Gray's Anastomosis

Jonathan Derbyshire recently posted a very interesting interview with noted English philosopher John Gray, which led me to pull Gray's Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions off of the shelf. The collection of brief essays, published over the past several years in the New Statesman, makes for quick and easy reading. The brevity of most of the pieces doesn't entail any shallowness, however; he manages to exhibit a wealth of ideas in a short space.

Gray cuts an interesting figure on multiple levels, and some of his views resonate powerfully with my own preoccupations. Along with the late Robert Nozick, he is one of the prominent libertarian "apostates" to have emerged over the last decade or so. The discomfiture aroused by someone who abjures a faith to which we are attached can make for a bitter pill. But a repellant flavor is hardly an argument against a medicine - especially when the possible malady to treat (or pre-empt) is one's own philosophical sclerosis.

The worldview which suffuses Heresies is pretty gloomy - and the understanding laid out in detail in Gray's Straw Dogs is darker still. In the latter, there's a real question, it seems to me, of coherence. The occasional nature of Heresies doesn't usually dig deep enough into capital-M metaphysical terrain to require one to join or oppose Gray on bedrock questions of volition, human identity and its continuousness with the animal kingdom, etc. Hence it makes for a more readable work.

Nevertheless there's plenty of room for controversy in Heresies, many premises of which "go to the foundations." I haven't read enough of Gray to say this with confidence, but intuitively I'd describe him as a deeply pessimistic old-style conservative, forged by modernity - that is, an "Augustinian atheist."

What are the recurring, fundamental ideas of Heresies?

* There is no "progress" in history. Rather, history exhibits recurrent patterns, is cyclical.
* The modern conception of science betokens the only aspect of life in which progress is meaningful: scientific knowledge alone is cumulative.
* There is no moral progress, in the sense of a general, steady stream of improvement; persons, peoples, and polities improve and then degenerate. There is a deep wisdom in the notion of "Original Sin."
* Hence man, the perenially unregenerate animal, now grows increasingly powerful: most technological opportunities for good open vast possibilities for destruction. In other words, science is a means to an end - and science is merely harnassed to extant ends.
* There is a religious impulse or instinct the denial of which is just as harmful - and for precisely the same reasons - as the repression of sexual feelings. In both cases, instinctoid needs reappear in distorted and destructive guise. In the case of denied religious yearnings, the cult of progress and the "scientising" of science form a modern sham religion; one falsely imagines that deep meanings and purposes are disclosed. The new myths - and myths they are - lack the grandeur, and deep insight into man's lot, which the old ones had.

The following characterizations and views comprise some of Gray's commentary on current events, in Heresies:

* Globalization in no way entails good neighbors; it only means ineffectual fences.
* Marxists and Neo-Liberals are similarly deluded in believing that there is a privileged social system or arrangement which, if realized, would/will usher in a perduring era of peace and prosperity. Rather, there is every reason to expect that, after the interregnum of the '90's, we are now "back to history": we can look forward to familiar resource-wars, which will inevitably accompany accelerating global industrialization.
* Neo-conservatives are the "New Jacobins."
* Americans differ from Europeans not in the sense that the former are keenly alive to evil in the world, and the latter are not; but rather the former speak and act as if evil can finally be defeated, and the latter resign themselves to evil's ubiquity and permanence. This explains the optimistic or "idealistic" strain in American rhetoric and policy, vs. European realism or even resignation.
* The long-term effect of the invasion of Iraq will actually be a strengthening of state sovereignty (on the time-tested pattern of old), across the board - not the cosmopolitan "Liberal Imperium" which some herald as the wave of the future.
* The American hegemon, for all its flaws, is the only viable force of relative benignity and power on offer to effect global quasi-governance. Hence it is misguided to welcome a weakening of American power.
* Nevertheless, the invasion of Iraq was ill-conceived, quite possibly illegal, and "criminally stupid."

Read Jonathan's interview for more.