The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Dictionary: opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order. The
dustjacket offers this nugget in the spirit of irony. John Ralston
Saul’s version sticks to alphabetical order but makes no pretence of
having cornered the market on truth. As his short introduction makes
clear, dictionaries rightly differ. Saul’s “humanistic” or
Socratic version takes its place in a venerable tradition of questioning
received wisdom, of opening doors rather than shutting them in
perpetuity. Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1509), Samuel Johnson’s
dictionary (1755), Denis Diderot’s encyclopedia, and Voltaire’s
Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) figure prominently in this genre.

This “dictionary” is really a book of epigrams and short, pithy
essays ranging from history and biography to philosophy and social
criticism. “Friendship. An imprecise emotion combined with loyalty.
... As Blake put it, ‘opposition is true friendship.’” “A Big
Mac. The communion wafer of consumption ... a symbol of passive
conformity.” “Irradiation. Done to dead chickens to prolong their
lives.”

Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards (1992) is a bold and brilliant analysis
of current political and economic confusions in the West. The
Doubter’s Companion suggests, if only indirectly, some practical
weapons of change that could result from questioning received wisdom.
Socrates would approve.