The Wor(l)d According to Saul: Dictionaries and the Language Wars, Doubt versus Ideology

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Literary & Linguistics, Media & Communications, Old technology, Politics, Regional History

Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul is the secular high-priest of doubters and cynics, a non-believer in “the gospel” of the modern corporate state, constantly debunking the conventional wisdoms offered up as “absolute truths” in Western society✲. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Saul would produce a guidebook for other secular agnostics. Wedged between his treatises on his personal philosophy ‘superstar’ Voltaire, his studies of modern Canadian society and his excursions into the realm of fiction, is JR Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion, or to give it his full title:

The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense (Viking, 1994)¹

Although Saul calls his volume “a dictionary”, the term applies more to the book’s format (utilising the standard A-Z form of the dictionary) than to its content or purpose. The Companion goes on to define Dictionary as “Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order”. And Answers are merely “a mechanism for avoiding questions”. Saul decries the trajectory of modern dictionaries and language (which have been captured by the forces of a rational orthodoxy), yearning instead for a return to the Humanist dictionaries of the 18th century (Voltaire, Diderot, Johnson, etc)².

When I first delved into The Doubter’s Companion (around 1995), my mind took me to that other great cynic’s dictionary of the early 1900s, Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary. Both works, albeit very different books, are idiosyncratically unconventional takes on language and meaning in their respective societies, and both proffer a contrarian view of the established wisdom of the day. Both Saul and Bierce are provocateurs, each with their own personal axe to grind⁌.

The Doubter’s Companion, by its polemical nature is unequivocally meant to shake up orthodox thinking (TDC was described by one reader as “an abecedarium of subversion”). The dictionary form of the book is a device Saul employs to launch into short philosophical essays on topics about modern post-industrial society that concern him—corporatism, individualism, leadership and managerialism, freedom of expression, communication, public relations, advertising and the way language is distorted to control communications (see his definition of ‘ideology’). In so doing, Saul skewers the accepted veracity of many of the words, phrases and terms you will find in today’s dictionaries.

And as it is an instruction manual to help doubters navigate their way through a linguistic maze of (in Saul’s opinion) mis-defined terms, the central tenet is thus affirmed:

Doubt: The only human activity capable of controlling the use of power in a positive way. Doubt is central to understanding.

Wisdom: The purpose of doubt … wisdom is life with uncertainty, the opposite of power or ideology.

Ideology: Tendentious arguments which advance a world view as absolute truth in order to win and hold political power.

The Corporate executive “is not a capitalist but a technocrat in drag”.

Economics is “the romance of truth through measurement”.

Level playing field: An ideological abstraction adopted as a universal value by the management of large corporations.

Saul the provocateur infuses the dictionary with a regular diet of “outrageous statements and provocations”:

Marxist: The only serious functioning Marxists left in the West are the senior managers of large, usually transnational corporations.

Neo-Conservatives are the Bolsheviks of the Right (“the exact opposite of a conservative”).

Modern (that should be “post-modern”) fads of intellectual thinking such as Deconstructionism get short shrift from Saul:

Deconstructionism: Can also be seen as a school of light comedy.

Calm: A state of emotion which is overrated except in religious retreats. Calmness for Saul has a decidedly political connotation today, “it is used to control people who are dissatisfied with the way those in authority are doing their job”✬.

Public relations: A negative form of imagination. In Mussolini’s phrase, “invention is more useful than truth”.

Saul savages that that most universal institution of fast food, MacDonalds:

A Big Mac: The communion wafer of consumption. (It is) not really food but the promise of food.

He goes on sardonically to bracket it with “Perrier, one of the last sacred objects of the leading philosophical school of the late-twentieth century—public relations”…one of Saul’s greatest bête noires.

Elsewhere, in a similar vein, he brands Ronald McDonald as a “Post-modern philosopher”…the “face and voice of consumer culture”.

Contemporary education doesn’t escape a broadside from Saul, especially the American form:

SAT: A system of standardized American college entry exams designed to nurture and reward functional illiteracy.

Universities find themselves in Saul’s cross-hairs as well. Within the “exclusive territories” of the university that knowledge is divided into, the principal occupation of academics is “to invent dialects sufficiently hermetic to prevent knowledge from passing between territories”.

Happy Hour is “a depressing comment on the rest of the day”.

At different points Saul diverts momentarily from his philosophical musings to give historical clarification on certain pertinent terms of interest to him. Having defined Depression as “a form of economic disaster common throughout history”, he goes on to contend that “in 1973 the word was deleted from all Western languages and replaced by the term recession”, a softer word which in Saul’s mind allows economists to maintain the myth of appearing to “manage real situations”. The author expands his point: “to admit to the existence of anything as uncontrollable as a depression would be to admit failure”.

The book’s dictionary entries allow space for brief commentaries on individuals from the pages of history who attract Saul’s interest. These are usually philosopher-figures but not always. He has an interesting take on the great turn-of-the-century novelist Joseph Conrad, “The essential modern writer…demonstrated that the novel could have a third century of relevance if the story was transformed into metaphysics disguised as reality”.

Sigmund Freud, who in America would be described as the “father of shrinks”, gets a guernsey in the dictionary, albeit a cynical and disparaging reference – “a man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would just listen—or better still, talk—that they’re parents were just as bad”.

Air Conditioning: An efficient means for spreading disease in enclosed public spaces.

Muzak: A public noise neither requested nor listened to by individuals. It is the descendant of a school of public relations invented by the Nazis.

For one so articulately cynical of human nature, politics, economics, most things in the modern world (except of course doubt), Saul’s definition of that attitudinal standpoint seems contradictory:

Cynicism: An effective social mechanism for preventing communication.

Pessimism on the other hand is “a valuable protection against quackery”. More beneficial than ‘scepticism’ “which slips easily into cynicism and so becomes a self-defeating negative force”.

Whereas Optimism to Saul is double-edged. When applied to oneself it is “a pleasant and sometime useful distraction” to reality, but “when encouraged as a social attitude … it is the public tool of scoundrels and ideologues” (as is patriotism).

World Class: A phrase used by provincial cities and second-rate entertainment and sports events … to assert they are not provincial or second-rate, thereby confirming that they are.

Saul includes in the alphabetical list a number of surprising and disparate entries for a reference book on philosophical common sense. These include Ants (Saul makes the unexpected and unverified statement that the members of the Formicidae family of eusocial insects “do nothing 71.5 per cent of the time”)⊡; Apple (the fruit not the corporation); Armpits (which is curiously cross-referenced to Reality); Nannyism (not sure why this topic warranted nine paragraphs and over 400 words but Saul interweaves a discourse on Margaret Thatcher, bullying and sex appeal into the entry); Urban weather patterns (wtf?); White bread (“the sophisticated product of a civilization taken to its logical conclusion … continually refined until all utility has been removed”).

Among the many asides Saul offers an interesting reflection on the city-state of Venice – he declares it “the original model of modern dictatorship, in which commercial power finds its cultural expression in painting, architecture and music … (but not) language”. And on Benito Mussolini: “the nascent modern Heroic leader (who) combined corporatism, public relations and sport together, while replacing public debate and citizen participation with false popularism and the illusion of direct democracy”.

JRS humorous and glib

The philosopher’s serious message aside, Saul produces a regular line of humorous explanations of terms, some of these are dazzlingly economic epigrams or bon mots:

Museums: Safe storage for stolen objects.

Cosmetic surgery: Cosmetic perjury.

Biography: A respectable form of pornography.

Other descriptors and definitions however are quite glib:

René Descartes is thus presented “gave credibility to the idea that the mind exists separately from the body, which suggests he didn’t look down while writing” [ba-dum-tss!].

Anorexia: A condition aspired to by most middle-class women (a subject taken much more medically serious today!).

JRS’s extensive catalogue of pet bugbears include ideology (and ideologues), applied corporatism, applied civilisation, conventional wisdom, , economic determinism, technocrats, absolute truth and certainty, dry, sectarian ‘definitions’, rigid scholasticism and structure, superstition, public relations and advertising.

Footnote: it’d be interesting to see an update of the Companion. A chance to find out what the perspicacious John Ralston Saul makes of early 21st century concepts such as social media, iPhones, fake news, drones. climate change deniers and the nanny state, to name just a handful.

╰━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━✶━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━✶━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━✶ ━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━✶━━ ⋅𖥔⋅ ━━╯

✲ whether that be from the left or right

⁌ though where Bierce is acerbic, Saul is out and out incendiary

✬ adding the rider that “calm incompetence” has risen to become a quality of high professionalism”

⊡ in case this isn’t enough on the subject, JRL follows up with an entry for ant-eaters (Myrmecophaga Jubata)

¹ Amazon‘s “dust-jacket” review summarises the book as full of “renegade opinions”; (it) uses “guerrilla lexicography to reclaim public language from stultifying dialects of modern expertise”
² ‘Doubter’s Companion’, www.freelistbooks.com

⏏³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹⁰⏏

Work of “The Devil”, a Reference Compendium of Unconventional Wisdom for Cynics in the Progressive Era

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History

The World According to Bierce

Ambrose Bierce, American short story writer, man of letters, journalist and civil war (Union side) veteran, is best known for his unorthodox lexicon, The Devil’s Dictionary, a humorous, satirical and very personal take on a selection of words in the English language. The dictionary was compiled by Bierce over three decades, being initially published in instalments in various newspapers and magazines. Eventually the collection was published in book form, first as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906 and then as The Devil’s Dictionary in 1911, two years before Bierce’s never satisfactorily-explained disappearance in Chihuahua, Mexico, where the journalist was visiting to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution.

Highly influential literary critic of the first half of the 20th century, HL Mencken, heaped lavish almost doting praise on The Devil’s Dictionary… “the true masterpiece of the one genuine wit that These States have ever seen“…”some of the most gorgeous witticisms in the English language“…”some of the most devastating epigrams ever written“.⇑ First (1911) edition of the Dictionary

დ~დ~დ დ~დ~დ დ~დ~დ

Cynicism and satire provide the backbones of Bierce’s provocative dictionary. So, an interesting place to start looking is how he handles these terms – the words ‘satire’, ‘cynic’ and ‘dictionary’ themselves. Despite being fully versed in the craft himself, Bierce views the practitioner of cynicism less than favourably.

Cynic: A blackguard❅ who sees things as they are, and not as they ought to be (which presumably is the definition of an optimism۞).

Satire: An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness✫.

Dictionary: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.

Bierce goes on to add with tongue firmly planted in his cheek that his dictionary, however, is “a most useful work”.

But a cynic Bierce certainly is. At one point he sweepingly declares, in the blanket fashion that is his trademark, that “all are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher” (in which case, what would Bierce have made of Freud and the “dark art” of psychotherapy!?!). This perception of the author reminds me to some extent of the distinction often made between a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is poor (and is labelled insane), and a person with an erratic behavioural pattern who is wealthy (labelled merely eccentric).

Romance and true love falls by the wayside with Bierce’s cynic always hovering around ground level:

Love: A temporary insanity cured by marriage.

Politics is even more fertile ground for Biercian cynicism…even the highest office in the land is not spared. With characteristic directness, there is:

President: The greased pig in the field game of American politics.

Senate: A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.

Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.

And of course, to Bierce, ‘capital’ (ie, the capital) is defined as “the seat of misgovernment”.

The contemporary power politics of the day is very entrenched in Bierce’s cynic’s consciousness:

Cannon: an instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

In a similar vein Bierce gives recognition to the tradition of his nation’s imperialistic ambitions in possibly the most quoted and most acute of Bierce’s definitions:

War: God’s way of teaching Americans geography⬲.

Bierce’s entries can go off on a tangent☒, often making extensive use of quotations from “eminent poets” to underscore his definitions (Father G Jape, SJ, is a much relied upon prop for Bierce). Sometimes this involves recourse to wordy anecdotes and phrases. In contrast to lengthy descriptors, some Devil’s Dictionary‘s entries are succinctly on the mark, some are absolute poetic corkers:

Absent: Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction.

Erudition: Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Envy: Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.

Fib: A lie that has not cut its teeth.

Martyr: One who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired death.

Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.

And even more succinctly summarised is:

Hope: Desire and expectation rolled into one.

Some of Bierce’s ‘opinions’ veiled as definitions are little more than whimsical nonsenses or clever wordplays:

Incumbent: A person of the liveliest interest to the outcumbents.

Harbor: A place where ships taking shelter from stores are exposed to the fury of the customs.

The Devil’s Dictionary dishes up irony in spades, repeatedly turning the mirror back on the reader:

Bigot: One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.

Bierce’s lexicon is strewn with idiosyncratic elements, one is a recurring motif of robbers and theft, regularly he describes a situation where someone’s hands are in someone else’s pockets:

Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Bierce is often lauded for his humanist perspective of the world…the major organised religions do not escape his critical eye:

Religions are “conclusions for which the facts of nature supply no major premises”

Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

He can be irreverent – “Christians and camels both receive their burdens kneeling”.

The Dictionary dishes up a smorgasbord of satirical, ironic and often bitter definitions of the world as seen by Ambrose Bierce (one of the acerbic writer’s nicknames was “Bitter Bierce”). But Bierce is of course a creature of his time with all the glaring faults and prejudices of the 19th century white man’s mindset. So, through the satire and cynicism we witness the less savoury traits and predisposition of the lexicographer. Casual assumptions of racism and misogyny run through the pages of The Devil’s Dictionary.

 Witch: A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.

Widows are depicted as “pathetic creatures”, whereas wives are dismissed as merely “bitter halves” (big surprise: Bierce was separated from his own wife). On occasions he crosses the line that even he should not have ventured, such as advocating or at the very least implying a violent impulse towards the female sex:

Bang: The arrangement of a woman’s hair which suggests the thought of shooting her.

The dreaded ‘N’ word is wheeled out in the cause superior of cynicism:

African: A nigger who votes our way.

And there is more than a hint of a general misanthropic disposition emerging from the pages of the Dictionary:

Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.

Marriage is the union of “two slaves”.

AB’s miscellany of hobby horses

Politicians and philosophers are on Bierce’s “hit list”, as are lawyers who get a predictable assessment:

Lawyer: One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

Liar: A lawyer with a roving commission.

Historians, in The Devil’s Dictionary are reduced to “broad-gauge gossips”, and ‘history’ is summarily pigeonholed as “mostly false (and) about unimportant events”.

Although he doesn’t specifically give medical students a definition entry, his regular references to them through the book might prompt one to conclude that their single defining feature is that of “grave-robbers”∞.

Places like New York City and specifically Wall Street are “dens of iniquity”, the sort of Biblical association Bierce employs to those things or entities representing (in his eyes) absolute evil.

Bierce’s idiosyncratic designation of ‘happiness’, as “an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another” dovetails neatly to the definition of the German term Schadenfreude (substituting the word ‘perverse’ for ‘agreeable’ perhaps).

Bierce’s dictionary is also prone to outbursts of elitism – such as:

Laziness: Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.

Idiot: A member of a large and powerful tribe✪ whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling (an ‘idiotocracy’ perhaps).

EndNote: Bierce’s cold trail
The mysterious disappearance of Bierce has fascinated interested parties for the hundred plus years since the author vanished in Mexico. Speculation has been wildly unrestrained and rampant as to the writer’s supposed end (eg, he hooked up with Mexican bandit leader Pancho Villa and he was killed by Federal troops, or by rebels, or by his own hand or by Villa himself). Novelists, playwrights and filmmakers have all had a go at unravelling the mystery, but the reality is that no one really knows what happened to Bierce [‘The Death of Bierce’, The Ambrose Bierce Appreciation Society, www.biercephile.com].

👿

⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝⇝

❅ Bierce defines ‘blackguard’ as an “inverted gentleman”, like a box of cherries that displays the fine ones on top but with the box “opened on the wrong side”

۞ except that Bierce’s ‘optimist’ is “a pessimist (who) applied to God for relief”

✫ obsolete or not, it doesn’t stop AB from indulging in the device

⬲ it is not universally accepted that this most famous of Bierce-isms originated with Bierce himself, see for instance “The Ambrose Bierce Site”, www.donswain.com

☒ for example see the entry for ‘story’

∞ maybe overstated but Bierce was not fabricating a connection – “body snatching” for medical education was a very real and very lucrative activity at the time

✪ Bierce tended to view different societal groups as tribal entities