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Dr. John Ralston Saul, CC , Ph.D (born June 19, 1947) is a Canadian author, essayist and philosopher. He is the husband of Canada's 26th Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, whose term ended on September 27, 2005. Therefore, he is a former Viceregal Consort of Canada.
Born in Ottawa, Saul studied at McGill University in Montreal and at the University of London, where he earned his Ph.D in 1972. After working for Petro-Canada, he turned his attention to writing.
His first works were novels, including The Birds of Prey, Baraka, The Next Best Thing, The Paradise Eater, and De si bons Américains.
He is best known now, however, for his philosophical essays. These began with a philosophical trilogy made up of the bestseller Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West; the polemic philosophical dictionary The Doubter's Companion; and the book that grew out of his presentation of the Massey Lectures, The Unconscious Civilization. The last won the 1996 Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction Literature.
These books deal with themes such as the dictatorship of reason unbalanced by other human qualities, how it can be used for any ends especially in a directionless state that rewards the pursuit of power for power's sake. He argues that this leads to deformations of thought such as ideology promoted as truth; the rational but anti-democratic structures of corporatism, by which he means the worship of small groups; and the use of language and expertise to mask a practical understanding of the harm this causes, and what else our society might do. He argues that the rise of individualism with no regard for the role of society has not created greater individual autonomy and self-determination, as was once hoped, but isolation and alienation. He calls for a pursuit of a more humanist ideal in which reason is balanced with other human mental capacities such as common sense, ethics, intuition, creativity, and memory, for the sake of the common good, and he discusses the importance of unfettered language and practical democracy.
He expanded on these themes as they relate to Canada and its history and culture in Reflections of a Siamese Twin. In this book, he coined the idea of Canada being a "soft" country, meaning not that the nation is weak, but that it is has a flexible and complex identity, as opposed to the unyielding or monolithic identities of other states.
He argued that Canada's complex national identity is made up of the "triangular reality" of the three nations that compose it: anglophones, francophones, and the First Peoples. He emphasizes the willingness of these Canadian nations to compromise with one another, as opposed to resorting to open confrontations. In the same vein, he criticizes those in the Quebec separatist Montreal School for emphasizing the conflicts in Canadian history, and formulates the concept of a "victim mythology" as a critical weapon.
His book, On Equilibrium (2001), is an essay on six qualities that all of us possess: Common Sense, Ethics, Imagination, Intuition, Memory, and Reason. He describes how these inner forces serve us, how we can use them to balance each other, and what happens when they are unbalanced such as when one is used in isolation such as when there is a "Dictatorship of Reason".
In an article written for Harper's magazine and published in the magazine's March 2004 issue under the title The Collapse of Globalism and the Rebirth of Nationalism, he argued that the globalist ideology was under attack by counter-movements. Saul extended this argument in his most recent book, The Collapse of Globalism (2005).
Bibliography
Fiction
- The Birds of Prey (1977)
- Baraka (1983)
- The Next Best Thing
- The Paradise Eater
- De si bons Américains (1994)
Non Fiction
- Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992)
- The Doubter's Companion (1994)
- The Unconscious Civilization (1995)
- Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997)
- On Equilibrium (2001)
- The Collapse of Globalism (2005)
Honours
- Companion of the Order of Canada (1999)
- Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal (2002)
- Order of Arts and Letters
External links
- John Ralston Saul biography - Government of Canada
- J.R. Saul's Order of Canada Citation
- Full text and streaming audio and another transcript of Citizenship vs the Reigning Linear Trap, a public lecture given at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, 29 August 1999
- Full text and streaming audio and another transcript of Globalisation and Democracy, a public lecture given at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, January 1999
- Interview with Scott London, Insight and Outlook December 2001
- Saul's Australian Financial Review Essay: The End of Globalism 20 February 2004
- Saul's Harper's Magazine Essay: The Collapse of Globalism March 2004 (index only, not full text)
- Interview with Stuart Jeffries The prophet of anti-globalism, The Guardian, 9 June 2005
- Good governance as the Key to Gross National Happiness, keynote speech by John Ralston Saul at Rethinking Development (GNH2) in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, June 23, 2005.