John Ralston Saul, a civilising influence

By SIMON COLLINS

John Ralston Saul has become one of the most challenging thinkers of our time. When he spoke in Wellington in March 1997, the venue was sold out. At parties, people raved about his book The Unconscious Civilization.

In an era when Jim Bolger and Bill Birch held sway over the land, this Canadian economist-turned-writer-and-philosopher brought a fresh message: Business does not have to dominate. In fact, he said, the narrow-minded pursuit of economic efficiency was blinding Western societies to the qualities that are define civilisation.

Five years on, we have a new Government. But Saul seems as relevant as ever.

He returns next month to promote his new book, On Equilibrium, in which he elaborates on the six human qualities that he earlier identified: common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory and reason.

For example, under "Imagination", he says the alienation of aboriginal people in North America and Australia shows how an obsession with development ignores fundamental human needs.

"The utilitarian will say of the people in these communities that if they got jobs they would not have their problems of alcoholism, drug addiction, violence and suicide. And that a proper education - by which they usually mean training - would get them a proper job," he writes.

"But every study done shows that the real barrier to academic success in these places is ... [that they] have lost a reflection of who they are and why ...

"Alienation at its most essential level is not poverty or unemployment. It is the inability to imagine your society and therefore to imagine yourself in it."

And under "Reason" he deplores the ease with which we now talk of training youth rather than educating them.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is typical of those seduced by the utilitarian solution, Saul writes. Blair argues that human capital is the key to economic prosperity. Saul disagrees.

"I'm not suggesting that students shouldn't have training, but a rational citizen is not human capital any more than she is a utilitarian mechanism," he says.

His Excellency John Ralston Saul, as he is known officially (he is married to Canadian Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson), has not always railed against commercialism. Indeed, he has spent much of his life in the thick of it.

After completing a doctorate on the modernisation of France in 1972, he created his own European investment firm, then became a policy adviser to the head of Petro-Canada.

But during this last job he began to write novels about the crisis of modern power and its clash with the individual.

It was not that he experienced a sudden change of heart, he said on the phone from Ottawa last week. "I don't think my view has particularly changed. It's just that the different experiences I have had have made me think more and more about how things really work."

He is not against the market, he says - he just thinks that it should not be allowed to dominate areas such as education and human relationships.

"If someone is seriously in favour of the market, they would never suggest that it should lead," he says. "What is unacceptable is to be told that there is only one way to do things, or there is only one mechanism which predominates, and that we primarily exist as one thing ... We are capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, of doing two or three things at once and thinking at two or three levels.

"We do not need to be corralled like sheep by a dog into very narrow headliner views of life. It's very impoverishing for democracies to think so little of their own citizens, and for the citizens to think so little of themselves.

"Everyone who is in business is also a citizen, a voter, a taxpayer. They are often parents, they have children, they want their children to be educated, they live in the streets, they breathe the air."

Saul writes that "compromise is a necessary characteristic of civilisation", but suggests it has gone awry.

"There is a very real difference between this talent and the marginalisation of ethics in the name of smooth process ... Because we so often fudge that line, hundreds of thousands of adults, who believe themselves to be good people, have collaborated over foreclosures, expulsions, deportations, inappropriate dams, humanitarian inaction, dubious scientific advancements, dubious payouts, information of myriad sorts held back or rearranged and so on. And in each one of these cases, we try to tell ourselves that one day, when we are in charge, things will be different."

Saul's analysis has clear political implications. He favours regulating the market and taxing people to provide universal public health and education.

But his main call is for you and me to recognise that what we do affects other people.

"To act as if our actions do not have consequences is to pretend that we are without qualities and are naturally passive factors when faced by the actions of others. It is to reduce ourselves to forms of reaction," he writes.

"Today's dominant rhetoric of power is designed to marginalise [the] reality of responsible individualism and to replace it with abstract and technological forces beyond our control.

"I cannot help feeling that it is precisely the opposite which will happen, because it needs to happen."