John Gray is a small-minded, cynical reactionary and an apologist for religion.
Read A C Grayling’s eloquent rebuttal of his badly written and badly argued Guardian piece.
One has to admire John Gray’s publicists. Newspapers sometimes run articles excerpted or cobbled from books which are just about to be first published; here, they have managed to get a long screed advertising his Black Mass into the Guardian Review, with a shortened form of it on Comment is free, in preparation for the publication of the paperback edition one year on. That is good going.
What astonishes me is that, in the year since the hardback publication of Black Mass, Gray appears blithely to have ignored the debunking which its absurd and irresponsible arguments received at the hands of reviewers. It is not that he was ignorant of the response (I know for a fact that he was not, because I debated him at the ICA in London and put all and more of the points made in my own published response to him), but has chosen to ignore them and to repeat his views – despite their having been systematically challenged.
At the very least, if he had a case to make in response, he should have taken this opportunity to offer it; instead, he has merely iterated his views in the teeth of the severe drubbing given to their cogency and credentials. But then – he is, after all, an apologist for religion; perhaps sticking to a credo in the face of everything contrary comes naturally. Such is the virtue of faith.
Grayling links to another critique by Kenan Malik, who points out that utopianism isn’t always and everywhere a bad thing.
Gray defines a Utopian project as one for which ‘there are no circumstances under which it can be realized’. That includes just about every political venture. Marxism and Thatcherism, Communism and anti-Communism, the Enlightenment project and the project of the Counter-Enlightenment, the ‘project of engineering a western-style market economy in post-communist Russia’ and the attempt to ‘establish liberal democracy in post-Saddam Iraq’ – all are not just Utopian but rooted in eschatology. Sometimes it appears as if the only non-Utopians in the world are Gray himself and his handful of heroes such as Edmund Burke and Isaiah Berlin.
But what of the reality of human life? From the overthrow of absolute monarchy to the abolition of slavery, from the banning of torture to the establishment of universal suffrage, history is precisely a narrative of humans transforming the world through their will. Such historical change requires not just a belief that the world can be transformed by human action but also a vision of what a better world may look like.
Gray attempts to wriggle out of this problem by suggesting that the abolition of slavery, say, was not a Utopian project because it was not inherently unrealisable. But inherently unrealisable was exactly how critics of abolition – the John Grays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – saw it. In any case it is difficult to see why the abolition of slavery should have been any more realizable than, say, the bringing of democracy to Iraq.
In place of Utopianism, Gray suggests, we need realism. A realism that accepts that life consists not of soluble problems but of irresolvable conflicts and that humans are mere animals with no more ability to shape our future than do whales or gorillas. There is little that politics can achieve, Gray seems to suggest, because ‘human disorders cannot be remedied, only treated day by day’. This is not so much realism as cynicism. The blind acceptance of Utopian ideas can certainly be corrupting. But so, too, can be the blind rejection of Utopianism. After all what could be more corrupting that accepting as inevitable problems that we might be able to tackle were we to attempt the impossible?
Possibly Gray’s slavery-era equivalents would taunt the abolitionists by writing articles like, ‘The abolitionism of Wilberforce and Thomas Paine is so strong that it is like a form of slavery. Do you see? Aaaaahhh!‘
Also, Normas Geras (no friend of what he calls the ‘religion poisons everything’ tendency’) has weighed in:
This is threadbare stuff. Gray is unable to maintain that all those committed to human progress are thereby attached to an ‘inevitabilist’ version of it, because it isn’t true. So he concedes that it isn’t. What, then, makes attachment to the possibility of progress ‘a relic of the Christian view’? The idea, simply, that bad things continue to happen. Or the idea that you can always say ‘but’: slavery was abolished, but… torture has been prohibited but… etc.
The commitment to progress is precisely a commitment; it embodies, not a belief in linear directionality, but a hope, a set of objectives, and some degree of willingness to try to make the world a better place.
And what, John Gray, is so fundamentalist about hope?
