The Independent, 27 June 2007
An edited excerpt from Black Mass.
Neo-conservatism is not the most recent variety of conservatism. It is a new type of politics that can emerge at any point on the political spectrum. In Britain, neo-conservatism's political vehicle was not the Conservative Party but the new party that Blair created when he seized the Labour leadership.
The single most important fact in Blair's rise to power was Thatcher's new settlement. Both in economic and political terms it was an established fact, but while this was an index of Thatcher's achievement it was also a source of weakness for the Conservatives.
Thatcher often declared that she aimed to destroy socialism in Britain. She never paused to consider what would be the effect on her party if she succeeded. For much of the 20th century the Conservatives acted as a brake on collectivism. The Conservative Party existed to oppose not just socialism but also - and more relevantly - any further advance towards social democracy. By dismantling the Labour settlement, Thatcher removed the chief reason for the existence of the Conservative Party. Without a clearly defined enemy it lacked an identity. Labour had never been a doctrinaire socialist party - as Harold Wilson remarked, it had always owed more to Methodism than to Marx - but by identifying New Labour with the market, Blair was able to deprive the Conservatives of the threat that had defined them for generations. As a result they were mired in confusion for nearly a decade.
While Blair's embrace of neo-liberal economic policies was a strategic decision, it soon acquired an ideological rationale. More conventional in his thinking about domestic issues than most politicians, and having an even shorter historical memory, Blair embraced without question the neo-liberal belief that only one economic system can deliver prosperity in a late modern context. Modernisation became the Blairite mantra, and for Blair it meant something precise: the reorganisation of society around the imperatives of the free market.
When he was still in opposition, Blair curried support from disillusioned Conservatives by representing himself as a One Nation Tory - a progressive conservative who accepted the central role of the market but also understood the importance of social cohesion. Once in power it was clear Blair came not to bury Thatcher but to continue her work.
Blair's One Nation Toryism was like his fabled Third Way, a political marketing tool. The Third Way originated in Bill Clinton's practice of "triangulation" - a tactic invented in the mid-1990s by Clinton's adviser Dick Morris, which involved Clinton setting himself up as a more pragmatic alternative to both parties in Congress. Adopting the same tactic, Blair attacked his own party as much as the Conservatives. His successful campaign to remove Clause Four (which mandated common ownership of the means of production) from the Labour constitution in 1995 was a symbolic act rather than a policy shift. At the same time it was a marker for larger challenges to Labour's social-democratic inheritance. Blair carried on the agenda of privatisation that had developed from Thatcher's original programme into core areas of the state such as sections of the justice system and prison service, and inserted market mechanisms into the NHS and the schooling system.
In these respects Blair did no more than consolidate Thatcherism, but he did not change British society in the way Thatcher did. His chief impact has been on his own party. New Labour was constructed to bury the past and in this, if in nothing else, it succeeded. It began as a coup masterminded by a handful of people - Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Philip Gould and others - who aimed to rebuild the party as an instrument for securing power.
New Labour was a purpose-built construction with few links to the political tradition that preceded it. If it displayed any continuity with the past it was with the Social Democratic Party that had split from Labour in the Eighties, but unlike the Social Democrats, New Labour grasped that issues of strategy and organisation are more important than questions of policy. New Labour's first priority was to restructure the party as a centralised institution. Power had to be concentrated before anything else could be done. New Labour always had a Leninist aspect, but it was a Leninism that focused on reshaping the image of the party. If New Labour was "modern" in its acceptance of the free market, it was "postmodern" in its conviction that power is exercised by changing the way society is perceived.
Blair's most prominent talents were his skill in using the techniques of public relations and his sensitivity to the public mood. These traits have led some observers to the view that he is an opportunist with no underlying convictions. It is true that there has never been anything like a Blairite ideology, but that does not mean Blair has no beliefs.
His career in politics is testimony to the power of neo-conservative ideas, which guided his most fateful decisions. Blair was a neo-liberal by default, but a neo-conservative by conviction. Neo-conservatism diverges from neo-liberalism at crucial points, and it is specifically neo-conservative beliefs that shaped Blair's view of the world. Unlike neo-liberals, neo-conservatives do not aim to return to an imaginary era of minimum government. They perceive that the social effects of free markets are not all benign and look to government to promote the virtues the free market neglects.
Blair has always been a strong advocate of "law and order", and made this a theme when he served as shadow Home Secretary under Labour leader John Smith. In part this was a strategic move to wrest the territory from the Conservatives, but it also matched his instincts.
Neo-conservatives may not always be admirers of Victorian values - some (including Blair) have seen themselves as having liberal views on personal morality - but they reject the view that the state can be morally neutral. Government must act to promote the good life, which involves accepting the need for discipline and punishment. It also means promoting religion. Unlike neo-liberals, who are usually secular in outlook, neo-conservatives view religion as a vital source of social cohesion - a view expressed in Blair's support for faith schools.
Above all, neo-conservatives are unwilling to rely on social evolution. Commonly more intelligent than neo-liberals, they understand that while capitalism is a revolutionary force that overturns established social structures and topples regimes, this does not happen by itself - state power and sometimes military force are needed to expedite the process. In its enthusiasm for revolutionary change, neo-conservatism has more in common with Jacobinism and Leninism than with neo-liberalism or traditional conservatism. The common view of Blair as a crypto-Tory could not be more mistaken. There is no trace in him of the scepticism about progress voiced by Tories such as Disraeli. Nor is he simply another neo-liberal prophet of the free market. He is an American neo-conservative and has been throughout most of his political life.
It is in international relations that neo-conservatism shaped Blair most deeply. Whatever he may have wished his inheritance to be - British entry into the single European currency, perhaps - he will be remembered for taking the UK into a ruinous war. His part in the Iraq War destroyed him as a politician, and he cannot have wanted this result. It would be a mistake to imagine that he was as committed at the beginning of this ill-conceived venture as he later came to be; he made errors of judgement at every stage. At the same time, his support for the war expressed his most basic beliefs.
From one point of view it was a misjudged exercise in realpolitik. Like other British prime ministers, Blair feared the consequence of opposing US policies and was prey to the conceit that by being America's unswerving ally Britain could help shape its behaviour in the international system. Anthony Eden's attempt to topple the Egyptian president Nasser and reassert British control of the Suez Canal in 1956 destroyed his political career and underlined the risks of any British leader opposing American power. Later prime ministers successfully distanced themselves from American policies - most notably Harold Wilson, who wisely declined to send troops to support the Americans in Vietnam - but Blair was insistent that Britain must give the US full support. He feared the impact on the international system if the US acted alone and saw an opportunity for Britain to "punch above its weight" by acting as the bridge between America and Europe.
In fact, the war left the transatlantic divide wider than at any time since the Second World War, with British opinion alienated from the US, and Britain at the same time more at odds with Europe even than in Thatcher's time. But it was not only a misguided attempt at higher strategy, and there can be no doubt that Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam chimed with Blair's convictions. Saddam was a tyrant who represented a stage in human history whose time had passed. A new international order was under construction with America in the lead, and Blair wanted to be at the forefront of this project. As John Kampfner has written, "Blair was not dragged into war with Iraq. He was at ease with himself and his own beliefs."
What were those beliefs? In a span of six years, Blair took Britain into war five times. He sanctioned air strikes against Saddam Hussein in 1998, the Kosovo war in 1999, British military intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000, the war in Afghanistan in 2002, and Iraq in 2003. He dispatched further contingents of British troops to Afghanistan in 2006 when US forces were run down in the country. There is a strong strand of continuity in these decisions. Blair believes in the power of force to ensure the triumph of the good. From this point of view, the attack on Iraq was a continuation of policies in the Balkans and Afghanistan. In each case war was justified as a form of humanitarian intervention. This may have had some force in the Balkans and Sierra Leone. It was dubious in Afghanistan and duplicitous in Iraq.
Blair justified these military involvements in terms of a "doctrine of international community", which he presented in a speech at the Economic Club in Chicago in 1999. Blair's new doctrine rested on the belief that state sovereignty could no longer survive in an interdependent world: "We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community. By this I mean the explicit recognition that today more than ever before we are mutually dependent, that national interest is to a significant extent governed by international collaboration and that we need a clear and coherent debate as to the direction the doctrine takes us in each field of international endeavour. Just as within domestic politics, the notion of community - the belief that partnership and co-operation are essential to advance self-interest - is coming into its own; so it needs to find its own international echo."
Blair's speech reflects the unreal intellectual climate of the time. In the Nineties, it was fashionable to maintain that the world had moved into a "post-Westphalian" era - so called after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which is often seen as marking the point at which the modern state was recognised in law. This system had ended in the post-Cold War period, it was believed: state sovereignty was no longer at the centre of the international system, which was governed by global institutions. In fact the sovereign state was as strong as it had ever been, and its seeming decline was a by-product of the interval after the end of the Cold War in which the US seemed able to act without restraint from other powers. The interval was destined to be brief.
China and India were emerging as great powers whose interests diverge at important points but which are at one in rejecting any system based on American hegemony. In the Nineties, as in the past, several great powers were interacting in a mix of rivalry and co-operation. In many ways this was a re-run of the late 19th century with different players.
The idea that the sovereign state is on the way out was nonsense, but it served Blair well. In the first place, it matched his view of the world in which human development is seen as a series of stages, each better than the last. This is a Whiggish variant of the belief in providence to which Blair subscribed as part of his Christian worldview.
It would be unwise to take too seriously Blair's claim to have been inspired by the Quaker philosopher John Macmurray (1891-1976) - a Christian communitarian thinker who developed from the British Idealist tradition and argued for a positive understanding of freedom as a part of the common good. To a greater extent than for most politicians, Blair's view of the world was formed by the conventional beliefs of the day. He never doubted that globalisation was creating a worldwide market economy that must eventually be complemented by global democracy. When he talked of the necessity for continuing "economic reform" - as he often did - he took for granted that this meant further privatisation and the injection of market mechanisms into public services. The incessant "modernisation" he demanded was, in effect, an ossified version of the ideas of the late Eighties. Like Thatcher - with whom he has very little else in common - Blair lacked scepticism. For him, the clichés of the hour have always been eternal verities.
As with George W Bush, however, there is no reason to doubt the reality of Blair's faith. Like Bush, Blair thinks of international relations in terms derived from theology. To be sure, this is not the theology of Augustine or Aquinas. It failed to persuade Pope John Paul II when Blair had an audience with him in late February 2003.
Medieval Christian thinkers developed a rigorous theory of the conditions that must be satisfied before a war can be considered just, and the pontiff rightly believed they had not been met. The audience must have pained Blair, but it failed to shake his sense of rectitude. It was enough that he felt he was right. The scrupulous casuistry of medieval thinkers regarding the consequences of human action was of no interest.
Good intentions are what matter and they are bound in the end to prevail. And yet these same "good intentions" were promoted through ill-conceived and ideologically motivated policies, whose distance from any prudent assessment of facts he seemed unable to perceive.
The idea that the international system was moving towards global governance expanded the traditional purposes of war. The "international community" could take military action whenever it was morally right to do so. Not only "rogue states" that threatened the international system by developing weapons of mass destruction, but also states that violated the human rights of their citizens should be the target of armed force. The aim was not just to neutralise threats - even pre-emptively. It was to improve the human condition. War was no longer a last resort against the worst evils but an instrument of human progress. In his speech in Chicago, Blair acknowledged that military action should be taken only when diplomacy had failed, and then only if it had a reasonable prospect of achieving its goals.
Nevertheless, he dismissed the views of those - many of them in the professional military in the UK and the US - who demanded that an exit strategy be identified before military intervention could be seriously contemplated. For Blair, their caution smacked of defeatism. "Success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider," he declared.
Later speeches show Blair accepting that military force alone cannot bring about the radical transformation in the international system to which he is committed. Addressing the World Affairs Council in Los Angeles in August 2006, Blair declared that the struggle against terrorism "is one about values". He was reticent in specifying what these values might be; but whatever they were, he had no doubt they spearheaded human advance: "Our values are worth struggling for. They represent humanity's progress throughout the ages and at each point we have had to fight for them and defend them. As a new age beckons, it is time to fight for them again."
Blair returned to the subject in January 2007, when he opined: "Terrorism destroys progress. Terrorism can't be defeated by military means alone. But it can't be defeated without it."
Lying behind Blair's view of international relations is a view of America. Along with his fellow neo-conservatives in Washington, Blair regards America as the paradigm of a modern society. Propelled by the momentum of history, it is invincible. In giving his backing to the Bush administration in Iraq, Blair was able to believe that he was aiding the cause of human progress while having the consoling sense of being on the side of the big battalions. Blair's faith in American invincibility was misguided. America's defeat by the Iraqi insurgency was in no way unexpected. The French were driven from Algeria despite prosecuting the war with extreme ruthlessness and being backed by over a million French settlers. In conditions more like those the American forces faced in Iraq, the Soviets had also been driven from Afghanistan. The lesson of asymmetric warfare - where the militarily weak use unorthodox tactics against the seemingly overwhelmingly strong - is that the weak have the winning hand.
If Blair failed to heed these lessons, the reason was partly ignorance. A politician who has unusual intuitive gifts in divining the British public mood, he lacked the knowledge necessary to make well-founded judgements in international contexts. His record of success in domestic politics was based on banishing the past. He was led into the Iraq débâcle by the belief that history was on his side. Actually, he knew very little history, and what he did know he refused to accept when it undercut his hopes. History was significant only as a record of human advance. To turn to it to chasten current ambitions was unthinkable, even immoral. Like Bush, Blair viewed history as the unfolding of a providential design, and a feature of their view is that the design is visible to the faithful. Others may be blind to the unfolding pattern, and in that case they may have to be guided. In Augustinian terms this is unacceptable, for only God can know the design of history. Here Blair has been the modern man he claims to be: for him, a sense of subjective certainty is all that is needed for an action to be right. If deception is needed to realise the providential design, it cannot be truly deceitful.
Deception has been integral at every stage of the Iraq War. [Let us] consider some of the key episodes of disinformation that enabled British involvement in the war. In the run-up to the invasion, Blair always insisted publicly that its goal was not regime change - which he knew to be legally unacceptable as a ground for attacking the country - but the threat posed by Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. A document was circulated titled "Iraq's Programme of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government" (published on 24 September 2002 under the title "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government"). The document - which came to be known as the "dodgy dossier" - claimed to be an authoritative statement based on intelligence concerning Iraq's capabilities and intentions regarding WMD; but it contradicted earlier intelligence assessments. In March 2002, a report to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which brings together information from all of the UK's intelligence services, concluded that there was "no evidence that Saddam Hussein posed a significantly greater threat than in 1991 after the Gulf War". Moreover, while the dossier claimed to be based on intelligence sources, 90 per cent of it was copied from three published articles. In the case of one of them, the meaning was changed to imply that Iraq was supporting Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qa'ida - a claim for which there was no basis, and which evidence of enmity and suspicion between the two rendered highly implausible.
Like Bush, Blair has focused on intelligence failures as being among the chief reasons for the difficulty of prosecuting the war. In fact, a recurrent feature of the conflict has been that intelligence findings that ran counter to claims made in support of the decision to go to war have been ignored or suppressed. In February 2003, a leaked document from the UK Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) acknowledged that there had been contact between al-Qa'ida and the Iraqi regime in the past but noted that any relationship between them foundered on mistrust. "[Bin Laden's] aims are in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq," the report concluded. The report contradicted the claim that Saddam cultivated contacts with the group that organised the 9/11 attacks - a claim central to Blair's defence of the attack on Iraq as part of the "war against terror".
An earlier report, the "Iraq Options" paper produced by the Overseas and Defence Secretariat of the Cabinet Office on 8 March 2002, surveyed the evidence and concluded unambiguously: "In the judgement of the JIC, there is no recent evidence of Iraq[i] complicity with international terrorism. There is therefore no justification for action against Iraq based on self-defence to combat imminent threats of terrorism as in Afghanistan." This report and others show that Britain's intelligence agencies were repeatedly tasked to find evidence for links between Saddam and al-Qa'ida. Unable to find any such evidence and unwilling to invent it, they reported that none existed. The only effect their reports had was that Blair shifted the case for war to arguments about WMD, where intelligence could be more easily manipulated.
In this instance, as in others, the problem was not defective intelligence. It was that intelligence was disregarded when it did not support the case for war. Blair had no use for intelligence based on facts. He was only interested in "faith-based intelligence" - as a former arms-control expert who used to work for the American State Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, described the way intelligence is viewed in the Bush administration. One of its key proponents headed the Office of Special Plans - an ad hoc organisation set up to screen out inconvenient intelligence.
Secret planning for the invasion seems to have started in America months or weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks late in 2001, and it was clear to Blair that Bush meant to go to war in Iraq from the time he visited Bush at Camp David in April 2002. A memorandum from the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, which was sent to Blair on 25 March 2002 in preparation for the visit, noted that while it seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind, the case for war was thin - Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. Despite this advice, Blair gave his full backing to Bush when the two met at Camp David. At a meeting held at 10 Downing Street at 9am on 23 July 2002, whose details were subsequently leaked in the "Downing Street Memo", Blair was told by "C" - the head of the Secret Intelligence Service MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, who had recently had talks in Washington with the head of the CIA, George Tenet - that military action against Saddam was "seen as inevitable" and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy". Partly in order to placate opinion in the Labour Party, Blair persuaded Bush to go to the UN to seek a second resolution authorising military action. Yet at a meeting in the White House on 31 January 2003, Bush made it clear to Blair that he meant to go to war regardless of the UN's decision, and Blair again promised Bush his full support. He also rejected an offer from Bush that could have spared Britain from full involvement in the war. In March 2003, fearful that Blair's government might fall, Bush gave him the option of British forces not participating in the invasion. Blair dismissed the option and insisted he was fully committed. However, in the House of Commons Blair maintained the pretence that war could still be avoided right up to the crucial vote on 18 March (two days before the war).
Blair's complicity in deception in the run-up to war has led to him being seen as mendacious. This is a misreading. It is not so much that he is economical with the truth as that he lacks the normal understanding of it. For him, truth is whatever serves the cause, and when he engages in what is commonly judged to be deception he is only anticipating the new world that he is helping to bring about. His silences serve the same higher purpose. Blair has remained silent regarding the abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib, and he has dismissed well-sourced reports that American planes have used British airports to implement the policy of "special rendition", in which terrorist suspects are kidnapped and transported to countries where they can be tortured. Blair's stance on these issues must by ordinary standards be judged to be thoroughly dishonest, but it is clear he believes ordinary standards do not apply to him. Deception is justified if it advances human progress - and then it is not deception. Blair's untruths are not true lies. They are prophetic glimpses of the future course of history, and they carry the hazards of all such revelations.
During Blair's decade in office, British government changed in character. All administrations aim to present a positive image of themselves, and some have departed from truth in the process. Where Blair was unique was in viewing the shaping of public opinion as government's overriding purpose. The result was that, whereas in the past lies were an intermittent feature of government, under his leadership they became integral to its functioning. Writing about the role of lying in Soviet politics, the French political thinker Raymond Aron observed: "In the exact, strict sense of the word, he who consciously says the opposite of the truth is lying: Lenin's companions were lying when they confessed to crimes they had not committed, and Soviet propaganda was lying when it sang of the happiness of the people during the days of collectivisation... On the other hand, when the Bolsheviks, the Communists, call the Soviet Union socialist, must we say that they are lying? ... if they recognise the difference between what socialism is today and what it will be when it conforms to its essence, then they are not, in the strictest sense, lying, but rather substituting for reality (something that can be described as) 'pseudo reality': the meaning that they give something in terms of a future they imagine as conforming to the ideology. Despite everything, Sovietism becomes a step along the road to socialism, and hence a step toward the salvation of mankind." If there is an historical precedent for Blair's methodical disregard for truth it is in the Soviet era, when a generation of Western communists represented the USSR as a stage on the way to universal democracy. Believing they were serving an invincible cause, these fellow-travellers were ready to "lie for the truth" by portraying the Soviet system not as it was in fact but as it would inevitably - so they believed - become.
It was absurd to describe the Soviet Union as a democracy. It is no less absurd to suggest that Iraq is an emerging liberal democracy and to refer to the country as the place in which the war against global terrorism is being won. In factual terms Iraq is a failed state, and insofar as there is anything like democracy it is working to produce Iranian-style theocracy. In the same way, facts tell us that the US-led invasion has turned the country into a training ground for terrorists.
Blair did more than conceal these facts. He constructed a pseudoreality that aimed to shape the way we think. As in the Soviet case, the pseudoreality failed to withstand the test of history. The hideous facts of life in Iraq refute the postmodern dogma that truth is a construction of power. If they have yet to penetrate into Blair's awareness, they have entered that of American voters, and as a result he is condemned to live out his days as the redundant servant of a failed administration. Out of power, he faces decades on the lecture circuit dispensing uplifting platitudes to listless audiences drawn from the second division of American business.
The political environments in which Blair and Bush came to power could hardly be more different. Blair could not mobilise popular religious belief behind him as Bush did, and a neo-conservative intellectual movement supporting his messianic foreign policy began to develop in Britain only towards the end of his period in power. Yet there was a kinship between Bush and Blair. The combination of a shallow but intense religiosity with a militant faith in human progress that defines Bush's world-view also shaped Blair's. Blair and Bush interpreted the history of the past two decades - the only history they knew - as showing that humanity had entered a wholly new era. Like Thatcher at the end of the 1980s, they interpreted the collapse of Communism not as a setback for Western universalism - which it was - but as a sign of the triumph of "the West". Lacking any longer historical perspective, they understood the challenges of the early 20th century in terms of the triumphal illusions of the post-Cold War era.
Blair and Bush came at the end of a period of ascending utopianism in Western politics. For them, human progress was axiomatic; but it was never understood only in the terms of secular thought. Both practised a missionary style of politics, whose goal was nothing less than the salvation of mankind.
Sunday 20 July 2008
Toby Green on John Gray
The Independent, 29 June 2007
Creative genius can at times be connected to crisis. Some of the most pathfinding literature and philosophy of the 20th century emerged from disaster. The most insightful work of Achebe, Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn would not exist were it not for the debris of massacres. No one reading this new book about "apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia" can be under any illusion but that this is also a time of crisis. Indeed, one of John Gray's supreme qualities as a thinker is that he is bereft of illusions.
Stripping away the meaningless verbiage which swaddles so much analysis, Gray discerns an underlying structure of thought (or lack of thought) in the political landscape. This is the refuge in fantasies which derive either from apocalyptic religion or from secularist utopianism. Such fantasies, he shows, drive the neo-conservative agenda and are the true origins of the crisis faced today.
At first, this analysis may not appear original. Gray is hardly alone in drawing attention to the influence of the apocalyptic Christian right in America. The most disturbing instance came in October 2003, when under-secretary of defence William Boykin declared that the enemy in the "war on terror" was "a guy called Satan". As Gray notes, instead of this remark heralding the end of Boykin's career, he continues to work at the Pentagon.
Gray's importance, however, lies in tracing the connections of thought rather than in outlining the detail of politics. Black Mass shows the intellectual linkage between today's religious rhetoric and movements as diverse as the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins and the Nazis. His deep insight is that the underlying structure of modern politics derives from Christianity, and that the return of overt religious language to politics is merely the renewal of a latent characteristic.
There is much here to stir controversy. When British politics subsists within the parameters of secularism, the idea that this secularism is derivative of Christianity is highly provocative. Yet the argument is meticulous and persuasive. Gray shows lucidly how the secular utopian projects of both communism and Nazism were vehicles for religious myths.
Both ideologies held that after a great struggle the optimum social organisation would emerge for a chosen people – proletarians for the communists, Aryans for the Nazis. In this process there was a redemptive quality to the violence, which was an essential part of the process of revolution which accompanied the change.
This may seem a long way from Christianity but, as Gray shows, the concepts of an "end time" and of a final struggle leading to harmony are central to early Christian theology. Furthermore, "the very idea of revolution as a transforming event in history is owed to religion". Thus the ideas of the most brutal atheistic regimes of the 20th century derived their imagery from religious thought.
Nor is the influence of religion on political ideals restricted to these extremes. Gray goes much further, arguing that the "evangelism" of democratic liberalism itself derives from Christianity. In this light, the prevalent view amid the pseudo-comfort of the political classes of London and Washington, that the world has settled on democratic values and institutions as its political "end-point", is merely a reprise of the theology of an end-time that presages harmony. The liberal narrative of progress is itself a proto-Christian story ending in redemption, while the political goal of perfecting human relations is a secular mirror to the religious vision of heaven.
Yet none of this analysis means that Gray is as critical of religion as writers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. The humanist alternative to religion is itself, he argues, derivative of Christianity. Why else privilege humankind above other animals, if not for the anthropocentric worldview of the Judaeo-Christian tradition? Far from being outmoded and dangerous, religion is on the contrary a primary human need which contemporary society represses. In his most daring act, Gray applies classic Freudian theory. He suggests that "like suppressed sexual desire, faith returns, often in grotesque forms, to govern the lives of those who deny it", and that it is this which causes "the perversion of politics by repressed religion".
This is pathfinding thought. Gray is unusual among contemporary Anglo-American philosophers in recognising the primary role of the passions in forming ideas. He is a compelling writer, dismembering his targets with surgical irony, as with his devastating analysis of Tony Blair: "For him, the clichés of the hour have always been eternal verities... he was led into the Iraq débâcle by the belief that history was on his side. Actually, he knew very little history, and what he did know he refused to accept when it undercut his hopes."
This does not mean that his book is without its difficulties. A true sign of the originality of Black Mass is that it raises almost as many problems as it solves. There is, for instance, Gray's definition of a utopian project as one in which "there are no circumstances in which it can be realized". Quite rightly, he shows how under this definition the tag of utopianism applies both to the ravages of Nazi Germany and to the war in Iraq. Yet one can also wonder whether the entire Western project of peace via the suppression of desire in universal consumerism is not itself utopian. If so many systems of government are based on unrealisable dreams, could the human species itself be classed utopian by nature? This is not a question Gray poses, but it is a subtext of his book. If the answer is yes, his thesis comes dangerously close to a tautology, one which is true by the very terms of its definitions.
An optimist must hope that we can rise above delusional ideals. Yet on finishing Gray's book, one has little faith that this can happen through politicians. Instead, I was reminded of Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese modernist writer, who saw politics itself as the worst form of escapism: "Revolutionaries and reformers all make the same mistake. Lacking the power to master and reform their own attitude towards life, which is everything, or their own being, which is almost everything, they escape into wanting to change others and the external world. Every revolutionary, every reformer, is an escapee".
Creative genius can at times be connected to crisis. Some of the most pathfinding literature and philosophy of the 20th century emerged from disaster. The most insightful work of Achebe, Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn would not exist were it not for the debris of massacres. No one reading this new book about "apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia" can be under any illusion but that this is also a time of crisis. Indeed, one of John Gray's supreme qualities as a thinker is that he is bereft of illusions.
Stripping away the meaningless verbiage which swaddles so much analysis, Gray discerns an underlying structure of thought (or lack of thought) in the political landscape. This is the refuge in fantasies which derive either from apocalyptic religion or from secularist utopianism. Such fantasies, he shows, drive the neo-conservative agenda and are the true origins of the crisis faced today.
At first, this analysis may not appear original. Gray is hardly alone in drawing attention to the influence of the apocalyptic Christian right in America. The most disturbing instance came in October 2003, when under-secretary of defence William Boykin declared that the enemy in the "war on terror" was "a guy called Satan". As Gray notes, instead of this remark heralding the end of Boykin's career, he continues to work at the Pentagon.
Gray's importance, however, lies in tracing the connections of thought rather than in outlining the detail of politics. Black Mass shows the intellectual linkage between today's religious rhetoric and movements as diverse as the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins and the Nazis. His deep insight is that the underlying structure of modern politics derives from Christianity, and that the return of overt religious language to politics is merely the renewal of a latent characteristic.
There is much here to stir controversy. When British politics subsists within the parameters of secularism, the idea that this secularism is derivative of Christianity is highly provocative. Yet the argument is meticulous and persuasive. Gray shows lucidly how the secular utopian projects of both communism and Nazism were vehicles for religious myths.
Both ideologies held that after a great struggle the optimum social organisation would emerge for a chosen people – proletarians for the communists, Aryans for the Nazis. In this process there was a redemptive quality to the violence, which was an essential part of the process of revolution which accompanied the change.
This may seem a long way from Christianity but, as Gray shows, the concepts of an "end time" and of a final struggle leading to harmony are central to early Christian theology. Furthermore, "the very idea of revolution as a transforming event in history is owed to religion". Thus the ideas of the most brutal atheistic regimes of the 20th century derived their imagery from religious thought.
Nor is the influence of religion on political ideals restricted to these extremes. Gray goes much further, arguing that the "evangelism" of democratic liberalism itself derives from Christianity. In this light, the prevalent view amid the pseudo-comfort of the political classes of London and Washington, that the world has settled on democratic values and institutions as its political "end-point", is merely a reprise of the theology of an end-time that presages harmony. The liberal narrative of progress is itself a proto-Christian story ending in redemption, while the political goal of perfecting human relations is a secular mirror to the religious vision of heaven.
Yet none of this analysis means that Gray is as critical of religion as writers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. The humanist alternative to religion is itself, he argues, derivative of Christianity. Why else privilege humankind above other animals, if not for the anthropocentric worldview of the Judaeo-Christian tradition? Far from being outmoded and dangerous, religion is on the contrary a primary human need which contemporary society represses. In his most daring act, Gray applies classic Freudian theory. He suggests that "like suppressed sexual desire, faith returns, often in grotesque forms, to govern the lives of those who deny it", and that it is this which causes "the perversion of politics by repressed religion".
This is pathfinding thought. Gray is unusual among contemporary Anglo-American philosophers in recognising the primary role of the passions in forming ideas. He is a compelling writer, dismembering his targets with surgical irony, as with his devastating analysis of Tony Blair: "For him, the clichés of the hour have always been eternal verities... he was led into the Iraq débâcle by the belief that history was on his side. Actually, he knew very little history, and what he did know he refused to accept when it undercut his hopes."
This does not mean that his book is without its difficulties. A true sign of the originality of Black Mass is that it raises almost as many problems as it solves. There is, for instance, Gray's definition of a utopian project as one in which "there are no circumstances in which it can be realized". Quite rightly, he shows how under this definition the tag of utopianism applies both to the ravages of Nazi Germany and to the war in Iraq. Yet one can also wonder whether the entire Western project of peace via the suppression of desire in universal consumerism is not itself utopian. If so many systems of government are based on unrealisable dreams, could the human species itself be classed utopian by nature? This is not a question Gray poses, but it is a subtext of his book. If the answer is yes, his thesis comes dangerously close to a tautology, one which is true by the very terms of its definitions.
An optimist must hope that we can rise above delusional ideals. Yet on finishing Gray's book, one has little faith that this can happen through politicians. Instead, I was reminded of Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese modernist writer, who saw politics itself as the worst form of escapism: "Revolutionaries and reformers all make the same mistake. Lacking the power to master and reform their own attitude towards life, which is everything, or their own being, which is almost everything, they escape into wanting to change others and the external world. Every revolutionary, every reformer, is an escapee".
Looking Out for The Enemy Within
The Guardian, July 10 2005.
Along with the death and injury they inflicted, Thursday's bombings were a demonstration of an unpalatable truth. The threat of indiscriminate terror will be with us in any future we can realistically foresee. Terror has causes and it is right that they should be identified. The war in Iraq has given al-Qaeda a major boost, enabling it to link its extremist agenda with grievances that are widely felt in Islamic countries. At the same time, it has resulted in a massive diversion of resources from the real work of counterterrorism and significantly boosted terrorist recruitment.
The 'war on terror' suggests terrorism is a global phenomenon but, actually, it remains almost entirely national or regional in its scope and goals. The Tamil Tigers do not operate worldwide any more than the IRA or Eta. Only al-Qaeda has a genuinely global reach, and it has been strengthened by American policies that have turned Iraq into a terrorist training ground.
Western governments have helped make al-Qaeda what it is today, but it would be folly to imagine that any shift in their policies can neutralise the threat it now poses.
No longer the semi-centralised organisation it was before the destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda has mutated into a brand name that covers an amorphous network of groups that are linked together mainly by their adherence to an apocalyptic version of Islamist ideology. This network is the vehicle of a movement that has more in common with Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult whose members planted sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo underground, than it does with any version of traditional Islam.
It is a network that seems to be replicating itself in Europe and other advanced industrial regions, and if it turns out that the London bombings were al-Qaeda-related, the group that committed them could prove to be largely homegrown.
Despite the high level of globalisation of many of al-Qaeda's activities, it is a mistake to think it acts solely as an external trigger for terrorist activity. In fact, we may be witnessing the emergence of an indigenous version of terrorism in this country, and it is important that we understand that this is by no means unprecedented. Some of the most advanced industrial nations have produced terrorist movements, often driven by apocalyptic ideologies, in which the existing world is believed to be on the brink of an imminent, total and violent transformation.
Consider the US and Japan. In the decades before 9/11, terrorism in America was very much an indigenous phenomenon. The Oklahoma bombing of 1995, which killed more than 160 people, emerged out of a netherworld of shadowy right-wing militias that grew up during the Eighties and early Nineties. The world view of Timothy McVeigh, who planted the bomb, was shaped by neo-Nazi groups which believed the US was on the brink of a huge conflict in which it would be partly destroyed, racially 'purified' and then reborn.
The Aum movement grew out of Japan's subculture of new religions. Recruited from Japanese and American universities, and containing engineers and scientists with expertise in pharmacology and genetics, its followers looked forward to the annihilation of most of the human species. Only cult members would survive in the new world that would arise after the conflagration.
Apocalyptic beliefs of this kind recur in the most scientifically advanced societies and they have a long history. In late medieval times, they animated Christian millenarian movements, and the belief that an old world was ending and a new one beginning has been used as a justification of terror at least since the Jacobins, who, more than any other group, can take credit for originating the idea that society can be regenerated through violence.
A similar view inspired anarchist practitioners of propaganda by deed in the late 19th century. In the 20th century, versions of apocalyptic belief were not far under the surface of the Nazi and communist regimes, both of which were notable for their readiness to deploy terror and mass killing as instruments for reshaping human nature and society. Common to all these movements was the belief that the old world was ending and a new one coming into being, whose arrival could be hastened by the systematic use of violence.
In terms of its apocalyptic mindset, al-Qaeda is not unique, nor is it peculiarly Islamic. It is the most recent expression of a tradition of terrorism which has deep roots in Western religious beliefs and in modern revolutionary politics. The idea that violence can be used to remake the world has a powerful appeal, and if al-Qaeda is distinctive, it is in the ruthlessness with which it implements this belief.
Unlike most other terrorist movements, it seeks deliberately to maximise civilian casualties,and, as we saw in Madrid, its members are ready to embrace death in order to avoid capture. It is a potent mix and al-Qaeda seems to be attracting a new generation of recruits who have grown up in some of the world's richest countries.
Terror is not now, if it ever was, something that comes to us from outside. It is a part of the society in which we live. Both liberals and neoconservatives believe terrorism can be dealt with by removing its causes. The truth is less reassuring. Al-Qaeda has mutated into a decentralised, often locally based type of apocalyptic terrorism and, in this new guise, seems to be acquiring a formidable momentum. We are going to need all our resources of wisdom, guile and determination to deal with it.
Along with the death and injury they inflicted, Thursday's bombings were a demonstration of an unpalatable truth. The threat of indiscriminate terror will be with us in any future we can realistically foresee. Terror has causes and it is right that they should be identified. The war in Iraq has given al-Qaeda a major boost, enabling it to link its extremist agenda with grievances that are widely felt in Islamic countries. At the same time, it has resulted in a massive diversion of resources from the real work of counterterrorism and significantly boosted terrorist recruitment.
The 'war on terror' suggests terrorism is a global phenomenon but, actually, it remains almost entirely national or regional in its scope and goals. The Tamil Tigers do not operate worldwide any more than the IRA or Eta. Only al-Qaeda has a genuinely global reach, and it has been strengthened by American policies that have turned Iraq into a terrorist training ground.
Western governments have helped make al-Qaeda what it is today, but it would be folly to imagine that any shift in their policies can neutralise the threat it now poses.
No longer the semi-centralised organisation it was before the destruction of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda has mutated into a brand name that covers an amorphous network of groups that are linked together mainly by their adherence to an apocalyptic version of Islamist ideology. This network is the vehicle of a movement that has more in common with Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult whose members planted sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo underground, than it does with any version of traditional Islam.
It is a network that seems to be replicating itself in Europe and other advanced industrial regions, and if it turns out that the London bombings were al-Qaeda-related, the group that committed them could prove to be largely homegrown.
Despite the high level of globalisation of many of al-Qaeda's activities, it is a mistake to think it acts solely as an external trigger for terrorist activity. In fact, we may be witnessing the emergence of an indigenous version of terrorism in this country, and it is important that we understand that this is by no means unprecedented. Some of the most advanced industrial nations have produced terrorist movements, often driven by apocalyptic ideologies, in which the existing world is believed to be on the brink of an imminent, total and violent transformation.
Consider the US and Japan. In the decades before 9/11, terrorism in America was very much an indigenous phenomenon. The Oklahoma bombing of 1995, which killed more than 160 people, emerged out of a netherworld of shadowy right-wing militias that grew up during the Eighties and early Nineties. The world view of Timothy McVeigh, who planted the bomb, was shaped by neo-Nazi groups which believed the US was on the brink of a huge conflict in which it would be partly destroyed, racially 'purified' and then reborn.
The Aum movement grew out of Japan's subculture of new religions. Recruited from Japanese and American universities, and containing engineers and scientists with expertise in pharmacology and genetics, its followers looked forward to the annihilation of most of the human species. Only cult members would survive in the new world that would arise after the conflagration.
Apocalyptic beliefs of this kind recur in the most scientifically advanced societies and they have a long history. In late medieval times, they animated Christian millenarian movements, and the belief that an old world was ending and a new one beginning has been used as a justification of terror at least since the Jacobins, who, more than any other group, can take credit for originating the idea that society can be regenerated through violence.
A similar view inspired anarchist practitioners of propaganda by deed in the late 19th century. In the 20th century, versions of apocalyptic belief were not far under the surface of the Nazi and communist regimes, both of which were notable for their readiness to deploy terror and mass killing as instruments for reshaping human nature and society. Common to all these movements was the belief that the old world was ending and a new one coming into being, whose arrival could be hastened by the systematic use of violence.
In terms of its apocalyptic mindset, al-Qaeda is not unique, nor is it peculiarly Islamic. It is the most recent expression of a tradition of terrorism which has deep roots in Western religious beliefs and in modern revolutionary politics. The idea that violence can be used to remake the world has a powerful appeal, and if al-Qaeda is distinctive, it is in the ruthlessness with which it implements this belief.
Unlike most other terrorist movements, it seeks deliberately to maximise civilian casualties,and, as we saw in Madrid, its members are ready to embrace death in order to avoid capture. It is a potent mix and al-Qaeda seems to be attracting a new generation of recruits who have grown up in some of the world's richest countries.
Terror is not now, if it ever was, something that comes to us from outside. It is a part of the society in which we live. Both liberals and neoconservatives believe terrorism can be dealt with by removing its causes. The truth is less reassuring. Al-Qaeda has mutated into a decentralised, often locally based type of apocalyptic terrorism and, in this new guise, seems to be acquiring a formidable momentum. We are going to need all our resources of wisdom, guile and determination to deal with it.
Gray, Tony Judt and Liberal and Left Intellectuals.
The Guardian , April 26, 2008
The years the locusts ate
John Gray enjoys Tony Judt's devastating critique of intellectual life over the past two decades, Reappraisals Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.
Tony Judt has always been a dissenter from this consensus. In Reappraisals the British-born historian, now a university professor in New York, collects 23 essays, written between 1994 and 2006, in which he undertakes a ruthless dissection of the ruling illusions of the post-cold war years - "the years the locusts ate", as he calls them. A book of essays originally published over a period of 12 years may seem an unlikely place to find a systematic analysis of the follies of an era, and it is true that the pieces gathered here cover a remarkable range of writers and themes. There are illuminating assessments of Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, a superb deconstruction of Blair's Britain, a penetrating discussion of the fall of France in 1940, explorations of Belgium's fractured statehood and the ambiguous position of Romania in Europe, analyses of the Cuba crisis and Kissinger's diplomacy, and much else besides.
This breadth of reference may seem to militate against continuous argument, but in fact these articles and reviews pursue a single overarching theme. Reappraisals is a devastating critique of intellectual life over the past two decades, and it is mostly icons of the left that are smashed. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is described as "a communist mandarin - with all the confidence and prejudices of his caste", who by ignoring Stalin's crimes "slept through the terror and shame of the age". Louis Althusser, the founder of a hermetic type of Marxism whose gibberish blighted academic discourse for a generation, resembles "a minor medieval scholastic, desperately scrabbling around in categories of his own imagining", whose theories are worth less than "the most obscure theological speculation, which usually had as its goal something of significance".
These are severe judgments, but they are not unjust. Each of these writers insulated his political beliefs from any contact with historical realities - Hobsbawm by affecting a patrician silence, Althusser by retreating into incomprehensibility. As a result they have contributed nothing to understanding the past century. In contrast, Judt praises Arthur Koestler as "the exemplary intellectual" whose courageous nonconformity "has assured him his place in history". He describes Leszek Kolakowski's reply to an "open letter" by EP Thompson in which the British historian berates the Polish philosopher for his departures from socialist orthodoxy as "the most perfectly executed demolition in the history of political argument: no one who reads it will ever take EP Thompson seriously again." In similar vein Judt writes sympathetically of Whittaker Chambers, the American former Communist party member who outed Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent, whose reward for speaking out at great risk to himself was to be defamed and detested by right-thinking liberals. In their different ways, these ex-communists demonstrated a kind of integrity that has been noticeably absent in the paragons of the intellectual left.
Judt is pitiless in his assault on bien-pensant illusions about communism, but his concern is not to rehash the intellectual battles of the cold war. It is to show the chronic unreality of post-cold war thinking, and here his target is as much the American liberal mainstream as neoconservative intellectuals. As Judt points out, both liberal and neocon thinking has suffered from an ingrained provincialism that, when combined with grandiose schemes for rebuilding the world on an American model, helped to precipitate the foreign policy disasters of the Bush era. Thinking of the cold war in narrowly Americocentric terms, neocons along with most liberals never paused to examine the origins of that conflict, which go back all the way to the start of the Soviet regime, and they were unprepared for the new conflicts that followed it. The upshot has been the destruction of Iraq and an accelerating decline in American power, which is now entering a critical phase.
Judt is especially hard on America's liberal hawks. These " tough", "muscular" liberals have collaborated with neocons in injecting into the centre of politics a type of thinking inherited from the old left, he suggests. "They see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mix of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention an exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people's expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the cold war ideological divide." As Judt sees it, left-liberals such as Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman are not much more than camp followers of the Bush administration. "America's liberal armchair warriors," he writes sharply, "are the 'useful idiots' of the War on Terror." A few pages later, he hammers the point home: "In today's America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them."
Judt entitles the essay in which he takes American liberals to task "The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America". This may be a little overdone. A good many American liberals - not least Barack Obama - were opposed to the Iraq war pretty much from the start. But it is true that the organs of the liberal centre in America - the Washington Post and New York Times, for example - colluded with the Bush administration in a grotesquely ill-judged and demeaning way. The job of countering pro-war disinformation was left to investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersh and Michael Massing, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The voices of those who were opposed to the war from the start - often old-style conservatives and remnants of the anti-imperialist left - were hardly heard in America's mainstream media. The continuing carnage in Iraq is as much the responsibility of the liberals who legitimised the war as it is of the neocons who engineered it.
Analysing the motives of the liberal hawks, Judt finds a yearning for lost moral simplicities: "Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today's liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose. They are at war with 'Islamo-fascism'." He is surely right about left-liberal moral nostalgia. Though he does not comment on the fact, a similar shift has occurred on this side of the Atlantic where, on some sections of the British left, the US has succeeded the former Soviet Union as the regime appointed by history to bring about a revolutionary transformation in human affairs. Neocons and strong-arm liberals have not lost the taste for bloodshed in faraway places of the fellow-travelling left, they have merely fastened on a different regime as the vehicle for their fantasies of world revolution.
Judt's critique of the role of liberal intellectuals in politics is wide-ranging and unsparing. If his tone is sharp it is because, despite everything, he writes as one of these intellectuals. When he takes seriously a one-state solution for the Palestine/Israel conflict, or suggests looking to Europe for a 21st-century model of the good society, he is as remote from historically realisable possibilities as the writers he criticises. Even when he is wrong, however, Judt writes with fearless integrity and moral seriousness. Like Raymond Aron, the subtle and relentless French polemicist whose spirit breathes through these pages, Judt is a liberal thinker dedicated to demystifying liberal illusions. Reappraisals is an indispensable tract for the times by one of the great political writers of the age.
The years the locusts ate
John Gray enjoys Tony Judt's devastating critique of intellectual life over the past two decades, Reappraisals Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.
Tony Judt has always been a dissenter from this consensus. In Reappraisals the British-born historian, now a university professor in New York, collects 23 essays, written between 1994 and 2006, in which he undertakes a ruthless dissection of the ruling illusions of the post-cold war years - "the years the locusts ate", as he calls them. A book of essays originally published over a period of 12 years may seem an unlikely place to find a systematic analysis of the follies of an era, and it is true that the pieces gathered here cover a remarkable range of writers and themes. There are illuminating assessments of Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, a superb deconstruction of Blair's Britain, a penetrating discussion of the fall of France in 1940, explorations of Belgium's fractured statehood and the ambiguous position of Romania in Europe, analyses of the Cuba crisis and Kissinger's diplomacy, and much else besides.
This breadth of reference may seem to militate against continuous argument, but in fact these articles and reviews pursue a single overarching theme. Reappraisals is a devastating critique of intellectual life over the past two decades, and it is mostly icons of the left that are smashed. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is described as "a communist mandarin - with all the confidence and prejudices of his caste", who by ignoring Stalin's crimes "slept through the terror and shame of the age". Louis Althusser, the founder of a hermetic type of Marxism whose gibberish blighted academic discourse for a generation, resembles "a minor medieval scholastic, desperately scrabbling around in categories of his own imagining", whose theories are worth less than "the most obscure theological speculation, which usually had as its goal something of significance".
These are severe judgments, but they are not unjust. Each of these writers insulated his political beliefs from any contact with historical realities - Hobsbawm by affecting a patrician silence, Althusser by retreating into incomprehensibility. As a result they have contributed nothing to understanding the past century. In contrast, Judt praises Arthur Koestler as "the exemplary intellectual" whose courageous nonconformity "has assured him his place in history". He describes Leszek Kolakowski's reply to an "open letter" by EP Thompson in which the British historian berates the Polish philosopher for his departures from socialist orthodoxy as "the most perfectly executed demolition in the history of political argument: no one who reads it will ever take EP Thompson seriously again." In similar vein Judt writes sympathetically of Whittaker Chambers, the American former Communist party member who outed Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent, whose reward for speaking out at great risk to himself was to be defamed and detested by right-thinking liberals. In their different ways, these ex-communists demonstrated a kind of integrity that has been noticeably absent in the paragons of the intellectual left.
Judt is pitiless in his assault on bien-pensant illusions about communism, but his concern is not to rehash the intellectual battles of the cold war. It is to show the chronic unreality of post-cold war thinking, and here his target is as much the American liberal mainstream as neoconservative intellectuals. As Judt points out, both liberal and neocon thinking has suffered from an ingrained provincialism that, when combined with grandiose schemes for rebuilding the world on an American model, helped to precipitate the foreign policy disasters of the Bush era. Thinking of the cold war in narrowly Americocentric terms, neocons along with most liberals never paused to examine the origins of that conflict, which go back all the way to the start of the Soviet regime, and they were unprepared for the new conflicts that followed it. The upshot has been the destruction of Iraq and an accelerating decline in American power, which is now entering a critical phase.
Judt is especially hard on America's liberal hawks. These " tough", "muscular" liberals have collaborated with neocons in injecting into the centre of politics a type of thinking inherited from the old left, he suggests. "They see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mix of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention an exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people's expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the cold war ideological divide." As Judt sees it, left-liberals such as Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman are not much more than camp followers of the Bush administration. "America's liberal armchair warriors," he writes sharply, "are the 'useful idiots' of the War on Terror." A few pages later, he hammers the point home: "In today's America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them."
Judt entitles the essay in which he takes American liberals to task "The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America". This may be a little overdone. A good many American liberals - not least Barack Obama - were opposed to the Iraq war pretty much from the start. But it is true that the organs of the liberal centre in America - the Washington Post and New York Times, for example - colluded with the Bush administration in a grotesquely ill-judged and demeaning way. The job of countering pro-war disinformation was left to investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersh and Michael Massing, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The voices of those who were opposed to the war from the start - often old-style conservatives and remnants of the anti-imperialist left - were hardly heard in America's mainstream media. The continuing carnage in Iraq is as much the responsibility of the liberals who legitimised the war as it is of the neocons who engineered it.
Analysing the motives of the liberal hawks, Judt finds a yearning for lost moral simplicities: "Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today's liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose. They are at war with 'Islamo-fascism'." He is surely right about left-liberal moral nostalgia. Though he does not comment on the fact, a similar shift has occurred on this side of the Atlantic where, on some sections of the British left, the US has succeeded the former Soviet Union as the regime appointed by history to bring about a revolutionary transformation in human affairs. Neocons and strong-arm liberals have not lost the taste for bloodshed in faraway places of the fellow-travelling left, they have merely fastened on a different regime as the vehicle for their fantasies of world revolution.
Judt's critique of the role of liberal intellectuals in politics is wide-ranging and unsparing. If his tone is sharp it is because, despite everything, he writes as one of these intellectuals. When he takes seriously a one-state solution for the Palestine/Israel conflict, or suggests looking to Europe for a 21st-century model of the good society, he is as remote from historically realisable possibilities as the writers he criticises. Even when he is wrong, however, Judt writes with fearless integrity and moral seriousness. Like Raymond Aron, the subtle and relentless French polemicist whose spirit breathes through these pages, Judt is a liberal thinker dedicated to demystifying liberal illusions. Reappraisals is an indispensable tract for the times by one of the great political writers of the age.
We Trusted the State
The Guardian, February 10 2008.
The British state is no longer trusted and for most people, the reason is not so much creeping authoritarianism, though that is a well-founded anxiety, as endemic disorganisation. We are now so used to erratic public services we forget that the post used to be delivered before nine and family GPs once routinely made home visits.
Older people struggling to secure pension credit find it hard to believe there was ever a time when collecting their pension did not involve filling in lengthy, jargon-ridden forms. No one any longer believes government departments have accurate information about the services they provide or can be relied on not to misplace our personal details.
There was a time when British government worked. The NHS came out of the Blitz and for half a century, people were content to rely on it for their basic medical needs. In economic terms, it was astonishingly efficient but, more importantly, it was part of a state that most people felt they could rely on. Where this confidence is lacking, as in Italy and Greece, where no one willingly entrusts the state with anything important, people turn their backs on public institutions and make their own arrangements.
Something like this may be starting to happen in this country. Nearly all of us continue to be heavily dependent on state services, but there can be few who would not opt out and use the private sector if they could afford it. In a similar way, we all benefit from the protection of British law. But now there are voices - not least that of the Archbishop of Canterbury - who argue that entire communities should be able to manipulate the legal system, the state's core function.
It is not that Britain is sliding towards tyranny, though the casual extension of police powers is alarming. Instead, British government seems no longer fit for any coherent purpose and its authority is slipping away. This is a remarkable turnabout, since for at least 60 years, the British state was accepted as being fundamentally decent and reasonably efficient.
The shift in attitude can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher's attempt to shrink the size of government, which has had the paradoxical effect of increasing its presence in our lives. We are all more intensely regulated by the state than was the case in pre-Thatcher Britain. At the same time, the state is less accountable and noticeably less effective. Anyone who has tried to make a doctor's appointment on a Saturday morning, track down an NHS dentist or obtain help in deciphering a letter from a benefit agency knows how hard it is to find someone who can operate the system. Yet it is to this rickety machine that we are being asked to commit sensitive medical records and - in the case of ID cards - an important part of our liberty.
How we arrived at this state of affairs is a tangled tale, but one strand sticks out - the belief that markets must be injected into every corner of society. The policies of all three parties have come to be based on the assumption that no one - teachers, doctors, social workers, senior civil servants or members of the armed forces - can be trusted to serve the public interest. Everyone must be watched, appraised and kept under continuous supervision by an apparatus of internal markets and government targets. Wherever possible, services should be outsourced and labour costs reduced to a minimum by the use of information technology. Honed in new right and New Labour think- tanks in the Nineties, this is the orthodoxy that has given us the British state as we have it today, an impenetrable chaos that ministers or watchdog bodies are unable to control.
The fiascos of 'e-government' are not anomalies that can be corrected by more rigorous procedures. The billions that have been squandered on unworkable computer networks in the NHS and the repeated loss of data throughout government are signs of a dysfunctional system. The disappearance of millions of learner drivers' details somewhere in the Midwest is par for the course. Nothing that has been announced by Gordon Brown will prevent similar debacles. Inevitably, there will be more such incidents - plenty more.
At one level, this is a political opportunity opposition parties are busily exploiting. David Cameron and Nick Clegg understand the shift in public perception of government. By espousing a sort of liberal populism - socially progressive and hostile to further expansion of the state - they are surfing a wave the Prime Minister seems bent on resisting. But there may not be much substance to this new style of politics, which at no point challenges the market-based model of government. Neither Cameron nor Clegg is willing to contemplate scrapping internal markets or dismantling the system of targets.
Yet the suspicion of state power they voice poses an increasing threat to Mr Brown. A belief in the capacity of the government machine to engineer good outcomes in society is central to his outlook and when these do not materialise, his response is to equip the machine with new powers. The fact that the system is dysfunctional is never admitted.
It may be that the Prime Minister has not grasped the measure of the challenge or is incapable of changing his ways. With the general election getting closer, it is difficult to see how his Canute-like pose can be maintained in the face of further examples of government failure. If Mr Brown does not respond, others in his cabinet surely will.
The British state that was demolished as a result of Thatcherism cannot be reinvented. It belongs to a country, in some ways more cohesive but also more hierarchical, that no longer exists. Even so, an effective state remains the most important precondition of anything that can be called a liberal society.
We should junk the idea that state services should always be run as businesses; this has left public services struggling with debt and fixated on targets. It would be better to hive off some functions from the state altogether while accepting that others should be managed on non-market lines. We should be ready to give back autonomy to institutions. Devolving power has become the catchword of the hour for the opposition parties, but it involves more than giving schools and hospitals more discretion to decide their budgets. It means leaving them free to manage themselves whether or not the result is efficient.
It should be easier for communities to set up new schools and run them according to their own values, even if these values are not those of the government or the British majority. But we cannot do without something like the national curriculum and it has to apply to every school that receives public money. It is a principle that applies not only to schools. Establishing a kind of legal separatism for different communities would be a retrograde step. Going down that road would be a tacit admission that the state is damaged beyond repair, a dangerous move at any time.
The consensus that emerged from the Eighties encouraged the belief that the state is not much more than an enormous public utility, most of whose functions could be safely outsourced. The result is the shambling leviathan we have today. Renovating the state is emerging as the political task of the age, for unless it is achieved, no other objective can be realised.
The British state is no longer trusted and for most people, the reason is not so much creeping authoritarianism, though that is a well-founded anxiety, as endemic disorganisation. We are now so used to erratic public services we forget that the post used to be delivered before nine and family GPs once routinely made home visits.
Older people struggling to secure pension credit find it hard to believe there was ever a time when collecting their pension did not involve filling in lengthy, jargon-ridden forms. No one any longer believes government departments have accurate information about the services they provide or can be relied on not to misplace our personal details.
There was a time when British government worked. The NHS came out of the Blitz and for half a century, people were content to rely on it for their basic medical needs. In economic terms, it was astonishingly efficient but, more importantly, it was part of a state that most people felt they could rely on. Where this confidence is lacking, as in Italy and Greece, where no one willingly entrusts the state with anything important, people turn their backs on public institutions and make their own arrangements.
Something like this may be starting to happen in this country. Nearly all of us continue to be heavily dependent on state services, but there can be few who would not opt out and use the private sector if they could afford it. In a similar way, we all benefit from the protection of British law. But now there are voices - not least that of the Archbishop of Canterbury - who argue that entire communities should be able to manipulate the legal system, the state's core function.
It is not that Britain is sliding towards tyranny, though the casual extension of police powers is alarming. Instead, British government seems no longer fit for any coherent purpose and its authority is slipping away. This is a remarkable turnabout, since for at least 60 years, the British state was accepted as being fundamentally decent and reasonably efficient.
The shift in attitude can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher's attempt to shrink the size of government, which has had the paradoxical effect of increasing its presence in our lives. We are all more intensely regulated by the state than was the case in pre-Thatcher Britain. At the same time, the state is less accountable and noticeably less effective. Anyone who has tried to make a doctor's appointment on a Saturday morning, track down an NHS dentist or obtain help in deciphering a letter from a benefit agency knows how hard it is to find someone who can operate the system. Yet it is to this rickety machine that we are being asked to commit sensitive medical records and - in the case of ID cards - an important part of our liberty.
How we arrived at this state of affairs is a tangled tale, but one strand sticks out - the belief that markets must be injected into every corner of society. The policies of all three parties have come to be based on the assumption that no one - teachers, doctors, social workers, senior civil servants or members of the armed forces - can be trusted to serve the public interest. Everyone must be watched, appraised and kept under continuous supervision by an apparatus of internal markets and government targets. Wherever possible, services should be outsourced and labour costs reduced to a minimum by the use of information technology. Honed in new right and New Labour think- tanks in the Nineties, this is the orthodoxy that has given us the British state as we have it today, an impenetrable chaos that ministers or watchdog bodies are unable to control.
The fiascos of 'e-government' are not anomalies that can be corrected by more rigorous procedures. The billions that have been squandered on unworkable computer networks in the NHS and the repeated loss of data throughout government are signs of a dysfunctional system. The disappearance of millions of learner drivers' details somewhere in the Midwest is par for the course. Nothing that has been announced by Gordon Brown will prevent similar debacles. Inevitably, there will be more such incidents - plenty more.
At one level, this is a political opportunity opposition parties are busily exploiting. David Cameron and Nick Clegg understand the shift in public perception of government. By espousing a sort of liberal populism - socially progressive and hostile to further expansion of the state - they are surfing a wave the Prime Minister seems bent on resisting. But there may not be much substance to this new style of politics, which at no point challenges the market-based model of government. Neither Cameron nor Clegg is willing to contemplate scrapping internal markets or dismantling the system of targets.
Yet the suspicion of state power they voice poses an increasing threat to Mr Brown. A belief in the capacity of the government machine to engineer good outcomes in society is central to his outlook and when these do not materialise, his response is to equip the machine with new powers. The fact that the system is dysfunctional is never admitted.
It may be that the Prime Minister has not grasped the measure of the challenge or is incapable of changing his ways. With the general election getting closer, it is difficult to see how his Canute-like pose can be maintained in the face of further examples of government failure. If Mr Brown does not respond, others in his cabinet surely will.
The British state that was demolished as a result of Thatcherism cannot be reinvented. It belongs to a country, in some ways more cohesive but also more hierarchical, that no longer exists. Even so, an effective state remains the most important precondition of anything that can be called a liberal society.
We should junk the idea that state services should always be run as businesses; this has left public services struggling with debt and fixated on targets. It would be better to hive off some functions from the state altogether while accepting that others should be managed on non-market lines. We should be ready to give back autonomy to institutions. Devolving power has become the catchword of the hour for the opposition parties, but it involves more than giving schools and hospitals more discretion to decide their budgets. It means leaving them free to manage themselves whether or not the result is efficient.
It should be easier for communities to set up new schools and run them according to their own values, even if these values are not those of the government or the British majority. But we cannot do without something like the national curriculum and it has to apply to every school that receives public money. It is a principle that applies not only to schools. Establishing a kind of legal separatism for different communities would be a retrograde step. Going down that road would be a tacit admission that the state is damaged beyond repair, a dangerous move at any time.
The consensus that emerged from the Eighties encouraged the belief that the state is not much more than an enormous public utility, most of whose functions could be safely outsourced. The result is the shambling leviathan we have today. Renovating the state is emerging as the political task of the age, for unless it is achieved, no other objective can be realised.
Russia's Fall
The Guardian, 22 September 2000.
What has the fate of the Russian submariners to do with the Siberian tiger? Mr Putin's powerlessness in the face of the trapped submariners is a symptom of a much more widespread weakness. Russia's crumbling state could do nothing to save the Kursk, and not much to prevent still worse catastrophes from happening in the future.
It is not only the country's nuclear facilities that are rusting away - at fearful risk to Russia and the world, as Gwyn Prins wrote last week. An enfeebled state cannot stop the plundering of Russia's natural resources. Illegal logging is destroying its forests. Deeply scarred by 70 years of Soviet central planning, Russia's environment is now at grave risk from the decay of the Russian state.
Mr Putin's efforts to strengthen the authority of government have been lauded in the west. Yet his policies do not bode well for the protection of nature in Russia. He is credited with seeking to rein in the mafias that are thriving in the wake of the country's failed transition to a western-style market economy. But he has chosen to abolish two of its principal environmental agencies - the State Committee for Environmental Protection and the Federal Forestry Service - that have curbed poaching in the past. As a result, the wild Siberian tiger - already reduced to a few hundred in numbers - faces extinction in the near future.
At the same time, Russia's human population has gone into free fall. Over the past decade it has dropped by around 6m. On present trends it will shrink by nearly 40m more over the next quarter-century. Poor nutrition, alcohol abuse and, to an increasing but not precisely measurable extent, intravenous drug use have produced a drastic reduction in life expectancy. Over half the teenage boys living in Russia today will not reach 60. A parallel drop in birth rates has come about owing to a ruined healthcare system, large numbers of infant deaths and the widespread use of abortion as a means of contraception. Russia is facing a population collapse unprecedented in any peacetime country.
Russia's desperate plight is unique in modern history and calls for explanation. Curiously, western governments are silent as to its causes. It is as if the conditions that prevail in Russia had nothing whatever to do with them. Rightly, the west is giving economic and humanitarian aid, but no one accepts any responsibility for the conditions that have made it necessary. None of the transnational agencies which shaped Russia's economic policies at the behest of western governments has admitted any role in bringing the country to its present pass. Nor, so far as I know, has any of the army of western advisers who trooped in and out of the country touting the virtues of the free market.
In fact, not a single person accepts responsibility for urging on Russia economic policies utterly unsuited to its history and circumstances. Apparently, no one told Russia's economic reformers to scrap price controls - a move that was bound to trigger inflation, given the strength of monopolies in the economy. Equally, it seems, no one recommended the reckless privatisations that left much of the country's resources in the hands of a few oligarchs. Presumably it is Russia's rulers who must shoulder all the blame - the west's hands are clean.
The Russian government should not be exempt from criticism. As its wooden response to the tragedy of the Kursk has shown, Soviet habits die hard. Even so, the desperate straits in which the region finds itself today are as much an indictment of the west as they are of Russia's rulers.
The country's misfortune is that the collapse of communism coincided with market triumphalism in the west. The crackpot policies that were foisted on it had little to do with the country's needs and everything to do with the neo-liberal hubris that had gripped western governments. It was clear from the start that the country's uniquely daunting problems required pragmatic solutions, not ideologically-driven programmes. It never made any sense to imagine that the Russian economy - largely a military-industrial rustbelt - could be made over into an Anglo-Saxon free market.
Predictably, the results of attempting this impossible task have been ruinous. The upshot of a decade of western-inspired reforms in Russia is that anti-western feeling is stronger than it has been for generations. Xenophobia and anti-semitism are rife. Fervently pro-western 10 years ago, Russia has now reverted to all the troubled ambiguities of its historic relationship with the west.
The credit for this remarkable turn-about must go chiefly to western policy-makers. Russia has wasted a decade following worthless western advice. As a consequence, today it has few options open to it, none of them attractive.
Before it can have a modern economy Russia must have a modern state. That is what Mr Putin seems to be trying to build up from the privatised fragments of the totalitarian apparatus he has inherited. It is too early to know whether the Russian leader's policies are the beginnings of a reassertion of government, or merely another episode in internecine conflict within the oligarchy. An authoritarian state might be an acceptable outcome if it really meant - as Mr Putin has claimed - "the dictatorship of law". If it turns out to mean the rule of the oligarchs by other means, the future is dark. Anarchy may be staved off, but at the price of despotism.
The entombed submariners and the vanishing Siberian tiger may seem worlds apart, but they are casualties in the same ongoing catastrophe. It would be pleasant to think that the loss of the Kursk might stir some new thinking on western policy towards Russia. The dismal record of the past decade suggests we should not be holding our breath.
What has the fate of the Russian submariners to do with the Siberian tiger? Mr Putin's powerlessness in the face of the trapped submariners is a symptom of a much more widespread weakness. Russia's crumbling state could do nothing to save the Kursk, and not much to prevent still worse catastrophes from happening in the future.
It is not only the country's nuclear facilities that are rusting away - at fearful risk to Russia and the world, as Gwyn Prins wrote last week. An enfeebled state cannot stop the plundering of Russia's natural resources. Illegal logging is destroying its forests. Deeply scarred by 70 years of Soviet central planning, Russia's environment is now at grave risk from the decay of the Russian state.
Mr Putin's efforts to strengthen the authority of government have been lauded in the west. Yet his policies do not bode well for the protection of nature in Russia. He is credited with seeking to rein in the mafias that are thriving in the wake of the country's failed transition to a western-style market economy. But he has chosen to abolish two of its principal environmental agencies - the State Committee for Environmental Protection and the Federal Forestry Service - that have curbed poaching in the past. As a result, the wild Siberian tiger - already reduced to a few hundred in numbers - faces extinction in the near future.
At the same time, Russia's human population has gone into free fall. Over the past decade it has dropped by around 6m. On present trends it will shrink by nearly 40m more over the next quarter-century. Poor nutrition, alcohol abuse and, to an increasing but not precisely measurable extent, intravenous drug use have produced a drastic reduction in life expectancy. Over half the teenage boys living in Russia today will not reach 60. A parallel drop in birth rates has come about owing to a ruined healthcare system, large numbers of infant deaths and the widespread use of abortion as a means of contraception. Russia is facing a population collapse unprecedented in any peacetime country.
Russia's desperate plight is unique in modern history and calls for explanation. Curiously, western governments are silent as to its causes. It is as if the conditions that prevail in Russia had nothing whatever to do with them. Rightly, the west is giving economic and humanitarian aid, but no one accepts any responsibility for the conditions that have made it necessary. None of the transnational agencies which shaped Russia's economic policies at the behest of western governments has admitted any role in bringing the country to its present pass. Nor, so far as I know, has any of the army of western advisers who trooped in and out of the country touting the virtues of the free market.
In fact, not a single person accepts responsibility for urging on Russia economic policies utterly unsuited to its history and circumstances. Apparently, no one told Russia's economic reformers to scrap price controls - a move that was bound to trigger inflation, given the strength of monopolies in the economy. Equally, it seems, no one recommended the reckless privatisations that left much of the country's resources in the hands of a few oligarchs. Presumably it is Russia's rulers who must shoulder all the blame - the west's hands are clean.
The Russian government should not be exempt from criticism. As its wooden response to the tragedy of the Kursk has shown, Soviet habits die hard. Even so, the desperate straits in which the region finds itself today are as much an indictment of the west as they are of Russia's rulers.
The country's misfortune is that the collapse of communism coincided with market triumphalism in the west. The crackpot policies that were foisted on it had little to do with the country's needs and everything to do with the neo-liberal hubris that had gripped western governments. It was clear from the start that the country's uniquely daunting problems required pragmatic solutions, not ideologically-driven programmes. It never made any sense to imagine that the Russian economy - largely a military-industrial rustbelt - could be made over into an Anglo-Saxon free market.
Predictably, the results of attempting this impossible task have been ruinous. The upshot of a decade of western-inspired reforms in Russia is that anti-western feeling is stronger than it has been for generations. Xenophobia and anti-semitism are rife. Fervently pro-western 10 years ago, Russia has now reverted to all the troubled ambiguities of its historic relationship with the west.
The credit for this remarkable turn-about must go chiefly to western policy-makers. Russia has wasted a decade following worthless western advice. As a consequence, today it has few options open to it, none of them attractive.
Before it can have a modern economy Russia must have a modern state. That is what Mr Putin seems to be trying to build up from the privatised fragments of the totalitarian apparatus he has inherited. It is too early to know whether the Russian leader's policies are the beginnings of a reassertion of government, or merely another episode in internecine conflict within the oligarchy. An authoritarian state might be an acceptable outcome if it really meant - as Mr Putin has claimed - "the dictatorship of law". If it turns out to mean the rule of the oligarchs by other means, the future is dark. Anarchy may be staved off, but at the price of despotism.
The entombed submariners and the vanishing Siberian tiger may seem worlds apart, but they are casualties in the same ongoing catastrophe. It would be pleasant to think that the loss of the Kursk might stir some new thinking on western policy towards Russia. The dismal record of the past decade suggests we should not be holding our breath.
The End of the End of History
POLITICAL COMMENTARY. Summer 2002.
Throughout modern times liberal states have always co-existed alongside many kinds of tyranny. Similarly, the modern world has always contained numerous economic systems – many varieties of capitalism, planned and guided economies, and a host of hybrid economic systems not easily classified.
Diplomacy and international law developed to cope with the fact of diverse regimes. Yet throughout the 20th century global politics was shaped by the project of unifying the world within a single regime. Insofar as it remained committed to Marxist ideology, the long-term goal of the Soviet regime was world communism. The whole world was to be a single socialisteconomy, administered by forms of governance that were to be everywhere the same.
This Marxist project is now widely and rightly viewed as utopian. Even so, its disappearance as a force in world politics has not been accompanied by an acceptance of a diversity of political systems. With communism’s fall we were, in Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase, at the ‘end of history,’ a time when western governments could dedicate themselves to unifying the international system into a single regime based on free markets and democratic government. But this project is as utopian as Marxism once was, and promises to be considerably moreshortlived than the Soviet Union.
Many reasons exist for why the Soviet bloc collapsed, but – contrary to conventional opinion –economic inefficiencies were not central among them. The Soviet bloc disintegrated because it could not cope with nationalist dissent in Poland and the Baltic states and more generally because a single economic and political system could not meet the needs of vastly different societies and peoples.
Marxism is a version of economic determinism. It predicts that differences between societies and peoples narrow as they achieve similar levels of economic development. Nationalism and religion have no enduring political importance, Marxists believed. In the short run, they can be used to fuel anti-imperialist movements. Ultimately, they are obstacles to the construction of socialism. Guided by these beliefs, the Soviet state waged an incessant war on the national and religious traditions of the peoples they governed.
In practice, Soviet rulers were compelled to compromise in order to remain in power. Few could be described as wholehearted ideologues. Even so, the Soviet system’s rigidity was largely the result of the fact that it was established on a false premise.
The basis of the Soviet system was the Marxian interpretation of history in which every society is destined to adopt the same economic system and the same form of government. The USSR fell apart because its monolithic institutions could not accommodate nations – Czechs and Uzbeks, Hungarians and Siberians, Poles and Mongols – whose histories, circumstances and aspirations were radically divergent.
Today, the global free market constructed in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse is also falling apart – and for similar reasons. Like Marxists, neo-liberals are economic determinists. They believe that countries everywhere are destined to adopt the same economic system and therefore the same political institutions. Nothing can prevent the world from becoming one vast free market; but the inevitable process of convergence can be accelerated. Western governments and transnational institutions can act as midwives for the new world.
Implausible as it sounds, this ideology underlies institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Argentina and Indonesia have very different problems, but for the IMF the solution is the same: they must both become free-market economies. Russia at the time of communism’s fall was a militarized rustbelt, but the IMF was convinced that it could be transformed into a western-style market economy. An idealized model of Anglo-Saxon capitalism was promoted everywhere.
Unsurprisingly, this highly ideological approach to economic policy has not succeeded. Indonesia is in ruins, while Argentina is rapidly ceasing to be a first-world country. Russia has put the neo-liberal period behind it and is now developing on a path better suited to its history and circumstances.
Countries that have best weathered the economic storms of the past few years are those – like India, China and Japan which took the IMF model with a large grain of salt. To be sure, like the few remaining Marxists who defend central economic planning, the ideologues of the IMF claim that their policies did not fail; they were not fully implemented. But this response is disingenuous. In both cases, the policies were tried – and failed at great human cost.
If the global free market is unraveling, it is not because of the human costs of its policies in countries such as Argentina, Indonesia and Russia. It is because it no longer suits the countries that most actively promote it. Under the pressure of a stock market downturn, the US is abandoning policies of global free trade in favor of more traditional policies of protectionism. This turn of events is not surprising. Throughout its history, America has always tried to insulate its markets from foreign competition. So history has once more triumphed over ideology.
With America’s loss of interest the chief prop of neo-liberal policies has been pulled away. Mainstream politicians may still nod reverently when the global free market is invoked, but in practice the world is reverting to an older and more durable model. It is being tacitly accepted that in the future, as in the past, the world will contain a variety of economic systems and regimes. The global free market is about to join communism in history’s museum of discarded utopias.
Throughout modern times liberal states have always co-existed alongside many kinds of tyranny. Similarly, the modern world has always contained numerous economic systems – many varieties of capitalism, planned and guided economies, and a host of hybrid economic systems not easily classified.
Diplomacy and international law developed to cope with the fact of diverse regimes. Yet throughout the 20th century global politics was shaped by the project of unifying the world within a single regime. Insofar as it remained committed to Marxist ideology, the long-term goal of the Soviet regime was world communism. The whole world was to be a single socialisteconomy, administered by forms of governance that were to be everywhere the same.
This Marxist project is now widely and rightly viewed as utopian. Even so, its disappearance as a force in world politics has not been accompanied by an acceptance of a diversity of political systems. With communism’s fall we were, in Francis Fukuyama’s famous phrase, at the ‘end of history,’ a time when western governments could dedicate themselves to unifying the international system into a single regime based on free markets and democratic government. But this project is as utopian as Marxism once was, and promises to be considerably moreshortlived than the Soviet Union.
Many reasons exist for why the Soviet bloc collapsed, but – contrary to conventional opinion –economic inefficiencies were not central among them. The Soviet bloc disintegrated because it could not cope with nationalist dissent in Poland and the Baltic states and more generally because a single economic and political system could not meet the needs of vastly different societies and peoples.
Marxism is a version of economic determinism. It predicts that differences between societies and peoples narrow as they achieve similar levels of economic development. Nationalism and religion have no enduring political importance, Marxists believed. In the short run, they can be used to fuel anti-imperialist movements. Ultimately, they are obstacles to the construction of socialism. Guided by these beliefs, the Soviet state waged an incessant war on the national and religious traditions of the peoples they governed.
In practice, Soviet rulers were compelled to compromise in order to remain in power. Few could be described as wholehearted ideologues. Even so, the Soviet system’s rigidity was largely the result of the fact that it was established on a false premise.
The basis of the Soviet system was the Marxian interpretation of history in which every society is destined to adopt the same economic system and the same form of government. The USSR fell apart because its monolithic institutions could not accommodate nations – Czechs and Uzbeks, Hungarians and Siberians, Poles and Mongols – whose histories, circumstances and aspirations were radically divergent.
Today, the global free market constructed in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse is also falling apart – and for similar reasons. Like Marxists, neo-liberals are economic determinists. They believe that countries everywhere are destined to adopt the same economic system and therefore the same political institutions. Nothing can prevent the world from becoming one vast free market; but the inevitable process of convergence can be accelerated. Western governments and transnational institutions can act as midwives for the new world.
Implausible as it sounds, this ideology underlies institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Argentina and Indonesia have very different problems, but for the IMF the solution is the same: they must both become free-market economies. Russia at the time of communism’s fall was a militarized rustbelt, but the IMF was convinced that it could be transformed into a western-style market economy. An idealized model of Anglo-Saxon capitalism was promoted everywhere.
Unsurprisingly, this highly ideological approach to economic policy has not succeeded. Indonesia is in ruins, while Argentina is rapidly ceasing to be a first-world country. Russia has put the neo-liberal period behind it and is now developing on a path better suited to its history and circumstances.
Countries that have best weathered the economic storms of the past few years are those – like India, China and Japan which took the IMF model with a large grain of salt. To be sure, like the few remaining Marxists who defend central economic planning, the ideologues of the IMF claim that their policies did not fail; they were not fully implemented. But this response is disingenuous. In both cases, the policies were tried – and failed at great human cost.
If the global free market is unraveling, it is not because of the human costs of its policies in countries such as Argentina, Indonesia and Russia. It is because it no longer suits the countries that most actively promote it. Under the pressure of a stock market downturn, the US is abandoning policies of global free trade in favor of more traditional policies of protectionism. This turn of events is not surprising. Throughout its history, America has always tried to insulate its markets from foreign competition. So history has once more triumphed over ideology.
With America’s loss of interest the chief prop of neo-liberal policies has been pulled away. Mainstream politicians may still nod reverently when the global free market is invoked, but in practice the world is reverting to an older and more durable model. It is being tacitly accepted that in the future, as in the past, the world will contain a variety of economic systems and regimes. The global free market is about to join communism in history’s museum of discarded utopias.
Entombed in Poverty-Russia Under Market Bolshevism
The New Statesman, 28 October 2002.
Russia: experiment with a people. Robert Service.
Russia's Bitter Path to Modernity: a history of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Alexander Chubarov.
With the fall of communism, it might have been expected that the specialists who were charged with keeping Lenin's remains preserved would be unemployed. In fact, the embalming of corpses is a thriving trade in post-communist Russia. Despite a strengthening of state power in recent years, criminal mafias continue to exercise considerable influence in many areas of life. Sentimental about their dead, the new criminal elite had prevented the art of embalming from following communism into oblivion. In this, as in other contexts, Soviet traditions live on.
The embalming of dead mobsters is only one of many echoes of the Soviet era that are identified in Robert Service's indispensably useful and arrestingly well- written new book. Not only the habits of mind and social structures of post- communist Russia, but even its physical appearance, show many deep marks of the Soviet regime. Yet it would be a mistake to think one can understand Russia today simply by looking to the regime that collapsed just over a decade ago. The deeper continuities are between post-communist and pre-communist times.
Russia as we know it today is a product of two experiments in westernisation, one imposed by Lenin, and the second by the market Leninists who ruled the country during the ill-fated years of neoliberal "shock therapy". Both were disastrous. In the wake of these failed attempts to achieve modernity by blindly following western models, Russia is returning to its pre-communist, Eurasian past. As in late tsarist times, when the country had one of the highest rates of economic growth in the world, Russia today has a highly dynamic economy that blends wild entrepreneurship with far-reaching state intervention. Today, as in the 19th century, Russia leans towards Europe, while remaining unalterably distinct from Europe in its religious traditions, culture and Asiatic vastness.
The government of Boris Yeltsin was one of a long line of westernising regimes that have sought to make Russia an unequivocally European country. Like Lenin's Bolsheviks, the market liberals of the Yeltsin era tried to reshape the country in accordance with what they perceived as the most progressive current in European thought. In Lenin's day, this was Marxism, which instructed the Bolsheviks that the only way forward for Russia was rapid industrialisation and the reorganisation of Russian agriculture on the model of factory production. As he showed in the New Economic Policy, which allowed some peasants to grow rich, Lenin recognised the necessity of tactical retreats. But he never renounced the classical Marxist view that socialism could be fully achieved only when Russia had become an industrial society. The result of the policies suggested by this orthodoxy - which, contrary to conventional wisdom, Stalin followed faithfully - was the collapse of Russian farming, ecological devastation and the deaths of millions of peasants. Those who survived did so by relying on the produce of smallholdings - vestiges of the peasant agriculture that had to be destroyed if Russia was to become a western-style modern country.
The Yeltsin era saw a rerun of the Bolsheviks' forced modernisation from above, but this time the western model was American, not European, and it demanded the creation of free markets rather than central planning. As in the past, Russia's westernising elites were keen to implement what they took to be the most advanced ideas. Western opinion had changed from the time when Sidney and Beatrice Webb had written of Stalinist Russia as the embryo of a new world civilisation; but the conventional wisdom had not become any wiser. It still insisted that the only possible future for Russia was for her to remake herself on a western model, and it continued to approach this prospect with missionary zeal. Just as in the 1930s, a stream of political pilgrims flowed from west to east - not, this time, the communists and fellow-travellers who lauded Soviet achievements while millions starved, but instead a motley band of international civil servants, investment bankers and tacky think-tank operators. They all preached the gospel of the free market as the Russian economy spiralled into one of the greatest depressions of the 20th century.
As could be foreseen from the beginning, the market Bolshevism that was imposed on Russia in the early 1990s by the Yeltsin government - strongly influenced by the IMF - was ruinous in its effects. Millions of people did not die of starvation as they had during the Stalinist experiment, but a large part of the population was entombed in hopeless poverty. As in the past, millions survived on the output of private, peasant-style plots. At the end of Russia's neoliberal experiment, the country was far from the modern society envisaged by the financial engineers of the IMF and its own romantically pro-western elites. It was trapped in a Byzantine labyrinth of crime and corruption from which it is only now emerging.
Providing a much-needed and richly informed historical perspective on Russia's development over the past decade, Alexander Chubarov tersely sums up this half-tragic, half-farcical story: "The 'shock therapy' of the early 1990s . . . inflicted great pain but gave little cure. It was a Bolshevik-style attempt to destroy an old economic system to its foundations in the hope that the phoenix of the market would rise from the ashes. This, however, did not happen."
Service and Chubarov add to a growing list of books highlighting the errors, crimes and follies of Russia's neoliberal experiment.
Of this number, the most comprehensive remains Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski's The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: market Bolshevism against democracy (United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001). Reddaway and Glinski provide a penetrating analysis of the undemocratic politics underpinning this experiment, but neither they nor, so far as I know, anyone else has yet been able to explain fully how a project so manifestly absurd could have been launched, and pursued with some consistency, in post-communist Russia.
When the USSR collapsed, none of the conditions for a western-style free market existed. Something between one-third and a half of the economy was a military-industrial rust belt that had no hope of survival in the global market. There was no law of property or contract. The rule of law itself was not even a memory. Schooled by decades of Soviet experience, most people associated enterprise with crime. Against this background, the prospect of a swift transition to a market economy was sheer fantasy. Yet it was the basis of all the policies of western financial institutions and governments until Russia finally defaulted on its debts in late summer 1998. How are we to make sense of this bizarre tale?
If answers are to be found, they are in the longer intellectual history of Russia and in the recurring utopianism of the European Enlightenment. From Peter the Great onward, a section of Russia's ruling elites has sought to wrest the country from its Eurasian ambiguities and lock it irrevocably in to the west. By no means all Russians who belong in this pro-western camp have believed that the west supplies a simple formula for modernising Russia. In their different ways, the liberal Ivan Turgenev and the radical Alexander Herzen believed that Russia would make progress only in so far as it entered fully into European culture, but neither of them imagined that this could be achieved by mechanically replicating European models. Unfortunately, Turgenev and Herzen are not characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia, which has always been attracted to the most doctrinaire strands in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment thinkers who have been most influential in Russia have not been sceptics such as David Hume or empiricists such as John Stuart Mill, but rationalists such as Fichte, Hegel and Marx. Infecting Russia's elites with a utopian mentality, the quasi-religious view of history advanced by these European thinkers has had a disastrous impact on the development of the country. Politics became a matter of absolute choice, rather than the piecemeal borrowings and evolutionary adaptations through which other countries have edged towards their own distinctive versions of modernity.
The misfortunes of Russia in the 1990s came from the interaction of its indigenous tradition of pro-western Romanticism with the new right's victory in the west.
For the bureaucrats of the IMF, there was only one route to modernity, for Russia or anywhere else, and that was the narrow path of free-market development prescribed by the "Washington consensus". Never mind that the US had achieved economic development behind the high walls of protectionism. The only salvation for Russia was in joining the global free market. Many other factors lie behind the tragic comedy of Russia's "market reform" - not least spectacular corruption. Its ultimate source is in the deadly combination of the west's ideological enthusiasm for free markets with the Russian belief that modernisation can be achieved only by adopting western models. Now that the era of the free market is nearly over, it remains to be seen whether Russia - under the aegis of Vladimir Putin's subtle and flexible authoritarian regime - can at last discover a version of modernity that matches its own peculiar history.
John Gray reviews two books on post-communist Russia.
Russia: experiment with a people. Robert Service.
Russia's Bitter Path to Modernity: a history of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Alexander Chubarov.
With the fall of communism, it might have been expected that the specialists who were charged with keeping Lenin's remains preserved would be unemployed. In fact, the embalming of corpses is a thriving trade in post-communist Russia. Despite a strengthening of state power in recent years, criminal mafias continue to exercise considerable influence in many areas of life. Sentimental about their dead, the new criminal elite had prevented the art of embalming from following communism into oblivion. In this, as in other contexts, Soviet traditions live on.
The embalming of dead mobsters is only one of many echoes of the Soviet era that are identified in Robert Service's indispensably useful and arrestingly well- written new book. Not only the habits of mind and social structures of post- communist Russia, but even its physical appearance, show many deep marks of the Soviet regime. Yet it would be a mistake to think one can understand Russia today simply by looking to the regime that collapsed just over a decade ago. The deeper continuities are between post-communist and pre-communist times.
Russia as we know it today is a product of two experiments in westernisation, one imposed by Lenin, and the second by the market Leninists who ruled the country during the ill-fated years of neoliberal "shock therapy". Both were disastrous. In the wake of these failed attempts to achieve modernity by blindly following western models, Russia is returning to its pre-communist, Eurasian past. As in late tsarist times, when the country had one of the highest rates of economic growth in the world, Russia today has a highly dynamic economy that blends wild entrepreneurship with far-reaching state intervention. Today, as in the 19th century, Russia leans towards Europe, while remaining unalterably distinct from Europe in its religious traditions, culture and Asiatic vastness.
The government of Boris Yeltsin was one of a long line of westernising regimes that have sought to make Russia an unequivocally European country. Like Lenin's Bolsheviks, the market liberals of the Yeltsin era tried to reshape the country in accordance with what they perceived as the most progressive current in European thought. In Lenin's day, this was Marxism, which instructed the Bolsheviks that the only way forward for Russia was rapid industrialisation and the reorganisation of Russian agriculture on the model of factory production. As he showed in the New Economic Policy, which allowed some peasants to grow rich, Lenin recognised the necessity of tactical retreats. But he never renounced the classical Marxist view that socialism could be fully achieved only when Russia had become an industrial society. The result of the policies suggested by this orthodoxy - which, contrary to conventional wisdom, Stalin followed faithfully - was the collapse of Russian farming, ecological devastation and the deaths of millions of peasants. Those who survived did so by relying on the produce of smallholdings - vestiges of the peasant agriculture that had to be destroyed if Russia was to become a western-style modern country.
The Yeltsin era saw a rerun of the Bolsheviks' forced modernisation from above, but this time the western model was American, not European, and it demanded the creation of free markets rather than central planning. As in the past, Russia's westernising elites were keen to implement what they took to be the most advanced ideas. Western opinion had changed from the time when Sidney and Beatrice Webb had written of Stalinist Russia as the embryo of a new world civilisation; but the conventional wisdom had not become any wiser. It still insisted that the only possible future for Russia was for her to remake herself on a western model, and it continued to approach this prospect with missionary zeal. Just as in the 1930s, a stream of political pilgrims flowed from west to east - not, this time, the communists and fellow-travellers who lauded Soviet achievements while millions starved, but instead a motley band of international civil servants, investment bankers and tacky think-tank operators. They all preached the gospel of the free market as the Russian economy spiralled into one of the greatest depressions of the 20th century.
As could be foreseen from the beginning, the market Bolshevism that was imposed on Russia in the early 1990s by the Yeltsin government - strongly influenced by the IMF - was ruinous in its effects. Millions of people did not die of starvation as they had during the Stalinist experiment, but a large part of the population was entombed in hopeless poverty. As in the past, millions survived on the output of private, peasant-style plots. At the end of Russia's neoliberal experiment, the country was far from the modern society envisaged by the financial engineers of the IMF and its own romantically pro-western elites. It was trapped in a Byzantine labyrinth of crime and corruption from which it is only now emerging.
Providing a much-needed and richly informed historical perspective on Russia's development over the past decade, Alexander Chubarov tersely sums up this half-tragic, half-farcical story: "The 'shock therapy' of the early 1990s . . . inflicted great pain but gave little cure. It was a Bolshevik-style attempt to destroy an old economic system to its foundations in the hope that the phoenix of the market would rise from the ashes. This, however, did not happen."
Service and Chubarov add to a growing list of books highlighting the errors, crimes and follies of Russia's neoliberal experiment.
Of this number, the most comprehensive remains Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski's The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: market Bolshevism against democracy (United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001). Reddaway and Glinski provide a penetrating analysis of the undemocratic politics underpinning this experiment, but neither they nor, so far as I know, anyone else has yet been able to explain fully how a project so manifestly absurd could have been launched, and pursued with some consistency, in post-communist Russia.
When the USSR collapsed, none of the conditions for a western-style free market existed. Something between one-third and a half of the economy was a military-industrial rust belt that had no hope of survival in the global market. There was no law of property or contract. The rule of law itself was not even a memory. Schooled by decades of Soviet experience, most people associated enterprise with crime. Against this background, the prospect of a swift transition to a market economy was sheer fantasy. Yet it was the basis of all the policies of western financial institutions and governments until Russia finally defaulted on its debts in late summer 1998. How are we to make sense of this bizarre tale?
If answers are to be found, they are in the longer intellectual history of Russia and in the recurring utopianism of the European Enlightenment. From Peter the Great onward, a section of Russia's ruling elites has sought to wrest the country from its Eurasian ambiguities and lock it irrevocably in to the west. By no means all Russians who belong in this pro-western camp have believed that the west supplies a simple formula for modernising Russia. In their different ways, the liberal Ivan Turgenev and the radical Alexander Herzen believed that Russia would make progress only in so far as it entered fully into European culture, but neither of them imagined that this could be achieved by mechanically replicating European models. Unfortunately, Turgenev and Herzen are not characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia, which has always been attracted to the most doctrinaire strands in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment thinkers who have been most influential in Russia have not been sceptics such as David Hume or empiricists such as John Stuart Mill, but rationalists such as Fichte, Hegel and Marx. Infecting Russia's elites with a utopian mentality, the quasi-religious view of history advanced by these European thinkers has had a disastrous impact on the development of the country. Politics became a matter of absolute choice, rather than the piecemeal borrowings and evolutionary adaptations through which other countries have edged towards their own distinctive versions of modernity.
The misfortunes of Russia in the 1990s came from the interaction of its indigenous tradition of pro-western Romanticism with the new right's victory in the west.
For the bureaucrats of the IMF, there was only one route to modernity, for Russia or anywhere else, and that was the narrow path of free-market development prescribed by the "Washington consensus". Never mind that the US had achieved economic development behind the high walls of protectionism. The only salvation for Russia was in joining the global free market. Many other factors lie behind the tragic comedy of Russia's "market reform" - not least spectacular corruption. Its ultimate source is in the deadly combination of the west's ideological enthusiasm for free markets with the Russian belief that modernisation can be achieved only by adopting western models. Now that the era of the free market is nearly over, it remains to be seen whether Russia - under the aegis of Vladimir Putin's subtle and flexible authoritarian regime - can at last discover a version of modernity that matches its own peculiar history.
Letting Climate Change Happen.
The New Statesman, 29 May 2006
All shades of opinion are in denial about the magnitude of the environmental challenge facing us. Our need to be comfortable may be stronger than our will to survive, argues John Gray
During the present century, human beings are likely to experience a change in the planetary environment unlike any in history. Climate change is irreversible, and accelerating fast. No one, apart from a few cranks speaking on behalf of the Bush administration, doubts that global warming is a side effect of human activity. Accumulating scientific evidence suggests strongly that climate change is happening on a larger scale and more quickly than was suspected even a couple of years ago. Observable processes such as the melting of the Antarctic ice cap point to rising sea levels that will wipe out much of the world's arable land and flood many coastal cities. The face of the planet is changing before our eyes.
The message of science is clear: humans will soon find themselves in a world different from any they have ever lived in. Altering our way of life to cope with these conditions will be phenomenally difficult - if it can be done at all. Yet all sections of opinion are in denial regarding the scale of the shift and the magnitude of the challenge it poses. Mainstream politicians and green activists differ on many points; but they all believe that climate change can be halted or rendered innocuous, if only we adopt the right policies. They are at one in rejecting the fact that runaway climate change is a result of the toxic mix of rapidly growing human numbers with worldwide industrialisation. Across the whole political spectrum there is a refusal to face up to this reality. This is nowhere clearer than among the Greens, who persist in a delusional faith that sustainable development and renewable energy can save the day.
In this consensus of denial, there are some who tell us not to worry. So-called "sceptical environmentalists" suggest that the scientific consensus is not to be trusted, and counsel inaction until the damage done by climate change is undeniable. That is the view of Nigel Lawson, who recently advised a business-as-usual strategy. Preparing for climate change is costly and troublesome, the former chancellor said, and we should alter our way of life only when the evidence is incontestable. The trouble with this view is that climate change is not doom-mongering speculation: it is already happening, and it is foolish to shut one's eyes and hope it will go away. If it takes the abrupt and radical form that many scientists believe is now likely, it will have disastrous effects on the lives of millions - possibly billions - of people.
Under the leadership of David Cameron, Lawson's own party is not so complacent, but it, too, is in denial. Cameron talks lightly of "green growth", and has demonstrated the seriousness of his environmental commitment by riding a bicycle and installing a wind turbine on the roof of his house. The underlying assumption of his approach is that the crisis can be tackled without doing anything difficult or unpopular. The facts tell a different story. Wind power is not terribly efficient, and certainly cannot replace fossil fuels as the source of most of our energy. Even if combined with other types of renewable power such as solar and geothermal and implemented together with rigorous policies of energy conservation, the output of the hideous windfarms springing up across the country could not meet the rising demand for energy that goes with current patterns of economic growth.
Nor would a large-scale shift to renewable energy in Britain have any perceptible impact on global warming, which is far more affected by emissions originating in China, India and the United States. It might be argued that Britain should do what it can to reduce emissions regardless of the behaviour of other countries; but there is only one existing technology that can provide energy on the scale Britain needs while reducing its production of greenhouse gases, and that is nuclear power - which is highly unpopular. Images of Chernobyl and its aftermath are potent antidotes to rational thought, even if all they tell us is how horribly unsafe nuclear technology was in Soviet times. We live in a culture in which personal emotional comfort counts for more than any objective assessment of risks and consequences, and public attitudes to nuclear power reflect this. As a type of psychotherapy for shopped-out consumers troubled by occasional pangs of environmental guilt, renewable energy may be quite effective. As an appropriate response to environmental crisis it is a non-starter.
It may be too much to ask from electorates that they confront unpalatable environmental realities. This month Tony Blair declared that nuclear power was "back on the agenda with a vengeance". In a speech to the Confederation of British Industry, he suggested that the replacement of nuclear power stations - in conjunction with "a big push on renewables and a step change on energy efficiency" - must be considered as part of Britain's long-term energy strategy. Blair is to be congratulated on attempting to thrust the real energy options we face into the forefront of public debate. His intervention comes near the end of his political career, however, and, given his disastrous role in the Iraq war, nothing that he says on any controversial issue will be taken seriously - even if, as in this case, it deserves to be.
In speaking out in support of nuclear power Blair runs up against the feel-good mentality: most people want to believe that the environmental crisis can be solved by policies which involve no risk - to them or anyone else. Green thinking encourages this mentality. For example, the Kyoto treaty may have symbolic value in acknowledging the anthropogenic origins of global warming, but it hardly deserves the iconic status it is given by the green lobby. None of the big three producers of greenhouse gases has signed up to it, and even if it were fully implemented it would do very little to alter the climate shift that is already under way. Above all, such a treaty cannot halt the stampede to industrialisation that is the human cause of global warming.
Global warming as we know it today is a by-product of the industrial revolution. The temperature of the planet has been rising since roughly 1800, when the use of fossil fuels began on a large scale. Industrialisation and fossil-fuel use are different sides of the same process, and it is the rising demand for energy that is fuelling global warming. Our present industrial civilisation began with coal, and it may well end there. Oil gained in importance in energy use throughout the 20th century, but as light crude oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, industrial societies are beginning to look to other fossil fuels which are still abundant - notably coal and tar sands. If the oil price remains high over the coming years, market processes will make these other fuels economically viable, and many economists think this will solve our problems. They have failed to factor in the increase in global warming that such a shift will entail. There are new technologies that can make coal cleaner, and we would be well advised to develop them further if we want to limit its environmental risks; but a global shift from conventional energy sources to coal and tar sands is bound to increase greenhouse gases. While shifting to other fossil fuels may make economic sense, there is nothing in the operation of the price mechanism that registers costs to the planet as a whole.
Green activists say they want a new global economic system in which fossil fuels play a much smaller part and damage to the planet is fully accounted for, but here again we are in the realm of denial. The type of energy-intensive industrial economy that is being adopted in India and China is clearly unsustainable. At the same time there is not the remotest prospect that the rush to industrialisation will be abandoned. The ruling elites of China are well aware of the hideous damage that their breakneck industrial growth has done to the country's fragile natural environment - far more so than the western investors who gush on about the Chinese economic miracle. China's rulers also know they cannot risk slowing economic expansion. Even with the one-child policy and rapid ageing, China's population will continue to grow for the next 50 years, and the hundreds of millions who are moving from rural areas to towns will need jobs, housing and transport. If enormous social upheaval and political instability are to be avoided, economic expansion must continue whatever the environmental consequences. The same is true in India, and throughout the poor countries of the world.
Worldwide industrialisation has an overwhelming momentum that cannot be stopped by political means. Part of this momentum undoubtedly comes from continuing population growth, but any mention of growing human numbers is now taboo in environmental debate. In the affluent west, religious fundamentalists, neoliberal missionaries for free markets, development economists and the few remaining Marxists are as one in denouncing the idea that there can be too many people. Curiously, this view has not been adopted in poor countries. China, Egypt, Iran, India and many other developing countries have population policies. In per-capita use of resources, it is the richest countries that are most overpopulated, and this is often used to suggest that it is distribution of resources rather than the global human population that really matters. The inequalities are real and troubling. Even so, no redistribution of resources could enable the earth to sustain over the long term the human numbers projected for the second half of the present century, or even those that exist today.
The present human population of more than six billion people is supported by a type of industrialised farming that relies on rapidly depleting supplies of petroleum. Contrary to the romantics among greens who look back with nostalgia to an imaginary peasant culture of harmony with nature, farming has always been, ecologically, a highly disruptive human activity, and this remains true today. It is mainly the expansion of agriculture, not industry, which is destroying the Amazon rainforest; but agriculture everywhere is critically dependent on oil-based fertilisers. The green revolution was at bottom a process whereby food was extracted from petroleum. A human population of roughly nine billion - the UN estimate for the world in 2050 - would be even more dependent on fossil fuels, with all the harmful effects on global climate.
In a century or so, human numbers may decline as falling fertility spreads throughout the world. In the meantime there is a bottleneck, and governments are scrambling to secure control of the world's remaining reserves of oil and natural gas. The resource war that is being fought for oil in the Gulf is likely to be one of many in the coming century, and will be accompanied by conflicts over fresh water. Population growth, resource war and climate change are intertwined. Without a smaller human population there can be no solution to the environmental crisis, and one way or another human numbers are sure to fall. Greens shy away from these facts, and insist that climate change and conflict over natural resources can be avoided by adopting a low-tech lifestyle. But organic farms and windmills cannot stop the destruction of the natural world, or support the present human population.
Rather than flirting with the fantasy of a low-tech society we need to focus on high-tech solutions to environmental crisis. Technology cannot change the human condition. It cannot repeal the laws of thermodynamics, or make human beings less prone to folly or illusion than they have always been. It cannot even deflect the current wave of climate change, which will go on for centuries whatever we do now. What technology can do is help us cope with the abrupt alteration in the planetary environment that human activity has triggered - a process of adjustment that is sure to be forbiddingly difficult. We cannot stop climate change. If we make the most of technologies that limit the need for fossil fuels we can avoid accelerating it.
James Lovelock has argued that we need to move away from traditional modes of farming to the production of synthetic foods, and it seems to me that, here as elsewhere, he points a way forward. Lovelock is best known for his support of nuclear power - a view I have shared since 1993, when I endorsed it in my book Beyond the New Right. Despite Chernobyl, the risks of nuclear energy to human beings have been greatly exaggerated. Just as important, nuclear power is vastly less harmful to the non-human environment than fossil-fuel extraction. For this reason alone, green activists should support it. Yet they remain deeply hostile to high-tech solutions, and part of the reason may be their well-founded suspicion of the idea that humans can master nature by means of technology.
In the past, high technology has been linked with Promethean philosophies that seek to subject the natural environment to human will. This was the philosophy that produced ecological catastrophe in the former Soviet Union and in China during the Maoist era - and which, in a different ideological guise, is continuing the destruction of the environment in those countries. In western countries, the Promethean view is to be found mainly on the right, among neoliberal boosters of the free market and Bushite deniers of climate change. Given this background, it is hardly surprising that green movements should reject technical fixes, but by doing so they have become part of the problem rather than its solution.
Today, high technology offers the only way the human ecological footprint on the planet can be reduced. Nuclear power has risks, not least of terrorist attack; but it is vastly less harmful to the planetary equilibrium than the continued reliance on fossil fuels that is the realistic alternative. The environmental dangers of genetically modified crops are as yet unknown, so it is right to resist their use at present; but it is not difficult to envisage a time when they could be less destructive of the natural world than the further expansion of petroleum-based intensive agriculture. Far from rejecting these new technologies, we should be developing and improving them - not in order to further our domination of nature, which has always been an illusion, but as ways of retreating from our hugely overextended position in the planetary system. Green movements look to political solutions to the environmental crisis. For them, its source is in a defective economic system and in abuse of corporate power. However, the planetary rebalancing that is under way cannot be prevented by any transformation of human society, however revolutionary. Adapting to the situation requires political decisions, but there is no political solution to the problems we face. The human species has overshot the planet's resources, and it will have to use all its technological ingenuity if it is to avoid catastrophe.
It may be that the shift in habits of thinking that is needed is beyond human powers. We owe our evolutionary success partly to our capacity for denial. Blind hope has often been more useful than a rational estimate of danger in promoting human survival. Today the tendency to shut out from conscious thought the dangers we face has itself become dangerous, but it is a tendency that is encouraged in a culture which prizes emotional comfort over everything else. In the worst-case scenarios that are now looking increasingly realistic, the result could be a change in the way we live that has no precedent in human experience.
Abrupt climate change seems an apocalyptic prospect, and rather than face up to it and do what can be done to mitigate its effects, humanity may well opt to let it run its course. It is only in human terms that climate change can be viewed as apocalyptic, however. In the life of the planet, it is normal. A dramatic climate shift took place 55 million years ago, at the start of the Eocene era, in which most of the species that then existed became extinct. The planet revived and became the richly diverse biosphere human beings are at present destroying. The environmental change that the world is undergoing is another such shift. Much biodiversity will be lost, but the earth will renew itself. Life will continue and will thrive - whether or not humans are around to see it.
All shades of opinion are in denial about the magnitude of the environmental challenge facing us. Our need to be comfortable may be stronger than our will to survive, argues John Gray
During the present century, human beings are likely to experience a change in the planetary environment unlike any in history. Climate change is irreversible, and accelerating fast. No one, apart from a few cranks speaking on behalf of the Bush administration, doubts that global warming is a side effect of human activity. Accumulating scientific evidence suggests strongly that climate change is happening on a larger scale and more quickly than was suspected even a couple of years ago. Observable processes such as the melting of the Antarctic ice cap point to rising sea levels that will wipe out much of the world's arable land and flood many coastal cities. The face of the planet is changing before our eyes.
The message of science is clear: humans will soon find themselves in a world different from any they have ever lived in. Altering our way of life to cope with these conditions will be phenomenally difficult - if it can be done at all. Yet all sections of opinion are in denial regarding the scale of the shift and the magnitude of the challenge it poses. Mainstream politicians and green activists differ on many points; but they all believe that climate change can be halted or rendered innocuous, if only we adopt the right policies. They are at one in rejecting the fact that runaway climate change is a result of the toxic mix of rapidly growing human numbers with worldwide industrialisation. Across the whole political spectrum there is a refusal to face up to this reality. This is nowhere clearer than among the Greens, who persist in a delusional faith that sustainable development and renewable energy can save the day.
In this consensus of denial, there are some who tell us not to worry. So-called "sceptical environmentalists" suggest that the scientific consensus is not to be trusted, and counsel inaction until the damage done by climate change is undeniable. That is the view of Nigel Lawson, who recently advised a business-as-usual strategy. Preparing for climate change is costly and troublesome, the former chancellor said, and we should alter our way of life only when the evidence is incontestable. The trouble with this view is that climate change is not doom-mongering speculation: it is already happening, and it is foolish to shut one's eyes and hope it will go away. If it takes the abrupt and radical form that many scientists believe is now likely, it will have disastrous effects on the lives of millions - possibly billions - of people.
Under the leadership of David Cameron, Lawson's own party is not so complacent, but it, too, is in denial. Cameron talks lightly of "green growth", and has demonstrated the seriousness of his environmental commitment by riding a bicycle and installing a wind turbine on the roof of his house. The underlying assumption of his approach is that the crisis can be tackled without doing anything difficult or unpopular. The facts tell a different story. Wind power is not terribly efficient, and certainly cannot replace fossil fuels as the source of most of our energy. Even if combined with other types of renewable power such as solar and geothermal and implemented together with rigorous policies of energy conservation, the output of the hideous windfarms springing up across the country could not meet the rising demand for energy that goes with current patterns of economic growth.
Nor would a large-scale shift to renewable energy in Britain have any perceptible impact on global warming, which is far more affected by emissions originating in China, India and the United States. It might be argued that Britain should do what it can to reduce emissions regardless of the behaviour of other countries; but there is only one existing technology that can provide energy on the scale Britain needs while reducing its production of greenhouse gases, and that is nuclear power - which is highly unpopular. Images of Chernobyl and its aftermath are potent antidotes to rational thought, even if all they tell us is how horribly unsafe nuclear technology was in Soviet times. We live in a culture in which personal emotional comfort counts for more than any objective assessment of risks and consequences, and public attitudes to nuclear power reflect this. As a type of psychotherapy for shopped-out consumers troubled by occasional pangs of environmental guilt, renewable energy may be quite effective. As an appropriate response to environmental crisis it is a non-starter.
It may be too much to ask from electorates that they confront unpalatable environmental realities. This month Tony Blair declared that nuclear power was "back on the agenda with a vengeance". In a speech to the Confederation of British Industry, he suggested that the replacement of nuclear power stations - in conjunction with "a big push on renewables and a step change on energy efficiency" - must be considered as part of Britain's long-term energy strategy. Blair is to be congratulated on attempting to thrust the real energy options we face into the forefront of public debate. His intervention comes near the end of his political career, however, and, given his disastrous role in the Iraq war, nothing that he says on any controversial issue will be taken seriously - even if, as in this case, it deserves to be.
In speaking out in support of nuclear power Blair runs up against the feel-good mentality: most people want to believe that the environmental crisis can be solved by policies which involve no risk - to them or anyone else. Green thinking encourages this mentality. For example, the Kyoto treaty may have symbolic value in acknowledging the anthropogenic origins of global warming, but it hardly deserves the iconic status it is given by the green lobby. None of the big three producers of greenhouse gases has signed up to it, and even if it were fully implemented it would do very little to alter the climate shift that is already under way. Above all, such a treaty cannot halt the stampede to industrialisation that is the human cause of global warming.
Global warming as we know it today is a by-product of the industrial revolution. The temperature of the planet has been rising since roughly 1800, when the use of fossil fuels began on a large scale. Industrialisation and fossil-fuel use are different sides of the same process, and it is the rising demand for energy that is fuelling global warming. Our present industrial civilisation began with coal, and it may well end there. Oil gained in importance in energy use throughout the 20th century, but as light crude oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, industrial societies are beginning to look to other fossil fuels which are still abundant - notably coal and tar sands. If the oil price remains high over the coming years, market processes will make these other fuels economically viable, and many economists think this will solve our problems. They have failed to factor in the increase in global warming that such a shift will entail. There are new technologies that can make coal cleaner, and we would be well advised to develop them further if we want to limit its environmental risks; but a global shift from conventional energy sources to coal and tar sands is bound to increase greenhouse gases. While shifting to other fossil fuels may make economic sense, there is nothing in the operation of the price mechanism that registers costs to the planet as a whole.
Green activists say they want a new global economic system in which fossil fuels play a much smaller part and damage to the planet is fully accounted for, but here again we are in the realm of denial. The type of energy-intensive industrial economy that is being adopted in India and China is clearly unsustainable. At the same time there is not the remotest prospect that the rush to industrialisation will be abandoned. The ruling elites of China are well aware of the hideous damage that their breakneck industrial growth has done to the country's fragile natural environment - far more so than the western investors who gush on about the Chinese economic miracle. China's rulers also know they cannot risk slowing economic expansion. Even with the one-child policy and rapid ageing, China's population will continue to grow for the next 50 years, and the hundreds of millions who are moving from rural areas to towns will need jobs, housing and transport. If enormous social upheaval and political instability are to be avoided, economic expansion must continue whatever the environmental consequences. The same is true in India, and throughout the poor countries of the world.
Worldwide industrialisation has an overwhelming momentum that cannot be stopped by political means. Part of this momentum undoubtedly comes from continuing population growth, but any mention of growing human numbers is now taboo in environmental debate. In the affluent west, religious fundamentalists, neoliberal missionaries for free markets, development economists and the few remaining Marxists are as one in denouncing the idea that there can be too many people. Curiously, this view has not been adopted in poor countries. China, Egypt, Iran, India and many other developing countries have population policies. In per-capita use of resources, it is the richest countries that are most overpopulated, and this is often used to suggest that it is distribution of resources rather than the global human population that really matters. The inequalities are real and troubling. Even so, no redistribution of resources could enable the earth to sustain over the long term the human numbers projected for the second half of the present century, or even those that exist today.
The present human population of more than six billion people is supported by a type of industrialised farming that relies on rapidly depleting supplies of petroleum. Contrary to the romantics among greens who look back with nostalgia to an imaginary peasant culture of harmony with nature, farming has always been, ecologically, a highly disruptive human activity, and this remains true today. It is mainly the expansion of agriculture, not industry, which is destroying the Amazon rainforest; but agriculture everywhere is critically dependent on oil-based fertilisers. The green revolution was at bottom a process whereby food was extracted from petroleum. A human population of roughly nine billion - the UN estimate for the world in 2050 - would be even more dependent on fossil fuels, with all the harmful effects on global climate.
In a century or so, human numbers may decline as falling fertility spreads throughout the world. In the meantime there is a bottleneck, and governments are scrambling to secure control of the world's remaining reserves of oil and natural gas. The resource war that is being fought for oil in the Gulf is likely to be one of many in the coming century, and will be accompanied by conflicts over fresh water. Population growth, resource war and climate change are intertwined. Without a smaller human population there can be no solution to the environmental crisis, and one way or another human numbers are sure to fall. Greens shy away from these facts, and insist that climate change and conflict over natural resources can be avoided by adopting a low-tech lifestyle. But organic farms and windmills cannot stop the destruction of the natural world, or support the present human population.
Rather than flirting with the fantasy of a low-tech society we need to focus on high-tech solutions to environmental crisis. Technology cannot change the human condition. It cannot repeal the laws of thermodynamics, or make human beings less prone to folly or illusion than they have always been. It cannot even deflect the current wave of climate change, which will go on for centuries whatever we do now. What technology can do is help us cope with the abrupt alteration in the planetary environment that human activity has triggered - a process of adjustment that is sure to be forbiddingly difficult. We cannot stop climate change. If we make the most of technologies that limit the need for fossil fuels we can avoid accelerating it.
James Lovelock has argued that we need to move away from traditional modes of farming to the production of synthetic foods, and it seems to me that, here as elsewhere, he points a way forward. Lovelock is best known for his support of nuclear power - a view I have shared since 1993, when I endorsed it in my book Beyond the New Right. Despite Chernobyl, the risks of nuclear energy to human beings have been greatly exaggerated. Just as important, nuclear power is vastly less harmful to the non-human environment than fossil-fuel extraction. For this reason alone, green activists should support it. Yet they remain deeply hostile to high-tech solutions, and part of the reason may be their well-founded suspicion of the idea that humans can master nature by means of technology.
In the past, high technology has been linked with Promethean philosophies that seek to subject the natural environment to human will. This was the philosophy that produced ecological catastrophe in the former Soviet Union and in China during the Maoist era - and which, in a different ideological guise, is continuing the destruction of the environment in those countries. In western countries, the Promethean view is to be found mainly on the right, among neoliberal boosters of the free market and Bushite deniers of climate change. Given this background, it is hardly surprising that green movements should reject technical fixes, but by doing so they have become part of the problem rather than its solution.
Today, high technology offers the only way the human ecological footprint on the planet can be reduced. Nuclear power has risks, not least of terrorist attack; but it is vastly less harmful to the planetary equilibrium than the continued reliance on fossil fuels that is the realistic alternative. The environmental dangers of genetically modified crops are as yet unknown, so it is right to resist their use at present; but it is not difficult to envisage a time when they could be less destructive of the natural world than the further expansion of petroleum-based intensive agriculture. Far from rejecting these new technologies, we should be developing and improving them - not in order to further our domination of nature, which has always been an illusion, but as ways of retreating from our hugely overextended position in the planetary system. Green movements look to political solutions to the environmental crisis. For them, its source is in a defective economic system and in abuse of corporate power. However, the planetary rebalancing that is under way cannot be prevented by any transformation of human society, however revolutionary. Adapting to the situation requires political decisions, but there is no political solution to the problems we face. The human species has overshot the planet's resources, and it will have to use all its technological ingenuity if it is to avoid catastrophe.
It may be that the shift in habits of thinking that is needed is beyond human powers. We owe our evolutionary success partly to our capacity for denial. Blind hope has often been more useful than a rational estimate of danger in promoting human survival. Today the tendency to shut out from conscious thought the dangers we face has itself become dangerous, but it is a tendency that is encouraged in a culture which prizes emotional comfort over everything else. In the worst-case scenarios that are now looking increasingly realistic, the result could be a change in the way we live that has no precedent in human experience.
Abrupt climate change seems an apocalyptic prospect, and rather than face up to it and do what can be done to mitigate its effects, humanity may well opt to let it run its course. It is only in human terms that climate change can be viewed as apocalyptic, however. In the life of the planet, it is normal. A dramatic climate shift took place 55 million years ago, at the start of the Eocene era, in which most of the species that then existed became extinct. The planet revived and became the richly diverse biosphere human beings are at present destroying. The environmental change that the world is undergoing is another such shift. Much biodiversity will be lost, but the earth will renew itself. Life will continue and will thrive - whether or not humans are around to see it.
Bryan Appleyard on John Gray
Bryan Appleyard
The Sunday Times, 24th June 2007.
In 1994, John Gray, then professor of politics at Oxford, published an essay entitled The Undoing of Conservatism. It made my hair stand on end. It was, in places, exactly what I had been writing. I rang him. Professor Gray...” “Oh, hello. Good to hear from you.” Odd: somehow I wasn’t expecting a Geordie accent. “What you have written seems perilously close to what I have written.” “Synchronicity. Let’s have dinner.”
And so, for the next 13 years, I was to be entertained and dazzled by one of the most brilliant – and funny – men I have ever met. Gray doesn’t present himself as funny, and is never reported as such, but he is very funny indeed. In conversation, he veers off into fantasies, usually about people whose world-view has collapsed. In the 1980s, he advanced the destruction of academic Marxism by publishing a review of a book entitled The Word as Deed: Studies in the Labour Theory of Meaning, by a widely ignored Hungarian thinker named L Revai, a man who had significantly influenced Wittgenstein, apparently. People wrote in to applaud this reevaluation of a shamefully underrated thinker. Some said they had known his family; others that they had met the man himself. This was strange, because Gray had invented Revai. “I was beginning to expect to meet him myself.”
It is a sign of Gray’s remarkable prescience that one of Revai’s “discoveries” was the “ergoneme”, a primitive atom of meaning that exactly anticipates Richard Dawkins’s idea of memes. “I intended it as a joke, but, sadly, he doesn’t. I intended to create something as far away from genuine science as possible, something akin to creationism or alchemy.”
Only one reader was not taken in. The intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin simply said: “Too perfect, my boy, some kind of spoof.” Gray was a friend of Berlin for the last 25 years of his life, and has written a definitive guide to his thought. And Berlin is the best place to start when trying to understand Gray. But, first, a warning: he is, for the conventionally minded, difficult to understand or to appreciate. He is so out of the box that it is easy to forget there was ever any box. He is also impossible to categorise. He can’t be seen as an orthodox political thinker because his perspective is far too broad. And he can’t be seen as a philosopher because he is too impatient with the “arguments about arguments” in which philosophers tend to indulge. He says philosophy is just a way of finding good reasons for holding utterly ordinary opinions.
So, what is he all about? What Berlin repeatedly described was a central problem of liberalism. The liberal state’s job is to hold different world-views in balance, but it cannot resolve conflicts between them. It cannot, for example, say to Muslims “You are wrong” and to Christians “You are right”, because it then ceases to be liberal. At its most effective, it holds back the instinct of humanity to form itself into competing tribes. But the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe. True liberalism is, therefore, necessarily a tragic view, sceptical of all notions of progress. Gray calls it “agonistic liberalism”. He believes in the liberal state, and believes it is worth defending, but does not do so with empty optimism or with any belief that it should attempt to impose its ways on others.
Gray transforms Berlin’s basic insight into a refutation of all notions of progress or perfection and of the special destiny of humanity. Man, he asserts, is a tribal carnivore possessed of reason. His reason may give him science, a progressive, cumulative enterprise, but it cannot give him the wisdom to transcend his nature. Science, like everything else in the human world, will be used for evil as often as good. Conflict is eternal and all utopian thinking is fantasy. The best we can hope to do is protect, for a time, our cherished ways of life.
Because forms of utopianism are either implicit or explicit in most human projects, Gray’s is a world-view that causes vertigo when it does not cause outrage. Antiutopianism is the deep consistency in all his thought. It led him to support Thatcher in her efforts to save the British economy from the near-anarchy of the late 1970s, but mostly in her resistance to communism, that supremely lethal utopian project. Yet he also observed the agonies of liberalism in her deluded attempt to impose free-market reforms and intense social conservatism, nostalgic for the bourgeois discipline of the 1950s. “It was an impossible task. She produced a society that was almost the opposite of the one she intended. The free market dissolved the very values she espoused. I think our society is better for having escaped the tightness and oppression of the 1950s. But it left conservatism incoherent. It has still not recovered.”
The collapse of communism in 1989, and the publication of an academic paper and subsequent worldwide bestseller, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, signalled the start of Gray’s next campaign against utopianism. This involved a more radical assessment of the prevailing mythologies of the West. Fukuyama’s argument that liberal democracy was the final political state, the end point of history, reeked of precisely the belief that history was a story with an ending that Gray so loathed in his colleagues.
“That phrase ‘the end of history’ was like a red rag to a bull. It was an apocalyptic notion, and it was to me a sign that when the Soviet Union collapsed, we would not have a move towards prudence and realism, we’d have a politics of faith. I was adamantly opposed to that – it was what I had been opposed to in communism.”
Uncovering the faith base of seemingly rational opinions is a Gray speciality. He finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens particularly funny. He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people’s beliefs, you change their behaviour. He also sees an irony here. “They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists.”
The road from Fukuyama led him directly to a series of what to future generations will seem classic works. The best are Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals – a coruscating statement of our inability to free ourselves from human nature – and his latest, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Gray was, in the later stage of this phase, driven by what seemed to him to be collective amnesia. “I had been puzzled by the intensity and systematic and methodical character of the violence of the 20th century, because that century was dominated not by religious belief, but by secular belief in progress or the capacity of human beings to create a better world. It also featured unprecedented levels of mass murder.
“But I was even more puzzled by how quickly the memory of the 20th century began to fade; that, with the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China – and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal – seemed to be completely forgotten. And the reason those terrors have gone into the memory hole is that they illuminate cracks and absurdities in the beliefs of the secular humanist faith in progress.” The point is that what appeared to be secular projects were as founded upon belief as any religion. The lesson was that any human project could be used to justify slaughter: “Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”
That 20th-century amnesia, Gray says, led to new, faith-based utopian cults, but this time the primary one, neoconservatism, was of the right rather than the left. He shows, in Black Mass, how many of the neocon prophets were originally Trotskyists, a clear sign of the utopian linkage between Marxism and the neocons. And, most hilariously – though the comedy is very black indeed – he demonstrates the quite fantastic depths of neocon irrationality.
In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the neocons convinced themselves that the CIA, which was largely sceptical about the project, was too evidence-based. What was needed, they posited, was not empirical but rational analysis. So, Bush was told by a neocon CIA shadow organisation that Saddam had WMDs, not because there was evidence for it, but because it was logical that he must have them. A deranged Platonism had its finger on the trigger. Now, as Gray forecast, the Iraqis are blamed for the failure of the mission, just as the Russians were blamed for the failure of communism and Hitler blamed the Germans for the failure of Nazism. Nobody, he points out, seems ready to face the obvious conclusion: the goals of these projects were unattainable from the outset.
Perhaps Gray’s most controversial point is that the roots of modern terror lie in the western Enlightenment. Before the 18th century, he argues, wars and terrorist campaigns were not conducted as if they were mechanisms of general improvement. It was the French revolution that introduced the idea of terror as a tool of progress, and we have been living with – and dying from – that legacy ever since. Al-Qaeda, he argues, is a very modern organisation, precisely because it has learnt the lessons of the West.
Gray is a great sceptic, to be judged alongside his heroes, Montaigne, Hume, Schopenhauer and Berlin. Like them, he believes our only freedom lies in the most honest assessment possible of our predicament. And in his style, his humour, his empiricism, his realism, he’s a very English thinker. He has in common with the ecologist James Lovelock an English delight in exposing misconceptions and in the comedy of human folly.
Gray is soon to retire as professor of European thought at the LSE. Perhaps he will write more, perhaps less. You can’t tell with him. But, as his work makes clear, you can’t really tell with anybody. We’re going nowhere, our rationality is largely an illusion and, to each other, we are alarmingly opaque. But at our best we learn, tolerantly, liberally and realistically, to live with that. Read John Gray, and remember to laugh.
The Sunday Times, 24th June 2007.
In 1994, John Gray, then professor of politics at Oxford, published an essay entitled The Undoing of Conservatism. It made my hair stand on end. It was, in places, exactly what I had been writing. I rang him. Professor Gray...” “Oh, hello. Good to hear from you.” Odd: somehow I wasn’t expecting a Geordie accent. “What you have written seems perilously close to what I have written.” “Synchronicity. Let’s have dinner.”
And so, for the next 13 years, I was to be entertained and dazzled by one of the most brilliant – and funny – men I have ever met. Gray doesn’t present himself as funny, and is never reported as such, but he is very funny indeed. In conversation, he veers off into fantasies, usually about people whose world-view has collapsed. In the 1980s, he advanced the destruction of academic Marxism by publishing a review of a book entitled The Word as Deed: Studies in the Labour Theory of Meaning, by a widely ignored Hungarian thinker named L Revai, a man who had significantly influenced Wittgenstein, apparently. People wrote in to applaud this reevaluation of a shamefully underrated thinker. Some said they had known his family; others that they had met the man himself. This was strange, because Gray had invented Revai. “I was beginning to expect to meet him myself.”
It is a sign of Gray’s remarkable prescience that one of Revai’s “discoveries” was the “ergoneme”, a primitive atom of meaning that exactly anticipates Richard Dawkins’s idea of memes. “I intended it as a joke, but, sadly, he doesn’t. I intended to create something as far away from genuine science as possible, something akin to creationism or alchemy.”
Only one reader was not taken in. The intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin simply said: “Too perfect, my boy, some kind of spoof.” Gray was a friend of Berlin for the last 25 years of his life, and has written a definitive guide to his thought. And Berlin is the best place to start when trying to understand Gray. But, first, a warning: he is, for the conventionally minded, difficult to understand or to appreciate. He is so out of the box that it is easy to forget there was ever any box. He is also impossible to categorise. He can’t be seen as an orthodox political thinker because his perspective is far too broad. And he can’t be seen as a philosopher because he is too impatient with the “arguments about arguments” in which philosophers tend to indulge. He says philosophy is just a way of finding good reasons for holding utterly ordinary opinions.
So, what is he all about? What Berlin repeatedly described was a central problem of liberalism. The liberal state’s job is to hold different world-views in balance, but it cannot resolve conflicts between them. It cannot, for example, say to Muslims “You are wrong” and to Christians “You are right”, because it then ceases to be liberal. At its most effective, it holds back the instinct of humanity to form itself into competing tribes. But the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe. True liberalism is, therefore, necessarily a tragic view, sceptical of all notions of progress. Gray calls it “agonistic liberalism”. He believes in the liberal state, and believes it is worth defending, but does not do so with empty optimism or with any belief that it should attempt to impose its ways on others.
Gray transforms Berlin’s basic insight into a refutation of all notions of progress or perfection and of the special destiny of humanity. Man, he asserts, is a tribal carnivore possessed of reason. His reason may give him science, a progressive, cumulative enterprise, but it cannot give him the wisdom to transcend his nature. Science, like everything else in the human world, will be used for evil as often as good. Conflict is eternal and all utopian thinking is fantasy. The best we can hope to do is protect, for a time, our cherished ways of life.
Because forms of utopianism are either implicit or explicit in most human projects, Gray’s is a world-view that causes vertigo when it does not cause outrage. Antiutopianism is the deep consistency in all his thought. It led him to support Thatcher in her efforts to save the British economy from the near-anarchy of the late 1970s, but mostly in her resistance to communism, that supremely lethal utopian project. Yet he also observed the agonies of liberalism in her deluded attempt to impose free-market reforms and intense social conservatism, nostalgic for the bourgeois discipline of the 1950s. “It was an impossible task. She produced a society that was almost the opposite of the one she intended. The free market dissolved the very values she espoused. I think our society is better for having escaped the tightness and oppression of the 1950s. But it left conservatism incoherent. It has still not recovered.”
The collapse of communism in 1989, and the publication of an academic paper and subsequent worldwide bestseller, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, signalled the start of Gray’s next campaign against utopianism. This involved a more radical assessment of the prevailing mythologies of the West. Fukuyama’s argument that liberal democracy was the final political state, the end point of history, reeked of precisely the belief that history was a story with an ending that Gray so loathed in his colleagues.
“That phrase ‘the end of history’ was like a red rag to a bull. It was an apocalyptic notion, and it was to me a sign that when the Soviet Union collapsed, we would not have a move towards prudence and realism, we’d have a politics of faith. I was adamantly opposed to that – it was what I had been opposed to in communism.”
Uncovering the faith base of seemingly rational opinions is a Gray speciality. He finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens particularly funny. He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people’s beliefs, you change their behaviour. He also sees an irony here. “They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists.”
The road from Fukuyama led him directly to a series of what to future generations will seem classic works. The best are Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals – a coruscating statement of our inability to free ourselves from human nature – and his latest, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Gray was, in the later stage of this phase, driven by what seemed to him to be collective amnesia. “I had been puzzled by the intensity and systematic and methodical character of the violence of the 20th century, because that century was dominated not by religious belief, but by secular belief in progress or the capacity of human beings to create a better world. It also featured unprecedented levels of mass murder.
“But I was even more puzzled by how quickly the memory of the 20th century began to fade; that, with the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China – and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal – seemed to be completely forgotten. And the reason those terrors have gone into the memory hole is that they illuminate cracks and absurdities in the beliefs of the secular humanist faith in progress.” The point is that what appeared to be secular projects were as founded upon belief as any religion. The lesson was that any human project could be used to justify slaughter: “Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”
That 20th-century amnesia, Gray says, led to new, faith-based utopian cults, but this time the primary one, neoconservatism, was of the right rather than the left. He shows, in Black Mass, how many of the neocon prophets were originally Trotskyists, a clear sign of the utopian linkage between Marxism and the neocons. And, most hilariously – though the comedy is very black indeed – he demonstrates the quite fantastic depths of neocon irrationality.
In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the neocons convinced themselves that the CIA, which was largely sceptical about the project, was too evidence-based. What was needed, they posited, was not empirical but rational analysis. So, Bush was told by a neocon CIA shadow organisation that Saddam had WMDs, not because there was evidence for it, but because it was logical that he must have them. A deranged Platonism had its finger on the trigger. Now, as Gray forecast, the Iraqis are blamed for the failure of the mission, just as the Russians were blamed for the failure of communism and Hitler blamed the Germans for the failure of Nazism. Nobody, he points out, seems ready to face the obvious conclusion: the goals of these projects were unattainable from the outset.
Perhaps Gray’s most controversial point is that the roots of modern terror lie in the western Enlightenment. Before the 18th century, he argues, wars and terrorist campaigns were not conducted as if they were mechanisms of general improvement. It was the French revolution that introduced the idea of terror as a tool of progress, and we have been living with – and dying from – that legacy ever since. Al-Qaeda, he argues, is a very modern organisation, precisely because it has learnt the lessons of the West.
Gray is a great sceptic, to be judged alongside his heroes, Montaigne, Hume, Schopenhauer and Berlin. Like them, he believes our only freedom lies in the most honest assessment possible of our predicament. And in his style, his humour, his empiricism, his realism, he’s a very English thinker. He has in common with the ecologist James Lovelock an English delight in exposing misconceptions and in the comedy of human folly.
Gray is soon to retire as professor of European thought at the LSE. Perhaps he will write more, perhaps less. You can’t tell with him. But, as his work makes clear, you can’t really tell with anybody. We’re going nowhere, our rationality is largely an illusion and, to each other, we are alarmingly opaque. But at our best we learn, tolerantly, liberally and realistically, to live with that. Read John Gray, and remember to laugh.
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