When the writer and philosopher John Ralston Saul became President of PEN International in 2009, he began to pay attention to a set of unusual statistics - what professions were well-represented in the world's prisons?
He tells this story often at meetings of PEN, the international body that brings writers, journalists, free speech activists, artists and film-makers together under one umbrella. "How many heads of state do you know of who're in prison worldwide? Two or three, perhaps?" he asks. "How many bankers? About seven to ten, mostly in Russia. How many economists? Not nearly enough. And writers? 850 in prisons across the world. We must be doing something right."
The story's well-worn - Saul has narrated it in countries from Mexico (where journalists run the risk of being killed, often by decapitation) to Sierra Leone (where reading programmes try to offer a new set of stories in a country haunted by the civil war), to Canada, where he has lived for years as a writer and professional interrogator of power. His 15 books include six novels, and his works of philosophy from Voltaire's Bastards to On Equilibrium have found resonance among critics of globalisation.
Saul cut his teeth as a graduate student in philosophy who had a deep, and unusual, interest in military strategy. He has a fondness for sweeping statements: not enough philosophers study the army, which they should. "Prostitution isn't the oldest profession," he says. "The military is."
He began to compare the modern arms trade with the ancient arms trade and found few similarities, though he did begin to question the soundness of Western philosophy. "Take the world wars," he says, launching into a cornerstone critique. "They set a world record in murder by Western civilisations trying to kill each other in the most interesting of ways. What philosophy could possibly lead to this?" Saul's suggestion that there are fundamental problems with the rational model or with what he calls the Enlightenment model of thought often has his critics upset, to put it mildly.
"They have a heart attack," he says. "People ask, are you suggesting we lose rationality and Enlightenment values? But it doesn't have to be a Manichean choice, either-or - the choice is not rationality versus lunacy or Enlightenment values versus crazed superstition - there are many other choices."
Perhaps it was growing up in Canada, so close to the empire of the United States and yet at a critical distance from the myths of empire, that helped to shape Saul's lifelong interest in power structures. He's at home in imperial Delhi, and talks as we move along the flanks of the modern city, noting that the ruins of the Mughal empire curl around the insulated colonial bungalows inherited from the British Raj.
As a critic of globalisation, what he had to say in 2005 might not be as radical, but he makes his points with some relish: it's a fallacy to assume that we invented globalisation, and that people never travelled out of their villages, the West didn't bring globalisation to China, which had its free markets when "the West was living in caves".
Saul is far more fascinating when he explains why he sees the story of globalisation as a pervasive modern myth. The West is driven by the quest for one story-one religion, one language, one culture - and we pause here to clarify that he means the modern, and not the medieval world. The problem with the one-story model, says Saul, is that "you can never kill enough people to get to the purity the Western world wants".
"Everything is story," he says. "Thomas Friedman, who is completely wrong on many things, gets off a private jet, gets in a limo, goes to part of Bangalore and tells a myth. He's a mythmaker of a completely false idea of globalisation that doesn't include farmer suicides, the environment. But myths can be very true. Done right, they present correctly the way the world works. So if you're an ideologue, you desperately need to create false myths."
Martin Jacques, who had praised Saul's On Globalism, tempered his praise with one critique: Saul was better, in his opinion, on the last quarter of a century than he was in predicting the future. Through our conversation, we come back again and again to the subject of what follows - if Western philosophy has failed, what takes its place? If globalisation turns out to be a set of hollowed-out myths, what would be a better way? But though Saul is clear that you must "blow up the philosophy departments and build on the rubble", it is still easier for him to look at the past rather than the future.
His work at PEN has changed his reading habits: he hasn't read an American or an English novel in the last few years. "Not because good novels haven't been published," he says. But as he travelled through Asia and Africa, or went from Sierra Leone to Colombia to Serbia, he became more interested in reading writers from those parts of the world, and they may have restocked his mind with better dynamite.
He returns again and again to the subject of writers in prison, and the power of the word despite those who predict the end of the novel. "The truth is that writing in many forms has never been so powerful. Why are writers in jail if it's not powerful? Why are people adding to laws that curb freedom of expression if it's not important? What are they frightened of? They're frightened of the word, that's what they're frightened of."
Saul includes democracies in his critique, speaking of places that seem familiar, where those in power go "ballistic" about being criticised - "as if there's some relationship between power and the way people should talk to you. Imagine that." This is perhaps one of his larger obsessions - the apparently simple idea that the more power you have, the more you have to be criticised, that rulers work for citizens. "I'm not interested in the model of the Heroic leader, capital H, that is back in fashion. The Heroic leader shows off his muscles. He has a battalion of efficient people who will deliver the goods: that's corporatism and fascism, not democracy."
We have discussed power and its structures threadbare, and I am curious, because every thinker has a different answer to this question: when did he begin to think about empires and power? It's asked early on, and I think Saul has forgotten. But instead of getting into his taxi, Saul asks the driver if he might wait, and tells a family story.
His brother was born disabled; he was, Saul says, a wonderful person, who lived to be 19. "If someone in your family has disabilities, you grow up realising that the person who works the hardest at life is the person who has the smallest possibilities from life. People with disabilities work much harder than anybody else, much, much harder. When you understand that, it really makes nonsense of the idea that important people work harder than unimportant people. That's not the way the world works. That's not how it works at all."
He tells this story often at meetings of PEN, the international body that brings writers, journalists, free speech activists, artists and film-makers together under one umbrella. "How many heads of state do you know of who're in prison worldwide? Two or three, perhaps?" he asks. "How many bankers? About seven to ten, mostly in Russia. How many economists? Not nearly enough. And writers? 850 in prisons across the world. We must be doing something right."
The story's well-worn - Saul has narrated it in countries from Mexico (where journalists run the risk of being killed, often by decapitation) to Sierra Leone (where reading programmes try to offer a new set of stories in a country haunted by the civil war), to Canada, where he has lived for years as a writer and professional interrogator of power. His 15 books include six novels, and his works of philosophy from Voltaire's Bastards to On Equilibrium have found resonance among critics of globalisation.
Saul cut his teeth as a graduate student in philosophy who had a deep, and unusual, interest in military strategy. He has a fondness for sweeping statements: not enough philosophers study the army, which they should. "Prostitution isn't the oldest profession," he says. "The military is."
He began to compare the modern arms trade with the ancient arms trade and found few similarities, though he did begin to question the soundness of Western philosophy. "Take the world wars," he says, launching into a cornerstone critique. "They set a world record in murder by Western civilisations trying to kill each other in the most interesting of ways. What philosophy could possibly lead to this?" Saul's suggestion that there are fundamental problems with the rational model or with what he calls the Enlightenment model of thought often has his critics upset, to put it mildly.
"They have a heart attack," he says. "People ask, are you suggesting we lose rationality and Enlightenment values? But it doesn't have to be a Manichean choice, either-or - the choice is not rationality versus lunacy or Enlightenment values versus crazed superstition - there are many other choices."
Perhaps it was growing up in Canada, so close to the empire of the United States and yet at a critical distance from the myths of empire, that helped to shape Saul's lifelong interest in power structures. He's at home in imperial Delhi, and talks as we move along the flanks of the modern city, noting that the ruins of the Mughal empire curl around the insulated colonial bungalows inherited from the British Raj.
As a critic of globalisation, what he had to say in 2005 might not be as radical, but he makes his points with some relish: it's a fallacy to assume that we invented globalisation, and that people never travelled out of their villages, the West didn't bring globalisation to China, which had its free markets when "the West was living in caves".
Saul is far more fascinating when he explains why he sees the story of globalisation as a pervasive modern myth. The West is driven by the quest for one story-one religion, one language, one culture - and we pause here to clarify that he means the modern, and not the medieval world. The problem with the one-story model, says Saul, is that "you can never kill enough people to get to the purity the Western world wants".
"Everything is story," he says. "Thomas Friedman, who is completely wrong on many things, gets off a private jet, gets in a limo, goes to part of Bangalore and tells a myth. He's a mythmaker of a completely false idea of globalisation that doesn't include farmer suicides, the environment. But myths can be very true. Done right, they present correctly the way the world works. So if you're an ideologue, you desperately need to create false myths."
Martin Jacques, who had praised Saul's On Globalism, tempered his praise with one critique: Saul was better, in his opinion, on the last quarter of a century than he was in predicting the future. Through our conversation, we come back again and again to the subject of what follows - if Western philosophy has failed, what takes its place? If globalisation turns out to be a set of hollowed-out myths, what would be a better way? But though Saul is clear that you must "blow up the philosophy departments and build on the rubble", it is still easier for him to look at the past rather than the future.
His work at PEN has changed his reading habits: he hasn't read an American or an English novel in the last few years. "Not because good novels haven't been published," he says. But as he travelled through Asia and Africa, or went from Sierra Leone to Colombia to Serbia, he became more interested in reading writers from those parts of the world, and they may have restocked his mind with better dynamite.
He returns again and again to the subject of writers in prison, and the power of the word despite those who predict the end of the novel. "The truth is that writing in many forms has never been so powerful. Why are writers in jail if it's not powerful? Why are people adding to laws that curb freedom of expression if it's not important? What are they frightened of? They're frightened of the word, that's what they're frightened of."
Saul includes democracies in his critique, speaking of places that seem familiar, where those in power go "ballistic" about being criticised - "as if there's some relationship between power and the way people should talk to you. Imagine that." This is perhaps one of his larger obsessions - the apparently simple idea that the more power you have, the more you have to be criticised, that rulers work for citizens. "I'm not interested in the model of the Heroic leader, capital H, that is back in fashion. The Heroic leader shows off his muscles. He has a battalion of efficient people who will deliver the goods: that's corporatism and fascism, not democracy."
We have discussed power and its structures threadbare, and I am curious, because every thinker has a different answer to this question: when did he begin to think about empires and power? It's asked early on, and I think Saul has forgotten. But instead of getting into his taxi, Saul asks the driver if he might wait, and tells a family story.
His brother was born disabled; he was, Saul says, a wonderful person, who lived to be 19. "If someone in your family has disabilities, you grow up realising that the person who works the hardest at life is the person who has the smallest possibilities from life. People with disabilities work much harder than anybody else, much, much harder. When you understand that, it really makes nonsense of the idea that important people work harder than unimportant people. That's not the way the world works. That's not how it works at all."
The author is a writer and member, PEN Delhi