Voltaire’s Bastards
If your thoughts turn to Voltaire on this, the day of his birthday, why not look into one view of how Voltaire’s legacy of Reason has turned out over the ages. I’m sure if Voltaire knew what this legacy had become, he would disown it.
Saul, John Ralston. 1993. Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Penguin. ISBN 014015373X.
What I liked about this book: I originally read this book when it was first published in 1993. I bought it in hardcover at the World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto, and then I devoured it. It is witty, intelligent and for the first time opened my eyes to the “reasons” the world is the way it is - ratioanlism taken to extremes, exercised by technocrats, to the ruin of freedom.
Saul… argues that the Age of Reason, now nearing 500 years old, displaced medieval society with a reason-based state-corporate structure in which there are no values–and power became the new religion. Reason without values left the citizenry confused and yearning for meaning, Saul writes, and the new ideology was exploited by the ambitious to seize and justify power. “Knowledge became the currency of power,” he says. “The most common characteristics of our elites are cynicism, rhetoric and the worship of both ambition and power. These were also the characteristics of eighteenth-century courtesans.”
What I disliked about this book: nothing at all.
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