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.