The Independent, 27 July 2002.
Not ancient, but modern: John Gray argues that Islamist militants have Western roots
Some years ago -- just over a dozen, to be exact -- there was a good deal of talk about the collision of East and West. In the media and academy, the Cold War was routinely described as a clash between western liberal democracy and something else (Russian despotism, perhaps) that was definitely not western. In fact, the communist system from Lenin to Gorbachev was one of several attempts to turn Russia into a western society that the country had experienced since Peter the Great.
Soviet Marxism did not spring from an Orthodox monastery. It was one of the finest flowers of the European Enlightenment. Equally, the USSR was nothing if not an Enlightenment regime. The Soviet state was the vehicle of a westernising project from start to finish. The Cold War was a family quarrel among western ideologies, in which rival versions of political universalism struggled for hegemony.
Today, we are watching a rerun of that uncomprehending struggle. Of course, much has changed. Unlike communism, political Islam does not purport to be secular. For that reason alone, it is a puzzle for the many who still hold to the atavistic 19th-century faith that secularisation is the wave of the future. But the view that something called "the West" is under attack from an alien enemy is as mistaken now as it was in the Cold War.
Islamic fundamentalism is not an indigenous growth. It is an exotic hybrid, bred from the encounter of sections of the Islamic intelligentsia with radical western ideologies. In A Fury for God, Malise Ruthven shows that Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian executed after imprisonment in 1966 and arguably the most influential ideologue of radical Islam, incorporated many elements derived from European ideology into his thinking. For example, the idea of a revolutionary vanguard of militant believers does not have an Islamic pedigree. It is "a concept imported from Europe, through a lineage that stretches back to the Jacobins, through the Bolsheviks and latter-day Marxist guerrillas such as the Baader-Meinhof gang".
In a brilliantly illuminating and arrestingly readable analysis, Ruthven demonstrates the close affinities between radical Islamist thought and the vanguard of modernist and postmodern thinking in the West. The inspiration for Qutb's thought is not so much the Koran, but the current of western philosophy embodied in thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Qutb's thought -- the blueprint for all subsequent radical Islamist political theology -- is as much a response to 20th-century Europe's experience of "the death of God" as to anything in the Islamic tradition. Qutbism is in no way traditional. Like all fundamentalist ideology, it is unmistakeably modern.
Political Islam emerged partly from an encounter with western thought, but also from revulsion against the regimes founded in Egypt and elsewhere in the aftermath of European colonialism. In Jihad, Gilles Keppel argues al-Qa'ida turned to global terrorism because, like fundamentalist groups in other countries, it has failed to achieve its revolutionary goals on home territory. In a magisterial study of the rise and decline of political Islam, Keppel maintains that Islamist movements have never gained sufficient support to produce a sustainable alternative to democracy. He argues compellingly that the failed Khomeinist revolution in Iran gained much early support from western-educated Marxists "projecting the messianic expectations of communists and Third World Peoples on to revolutionary Shiism".
The aspirations of these westernising radicals were defeated when Khomeini set about constructing a theocratic regime. That regime proved highly repressive, but -- if we credit recent reports of pro-western demonstrations -- it failed to eradicate the yearning for a more pluralist government.
The political failures of radical Islam in Iran and elsewhere leads Keppel to conclude that "the Islamist movement will have much difficulty in reversing its trail of decline". Here he may be optimistic. As he notes in his analysis of the Saudi regime, a major source of Islamist strength comes from the growing numbers of dislocated young men in the Gulf. The Gulf States are rentier economies, dependent on a single depleting resource to sustain exploding populations. Fuelled by an insoluble Malthusian dilemma, Islamist movements may well gain enough momentum to overturn pro-western regimes. The likely outcome is chronic instability for the region.
In the first and last chapters of The Clash of Fundamentalisms, a hastily assembled collection of autobiographical vignettes and commentaries on Islamic themes, Tariq Ali writes that he is not a believer. The veteran leftist need not be taken literally. What he means is that he has rejected Islam for another faith: a rather crude version of Enlightenment humanism.
The Clash of Fundamentalisms is well worth reading, if only because it shows that the harshest critics of fundamentalism are often exponents of a rival fundamentalism. Tariq Ali performs a valuable service by reminding us that Islam was once a tolerant and pluralist religion, more intellectually advanced than anything Christendom had to offer. Ironically, though, he seems to pine not for the complex culture that Islam once animated, but for that monument to Enlightenment fundamentalism, the former Soviet Union.
Here Ali unwittingly testifies to an important truth. A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with neo-liberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from "non-western" traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims.
In their unshakeable faith that one way of living is best for all humankind, the chief protagonists in the dispute about political Islam belong to a way of thinking that is quintessentially western. As in Cold War times, we are led to believe we are locked in a clash of civilisations: "the West" against the rest. In truth, the ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel.
Sunday, 20 July 2008
A Trail of Terror Strecthing 200 years
The Times, 30 June 2007
At a time when Islamist terrorism seems to have returned to the centre of London, it is easy to forget that during the 20th century terror was used on a vast scale by secular regimes. Today suicide attacks are automatically linked with a belief in martyrdom followed by paradise in the afterlife. Yet suicide bombing of the kind we now confront is a terrorist technique that was developed by people with no such beliefs. Though they claim to reject all things modern and Western, Islamist terrorists are continuing a modern Western tradition of using systematic violence to transform society. The roots of contemporary terrorism are in radical Western ideology – especially Leninism – far more than religion.
Lenin saw himself as belonging in a European revolutionary tradition that began with the French Jacobins, whose use of terror he criticised only because he believed it was insufficiently merciless. For Lenin, as for Robespierre, terror was not just a means of defending the revolution against enemies but also an essential tool of social engineering.
Together with Trotsky, Lenin set up concentration camps, instituted a system of hostages to ensure obedience in suspect groups and executed about 200,000 people between 1917 and 1923. The Bolshevik leaders were clear that state terror was indispensably necessary for achieving a communist society in which the State – along with war, property, and religion – would no longer exist. It was Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin, who pioneered state terror in Russia, and they did so in order to realise a vision of Utopia.
In this way the Bolshevik leaders were part of a long tradition, which continues today. In late 19th-century Russia there were the Nihilists – revolutionary intellectuals who believed spectacular acts of individual terror could shake the existing order to its foundations and help to inaugurate a new world. A seminal figure was Sergei Nechaev, author of Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869), in which he defended blackmail and murder as legitimate political strategies. We tend to think of a nihilist as someone who scorns all human ideals, but Nechaev and his like believed passionately in science, social progress and human goodness. In terms of revolutionary strategy they differed from Lenin, who condemned individual acts of terror as ineffective; it was highly organised state terror that he favoured. Yet Lenin and the Nihilists were at one in their faith that terror was necessary to advance Enlightenment ideals of human progress.
It might be thought that with the rise of Islamism, secular terrorism has died out. This is far from the truth. Suicide bombing may now be the Islamist technique of choice, but it was the Tamil Tigers – a Marxist-Leninist group that recruits mostly from Hindus in Sri Lanka, but which is militantly hostile to all forms of religion – that devised it. It was the Tamil Tigers that developed the explosive belt worn by Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, and up to the Iraq war the Tigers had committed more such attacks than any other organisation.
The first wave of suicide attacks in Lebanon in the Eighties was also mainly the work of secular groups. Of 41 attacks between 1982 and 1986, including the attack in 1983 that killed more than 100 US Marines, 27 were carried out by members of leftist groups such as the Lebanese communist party and the Arab Socialist Union. Only eight were Islamists, and three were Christians (including a woman high school teacher).
Secular terrorism has had a formative influence on the threat we face at present. Islamist thinkers have taken from Lenin a modern faith that is not found in either traditional Islam or Christianity – the idea that through the systematic deployment of violence a new world, even a new humanity, can be brought into being. Medieval Europe was the site of almost continuous warfare and religious persecution, while Islam has been divided, sometimes violently, practically from the beginning. Even so, before modern times it was never imagined that the use of violence could initiate a perfect society, or rid the world of immemorial evils.
This is a nonsense that emerged only with the Jacobins, to be inherited by Marx and later exponents of the radical Utopian strand in Enlightenment thinking. It is hideously inhumane to torture and terrify people in order to save their souls, but to do so in order to establish universal freedom is supremely absurd.
Faith is dangerous, as evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens never cease reminding us. But fanaticism comes in many guises. We would do well to remember that it was secular faith that inspired much of the terror of the last century. The fantasy that society can be progressively transformed by violence inspired some of humanity’s worst crimes, and it casts a poisonous spell today.
At a time when Islamist terrorism seems to have returned to the centre of London, it is easy to forget that during the 20th century terror was used on a vast scale by secular regimes. Today suicide attacks are automatically linked with a belief in martyrdom followed by paradise in the afterlife. Yet suicide bombing of the kind we now confront is a terrorist technique that was developed by people with no such beliefs. Though they claim to reject all things modern and Western, Islamist terrorists are continuing a modern Western tradition of using systematic violence to transform society. The roots of contemporary terrorism are in radical Western ideology – especially Leninism – far more than religion.
Lenin saw himself as belonging in a European revolutionary tradition that began with the French Jacobins, whose use of terror he criticised only because he believed it was insufficiently merciless. For Lenin, as for Robespierre, terror was not just a means of defending the revolution against enemies but also an essential tool of social engineering.
Together with Trotsky, Lenin set up concentration camps, instituted a system of hostages to ensure obedience in suspect groups and executed about 200,000 people between 1917 and 1923. The Bolshevik leaders were clear that state terror was indispensably necessary for achieving a communist society in which the State – along with war, property, and religion – would no longer exist. It was Lenin and Trotsky, not Stalin, who pioneered state terror in Russia, and they did so in order to realise a vision of Utopia.
In this way the Bolshevik leaders were part of a long tradition, which continues today. In late 19th-century Russia there were the Nihilists – revolutionary intellectuals who believed spectacular acts of individual terror could shake the existing order to its foundations and help to inaugurate a new world. A seminal figure was Sergei Nechaev, author of Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869), in which he defended blackmail and murder as legitimate political strategies. We tend to think of a nihilist as someone who scorns all human ideals, but Nechaev and his like believed passionately in science, social progress and human goodness. In terms of revolutionary strategy they differed from Lenin, who condemned individual acts of terror as ineffective; it was highly organised state terror that he favoured. Yet Lenin and the Nihilists were at one in their faith that terror was necessary to advance Enlightenment ideals of human progress.
It might be thought that with the rise of Islamism, secular terrorism has died out. This is far from the truth. Suicide bombing may now be the Islamist technique of choice, but it was the Tamil Tigers – a Marxist-Leninist group that recruits mostly from Hindus in Sri Lanka, but which is militantly hostile to all forms of religion – that devised it. It was the Tamil Tigers that developed the explosive belt worn by Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, and up to the Iraq war the Tigers had committed more such attacks than any other organisation.
The first wave of suicide attacks in Lebanon in the Eighties was also mainly the work of secular groups. Of 41 attacks between 1982 and 1986, including the attack in 1983 that killed more than 100 US Marines, 27 were carried out by members of leftist groups such as the Lebanese communist party and the Arab Socialist Union. Only eight were Islamists, and three were Christians (including a woman high school teacher).
Secular terrorism has had a formative influence on the threat we face at present. Islamist thinkers have taken from Lenin a modern faith that is not found in either traditional Islam or Christianity – the idea that through the systematic deployment of violence a new world, even a new humanity, can be brought into being. Medieval Europe was the site of almost continuous warfare and religious persecution, while Islam has been divided, sometimes violently, practically from the beginning. Even so, before modern times it was never imagined that the use of violence could initiate a perfect society, or rid the world of immemorial evils.
This is a nonsense that emerged only with the Jacobins, to be inherited by Marx and later exponents of the radical Utopian strand in Enlightenment thinking. It is hideously inhumane to torture and terrify people in order to save their souls, but to do so in order to establish universal freedom is supremely absurd.
Faith is dangerous, as evangelical atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens never cease reminding us. But fanaticism comes in many guises. We would do well to remember that it was secular faith that inspired much of the terror of the last century. The fantasy that society can be progressively transformed by violence inspired some of humanity’s worst crimes, and it casts a poisonous spell today.
The Pathology of Faith. John Gray reviews The Islamist
The Literary Review.
Ed Husain begins one of the chapters of The Islamist with a quotation from Syed Qutb, the chief intellectual founder of Islamism, outlining the purpose of Qutb's most influential book: 'I have written Milestones for this vanguard of Islamists which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be realised.' Qutb's use of the concept of the vanguard reveals one of the paradoxes of political Islam: a movement that is avowedly anti-secular, anti-modern and anti-Western, it has been profoundly shaped by modern Western secular ideologies. The idea of a revolutionary elite dedicated to leading the deluded masses to a perfect society is a borrowing from Lenin and the Jacobins rather than anything derived from Islamic theology, and - though the fact is rarely noted - the type of terrorism with which Islamist movements are most often identified originates not in the twelfth-century Assassins but with a present-day Leninist party. Suicide bombing is a technique that was pioneered and developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist organisation that until the Iraq war had committed more such attacks than any other single group. For all its talk of reviving a mediaeval caliphate, Islamism owes large debts to the European revolutionary tradition, and despite its tabloid description as Islamo-fascism radical Islam is better described as Islamo-Leninism.
Nearly all media commentary accepts Islamism at face value and endorses its self-image as the mortal enemy of the modern West. In contrast, Ed Husain, who has the penetrating insight of a former insider, is clear that this is the opposite of the truth. The idea of a pure Islamic state, he writes, is 'not the continuation of a political entity set up by the Prophet, maintained by the caliphs down the ages (however debatable)'. Rather, it is a response to secular modernity. It is striking how much Islamists have taken from Western thinkers who rejected traditional religions in order to promote surrogate political faiths. Husain shows how Taqi Nabhani, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who left to found the more radical Islamist organisation Hizb-ut Tahrir that Husain joined in his late teens, was much influenced by Hegel and Marx, while Nabhani's contempt for liberal democracy echoed that of Rousseau. 'Nabhani's ideas', Husain concludes, 'were not innovatory Muslim thinking but wholly derived from European political thought.' He might have examined other, more contemporary examples: for example, Ali Sharati, the predecessor of Ayatollah Khomeini as leader of Iranian Islamists in exile during the reign of the Shah, took his conception of martyrdom as a type of chosen death from Martin Heidegger, who for a time saw himself as the philosopher of the Third Reich. Rather than recovering Islamic tradition Islamist thinking has been shaped by the Western ideologues who - whether they realised it or not - supplied the intellectual armoury of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
A uniquely well-informed guide to the netherworld of British Islamism, Husain illuminates its many similarities with the Western-inspired revolutionary movements that wreaked such havoc in the twentieth century.
All the telltale signs of totalitarian thinking were present in the Islamists with whom he worked. They believed Zionist agents staffed the management of Tower Hamlets College where Husain moved to do his A levels after beginning his drift to Islamism at Stepney Green, an all-Muslim boys' school. In the prayer room at Tower Hamlets there was talk of a 'gay-Jewish conspiracy' to undermine Islamist efforts. Husain was inducted into a culture of secrecy - familiar to anyone who knows the workings of communist and Trotskyist parties - which aimed at penetrating other organisations (including George Galloway's Respect party) and using them as front organisations. Like movements of the far left in the past the Islamists were riddled with bitter internal conflicts. But in the eyes of the world they struggled to maintain a united front, and as Husain observes they did have one thing in common: 'we all despised traditional Islam'. Far from being an attempt to return to mediaeval conditions, Islamism is a prototypically modern ideology. A by-product of the dislocations of globalisation, it aspires to a new universal identity based on rejection of the past.
For Husain, during his period as a part of the self-styled vanguard of radical Islam, rejecting the past meant repudiating his family, and The Islamist is as much a memoir of personal struggle and inner growth as it is a report on a new type of extremism. Rebelling against his father (a pious Muslim appalled by his son's attachment to radical Islam), Husain came to see the easy-going pluralism of Britain today as a form of decadence. Under the influence first of a school textbook that emphasised Islam's incompatibility with secular politics and then of a friend with links with the radical East London mosque, he began to view himself as a jihadist committed to the violent overthrow of Western governments. It was as much the cruelty as the unreality of this vision that triggered Husain's disillusionment. Traumatised by the murder of a Christian fellow student and horrified by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he explored the subtle spirituality of the Sufi mystical tradition. Coming into contact with more scholarly and orthodox Islamic thinkers, he found an incomparably more humane version of his religion than that promoted by Islamists. From his confusion - which he recounts with fearless candour - he achieved a sense of spiritual purpose, which rather than alienating him from British society enabled him to appreciate its virtues.
The Islamist is first and foremost a riveting personal narrative, but it also carries a powerful and - for some - unfashionable message. Particularly among the new army of evangelical atheists, there will be those who see his story as another proof of the evils of faith schools and of religion in general. Yet Husain did not finally sever his links with Islamism by becoming a militant atheist and converting to an Enlightenment faith in humanity - as secular fundamentalists urge. He did so by rediscovering what he describes as 'classical, traditional Islam', which includes Sufi mysticism. At the same time as he rejected the pathological hostility of Islamists to the West he returned to a tradition that had not been deformed by Western political religion. Islamism is a real threat to peace and freedom in Britain just as it is in Muslim countries. But it is such a threat in virtue of what it has in common with creeds such as Leninism, from which it largely derives. Aside from all its social and geopolitical causes Islamism is at bottom an expression of the pathology of faith, and it will not be cured by another dose of the secular ideology it so faithfully mirrors.
Ed Husain begins one of the chapters of The Islamist with a quotation from Syed Qutb, the chief intellectual founder of Islamism, outlining the purpose of Qutb's most influential book: 'I have written Milestones for this vanguard of Islamists which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be realised.' Qutb's use of the concept of the vanguard reveals one of the paradoxes of political Islam: a movement that is avowedly anti-secular, anti-modern and anti-Western, it has been profoundly shaped by modern Western secular ideologies. The idea of a revolutionary elite dedicated to leading the deluded masses to a perfect society is a borrowing from Lenin and the Jacobins rather than anything derived from Islamic theology, and - though the fact is rarely noted - the type of terrorism with which Islamist movements are most often identified originates not in the twelfth-century Assassins but with a present-day Leninist party. Suicide bombing is a technique that was pioneered and developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist organisation that until the Iraq war had committed more such attacks than any other single group. For all its talk of reviving a mediaeval caliphate, Islamism owes large debts to the European revolutionary tradition, and despite its tabloid description as Islamo-fascism radical Islam is better described as Islamo-Leninism.
Nearly all media commentary accepts Islamism at face value and endorses its self-image as the mortal enemy of the modern West. In contrast, Ed Husain, who has the penetrating insight of a former insider, is clear that this is the opposite of the truth. The idea of a pure Islamic state, he writes, is 'not the continuation of a political entity set up by the Prophet, maintained by the caliphs down the ages (however debatable)'. Rather, it is a response to secular modernity. It is striking how much Islamists have taken from Western thinkers who rejected traditional religions in order to promote surrogate political faiths. Husain shows how Taqi Nabhani, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who left to found the more radical Islamist organisation Hizb-ut Tahrir that Husain joined in his late teens, was much influenced by Hegel and Marx, while Nabhani's contempt for liberal democracy echoed that of Rousseau. 'Nabhani's ideas', Husain concludes, 'were not innovatory Muslim thinking but wholly derived from European political thought.' He might have examined other, more contemporary examples: for example, Ali Sharati, the predecessor of Ayatollah Khomeini as leader of Iranian Islamists in exile during the reign of the Shah, took his conception of martyrdom as a type of chosen death from Martin Heidegger, who for a time saw himself as the philosopher of the Third Reich. Rather than recovering Islamic tradition Islamist thinking has been shaped by the Western ideologues who - whether they realised it or not - supplied the intellectual armoury of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
A uniquely well-informed guide to the netherworld of British Islamism, Husain illuminates its many similarities with the Western-inspired revolutionary movements that wreaked such havoc in the twentieth century.
All the telltale signs of totalitarian thinking were present in the Islamists with whom he worked. They believed Zionist agents staffed the management of Tower Hamlets College where Husain moved to do his A levels after beginning his drift to Islamism at Stepney Green, an all-Muslim boys' school. In the prayer room at Tower Hamlets there was talk of a 'gay-Jewish conspiracy' to undermine Islamist efforts. Husain was inducted into a culture of secrecy - familiar to anyone who knows the workings of communist and Trotskyist parties - which aimed at penetrating other organisations (including George Galloway's Respect party) and using them as front organisations. Like movements of the far left in the past the Islamists were riddled with bitter internal conflicts. But in the eyes of the world they struggled to maintain a united front, and as Husain observes they did have one thing in common: 'we all despised traditional Islam'. Far from being an attempt to return to mediaeval conditions, Islamism is a prototypically modern ideology. A by-product of the dislocations of globalisation, it aspires to a new universal identity based on rejection of the past.
For Husain, during his period as a part of the self-styled vanguard of radical Islam, rejecting the past meant repudiating his family, and The Islamist is as much a memoir of personal struggle and inner growth as it is a report on a new type of extremism. Rebelling against his father (a pious Muslim appalled by his son's attachment to radical Islam), Husain came to see the easy-going pluralism of Britain today as a form of decadence. Under the influence first of a school textbook that emphasised Islam's incompatibility with secular politics and then of a friend with links with the radical East London mosque, he began to view himself as a jihadist committed to the violent overthrow of Western governments. It was as much the cruelty as the unreality of this vision that triggered Husain's disillusionment. Traumatised by the murder of a Christian fellow student and horrified by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he explored the subtle spirituality of the Sufi mystical tradition. Coming into contact with more scholarly and orthodox Islamic thinkers, he found an incomparably more humane version of his religion than that promoted by Islamists. From his confusion - which he recounts with fearless candour - he achieved a sense of spiritual purpose, which rather than alienating him from British society enabled him to appreciate its virtues.
The Islamist is first and foremost a riveting personal narrative, but it also carries a powerful and - for some - unfashionable message. Particularly among the new army of evangelical atheists, there will be those who see his story as another proof of the evils of faith schools and of religion in general. Yet Husain did not finally sever his links with Islamism by becoming a militant atheist and converting to an Enlightenment faith in humanity - as secular fundamentalists urge. He did so by rediscovering what he describes as 'classical, traditional Islam', which includes Sufi mysticism. At the same time as he rejected the pathological hostility of Islamists to the West he returned to a tradition that had not been deformed by Western political religion. Islamism is a real threat to peace and freedom in Britain just as it is in Muslim countries. But it is such a threat in virtue of what it has in common with creeds such as Leninism, from which it largely derives. Aside from all its social and geopolitical causes Islamism is at bottom an expression of the pathology of faith, and it will not be cured by another dose of the secular ideology it so faithfully mirrors.
On Suicide Bombers.
The New Statesman, 12 September 2005
Until very recently, most suicide bombers were secular in origin. The techniques of suicide bombing were first developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group operating in Sri Lanka that recruits mainly from the island's Hindu population, but which - like Marxist-Leninist parties everywhere - has always been intensely hostile to religion. Until 2003, the Tigers were responsible for more suicide bombings than any other single organisation in the world, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Communists and socialists were responsible for most of the suicide bombings that occurred in Lebanon in the early 1980s, forcing the withdrawal of US and French forces. More than a third of the suicide bombings committed by Muslims between 1980 and 2003 were the work of members of secular groups such as the Kurdistan Workers' Party. The situation changed with the invasion of Iraq. Until that time suicide bombing had been unknown in that country. Since then, there have been more suicide bombings in Iraq than in any other part of the world, many of them carried out by Islamists. Yet their principal objective is to drive US and allied forces out of the country, a goal shared by Ba'athist forces left over from Saddam Hussein's secularist regime.
The practice of suicide bombing originated in secular movements with specific political goals, and even where it attracts Islamist militants it is employed chiefly to advance a definite political agenda. This is the conclusion of Robert Pape's recent book Dying to Win: the strategic logic of suicide terrorism, the most rigorous empirical study of the phenomenon to date. Pape argues that suicide bombing is a rational strategy. It has no essential connection with religion. Viewed as part of what military theorists call asymmetric conflict - the struggle of the weak against the strong - suicide bombing is a cheap, highly focused and devastatingly effective technique of warfare. It worked in Lebanon, and it seems to be working in Iraq.
Pape's analysis does an enormous service in showing that what many view as the most senseless behaviour can be understood in rational terms, but that terrorism - even suicide terrorism - is not a simple phenomenon. People take part in it for a variety of reasons, and thinking of suicide bombing solely as a technique of armed struggle risks missing its role in giving meaning to the lives of the bombers. Becoming a suicide bomber may be a strategic decision in Baghdad, but the disoriented young men who carried out the 7 July attacks in London seem to have had no clear objectives, just an overwhelming sense of alienation from society. For them, becoming suicide bombers may have been a refuge from anomie, the feeling of purposelessness that has often fuelled the growth of cults.
In Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott seeks to uncover the motives of the 11 September 2001 hijackers. Who were they, how did they come together and - above all - why did they do what they did? McDermott aims to answer these questions by giving as full an account of the events leading up to the attacks as can be pieced together from the sources currently available. The result of his efforts, involving years of investigation using sources from all over the world, is a powerful narrative that presents the most convincing picture of the 9/11 hijackers to date.
In the media, terrorists are often portrayed as dysfunctional human beings, but McDermott demonstrates that there is no distinctive terrorist psychological profile. The hijackers had very different personalities, and most were remarkable for their ordinariness. Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, was an anxious and puritanical individual, but the pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, who seemed strict and withdrawn when he first arrived in Germany, soon emerged as an "easygoing, robust, hail-fellow-well-met young man who loved to sing and laugh". Ziad al-Jarrah (who piloted the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania) was a handsome young man from a thoroughly secularised middle-class family. He married a lively Turkish student with whom he seems to have been, for a time, genuinely happy. The pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour, was a "meek and quiet" person who worked hard to get his flying licence but found difficulty getting a job, and spent a lot of time surfing the internet.
These are not the demoniacal psychopaths of media legend, but average types, with an unexceptional range of traits and problems, yet they ended up mounting an attack that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people. As McDermott shows in a meticulous reconstruction, their involvement in terrorism was not the result of a single decision but the end point of a long period of drift. Ziad al-Jarrah came from a secular Muslim background, but along with a number of others who turned to terrorism, he converted to a cultish version of Islam in Hamburg. No doubt opposition to western policies was a crucial factor in this conversion, but so were the psychological benefits the converts gained. McDermott writes that they "chose not simply a new mosque or religious doctrine but an entry to a new way of life, the acquisition of a new world-view, in fact, of a new world". For these men, becoming jihadists - not in the sense in which jihad refers to the believer's struggle for his own soul, but rather that in which it enjoins incessant struggle against unbelievers - resolved a chronic existential crisis. From being drifters, they became warriors.
It is natural to look for a rational explanation of terrorism. How else can we hope to control it? But human behaviour is often irrational, and suicide bombing does not always have well-defined political ends. Sometimes it is more like behaviour of the kind that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana, where more than 900 people committed mass suicide in 1978. History is full of such apocalyptic movements, not all of them religious: many Nazis and communists were ready to kill and die in order to destroy the existing order of things. By doing so, they injected a kind of meaning into their lives, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that it is the same need that drives some suicide bombers.
Terrorism of this apocalyptic variety cannot spread unless there is a wider sense of grievance against the world, but it is not the work of ice-cold strategists. The ends it serves are inchoate, and it can be extremely amateurish in execution. McDermott notes that Ramzi Yousef - the "terrorist mastermind", also known as Abdul Basit Karim, who organised the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center - was so casual and disorganised in his methods that a CIA official described him as an "ad hoc terrorist". Yousef had only the vaguest and most unrealistic political demands, and the Liberation Army he claimed to represent was a figment of his imagination. Yet his attack killed six people and injured a thousand more. Ad hoc terrorism is a serious business, but it does not require a special sort of person to engage in it. With the right background of grievance and alienation, anyone can join in.
Until very recently, most suicide bombers were secular in origin. The techniques of suicide bombing were first developed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group operating in Sri Lanka that recruits mainly from the island's Hindu population, but which - like Marxist-Leninist parties everywhere - has always been intensely hostile to religion. Until 2003, the Tigers were responsible for more suicide bombings than any other single organisation in the world, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Communists and socialists were responsible for most of the suicide bombings that occurred in Lebanon in the early 1980s, forcing the withdrawal of US and French forces. More than a third of the suicide bombings committed by Muslims between 1980 and 2003 were the work of members of secular groups such as the Kurdistan Workers' Party. The situation changed with the invasion of Iraq. Until that time suicide bombing had been unknown in that country. Since then, there have been more suicide bombings in Iraq than in any other part of the world, many of them carried out by Islamists. Yet their principal objective is to drive US and allied forces out of the country, a goal shared by Ba'athist forces left over from Saddam Hussein's secularist regime.
The practice of suicide bombing originated in secular movements with specific political goals, and even where it attracts Islamist militants it is employed chiefly to advance a definite political agenda. This is the conclusion of Robert Pape's recent book Dying to Win: the strategic logic of suicide terrorism, the most rigorous empirical study of the phenomenon to date. Pape argues that suicide bombing is a rational strategy. It has no essential connection with religion. Viewed as part of what military theorists call asymmetric conflict - the struggle of the weak against the strong - suicide bombing is a cheap, highly focused and devastatingly effective technique of warfare. It worked in Lebanon, and it seems to be working in Iraq.
Pape's analysis does an enormous service in showing that what many view as the most senseless behaviour can be understood in rational terms, but that terrorism - even suicide terrorism - is not a simple phenomenon. People take part in it for a variety of reasons, and thinking of suicide bombing solely as a technique of armed struggle risks missing its role in giving meaning to the lives of the bombers. Becoming a suicide bomber may be a strategic decision in Baghdad, but the disoriented young men who carried out the 7 July attacks in London seem to have had no clear objectives, just an overwhelming sense of alienation from society. For them, becoming suicide bombers may have been a refuge from anomie, the feeling of purposelessness that has often fuelled the growth of cults.
In Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott seeks to uncover the motives of the 11 September 2001 hijackers. Who were they, how did they come together and - above all - why did they do what they did? McDermott aims to answer these questions by giving as full an account of the events leading up to the attacks as can be pieced together from the sources currently available. The result of his efforts, involving years of investigation using sources from all over the world, is a powerful narrative that presents the most convincing picture of the 9/11 hijackers to date.
In the media, terrorists are often portrayed as dysfunctional human beings, but McDermott demonstrates that there is no distinctive terrorist psychological profile. The hijackers had very different personalities, and most were remarkable for their ordinariness. Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, was an anxious and puritanical individual, but the pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, who seemed strict and withdrawn when he first arrived in Germany, soon emerged as an "easygoing, robust, hail-fellow-well-met young man who loved to sing and laugh". Ziad al-Jarrah (who piloted the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania) was a handsome young man from a thoroughly secularised middle-class family. He married a lively Turkish student with whom he seems to have been, for a time, genuinely happy. The pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, Hani Hanjour, was a "meek and quiet" person who worked hard to get his flying licence but found difficulty getting a job, and spent a lot of time surfing the internet.
These are not the demoniacal psychopaths of media legend, but average types, with an unexceptional range of traits and problems, yet they ended up mounting an attack that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people. As McDermott shows in a meticulous reconstruction, their involvement in terrorism was not the result of a single decision but the end point of a long period of drift. Ziad al-Jarrah came from a secular Muslim background, but along with a number of others who turned to terrorism, he converted to a cultish version of Islam in Hamburg. No doubt opposition to western policies was a crucial factor in this conversion, but so were the psychological benefits the converts gained. McDermott writes that they "chose not simply a new mosque or religious doctrine but an entry to a new way of life, the acquisition of a new world-view, in fact, of a new world". For these men, becoming jihadists - not in the sense in which jihad refers to the believer's struggle for his own soul, but rather that in which it enjoins incessant struggle against unbelievers - resolved a chronic existential crisis. From being drifters, they became warriors.
It is natural to look for a rational explanation of terrorism. How else can we hope to control it? But human behaviour is often irrational, and suicide bombing does not always have well-defined political ends. Sometimes it is more like behaviour of the kind that occurred in Jonestown, Guyana, where more than 900 people committed mass suicide in 1978. History is full of such apocalyptic movements, not all of them religious: many Nazis and communists were ready to kill and die in order to destroy the existing order of things. By doing so, they injected a kind of meaning into their lives, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that it is the same need that drives some suicide bombers.
Terrorism of this apocalyptic variety cannot spread unless there is a wider sense of grievance against the world, but it is not the work of ice-cold strategists. The ends it serves are inchoate, and it can be extremely amateurish in execution. McDermott notes that Ramzi Yousef - the "terrorist mastermind", also known as Abdul Basit Karim, who organised the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center - was so casual and disorganised in his methods that a CIA official described him as an "ad hoc terrorist". Yousef had only the vaguest and most unrealistic political demands, and the Liberation Army he claimed to represent was a figment of his imagination. Yet his attack killed six people and injured a thousand more. Ad hoc terrorism is a serious business, but it does not require a special sort of person to engage in it. With the right background of grievance and alienation, anyone can join in.
Atheists are Irrational too
The New Statesman, 20 March 2006.
John Gray reviews two books by proselytising atheists.
Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon. Daniel C Dennett.
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: the evolutionary origins of belief. Lewis Wolpert
In an interview he gave not long before he died, P G Wodehouse was asked whether he had any religious beliefs. His reply - "It's frightfully hard to say" - has always seemed to me to display an insight into the ambiguities of belief that is commonly lacking when philosophers talk about religion. Typically, philosophers take it for granted that religions are systems of belief, and condemn them for failing to meet standards of proof that are applied in other areas of human life, above all in science. Contemporary philosophy has not advanced very far beyond the views of the late-Victorian anthropologist J G Frazer, who, in his once hugely influential study of myth, The Golden Bough (1890), portrayed religion as a form of magical thinking.
In the spirit of 19th-century positivism, Frazer assumed that myths were primitive scientific theories - a highly reductive view that later cultural anthropologists have abandoned. Yet the idea of religion as a magical belief system remains the default position of most contemporary philosophers, and it is evident on every page of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell.
Dennett is best known for his militant atheism, and, like other evangelists of unbelief, he views the world through the conceptual grid of western monotheism. His view of religion itself proves this; he defines it as a social system "whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought". This may be commonplace as a perception of religion, but it is also highly parochial. One cannot make a sharp distinction between natural processes and supernatural agents unless one presupposes a view of the world something like that presented in the biblical creation story, and the distinction is not found in most of the world's religions. For example, in animism - which must rank as the oldest and most universal religion - spirits are seen as part of the natural world.
More fundamentally, it is a mistake to assume that belief is the core of religion. This may seem self-evident to many philosophers, but in fact belief is not very important in most religions. Even within Christianity there are traditions, such as Eastern Orthodoxy, in which it has never been central. For the majority of humankind, religion has always been about practice rather than belief. In fixating on the belief-content of religion, Dennett emulates Christianity at its most rationalistic and dogmatic. Pascal knew better, and understood that faith is not so much the basis of the religious life as a derivative from it. Dennett mocks those who say that life without faith has no meaning as "believers in belief". Yet he displays a zealous faith in unbelief that is far more inimical to doubt, and there is more scepticism in a single line of the Pensees than in the whole of Dennett's leaden tome.
Breaking the Spell approaches its subject with a relentless, simple-minded cleverness that precludes anything like profundity, and much of it seems designed to demonstrate the author's intellectual ingenuity rather than to advance the reader's understanding. (For example, there is a curious appendix on Kim Philby in which Dennett maintains that Philby's career is a real-life instance of W V Quine's principle of radical indeterminacy.) When Dennett delivers on the promise of the book - a naturalistic explanation of religion - the result is embarrassingly naive. The explanation turns out to be a variation on Richard Dawkins's theory of memes - units of information whose competition somehow explains the development of thought. One problem with memes is that, unlike genes, they are not identifiable physical structures. Ideas are elusive things - think of the ways in which artistic styles emerge and develop. It shows a sorry lack of cultural understanding to imagine that the baroque, say, can be reduced to a few simple structures.
In a postscript, Dennett defends memes against the criticism that they lack the clear identity of genes, but the real objection is that it is not a theory at all, as it fails to identify anything like a mechanism of cultural evolution. This is hardly surprising, given that there is nothing in the history of ideas that resembles natural selection in biology. Some ideas seem to be more contagious than others, but those which prevail are often the ones that have power on their side. Pagan religion did not disappear from the ancient world because it lost out in competition with non-pagan memes but because, following the conversion of Constantine, it was repressed. Like other evolutionist ideologies, the theory of memes passes over the role of power in history.
The appeal of the theory is that it reduces the fertile chaos of human thought to objects that can be manipulated, and seems to open up the prospect of memetic engineering - consciously directing the intellectual evolution of the species by disseminating some memes and discouraging others. In previous books Dennett has hinted that human evolution could be directed in this way, with his own ideas helping to guide the process, but happily the possibilities of memetic engineering are rather limited. Ideas can be suppressed, but they cannot be controlled. They have too many unexpected consequences, and always slip out of the hands of their authors. Like history as a whole, the history of ideas will always be partly a matter of chance. An attempt to defeat this contingency, the theory of memes is at bottom an expression of magical thinking and as remote from genuine science as "intelligent design".
Unlike Dennett, Lewis Wolpert writes as a practising scientist, and Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast is a robust defence of materialism that contains much interesting information. Relying heavily on evidence from the advancing science of evolutionary psychology, Wolpert interprets religion as a type of adaptive behaviour in which our beliefs are shaped by our practical needs. Like Dennett, he seems ignorant of the vast range of religious traditions in which belief is peripheral. Again, he thinks of religion as having to do with supernatural phenomena, writing naively: "Religion is concerned with the supernatural, and this involves forces and causes beyond our normal experience of nature." After a long discussion which shows that he sees it in Frazer-like terms as the prototype of irrationality, Wolpert concludes that religion is "deeply rooted in our biology".
I am sure he is right, but it is not supernatural belief that is hard-wired in humans: it is the need for myth, and it fuels secular belief as much as traditional religion. The idea that humanity is moving to a higher state of intellectual development is pervasive in modern culture, but belied by the facts. In the 1930s, many secular thinkers believed a new type of human being was emerging in the Soviet Union, and today there are many who believe that the advance of science will rid the world of irrationality.
This humanist faith in progress is a myth no different in kind from the stories that are repeated in churches and temples. Myths are not primitive scientific theories that belong in the infancy of the species. They are symbolic narratives that give meaning to the lives of those who accept them. The chief difference between religious and secular believers is that, while the former have long known their myths to be extremely questionable, the latter imagine their own to be literally true.
Breaking the Spell and Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast present themselves as examples of freethinking. Actually they are secular sermons, which will be of interest chiefly to anxious humanists seeking to boost their sagging faith. If it is the liberating air of sceptical doubt you want, you are better off reading Pascal - or P G Wodehouse.
John Gray reviews two books by proselytising atheists.
Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomenon. Daniel C Dennett.
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: the evolutionary origins of belief. Lewis Wolpert
In an interview he gave not long before he died, P G Wodehouse was asked whether he had any religious beliefs. His reply - "It's frightfully hard to say" - has always seemed to me to display an insight into the ambiguities of belief that is commonly lacking when philosophers talk about religion. Typically, philosophers take it for granted that religions are systems of belief, and condemn them for failing to meet standards of proof that are applied in other areas of human life, above all in science. Contemporary philosophy has not advanced very far beyond the views of the late-Victorian anthropologist J G Frazer, who, in his once hugely influential study of myth, The Golden Bough (1890), portrayed religion as a form of magical thinking.
In the spirit of 19th-century positivism, Frazer assumed that myths were primitive scientific theories - a highly reductive view that later cultural anthropologists have abandoned. Yet the idea of religion as a magical belief system remains the default position of most contemporary philosophers, and it is evident on every page of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell.
Dennett is best known for his militant atheism, and, like other evangelists of unbelief, he views the world through the conceptual grid of western monotheism. His view of religion itself proves this; he defines it as a social system "whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought". This may be commonplace as a perception of religion, but it is also highly parochial. One cannot make a sharp distinction between natural processes and supernatural agents unless one presupposes a view of the world something like that presented in the biblical creation story, and the distinction is not found in most of the world's religions. For example, in animism - which must rank as the oldest and most universal religion - spirits are seen as part of the natural world.
More fundamentally, it is a mistake to assume that belief is the core of religion. This may seem self-evident to many philosophers, but in fact belief is not very important in most religions. Even within Christianity there are traditions, such as Eastern Orthodoxy, in which it has never been central. For the majority of humankind, religion has always been about practice rather than belief. In fixating on the belief-content of religion, Dennett emulates Christianity at its most rationalistic and dogmatic. Pascal knew better, and understood that faith is not so much the basis of the religious life as a derivative from it. Dennett mocks those who say that life without faith has no meaning as "believers in belief". Yet he displays a zealous faith in unbelief that is far more inimical to doubt, and there is more scepticism in a single line of the Pensees than in the whole of Dennett's leaden tome.
Breaking the Spell approaches its subject with a relentless, simple-minded cleverness that precludes anything like profundity, and much of it seems designed to demonstrate the author's intellectual ingenuity rather than to advance the reader's understanding. (For example, there is a curious appendix on Kim Philby in which Dennett maintains that Philby's career is a real-life instance of W V Quine's principle of radical indeterminacy.) When Dennett delivers on the promise of the book - a naturalistic explanation of religion - the result is embarrassingly naive. The explanation turns out to be a variation on Richard Dawkins's theory of memes - units of information whose competition somehow explains the development of thought. One problem with memes is that, unlike genes, they are not identifiable physical structures. Ideas are elusive things - think of the ways in which artistic styles emerge and develop. It shows a sorry lack of cultural understanding to imagine that the baroque, say, can be reduced to a few simple structures.
In a postscript, Dennett defends memes against the criticism that they lack the clear identity of genes, but the real objection is that it is not a theory at all, as it fails to identify anything like a mechanism of cultural evolution. This is hardly surprising, given that there is nothing in the history of ideas that resembles natural selection in biology. Some ideas seem to be more contagious than others, but those which prevail are often the ones that have power on their side. Pagan religion did not disappear from the ancient world because it lost out in competition with non-pagan memes but because, following the conversion of Constantine, it was repressed. Like other evolutionist ideologies, the theory of memes passes over the role of power in history.
The appeal of the theory is that it reduces the fertile chaos of human thought to objects that can be manipulated, and seems to open up the prospect of memetic engineering - consciously directing the intellectual evolution of the species by disseminating some memes and discouraging others. In previous books Dennett has hinted that human evolution could be directed in this way, with his own ideas helping to guide the process, but happily the possibilities of memetic engineering are rather limited. Ideas can be suppressed, but they cannot be controlled. They have too many unexpected consequences, and always slip out of the hands of their authors. Like history as a whole, the history of ideas will always be partly a matter of chance. An attempt to defeat this contingency, the theory of memes is at bottom an expression of magical thinking and as remote from genuine science as "intelligent design".
Unlike Dennett, Lewis Wolpert writes as a practising scientist, and Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast is a robust defence of materialism that contains much interesting information. Relying heavily on evidence from the advancing science of evolutionary psychology, Wolpert interprets religion as a type of adaptive behaviour in which our beliefs are shaped by our practical needs. Like Dennett, he seems ignorant of the vast range of religious traditions in which belief is peripheral. Again, he thinks of religion as having to do with supernatural phenomena, writing naively: "Religion is concerned with the supernatural, and this involves forces and causes beyond our normal experience of nature." After a long discussion which shows that he sees it in Frazer-like terms as the prototype of irrationality, Wolpert concludes that religion is "deeply rooted in our biology".
I am sure he is right, but it is not supernatural belief that is hard-wired in humans: it is the need for myth, and it fuels secular belief as much as traditional religion. The idea that humanity is moving to a higher state of intellectual development is pervasive in modern culture, but belied by the facts. In the 1930s, many secular thinkers believed a new type of human being was emerging in the Soviet Union, and today there are many who believe that the advance of science will rid the world of irrationality.
This humanist faith in progress is a myth no different in kind from the stories that are repeated in churches and temples. Myths are not primitive scientific theories that belong in the infancy of the species. They are symbolic narratives that give meaning to the lives of those who accept them. The chief difference between religious and secular believers is that, while the former have long known their myths to be extremely questionable, the latter imagine their own to be literally true.
Breaking the Spell and Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast present themselves as examples of freethinking. Actually they are secular sermons, which will be of interest chiefly to anxious humanists seeking to boost their sagging faith. If it is the liberating air of sceptical doubt you want, you are better off reading Pascal - or P G Wodehouse.
John Gray reviews George Monbiot's Heat
The New Statesman, 18 September 2006
Heat: how to stop the planet burning. George Monbiot.
It may be too late to do anything about global warming. So, rather than pretending it can be stopped, shouldn't we concentrate on coping with the disruption?
The belief that human beings are masters of the planet dies hard. I cannot count the number of times I have heard environmentalists warning that we have only ten, 20 or 30 years in which we can prevent disaster. The implication is that, provided we apply sufficient intelligence and political will, we can arrest the dangerous environmental changes that are under way - as if global warming weren't a physical process that does not wait on humans. The assumption that we can stop it becomes less scientifically tenable by the day, and is in fact not much more than a green version of anthropocentrism.
In Heat, the environmental activist and thinker George Monbiot tries to bring the debate about climate change closer to known facts and reasonable conjecture, avoiding the woolly thinking that is so prevalent on the subject. The result is a book that anyone who thinks they know what should be done about global warming must read. One virtue of Monbiot's consistently heretical inquiry is that he recognises the magnitude of the danger: if present trends continue, the result could be a climate shift analogous to that which wiped out much of the world's biodiversity when the Permian era came to an abrupt end roughly 250 million years ago. Even if the change turns out to be much less dramatic, we can forget about carrying on with business as usual.
Monbiot clears the mind of a great deal of cant. As he shows, many fashionable environmental nostrums are either pointless or harmful in their effects. Micro wind-turbines are not worth the time and money spent on them: Britain needs a larger national grid, not a smaller one. Biofuels are a particularly dangerous panacea. To reduce our dependence on fossil fuels significantly, we would need to plant them on a vast scale, further reducing the world's shrinking inheritance of land and water. A large part of the present crisis is a result of the agricultural destruction of wilderness, which plays a vital role in maintaining global climate. Between 1985 and 200o, production of palm oil - currently the cheapest source of biofuel - accounted for nearly 90 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia. A large-scale shift to biofuels - as advocated by George W Bush, for example - could have a comparable effect worldwide, increasing the harm done by farming while diminishing food production. The result would damage human welfare and the biosphere as a whole. As Monbiot notes: "Biofuel production is a formula not only for humanitarian disaster but also for environmental catastrophe."
This is not the only example of environment-alist policies that can prove to be self-defeating. It is a pity Monbiot says nothing about the phenomenon of global dimming. As well as greenhouse gases, humans are releasing aerosol particles into the atmosphere through industry and air travel. These are pollutants, but one of their effects is to reflect sunlight back into space - dimming the sky and at the same time cooling the planet. Reducing this kind of pollution - by discouraging flying, for instance, as Monbiot proposes - would make the world cleaner; it would also accelerate global warming.
If so many of the policies touted by environmentalists are counter-productive, how are we to stop the planet burning? Monbiot allows some scope for technical fixes - he is optimistic that new, low-cost methods of electricity transmission can be developed, for example - but the implication of his analysis is that reducing global emissions depends largely on changing the way we live. Since he accepts that emissions need to be cut by around 90 per cent over the next 30 years, the task is plainly a formidable one, and he struggles valiantly to show how this could be done. Some system of carbon rationing must be devised, he believes, and the economy be transformed by redesigning the public transport system, replacing out-of-town shopping centres by a system of warehouses and deliveries, and constructing more energy-efficient homes.
It is hard to judge whether this programme would have the desired effect, but in a sense the question is immaterial. Monbiot is more realistic than most greens. Yet, like them, he overlooks some crucial facts. Britain's emissions of greenhouse gases make up a tiny percentage of emissions worldwide, and while reducing them by 90 per cent might generate a pleasing sensation of virtue, it would have a negligible impact on climate change. Monbiot's programme would have to be implemented globally to be feasible at all, and applied most vigorously in the countries that are the largest sources of emissions: China, India and the United States. However, the first two countries cannot afford to reduce their emissions by anything like the necessary amounts, and a majority of the population in the third country will not accept the changes in lifestyle that a 90 per cent reduction demands.
What of the rest of the world? Does Monbiot seriously believe that oil-rich Russia and resurgent Iran are going to accept policies that penalise fossil-fuel production merely to avert a catastrophic alteration in the world's climate? Or that western countries are likely to hold off from developing Canadian tar sands - which could potentially supply more energy than Saudi Arabia, but at the cost of producing far more greenhouse gases - just because going ahead could set the planet on fire?
However sensible it may be in parts, there is a profound unreality surrounding the programme of action Monbiot proposes. "Curtailing climate change must be the project we put before all others," he writes. But who are "we", exactly? Humanity at large is ridden with intractable conflicts, and delusional bigots rule its most powerful state. An American air attack on Iran would produce an oil shock greater than any that has yet occurred, triggering the search for other sources of energy - many of them dirtier than oil. Moreover, continuing growth in human numbers (a crucial factor in the worsening en vironmental situation that Monbiot mentions only once in the book, giving it less than a single complete sentence) is increasing resource scarcity around the world. It is always claimed that the human environmental impact is a matter of per capita resource rather than sheer numbers, but there is an upper limit. By conservative estimates, there will be some two billion more human beings on the planet 50 years from now. Coming decades are far more likely to bring intensifying resource wars than concerted action against climate change.
There is, in fact, not the remotest prospect of the world adopting anything like Monbiot's programme, but once again this may not matter. As he recognises, it may already be too late: "Because the carbon released now stays in the atmosphere for some 200 years and causes climate change many years into the future, there is perhaps a 30 per cent chance that we have already blown it." It is a sobering admission, from which Monbiot immediately retreats. "I am writing this book in a spirit of optimism," he declares, "so I refuse to believe it."
Here and throughout the book, Monbiot is torn between the angry passion of the activist and the stoic lucidity of the analyst. Like nearly all environmentalists, he believes we would lose nothing by moving towards a more sustainable way of life. But is this actually the case? If there is a 30 per cent chance that the ground on which we are standing is going to give way whatever we do, what is the point in focusing all our energies on trying to make our position more sustainable? Growing numbers of scientists believe the probability of highly disruptive climate change occurring during the present century may be a good deal higher than 30 per cent. If this is so, will we not be better employed preparing to cope with the disruption than by pretending that it can still be stopped?
There are some useful things that can be done. In Britain, we can increase flood defences against rising sea levels, secure our electricity supplies by commissioning replacements for existing nuclear power stations, develop new technologies for cleaner coal and create wildlife corridors to help other species adapt. But first we have to accept that we cannot control the process of climate change we have set in motion. Unfortunately this requires an insight into the limits of human power that is beyond most environmentalists. Like the rest of humankind, they cannot bear very much reality.
Heat: how to stop the planet burning. George Monbiot.
It may be too late to do anything about global warming. So, rather than pretending it can be stopped, shouldn't we concentrate on coping with the disruption?
The belief that human beings are masters of the planet dies hard. I cannot count the number of times I have heard environmentalists warning that we have only ten, 20 or 30 years in which we can prevent disaster. The implication is that, provided we apply sufficient intelligence and political will, we can arrest the dangerous environmental changes that are under way - as if global warming weren't a physical process that does not wait on humans. The assumption that we can stop it becomes less scientifically tenable by the day, and is in fact not much more than a green version of anthropocentrism.
In Heat, the environmental activist and thinker George Monbiot tries to bring the debate about climate change closer to known facts and reasonable conjecture, avoiding the woolly thinking that is so prevalent on the subject. The result is a book that anyone who thinks they know what should be done about global warming must read. One virtue of Monbiot's consistently heretical inquiry is that he recognises the magnitude of the danger: if present trends continue, the result could be a climate shift analogous to that which wiped out much of the world's biodiversity when the Permian era came to an abrupt end roughly 250 million years ago. Even if the change turns out to be much less dramatic, we can forget about carrying on with business as usual.
Monbiot clears the mind of a great deal of cant. As he shows, many fashionable environmental nostrums are either pointless or harmful in their effects. Micro wind-turbines are not worth the time and money spent on them: Britain needs a larger national grid, not a smaller one. Biofuels are a particularly dangerous panacea. To reduce our dependence on fossil fuels significantly, we would need to plant them on a vast scale, further reducing the world's shrinking inheritance of land and water. A large part of the present crisis is a result of the agricultural destruction of wilderness, which plays a vital role in maintaining global climate. Between 1985 and 200o, production of palm oil - currently the cheapest source of biofuel - accounted for nearly 90 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia. A large-scale shift to biofuels - as advocated by George W Bush, for example - could have a comparable effect worldwide, increasing the harm done by farming while diminishing food production. The result would damage human welfare and the biosphere as a whole. As Monbiot notes: "Biofuel production is a formula not only for humanitarian disaster but also for environmental catastrophe."
This is not the only example of environment-alist policies that can prove to be self-defeating. It is a pity Monbiot says nothing about the phenomenon of global dimming. As well as greenhouse gases, humans are releasing aerosol particles into the atmosphere through industry and air travel. These are pollutants, but one of their effects is to reflect sunlight back into space - dimming the sky and at the same time cooling the planet. Reducing this kind of pollution - by discouraging flying, for instance, as Monbiot proposes - would make the world cleaner; it would also accelerate global warming.
If so many of the policies touted by environmentalists are counter-productive, how are we to stop the planet burning? Monbiot allows some scope for technical fixes - he is optimistic that new, low-cost methods of electricity transmission can be developed, for example - but the implication of his analysis is that reducing global emissions depends largely on changing the way we live. Since he accepts that emissions need to be cut by around 90 per cent over the next 30 years, the task is plainly a formidable one, and he struggles valiantly to show how this could be done. Some system of carbon rationing must be devised, he believes, and the economy be transformed by redesigning the public transport system, replacing out-of-town shopping centres by a system of warehouses and deliveries, and constructing more energy-efficient homes.
It is hard to judge whether this programme would have the desired effect, but in a sense the question is immaterial. Monbiot is more realistic than most greens. Yet, like them, he overlooks some crucial facts. Britain's emissions of greenhouse gases make up a tiny percentage of emissions worldwide, and while reducing them by 90 per cent might generate a pleasing sensation of virtue, it would have a negligible impact on climate change. Monbiot's programme would have to be implemented globally to be feasible at all, and applied most vigorously in the countries that are the largest sources of emissions: China, India and the United States. However, the first two countries cannot afford to reduce their emissions by anything like the necessary amounts, and a majority of the population in the third country will not accept the changes in lifestyle that a 90 per cent reduction demands.
What of the rest of the world? Does Monbiot seriously believe that oil-rich Russia and resurgent Iran are going to accept policies that penalise fossil-fuel production merely to avert a catastrophic alteration in the world's climate? Or that western countries are likely to hold off from developing Canadian tar sands - which could potentially supply more energy than Saudi Arabia, but at the cost of producing far more greenhouse gases - just because going ahead could set the planet on fire?
However sensible it may be in parts, there is a profound unreality surrounding the programme of action Monbiot proposes. "Curtailing climate change must be the project we put before all others," he writes. But who are "we", exactly? Humanity at large is ridden with intractable conflicts, and delusional bigots rule its most powerful state. An American air attack on Iran would produce an oil shock greater than any that has yet occurred, triggering the search for other sources of energy - many of them dirtier than oil. Moreover, continuing growth in human numbers (a crucial factor in the worsening en vironmental situation that Monbiot mentions only once in the book, giving it less than a single complete sentence) is increasing resource scarcity around the world. It is always claimed that the human environmental impact is a matter of per capita resource rather than sheer numbers, but there is an upper limit. By conservative estimates, there will be some two billion more human beings on the planet 50 years from now. Coming decades are far more likely to bring intensifying resource wars than concerted action against climate change.
There is, in fact, not the remotest prospect of the world adopting anything like Monbiot's programme, but once again this may not matter. As he recognises, it may already be too late: "Because the carbon released now stays in the atmosphere for some 200 years and causes climate change many years into the future, there is perhaps a 30 per cent chance that we have already blown it." It is a sobering admission, from which Monbiot immediately retreats. "I am writing this book in a spirit of optimism," he declares, "so I refuse to believe it."
Here and throughout the book, Monbiot is torn between the angry passion of the activist and the stoic lucidity of the analyst. Like nearly all environmentalists, he believes we would lose nothing by moving towards a more sustainable way of life. But is this actually the case? If there is a 30 per cent chance that the ground on which we are standing is going to give way whatever we do, what is the point in focusing all our energies on trying to make our position more sustainable? Growing numbers of scientists believe the probability of highly disruptive climate change occurring during the present century may be a good deal higher than 30 per cent. If this is so, will we not be better employed preparing to cope with the disruption than by pretending that it can still be stopped?
There are some useful things that can be done. In Britain, we can increase flood defences against rising sea levels, secure our electricity supplies by commissioning replacements for existing nuclear power stations, develop new technologies for cleaner coal and create wildlife corridors to help other species adapt. But first we have to accept that we cannot control the process of climate change we have set in motion. Unfortunately this requires an insight into the limits of human power that is beyond most environmentalists. Like the rest of humankind, they cannot bear very much reality.
Maggie's Gift to Gordon
.The New Statesman, 20 September 2007
History imposed on David Cameron the task of persuading the electorate that Conservatives are at home in 21st-century Britain. William Hague, Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith were at one in supposing that, overlooked or derided by metropolitan opinion, there was a conservative British majority that viewed the society emerging around them with alarm and indignation. In fact, most voters felt at home in liberal Britain, and the Conservatives went on to three successive defeats. Breaking with his predecessors, Cameron decided that unless the Conservatives identified themselves with the nation that Britain has become they were finished as a party of government. By aligning himself with contemporary British values, he posed a challenge to Labour to which Gordon Brown must now respond.
The next general election will take place against the background of a period of profound social change that goes back to the crises of the Seventies. To a considerable extent, 21st-century Britain is an unintended consequence of Margaret Thatcher. It was Thatcher who, accentuating the impact of global forces that no one controls, dismantled the postwar settlement and created the market-driven society we live in today. She believed that by rejuvenating British capitalism she could revive the stolidly bourgeois Britain she had known in the Fifties; but that country was a product of Labour rule, and the upshot of reshaping public institutions on a market model was to create a society of a kind she had never imagined.
In an essay that had a powerful influence on the intellectual fringes of early Thatcherism, Friedrich Hayek distinguished between two rival versions of individualism - a "true", Burkean variety, rooted in tradition, that accepted the constraints of conventional morality and a "false", Romantic version in which personal choice and self-realisation trumped all other values. Hayek believed that a revitalised free market would bring with it a return to "true" individualism.
Instead, it was a version of Romantic individualism that triumphed. As the imperatives of market choice have spread into every area of social life, personal fulfilment and the satisfaction of desire have become the ruling values. Relationships of all kinds have become looser and social structures have become more negotiable and provisional. In many ways this has been a benign process. As a result we are more tolerant of the varieties of family and sexual life, and less pervasively racist, and although we are perceptibly more unequal we are less obsessed with class than in the past. But the country created by freeing up the market is in many respects the antithesis of the one Hayek and Thatcher aimed to restore. If ever there was such a thing as a conservative philosophy, its central values were social cohesion and cultural continuity in a settled form of common life. Yet when it is released from restraint the market works to unsettle established ways of living. So, far from reviving an older Britain, Thatcher wiped away its last traces.
Endemic discontent.
However, if the freewheeling society we have today is Thatcher's creation, her latter-day followers refuse to recognise the fact. The diehards who make up much of the Conservatives' core support despise and reject the nation she un wittingly created. They believe that by ditching Thatcher's inheritance, Cameron has abandoned anything resembling conservatism; but it was Thatcher who destroyed the old social structures - and with them the possibility of a viable conservative project. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Conservative Party itself. The loosening up of hierarchies that occurred in society at large has been reflected in a parallel dissolution of the Tory culture of loyalty. Before Thatcher, Tory leaders could rely on an ethos that elevated loyalty above ideology. After Thatcher, disloyalty and infighting became defining Tory traits, and every party leader was placed permanently on probation. Mistrusted by his party, Cameron is seen as a traitor to conservative values. But the Thatcherites themselves - with their endemic discontent and doctrinal mentality - demonstrate how unreal these values have become. Early this month, the former deputy leader Michael Ancram urged Cameron to "unveil the party's soul" rather than "trashing" its Thatcherite past. If Cameron follows such advice, the Conservatives will be left stranded on the margins of power in a country they have ceased to comprehend.
Whatever his critics may say, Cameron had no alternative but to remodel his party. His strategy of repositioning his party on the liberal centre ground enabled it to become, once again, a contender for power. The trouble is that the model of modernisation he adopted was already obsolete. By the time Cameron adopted Blairite new Labour as his template, Blair had become a buffoonish figure - a would-be global messiah who engineered the worst British foreign policy disaster since Suez. A more experienced politician might have asked himself whether it was wise to pose as Blair's successor. Cameron might have unseated Blair in a general election run-off; but once Blair vanished from the scene, the Tory leader was left looking dated and redundant.
In the Commons, Cameron goaded Blair with the taunt, "You were the future once." Yet, by modelling himself on Blair, Cameron tied himself to the past. Unprepared for the national sigh of relief that greeted Blair's departure, he seems ill-prepared for the very different style of politics that has arrived with Gordon Brown.
Only a new breed of Conservatives, for whom Thatcher was a chapter in the history books rather than a living presence, could have consigned her to the memory hole with such brisk finality. In this, Cameron's limited political experience has been a source of strength, but passing most of his short political life in Blair's shadow has narrowed Cameron's vision. Blair's decade in power was a by-product of unrepeatable historical conditions. He was able to return Labour to power by accepting many of Thatcher's policies because she embodied the interests and values of a crucial part of the electorate that was ready to transfer its allegiance to him.
By the time Blair left office he represented no one, and the same is true of Cameron today. Like Blair, Cameron moves in a smart, moneyed set with tenuous links to the wider society. Aside from the fox-hunting fraternity - promised a free vote on repealing the ban - it is hard to think of any social group whose concerns Cameron has consistently championed. Even his commitment to green issues, which at one point seemed to be voicing widely felt anxieties, sounds contrived and unconvincing. There is no section of today's Britain where his voice resonates with any particular force.
Cameron's patrician background plainly had a role in his most serious error to date. His in souciant dismissal of an institution that was for generations a hugely important part of British education showed how slender is his acquaintance with the choices most people have to face. Unlike most Tory voters, Cameron has always been able to take for granted the option of educating his children privately. Like a junior colonial officer in the declining years of empire, he seems hardly to comprehend the lives of those he has set out to govern. His stumble over grammar schools was more than a minor slip. It disclosed an amateurish quality in his entire operation, and exposed the vulnerability of a political project that lacks any solid base of social support.
Provincial majority.
There is a great opportunity here for Gordon Brown. Linked by overlapping social ties and a common proximity to the London media, Blair and Cameron are alike in their detachment from Britain's provincial majority. This is not the disaffected, reactionary rump invoked by latter-day Thatcherites. It is broadly liberal in outlook, but it demands from government some of the qualities that used to be claimed by Conservatives, such as common sense, competence and a cool head in times of crisis. It has no time for Blairite rants about incessant change, nor for the unending stream of ephemeral initiatives that embodied the Blair regime in practice. By distancing himself so sharply from this style of government, Brown has wounded Cameron at his weakest point.
The shift in the public philosophy of the Conservatives that Cameron initiated seems to have started as a psephological gambit, which recognised that the party could not return to power on the back of its core supporters alone and aimed to capture Liberal Democrat votes in about a hundred key seats. As an electoral strategy it has had mixed results, with Lib Dem voters switching to Labour as well as to Cameron's Conservatives. At the same time, large issues have been left unresolved. At present there are at least two tendencies vying for control among the Con servatives. There are neoliberals such as John Redwood, who urge further large-scale market deregulation and hugely reduced government - a programme whose effect would be to impose another revolutionary shake-up on society, and which for that reason has no prospect of being implemented by any government in the fore seeable future.
In contrast there are the neoconservatives, who accept that governments are bound to continue to play a significant role in social welfare and regulating the economy. What these tendencies have in common is that neither can claim to be distinctively conservative - the neoliberals owe more to Hayek (who always denied being a conservative) than they do to Burke, while neoconservatism originated on the American far left. Both are progressive ideologies, which differ from those that prevail on the centre left chiefly by being less realistic and more dogmatic.
The practical problem for Cameron is that neither of these tendencies allows the Conser vatives to make the vital break with the past. If the neoliberal tendency represents a reversion to Thatcherism at its most rigidly doctrinal, the neoconservative wing of the party - to which, in most respects, Cameron himself belongs - offers little more than a continuation of Blairism. These difficulties have been compounded by his most recent turn in which - while talking of the need to repair Britain's " broken society" - he has increasingly reverted to stock right-wing themes such as crime and immigration.
Many commentators have accused Cameron of inconsistency, but his larger error is that of moving back to the reactionary territory that lost his predecessors the past three elections. However dressed up in fashionable jargon, talk of the broken society cannot help harking back to a nation whose passing the majority of Britons do not regret. No doubt concern with crime is widespread, as are doubts about current levels of immigration. But these worries do not add up to anything like a wide sense of social collapse, and most of Britain's voters like the country in which they live. By putting a rejection of that country at the heart of his campaign, Cam eron has fallen into the trap that has snared every Conservative leader since Thatcher. He has failed to reconcile his party to the society she created, while alienating the voters he needs to attract by implicitly condemning the way many of them have chosen to live.
At present, both the parliamentary party and the party organisation are racked by internecine conflicts, and Cameron himself is looking ever more like an opportunist with no settled beliefs. By itself, intellectual incoherence has rarely been a serious obstacle to securing power. When combined with an ill-conceived political strategy, the result can be disastrous. Only months ago Cameron seemed poised to overtake Labour. There is still a chance he could deny it an overall majority in the general election, but with the Tory leader's switch to the self-defeating politics of reaction and Gordon Brown's assured performance as Prime Minister, the initiative has moved back to Labour. Brown's "steady as she goes" brand of government is an ambiguous phenomenon, for though it involves a sharp break with Blair's style, it is premised on continuing with much of the policy framework that was in place when Blair was in power - which itself continued much of Thatcher's. In an irony neatly captured by the tea at No 10, Cameron has been left struggling to manage the party Thatcher nearly destroyed, while Brown is using the Thatcher inheritance to entrench Labour as the party of government. If Brown can convince voters that he has viable new policies - particularly in the areas of energy and the environment - there is every chance Cameron will follow Blair into history's memory hole.
Much now depends on events. Enough has transpired to plant a large question mark over Cameron's project. He aimed to fashion a new centre-right party, but the result has been a continuation of drift and division. A setback in the next general election could turn these divisions into a civil war not unlike the one that engulfed the party when Thatcher was toppled. The difference is that, after Cameron's attempt to impose a Blair-style makeover on the party, it could end up like a failed state - a rabble of rival factions, each claiming to embody true conservatism at a time when such a thing is no longer imaginable.
The stakes could hardly be higher. The upshot of the next general election could be meltdown in the Conservative Party and a long period of unchallenged power for Gordon Brown.
History imposed on David Cameron the task of persuading the electorate that Conservatives are at home in 21st-century Britain. William Hague, Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith were at one in supposing that, overlooked or derided by metropolitan opinion, there was a conservative British majority that viewed the society emerging around them with alarm and indignation. In fact, most voters felt at home in liberal Britain, and the Conservatives went on to three successive defeats. Breaking with his predecessors, Cameron decided that unless the Conservatives identified themselves with the nation that Britain has become they were finished as a party of government. By aligning himself with contemporary British values, he posed a challenge to Labour to which Gordon Brown must now respond.
The next general election will take place against the background of a period of profound social change that goes back to the crises of the Seventies. To a considerable extent, 21st-century Britain is an unintended consequence of Margaret Thatcher. It was Thatcher who, accentuating the impact of global forces that no one controls, dismantled the postwar settlement and created the market-driven society we live in today. She believed that by rejuvenating British capitalism she could revive the stolidly bourgeois Britain she had known in the Fifties; but that country was a product of Labour rule, and the upshot of reshaping public institutions on a market model was to create a society of a kind she had never imagined.
In an essay that had a powerful influence on the intellectual fringes of early Thatcherism, Friedrich Hayek distinguished between two rival versions of individualism - a "true", Burkean variety, rooted in tradition, that accepted the constraints of conventional morality and a "false", Romantic version in which personal choice and self-realisation trumped all other values. Hayek believed that a revitalised free market would bring with it a return to "true" individualism.
Instead, it was a version of Romantic individualism that triumphed. As the imperatives of market choice have spread into every area of social life, personal fulfilment and the satisfaction of desire have become the ruling values. Relationships of all kinds have become looser and social structures have become more negotiable and provisional. In many ways this has been a benign process. As a result we are more tolerant of the varieties of family and sexual life, and less pervasively racist, and although we are perceptibly more unequal we are less obsessed with class than in the past. But the country created by freeing up the market is in many respects the antithesis of the one Hayek and Thatcher aimed to restore. If ever there was such a thing as a conservative philosophy, its central values were social cohesion and cultural continuity in a settled form of common life. Yet when it is released from restraint the market works to unsettle established ways of living. So, far from reviving an older Britain, Thatcher wiped away its last traces.
Endemic discontent.
However, if the freewheeling society we have today is Thatcher's creation, her latter-day followers refuse to recognise the fact. The diehards who make up much of the Conservatives' core support despise and reject the nation she un wittingly created. They believe that by ditching Thatcher's inheritance, Cameron has abandoned anything resembling conservatism; but it was Thatcher who destroyed the old social structures - and with them the possibility of a viable conservative project. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Conservative Party itself. The loosening up of hierarchies that occurred in society at large has been reflected in a parallel dissolution of the Tory culture of loyalty. Before Thatcher, Tory leaders could rely on an ethos that elevated loyalty above ideology. After Thatcher, disloyalty and infighting became defining Tory traits, and every party leader was placed permanently on probation. Mistrusted by his party, Cameron is seen as a traitor to conservative values. But the Thatcherites themselves - with their endemic discontent and doctrinal mentality - demonstrate how unreal these values have become. Early this month, the former deputy leader Michael Ancram urged Cameron to "unveil the party's soul" rather than "trashing" its Thatcherite past. If Cameron follows such advice, the Conservatives will be left stranded on the margins of power in a country they have ceased to comprehend.
Whatever his critics may say, Cameron had no alternative but to remodel his party. His strategy of repositioning his party on the liberal centre ground enabled it to become, once again, a contender for power. The trouble is that the model of modernisation he adopted was already obsolete. By the time Cameron adopted Blairite new Labour as his template, Blair had become a buffoonish figure - a would-be global messiah who engineered the worst British foreign policy disaster since Suez. A more experienced politician might have asked himself whether it was wise to pose as Blair's successor. Cameron might have unseated Blair in a general election run-off; but once Blair vanished from the scene, the Tory leader was left looking dated and redundant.
In the Commons, Cameron goaded Blair with the taunt, "You were the future once." Yet, by modelling himself on Blair, Cameron tied himself to the past. Unprepared for the national sigh of relief that greeted Blair's departure, he seems ill-prepared for the very different style of politics that has arrived with Gordon Brown.
Only a new breed of Conservatives, for whom Thatcher was a chapter in the history books rather than a living presence, could have consigned her to the memory hole with such brisk finality. In this, Cameron's limited political experience has been a source of strength, but passing most of his short political life in Blair's shadow has narrowed Cameron's vision. Blair's decade in power was a by-product of unrepeatable historical conditions. He was able to return Labour to power by accepting many of Thatcher's policies because she embodied the interests and values of a crucial part of the electorate that was ready to transfer its allegiance to him.
By the time Blair left office he represented no one, and the same is true of Cameron today. Like Blair, Cameron moves in a smart, moneyed set with tenuous links to the wider society. Aside from the fox-hunting fraternity - promised a free vote on repealing the ban - it is hard to think of any social group whose concerns Cameron has consistently championed. Even his commitment to green issues, which at one point seemed to be voicing widely felt anxieties, sounds contrived and unconvincing. There is no section of today's Britain where his voice resonates with any particular force.
Cameron's patrician background plainly had a role in his most serious error to date. His in souciant dismissal of an institution that was for generations a hugely important part of British education showed how slender is his acquaintance with the choices most people have to face. Unlike most Tory voters, Cameron has always been able to take for granted the option of educating his children privately. Like a junior colonial officer in the declining years of empire, he seems hardly to comprehend the lives of those he has set out to govern. His stumble over grammar schools was more than a minor slip. It disclosed an amateurish quality in his entire operation, and exposed the vulnerability of a political project that lacks any solid base of social support.
Provincial majority.
There is a great opportunity here for Gordon Brown. Linked by overlapping social ties and a common proximity to the London media, Blair and Cameron are alike in their detachment from Britain's provincial majority. This is not the disaffected, reactionary rump invoked by latter-day Thatcherites. It is broadly liberal in outlook, but it demands from government some of the qualities that used to be claimed by Conservatives, such as common sense, competence and a cool head in times of crisis. It has no time for Blairite rants about incessant change, nor for the unending stream of ephemeral initiatives that embodied the Blair regime in practice. By distancing himself so sharply from this style of government, Brown has wounded Cameron at his weakest point.
The shift in the public philosophy of the Conservatives that Cameron initiated seems to have started as a psephological gambit, which recognised that the party could not return to power on the back of its core supporters alone and aimed to capture Liberal Democrat votes in about a hundred key seats. As an electoral strategy it has had mixed results, with Lib Dem voters switching to Labour as well as to Cameron's Conservatives. At the same time, large issues have been left unresolved. At present there are at least two tendencies vying for control among the Con servatives. There are neoliberals such as John Redwood, who urge further large-scale market deregulation and hugely reduced government - a programme whose effect would be to impose another revolutionary shake-up on society, and which for that reason has no prospect of being implemented by any government in the fore seeable future.
In contrast there are the neoconservatives, who accept that governments are bound to continue to play a significant role in social welfare and regulating the economy. What these tendencies have in common is that neither can claim to be distinctively conservative - the neoliberals owe more to Hayek (who always denied being a conservative) than they do to Burke, while neoconservatism originated on the American far left. Both are progressive ideologies, which differ from those that prevail on the centre left chiefly by being less realistic and more dogmatic.
The practical problem for Cameron is that neither of these tendencies allows the Conser vatives to make the vital break with the past. If the neoliberal tendency represents a reversion to Thatcherism at its most rigidly doctrinal, the neoconservative wing of the party - to which, in most respects, Cameron himself belongs - offers little more than a continuation of Blairism. These difficulties have been compounded by his most recent turn in which - while talking of the need to repair Britain's " broken society" - he has increasingly reverted to stock right-wing themes such as crime and immigration.
Many commentators have accused Cameron of inconsistency, but his larger error is that of moving back to the reactionary territory that lost his predecessors the past three elections. However dressed up in fashionable jargon, talk of the broken society cannot help harking back to a nation whose passing the majority of Britons do not regret. No doubt concern with crime is widespread, as are doubts about current levels of immigration. But these worries do not add up to anything like a wide sense of social collapse, and most of Britain's voters like the country in which they live. By putting a rejection of that country at the heart of his campaign, Cam eron has fallen into the trap that has snared every Conservative leader since Thatcher. He has failed to reconcile his party to the society she created, while alienating the voters he needs to attract by implicitly condemning the way many of them have chosen to live.
At present, both the parliamentary party and the party organisation are racked by internecine conflicts, and Cameron himself is looking ever more like an opportunist with no settled beliefs. By itself, intellectual incoherence has rarely been a serious obstacle to securing power. When combined with an ill-conceived political strategy, the result can be disastrous. Only months ago Cameron seemed poised to overtake Labour. There is still a chance he could deny it an overall majority in the general election, but with the Tory leader's switch to the self-defeating politics of reaction and Gordon Brown's assured performance as Prime Minister, the initiative has moved back to Labour. Brown's "steady as she goes" brand of government is an ambiguous phenomenon, for though it involves a sharp break with Blair's style, it is premised on continuing with much of the policy framework that was in place when Blair was in power - which itself continued much of Thatcher's. In an irony neatly captured by the tea at No 10, Cameron has been left struggling to manage the party Thatcher nearly destroyed, while Brown is using the Thatcher inheritance to entrench Labour as the party of government. If Brown can convince voters that he has viable new policies - particularly in the areas of energy and the environment - there is every chance Cameron will follow Blair into history's memory hole.
Much now depends on events. Enough has transpired to plant a large question mark over Cameron's project. He aimed to fashion a new centre-right party, but the result has been a continuation of drift and division. A setback in the next general election could turn these divisions into a civil war not unlike the one that engulfed the party when Thatcher was toppled. The difference is that, after Cameron's attempt to impose a Blair-style makeover on the party, it could end up like a failed state - a rabble of rival factions, each claiming to embody true conservatism at a time when such a thing is no longer imaginable.
The stakes could hardly be higher. The upshot of the next general election could be meltdown in the Conservative Party and a long period of unchallenged power for Gordon Brown.
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