by Ken Hewitt

I NOTE WITH GREAT PLEASURE that the 33rd Sir Winston Scott Memorial Lecture on Monday will be delivered by The Honourable John Ralston Saul on the topic Small Societies In A Big World.

I have never met this gentleman but I was first introduced to his work 12 to 15 years ago in a bookshop at the Toronto Airport when I came across a publication entitled Voltaire's Bastards. Moved and influenced by the substance of this volume, I have since then read many of Saul's other publications including one of his more recent, The Collapse of Globalism.

Saul bemoans the "vulgar utilitarianism" of our societies and the fact that our "civilisation has become one of structure and form over one of content and consideration".

He postulates that we should be our brother's keeper and our actions and general behaviour should go beyond our personal interest in order to promote the public good.

In light of the current global financial crisis, it is instructive to mention some of Saul's views expressed 12 to 15 years ago.

* We keep on hoping that we will rediscover prosperity through this mechanism called market forces.

* In imitation of the nineteenth century and the 1920s we are deregulating everything in sight and even restructuring government and education along industry lines. We have fallen back in love with an old ideologythat has never paid off in the past."

* Unregulated money markets have now given us over 20 years of crisis, instability, gratuitous speculation and no real growth.

* Our lack of regulation in this whole area means that we encourage speculation. And in the final analysis, that's all the money markets are. Old-fashioned speculation run by sophisticated new technocrats.

* If society will permit and reward robbery, robbery will be invested in."

The international money markets, as he sees it, are the inventions of creativity at its most irresponsible and vacuous. In a normal world, there is room for some speculation, but a speculation frenzy cannot end well.

This was indeed prophetic.

Saul recognises that more often than not big business is the chief beneficiary of government largesse. He states that one indication of how far things have gone is the desire of business to see government intervene each time the situation gets out of hand and the willingness of governments to do so, despite a supposed devotion to market forces, shows that they realise how dangerous the current system is.

"The irony of deregulation is that the more freedom business is given, the more dependent it becomes upon government as the saviour of last resort, and while government intervention late in the day prevents general calamities, it also maintains the fiction that the system is healthy," he observed.

Saul is not kind to economists and economics. If economists were doctors, he writes, they would today be mired in malpractice suits.

A sensible society is very careful when it comes to market fashions parading as intellectual truths and it never lets such a perpetually virginal domain as economics get control of the public agenda.

"Saul pronounces Globalisation dead. Admittedly there was tremendous growth in world trade but it has become evident that "economic growth alone would not be sufficient to reduce poverty but that redistribution taxes and policies would be necessary".

Saul concludes that "generalisations about free trade or even about protectionism are not terribly useful. Each comes in many forms. Each has its uses, in particular circumstances for particular lengths of time."

Very much a Renaissance man, Saul believes that Ethics should be built into each of our lives and into society, so that much of it is simply normal behaviour.

In The Collapse Of Globalism published in 2005, Saul wrote: "I remember listening by chance in Chicago in November 2003 to a remarkable new American public figure, a year before he was elected to the Senate. Barack Obama already had a calm, clear idea of how community worked and how it was the big picture that had to adjust".

Saul is an outstanding philosopher, visionary and deep thinker whose publications have provided me with much pleasure and food for thought.

This article was submitted as a letter to the Editor.