John Ralston Saul’s immensely popular books are in persistent battle against today’s slide towards technocracy. In books like The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, Voltaire’s Bastards, The Unconscious Civilisation and, most recently, The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism, the Candian philosopher argues for a wider understanding of political economy and internationalism, as opposed to commerce-driven globalisation. Currently on a lecture tour through Asia, he spoke to Mini Kapoor in New Delhi:

Can your work be defined by some words in the title of one of your books — doubter, aggressive common sense?

I think we live in an era when people are rewarded for taking very narrow positions of expertise, with very little humanist discussion cutting across lines. I always try to look at power the way it needs to be looked at, which is with irony, and to reassure people that it’s all right to have doubts, not cynical doubt. Doubt is the way in which you change things. It’s a really powerful weapon.

In military takeovers like the one recently in Thailand “people power” is invoked and immense faith placed in technocrats to implement changes. Does that faith worry you?

It does worry me. It first showed serious signs in the seventies in Europe. It doesn’t show confidence in the intelligence of the citizenry. In a democracy legitimacy is supposed to exist in the citizenry. If the technocrats were actually smarter than the citizens, then why would we have a democracy? Why waste our time? Why not have an old-fashioned dictatorship? On the other hand, if you believe that the collective unconscious is more intelligent than a specialist, then you actually have to listen to the people, and not in a populist manner. You have to have real debate. I think you could say that there are many forms of illiteracy. The most dangerous modern form of illiteracy is the illiteracy of the specialists, because they know so much about so little, and they are discouraged from cutting across those lines. They know that if they are experts in, say, green shawls, and they were to start a discussion on red chairs, then the experts in red chairs would be furious with them. So they stick to their own territory. It’s problematic in a whole series of areas, including globalisation.

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