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eye WEEKLY                                             February 9 1995
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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BOOKS                                                            BOOKS

                           A DOUBTER'S LUNCH
             John Ralston Saul on the Internet and dessert

                                  by
                            JASON ANDERSON


John Ralston Saul has a very large brain, speaks with great eloquence
and eats like a Frenchman. You know what I mean -- ordering something
not on the menu, not eating more than half of what is on the plate,
requesting that the water come without ice and that the espresso arrive
after dessert. Over a recent lunch interview, I felt a distinct envy
for the Toronto writer's past life as a Parisian businessman and for
his general air of learned man of the world. I ate my chicken sandwich
and felt like a college boy.

The reason for the meeting was his latest book, The Doubter's Companion
(Viking/Penguin, $28.99), as well as some of the chords it's been
striking since its release last fall. The Companion is a dictionary,
but not in the modern sense of a dictionary as "a place of truth, how
to spell things and what things mean," he says. Instead, Saul's book
harkens back to the dictionaries of Dr. Johnson and Diderot as he seeks
to reclaim abused words "to show you what the ground is around
something, how you might think about them or how they don't mean what
you're told they mean."

As he did in 1992's controversial and much-lauded Voltaire's Bastards,
but in a less daunting (and funnier) manner, Saul rails against a
society dominated by structures that are maintained by an elite which
has failed in its responsibility to serve the whole. The key word in
this dictionary is corporatism, which is cited as the ideology that is
ultimately followed by businesspeople, politicos and educators. Saul
holds up for ridicule the triumph of rationalism over common sense,
public relations over humanist philosophy, bureaucracy over free
thinking, form over content.

In all, it's a very intelligent, charming and troubling book on why we
are where we are in the West, and The Doubter's Companion has provoked
a wide and varied response. Saul recently placed in the Utne Reader's
list of 100 modern-day "visionaries," largely because he is a writer
able to draw together strands of economic and political theory,
philosophy, corporate-speak and academic natterings with the finesse of
a novelist.

In fact, Saul says that these last two non-fiction books are part of "a
gradual evolution of ideas" present in his novels since The Birds Of
Prey. The fact that his ideas now seem so loud in certain quarters is
no doubt due to how badly we need to hear them.

                             SAUL IN SPACE

This was a chance to let Saul speak his peace on one topic not
addressed specifically in The Doubter's Companion -- namely, the effect
of the Internet and the emergent technologies which, according to the
thinking in some circles (including this newspaper), are about to
re-democratize the Western World, create a freely-flowing channel of
information and opinions and generally save us all from unimaginable
doom. Saul's take on this matter is typically meaty.

"I'm complaining all the time about how we're living in a civilization
which is essentially a civilization of structure," he says. "And so
it's quite logical that people would be relieved to find themselves in
a totally unstructured area. The answer to fighting against a
civilization which has reduced content to irrelevance -- where
everything is structure and form and everyone has to fit in -- is a
civilization without structure. Yet structure is supposed to serve.
That's why you have an alphabet, why language has a form, so it isn't
clear at this stage how it's going to help."

As Saul later points out, we're only now realizing the effects of
television, perhaps because as it takes "two or three generations to
react to an important phenomenon." But, as he asks, does having to
process a mountain of email make him any different than a 1930s
bureaucrat with a pile of memos?

"The fact that it's technology doesn't make it good, nor does it make
it bad," says Saul. "So we're kind of in this stage where there are a
lot of people very enthusiastic about it because it is technology, and
I'm only enthusiastic if you can tell me how this technology is going
to get me doing something I need to do, or thinking something I need to
think, either faster or better. If it doesn't do that, it's not
actually central, and if it slows me down or makes it harder, then it's
a negative."

As for the pros or cons in people becoming their own personal news
services through the Internet, Saul uses the example of the 1991
attempted coup d'etat in Russia. "Apparently there were people on the
Internet typing out what they'd seen, typing out reality, which made it
very hard for the government to control these versions of reality. So
you say, well, that's very interesting but a lot of people on the
Internet think that this is actually going to remove the need for
things like wire services, which have a lot of problems because wire
services control information and may be used for propaganda. If that is
the case and you end up with thousands and thousands of people typing
in reality, then how do you make a form out of that reality which can
be understood? And also, frankly, as the machines become more
sophisticated, surely the job of the secret services or the government
propaganda would be to find ways to flood the Internet with false
information. If you've suddenly got 25,000 different things coming out
of Moscow on the same day, how do you know which 10,000 are real?
Unless you have, and this is where I come back to, a professional, who
you trust or don't trust.

"The whole thing raises another question: how there's an enormous
amount of secrecy except that it's not real secrecy because there's
more information than we know what to do with. But one of the peculiar
things is that the more information there is out there, the more
relevant the secrecy becomes."

And so it went, a complex but engaging spiel in favor of common sense
and intellectual vigilance that continued well into dessert. Saul had
the white chocolate cake. He let me eat half.

                                  
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