A flawed tale of a gray future
It’s hard not to be skeptical about John Gray. His endless political reincarnations have lost him many friends. But after his latest one, he is set to catch up with some of those former ones. From cheerleader of the New Right during the Thatcher years and after a short-lived flirtation with Tony Blair’s once-hyped third way, Gray converted to a savage critic of neoliberal globalization. A professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, he recently took a plunge into the murky waters of «deep» ecology and so-called anti-humanism. Meanwhile, the sky above him grows darker. In his new book, «Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia» (Allen Lane, 2007), Gray unleashes a good dose of pessimism about the human condition: Our knowledge may grow, he says, but that does not mean we become better people. Contrary to what they may believe, human beings are not radically different from, nor can they expect to have more control over their lives than gorillas. A misanthrope? Not quite. A pessimist? Definitely so. Borrowing the dark lenses of his late teacher and friend Isaiah Berlin, Gray sees a world beset by incurable problems and endemic conflicts. Ultimate human values though there may be, there is simply no rational – and, as a result, no universal – way to choose between them. Excitement and a quiet life, freedom and security, mercy and justice: Humans often want incommensurable goods. But the very same thing that propels Berlin toward liberalism also drives Gray away from it. It all boils down to the perennial liberal paradox: Berlin sees liberal society as the best way to combine different or even incompatible life modes whereas Gray winks an eye at Nietzsche and treats liberalism as simply one more system among others. The problem for Gray is not liberalism per se, but politics in general. Politics, he says, is utopian. It is so because its nature is essentially metaphysical. Modern ideologies are repressed religion. Christianity preached the emergence of a new and purified cosmos after a confrontation with Satan. Under the banner of progress, Enlightenment thinkers preserved the eschatological dimension of Christianity, replacing faith in God with reason. The secular ideologies that surfaced in the wake of the Enlightenment in purported opposition to religion – liberalism, communism and Nazism – are in fact ersatz religions, that is, political versions of Christianity as they adopted the teleological faith in an end time when all the flaws and evils of human society would be abolished. It’s not just the West which is sick. The utopia virus, we are told, has also infected the body of Islamic movements. It is manifested in their tendency to see violence as a means for the creation of a new world. «Radical Islam may be best described as Islamo-Jacobinism,» writes Gray in one of his many bold aphorisms. Inevitably, the thread takes us all the way to the neoconservative fantasies of Bush and Blair about implanting a Western-style democracy in the desert soil of the Middle East. This ultimate secular utopia of establishing a universal democracy and free market «ended in the blood-soaked streets of Iraq.» Now that secular faith has been lost, Gray claims, global conflict returns in its primitive, religious shape. In contrast with the new genre of militant atheists, such as Dawkins and Hitchens, who look forward to a post-religious world, Gray deems that religions are here to stay. «Human beings will no more cease to be religious than they will stop being sexual, playful or violent,» he writes. Religions may be a myth, he goes on, but humans cannot live without myths. The problem is that if myths «create meaning for those who live by them, they also destroy it in the lives of others.» Too bad Gray too seems to be looking into myths for meaning. In his bid to strip the metaphysical underpinnings of modern narratives, the author conjures up his own big narrative, a proper theory of History littered with leaps, oversimplifications and hyperbole. Oil, geopolitics and national interests all bend before the crushing power of utopia. Eager to squeeze all ideologies inside the Pandora’s box of utopia, Gray ends up distorting its content. Liberalism, communism, Nazism, Islamism and neoconservatism – everything becomes one. Even Dawkin’s thought, Gray says, is essentially Christian, for it maintains faith in the uniqueness and perfectibility of man. Atheism made religion. What is to be done in this inhospitable world? Gray resorts to the lost charm of realism. We have to accept, he writes, that as the world becomes more modern it does not necessarily become more uniform. Harmony in ethics is an illusion, thus we’d better accept the fact that conflict is here to stay. The best we can hope is to «hold the worst evils at bay.» It comes full circle, as Gray finds himself on familiar ground. His call for a realistic world-view reveals an archetypal conservative view of human nature, straight from the pages of Hobbes and Oakeshott. It’s a view immersed in pessimism and passivity toward the imperfections and wrongs of this world. Whoever saw a gorilla in revolt?
