A Nation mag lefty takes a looks at John Gray's latest rantings against liberal civilization -- in a book titled Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. Last we saw of him, Gray had embraced the eco-nuttiness of James Lovelock, author of the intellectually disreputable "Gaia hypothesis". Over the past few years Gray has produced increasingly suspect intellectual goods -- as he's moved into the pop market and out of the world of serious ideas. No one every said that Gray was the best or the brightest, but within his area of competence (political philosophy / history of idea) he made a quite useful contribution to the literature -- even if he often made overly strong and often simply incorrect pronouncements on technical matters outside of his area of competence (e.g. on the topic of functional explanation).
His latest book actually sounds interesting -- Gray thinks outside the conventional theoretical box, which allows him to see things (and say things) that the standard issue PC mind-prison doesn't allow for. This makes his work not only provocative, it also forces one to do some thinking of ones own. The problem is that much of Gray's popular work is slap-dash and poorly reasoned -- it's not only unbound by conventional thinking, it's unbound by careful thinking -- or common sense. Often it's maddenly .. how to put it .. dumb. And it sometimes falsely reports intellectual history, i.e. it sometimes gets the literature wrong. Which simply drives me crazy. So Gray's pop work suffers serious defects. And not merely trivial defects. Often the problems are serious enough that his work threatens to descend into laugh zone of howler claims and intellectual incoherence. Some examples from our Nation lefty:
Gray views the nature of global conflict today in terms of "population growth, shrinking energy supplies and irreversible climate change"; "ethnic and religious enmities and the collapse or corrosion of the state in many parts of the world"; the emergence of "political organizations, irregular militias and fundamentalist networks" made all the more ominous given the dissemination of highly lethal weapons. Taken together, Gray contends, these developments spell almost certain disaster.
Actually, you can drop the "almost." There is a strikingly deterministic and fatalistic streak in Gray. Scattered throughout the book are formulations like: "The population of European Russia will be more than decimated"; "geopolitical upheaval is unavoidable"; "there is nothing to be done about this"; "a consequence of the universal fact of entropy." Sound familiar? The tone of ironclad inevitability is one of the carry-overs from Straw Dogs. As Adair Turner recently pointed out in the English journal Prospect, Gray's rigid determinism is more than a bit ironic given his ruthless critique of positivism for its insistence that the growth of scientific knowledge would inevitably lead to a utopian future- - one of Gray's central themes in Al Qaeda.
But this tension pales in comparison with a much more fundamental problem in Gray's project. For all of his insights into our geopolitical situation and his monitions about the perilous path we're on, when one reads the two books in tandem, the effect is one of moral numbness. If one follows the argument of Straw Dogs (as we can only assume Gray does), what difference does it make whether the human species avoids its collision course with doom? If we should look forward to a time "when humans have ceased to matter," as Gray exhorts us to do in Straw Dogs, what's the point of even considering the proposals he offers in Al Qaeda for fashioning a less calamitous future? How can the apocalyptic antihumanism of Straw Dogs be squared with the claim, in the concluding chapter of Al Qaeda, that "we need to think afresh about how regimes and ways of life that will always be different can come to coexist in peace"?
UPDATE: And oh my does Gray get slammed for this book on Amazon. Yeow.
Posted by Greg Ransom
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