Sahara or the ice of the Arctic it has to function as the mirror of the western soul sick with reason, in the same way as the shadows in the American Wilderness reflected outside the shapes of the fears and hopes that tormented inside the 17^th century Puritans, with the conflict between Sin and Grace.

Extremely archaic and seemingly rigid forms of life, excessively distant from the much-lauded flexibility of our rational schemes, are most suitable terms of comparison to evaluate the error we have made in the Western World, “by the mistaking method for content and structure for morality” and thus creating “a fatal weapon which can be used against any fair society.” (Ibid., p. 238) But all this would not have happened if we had not forged a real religion of reason more ferocious and more disastrous than the positivistic religions that it had dismantled. Saul's gaze from the desert -i.e. from a place not yet integrated into our "rational" civilization- is accompanied by a descent into the well of the past. In order to understand why a structure is not working, it is necessary to have experienced being outside, but to understand why things have developed this way, it is necessary to go down to the origin of the whole story. The Author confesses that he "approaches this seamless web almost in the manner of an archeologist, as if engaged in a dig for some forgotten civilization - the Age of Reason somehow become Unreason (Ibid., p. 26)

Let's see, then, who the Moses or the Zarathustra has been in this story.

 

3 - Working "for the king of Prussia"

In his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), Francois Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, resorts to an interesting comparison. As angry dogs of the most disparate races bark, each their own way, against a beautiful horse, similarly the philosopher is ferociously attacked by the stiff Lutheran, the savage Calvinist, the proud Anglican, the fanatical Jansenist, who, even in exile and very close to the gallows, is anxious to domineer the Sorbonist who keeps dreaming of becoming a deputy in a Council. And there are all those silly poor people who accept to be guided by that lot.

However, the dogs were not completely wrong to bark. At the entry Philosophe in the Dictionnaire, Voltaire maintains that those who do not think often ask what the use of philosophy has been. His answer is that philosophy has been able to block the fury of religions and to induce heads of state to dismantle such institutions as the Inquisition. It is philosophy that tempers mores and instructs governors. But there are different kinds of philosophers and sometimes persecutions have not been out of place, quite the opposite! And reminding us that Domitian expelled the philosophers, and Lucian mocked them, Voltaire says that those monstrously exiled by Domitian were conjurers, fortune-tellers, chiromancers, miserable Jews who made love potions, talismans - all people who claimed to have a special power on evil spirits, such as the power to evoke them and make them enter girls' bodies, with magic words and signs, and to drive them away with other signs and other words. They were the dregs of the human kind: beggars, and vagabonds unable to perform any profession whatsoever.

As one of the pivotal entries in the Dictionnaire elaborated by a champion of tolerance, the item Philosophe reveals some disconcerting aspects - and it does so not only due to that expression miserable Jews, which is in itself more than sufficient to obscure the light of reason lavished over Voltaire's work. Nor can we easily get away with admitting that the Age of the Enlightenment had a dark side imputable to the spirit of the age. Apart from any cheap kind of historicism, it is worth considering that the most disquieting shadows spring from a cone of light. In Dictionnaire, the conclusive line of the item Abé sounds peremptory in there being said that those who have taken advantage of centuries of ignorance and superstition should fear the day of the triumph of reason.

But reason, to be defined as such, needs the "dregs" as a background against which to stand out. Nor is Voltaire too soft on the various kinds of "dregs"  - so we gather from the mocking praise (once again in the Philosophe), of all Jesuits, to whom God gave the grace to end up hanged or quartered at the hands of Justice.

The God who had been so dangerously close to the savage Calvinist or the fanatical Jansenist etc. has now found shelter in the vast precincts of the Newtonian space. Nor, with all due respect to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, are we living in the best of possible worlds. But, because we are not, just for this reason, our world proves to be constantly improved through technology, whether applied to engineering (operating on material objects) or to the medical field (concerning human subjects), not to mention those particular treatments of a sick society, consisting in political and institutional reforms. Voltaire knew it well: the practice of philosophy is the teaching of moral truths. Preaching is not enough, example and action are needed.

Otherwise, as the ancients suspected, the philosopher would be only 'a lunar animal' (Cfr Vegetti), a splendid equine being from the world of ideas. With this assumption, the Author of Dictionnaire closes the cycle opened by Plato who envisioned philosophers-kings! The fact is that, in his Dictionnaire, Voltaire is, indeed, concerned with kings-philosophers. In order to be able to function, or rather "to triumph, "reason needs machines, instruments, apparatuses and extremely earthly resources: reason itself is a device, or, as John Ralston Saul likes to put it, a structure. Three cheers then to that "King of Prussia" who wrote as many books as he won battles.(Dictionnaire, p. 510 in Italian edition)

This is the price at which the reason of the Modern Age has fulfilled the promise of ancient philosophy. Voltaire seemed inclined to trust ''illumined'' governors burdened with the responsibility to rule the fate of the people. As a matter of fact, he ended up by paving the way for members of control apparatuses, for big and small government officers, for national and supranational bureaucracies - in short for all those, professors of philosophy included, who think they are officials of humanity. The reader will now begin to guess the reason for the title (of the present book): it is in the Age of the Enlightenment that we are to be seek for the roots of the "equation of freedom," i.e. "reason= structure=happiness (See especially chapter 3) What but force can ensure the efficiency of the device? And isn't force justified if it is used "for the Good" of future generations? As even a line of the International actually goes, La Raison tonne dans son cratère.  Saul would add that the consequences of this volcanic activity are there for everyone to see.

 

4 - Legitimate children or bastards

In chapter 5 of this volume, the Author says that, were Voltaire to reappear today, well, "it would be unlikely that rising technocrats anywhere would recognize in him their spiritual father." Very probably there would be a repeat of the Dostoyevsky story, in which Christ returns to Seville in the sixteenth century and the Grand Inquisitor threatens to burn him also at the stake with a hundred heretics, unless he leaves town. (Voltaire's Bastards, p. 139) Or, perhaps, bureacrats and heroes, political leaders and managers, with their chorus of 'creative' people, would just "begin to marginalize him through logical arguments designed to prove that his positions all suffer from lack of professionalism," There would be some "rational" even in this: after all professors of logic were always the favourite enemies of the author of Candide, if only for the unscrupulous use of the language and the tension of concepts about which he had shown his mastery in novels and stories.

All those 'gentlemen' are not Francois Marie Arouet's legitimate children; they are, rather, his bastards. John Ralston Saul devotes several pages, accompanied by precise footnotes, to the reconstruction of this deceitful legacy: the "Bastards" have sold to the public the fable according to which the application of reason, logics, and efficiency will lead automatically to the Good - even though their works have, instead, resulted in uncontrollable disasters. (Cfr chapter 3). Here we are not going to anticipate the whole complex design of this book - audacious, biting and provoking. Readers may find themselves prone to disagree with it: after all, it is the kind of book that never stops challenging established views and stereotypes. But let us at least mention the "catastrophe" - the unvolving of the story-and also the turning upside down of the process. (Cfr R.Thom, Parabole e Catastrofi). And let us mention the halchyon days - the seven days before and the seven days after the winter solstice. According to Greek mythology, that was the period when the legendary bird, alcyone, was believed to make its nest and the sea stayed calm: for a stormy year, those seven days were not many. Those very forces that kept the waves still, afterwards unleashed the waters in the gale.

Like others before and after him, Voltaire was the victim of a curious visual distortion: he could not firmly grasp how the optimistic expectations of reason were different from the segmented reality that was already coming through, even at his time.

 

5 - The Method between  Saint Ignatius and Descartes

At the beginning of this volume, Saul admits: "Voltaire and other thinkers of the eighteenth century could be criticized, with the facility of hindsight, for the passion with which they embraced reason." (Voltaire's Bastards, p. 5)

Year 1762: Jean Calas, a protestant shopkeeper, was executed after having been wrongly accused of the murder of his son who wanted to convert to Catholicism.

1766: A young man, Cavalier de la Barre, was sentenced to death rightly: greatly-talented, but befuddled like most of his peers called 'ill-ruled' in those days, he was accused of having sung wicked songs, and before the execution the Court had him tortured to oblige him to reveal exactly which songs he had been singing.

The very catholic France had made its choices; Voltaire did not hesitate, at personal risk, to take his own opposite decisions. The monster of persecution had a thousand lives, and not much Enlightenment was needed to realize that, but much courage, yes, was necessary to oppose them. However, not all those thousand lives could be erased. According to Saul, the easy conviction that reason is a moral force, rather than an indifferent administrative method, constitutes a "fundamental misunderstanding." But, since reason is nothing but structure, it "suits best those whose talents lie in manipulation and who have a taste for power in its purer form." (Ibid., p. 16)

With Voltaire there occurred something analogous to what had happened with the Founding Fathers of the protestant Reformation: the latter broke the unity of Christianitas and cast the basis of modern Europe. Yet, as Saul adds in this volume, the form of the future was better modeled by the opponents than by the reformers. About a century before Voltaire, René Descartes (Cartesio in Italian, 1596-1650) theorized that the discovery of truth requires a method. As Saul reminds us in chapter 3 and 5, Ignatius de Loyola (1491-1556), who went out among the people "[t]o draw them to God not through love, but through logic," (Ibid., p. 44), had already shown that the control of people's consciences needed membership in an organization endowed with a method. 'Amoral Ignatius' did not even have to wait for Descartes and his "provisional" morality - it is to be remembered, rather, that he had happened to be educated by the Jesuits.

 

6 - Re-arming the language

For every question there is an answer, but we must ask the questions that are correct, or, as Saul says, the "structured "ones." Who has the primacy in this double slogan - so central in the procedural reason, in the technocrat's logic, in the impatient rationalization of the delays of democracy and of "common sense"? The neo-positivists, Wittgenstein and his Tractatus, Voltaire or some other Enlightenment thinker? Descartes? Saul goes farther back, at least to the beginning of the Inquisition's undeniable ability to (literally) snatch truth from any defendant on trial.

"Archeologist" John Ralston Saul has, then, moved beyond Voltaire. The "raison d'état" has bent the Inquisition to its purposes and Loyola has managed to prevail both on the Inquisition and on the states, creating a "terror machine" more efficient than those he had succeeded in defeating- and, in the long run he has had more or less worthy successors, from Metternich to Kissinger. Victory went to the courtesans, those capable of castrating participation and democracy, starting with purging the language. In the great schools where they claim to form "experts" in "reforms and public services," learners are trained like this:

 [...] the applicant is instructed to attack the subjects from the high ground in order to dominate them.[...] And "reflection," in this case, means taking the time to work out the answer expected by examiners. The professors' comments on the previous year's entry exams are always printed up as a guide for new students. There the form which replies ought to take is laid out chapter and verse, sometimes down to the headings. It is a highly sophisticated game of intellectual painting by numbers.(Ibid., p. 129)

This is a kind of teaching-training which aims at dis-arming the language, depriving it of any "subversive" capacity: let all do exclusively their own parts, like Rusty (see above). But, Saul says, "one of the signs of a dying civilization is that its language breaks down into exclusive dialects which prevent communication." (Ibid., p. 110)

Yet, while techno-languages proliferate, we wonder what space is left to a person who is inclined to use the language not inside, but outside the structures, knowing that to offer concepts and negotiate their meanings helps not to close, but to open communication -"only the oddballs [extra vagantes] are capable of opposition." (Ibid., p. 246)

In this volume we read: "The new priest is the technocrat- the man who understands the organization, makes use of technology and controls access to information, which is a compendium of "facts"." (Ibid., p. 22) The Holy Trinity has been abandoned for this bureaucratic triad: What a gain! But readers might put to our Author the question that he has the candid citizen ask: "What does this person know to merit our ears"? (Ibid., p. 539)

Right. What does one know? Perhaps, once again, an old saying by Voltaire, which will be appropriated by those who really want to re-arm the language: Dieu n'est pas pour les gros bataillons, mais pour ceux qui tirent le mieux.

Giulio Giorello

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Works quoted

Bloor, D. La dimensione sociale della conoscenza. Milano: Cortina, 1994.

Barthes, R. Sade, Fourier, Loyola.Torino: Einaudi, 1997.

Bofantini, M. (a cura di) Voltaire, Dizionario filosofico. Milano: Mondadori, 1962.

Christie, A. La parola alla difesa. Milano:Mondadori, 1979

Feyerabend, P.K, Addio alla ragione, Roma: Armando, 1990.

Hill, C. Vita di Cromwell. Bari: Laterza, 1974

Lakatos, I. in Worral, J. Zahar, E. (a cura di). Dimostrazioni e Confutazioni. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1979.

Mill, J.S. Sulla Libertà. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1981.

Petitot, J. "Per un nuovo criticismo" in L'uomo, un segno, IV, n. 2-3, 1980.

Ralston Saul, John. I bastardi di Voltaire - la dittatura della Ragione in Occidente. Milano: Bompiani, 1994. /Voltaire's Bastards -The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1992.

Thom, R. Parabole e Catastrofi. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1980.

Turow, S. Presunto Innocente. Milano:Mondadori, 1991.

Vegetti, M. Il coltello e lo stilo. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1979.

We are also sharing the video with the audio recording of Giorello's commentary on Ralston Saul's work (with some photos of the event taken by Luca Trabalzini) delivered at the Siena-Toronto Centre in November 2002.