Global villager

>> John Ralston Saul on changing the world, renegade journalist Ken Hechtman
and his new book On Equilibrium

by JULIET WATERS

Novelist, philosopher, elitist-bashing iconoclast, husband to the Governor General, John Ralston Saul has to balance a lot of jobs. His latest book, On Equilibrium, is billed as “a user’s guide to citizenship in the modern world.” Reason, he believes, has been given too much weight as an intellectual quality in our civilization, resulting in a false hierarchy of knowledge. Ralston Saul proposes that there are six qualities intrinsic to every human being (which he lists in alphabetical order): common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and finally, reason. The more we work to nurture and balance these qualities, the closer we will come to overturning the “facile reason and the dogma of experts.” I sat down with Ralston Saul last week with a few questions.

Mirror: How will this book help alienated citizens develop the confidence to challenge society?

John Ralston Saul: If you don’t have any mechanisms for organizing thought, then it’s very hard to act as you would like to act. Confidence is something that is shaped to a great extent by what you’ve got to work with. So if you actually think to yourself “I do have, to some extent, these qualities,” you can use them and play with them. Even the fact that you have these six things is different from thinking “I’m a rational person” or “I’m a feeling person,” which really is a pretty useless way of looking at things when you think about it. Those categories are so broad. They don’t help to shape your life very well, or help other people help organize your society. You need to think in ways that help you sustain activism. An enthusiastic moment isn’t a life, or is rarely a life.

M: Can you suggest a few baby steps for people who feel overwhelmed by the elitism of the society we live in?

JRS: Just get involved in something and see how it works out. I think that’s the first thing, that people have to stop thinking that there are big magical solutions. They just have to do something. Get involved in anything. Once you get involved in something, if you don’t like it, get involved in something else. The other thing is that people believe that whatever structures are in place are the structures in place, and that they have to somehow either win them over or take part in those structures. Whereas it’s very easy to actually create structures of your own.

M: What do you think of the negative reaction to someone like [Mirror freelancer] Ken Hechtman, a citizen who just decided to go over to Afghanistan and write about it?

JRS: It was a very corporatist reaction. The first interview I gave for this book was on C-PAC and it was in December, just after this broke out. I actually said that I didn’t know what the fuss was about. I, myself, went off when I was in my 20s. I wandered off with a guerilla group behind the lines. I wrote various things for newspapers afterwards and I was totally ignorant and unpracticed. I probably made as many mistakes as this guy did, and I managed to get out of it alive. I was lucky. It’s no big deal. If he wants to do that with his life why shouldn’t he? And if you want to print it, that’s fine, as long as it’s honestly written. The history of journalism is full of people like him. Again, I think the reaction was corporatist. That somehow there was no room for somebody simply doing something they wanted to do; that you have to be a professional; that there have to be these formal structures in place for you to be a journalist. Next thing, you’ll have to take out cards for novelists. Or people will say about me, “He’s not a philosopher because he doesn’t have a card that says he’s a philosopher.” :

On Equlibrium by John Ralston Saul, Penguin, hc, 370pp, $35