Through a strange set of circumstances involving Chicken John Rinaldi – and are there ever any other sorts of circumstances involving Chicken John? – I have tracked down the 1992 volume “Voltaire’s Bastards,” by John Saul, a book sadly both out of print and not available in ebook form.
It’s terrific reading so far: intriguingly, Saul’s thesis about the rise of “Reason” and the technocrats feels both incredibly fresh and germane and completely out of touch with modern reality. The internet would become a fact of life for elite America just five years after Voltaire’s Bastards was published, and 10 years after that it would be a nearly ubiquitous fact of life. And we’re still 10 years past that, well into the world of Uber and Facebook.
This is a series of events which Saul’s thesis has everything to say about, but on which it is utterly silent owing to its year of publication. Its silence on these critical issues is deeply frustrating: to my mind Saul’s thesis is enhanced by the development of online technology, but the examples he actually uses are dated and almost quaint. This matters in a way that it does not in a book like Walden or Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, because Voltaire’s Bastards is speaking to a very specific set of historical contingencies rather than to the timeless nature of the human self.
Continue reading Education in the technocratic age (notes from Voltaire’s Bastards)