Entombed in Poverty-Russia Under Market Bolshevism

The New Statesman, 28 October 2002.

John Gray reviews two books on post-communist Russia.

Russia: experiment with a people. Robert Service.
Russia's Bitter Path to Modernity: a history of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Alexander Chubarov.

With the fall of communism, it might have been expected that the specialists who were charged with keeping Lenin's remains preserved would be unemployed. In fact, the embalming of corpses is a thriving trade in post-communist Russia. Despite a strengthening of state power in recent years, criminal mafias continue to exercise considerable influence in many areas of life. Sentimental about their dead, the new criminal elite had prevented the art of embalming from following communism into oblivion. In this, as in other contexts, Soviet traditions live on.
The embalming of dead mobsters is only one of many echoes of the Soviet era that are identified in Robert Service's indispensably useful and arrestingly well- written new book. Not only the habits of mind and social structures of post- communist Russia, but even its physical appearance, show many deep marks of the Soviet regime. Yet it would be a mistake to think one can understand Russia today simply by looking to the regime that collapsed just over a decade ago. The deeper continuities are between post-communist and pre-communist times.

Russia as we know it today is a product of two experiments in westernisation, one imposed by Lenin, and the second by the market Leninists who ruled the country during the ill-fated years of neoliberal "shock therapy". Both were disastrous. In the wake of these failed attempts to achieve modernity by blindly following western models, Russia is returning to its pre-communist, Eurasian past. As in late tsarist times, when the country had one of the highest rates of economic growth in the world, Russia today has a highly dynamic economy that blends wild entrepreneurship with far-reaching state intervention. Today, as in the 19th century, Russia leans towards Europe, while remaining unalterably distinct from Europe in its religious traditions, culture and Asiatic vastness.

The government of Boris Yeltsin was one of a long line of westernising regimes that have sought to make Russia an unequivocally European country. Like Lenin's Bolsheviks, the market liberals of the Yeltsin era tried to reshape the country in accordance with what they perceived as the most progressive current in European thought. In Lenin's day, this was Marxism, which instructed the Bolsheviks that the only way forward for Russia was rapid industrialisation and the reorganisation of Russian agriculture on the model of factory production. As he showed in the New Economic Policy, which allowed some peasants to grow rich, Lenin recognised the necessity of tactical retreats. But he never renounced the classical Marxist view that socialism could be fully achieved only when Russia had become an industrial society. The result of the policies suggested by this orthodoxy - which, contrary to conventional wisdom, Stalin followed faithfully - was the collapse of Russian farming, ecological devastation and the deaths of millions of peasants. Those who survived did so by relying on the produce of smallholdings - vestiges of the peasant agriculture that had to be destroyed if Russia was to become a western-style modern country.

The Yeltsin era saw a rerun of the Bolsheviks' forced modernisation from above, but this time the western model was American, not European, and it demanded the creation of free markets rather than central planning. As in the past, Russia's westernising elites were keen to implement what they took to be the most advanced ideas. Western opinion had changed from the time when Sidney and Beatrice Webb had written of Stalinist Russia as the embryo of a new world civilisation; but the conventional wisdom had not become any wiser. It still insisted that the only possible future for Russia was for her to remake herself on a western model, and it continued to approach this prospect with missionary zeal. Just as in the 1930s, a stream of political pilgrims flowed from west to east - not, this time, the communists and fellow-travellers who lauded Soviet achievements while millions starved, but instead a motley band of international civil servants, investment bankers and tacky think-tank operators. They all preached the gospel of the free market as the Russian economy spiralled into one of the greatest depressions of the 20th century.

As could be foreseen from the beginning, the market Bolshevism that was imposed on Russia in the early 1990s by the Yeltsin government - strongly influenced by the IMF - was ruinous in its effects. Millions of people did not die of starvation as they had during the Stalinist experiment, but a large part of the population was entombed in hopeless poverty. As in the past, millions survived on the output of private, peasant-style plots. At the end of Russia's neoliberal experiment, the country was far from the modern society envisaged by the financial engineers of the IMF and its own romantically pro-western elites. It was trapped in a Byzantine labyrinth of crime and corruption from which it is only now emerging.

Providing a much-needed and richly informed historical perspective on Russia's development over the past decade, Alexander Chubarov tersely sums up this half-tragic, half-farcical story: "The 'shock therapy' of the early 1990s . . . inflicted great pain but gave little cure. It was a Bolshevik-style attempt to destroy an old economic system to its foundations in the hope that the phoenix of the market would rise from the ashes. This, however, did not happen."
Service and Chubarov add to a growing list of books highlighting the errors, crimes and follies of Russia's neoliberal experiment.

Of this number, the most comprehensive remains Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski's The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: market Bolshevism against democracy (United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001). Reddaway and Glinski provide a penetrating analysis of the undemocratic politics underpinning this experiment, but neither they nor, so far as I know, anyone else has yet been able to explain fully how a project so manifestly absurd could have been launched, and pursued with some consistency, in post-communist Russia.

When the USSR collapsed, none of the conditions for a western-style free market existed. Something between one-third and a half of the economy was a military-industrial rust belt that had no hope of survival in the global market. There was no law of property or contract. The rule of law itself was not even a memory. Schooled by decades of Soviet experience, most people associated enterprise with crime. Against this background, the prospect of a swift transition to a market economy was sheer fantasy. Yet it was the basis of all the policies of western financial institutions and governments until Russia finally defaulted on its debts in late summer 1998. How are we to make sense of this bizarre tale?

If answers are to be found, they are in the longer intellectual history of Russia and in the recurring utopianism of the European Enlightenment. From Peter the Great onward, a section of Russia's ruling elites has sought to wrest the country from its Eurasian ambiguities and lock it irrevocably in to the west. By no means all Russians who belong in this pro-western camp have believed that the west supplies a simple formula for modernising Russia. In their different ways, the liberal Ivan Turgenev and the radical Alexander Herzen believed that Russia would make progress only in so far as it entered fully into European culture, but neither of them imagined that this could be achieved by mechanically replicating European models. Unfortunately, Turgenev and Herzen are not characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia, which has always been attracted to the most doctrinaire strands in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment thinkers who have been most influential in Russia have not been sceptics such as David Hume or empiricists such as John Stuart Mill, but rationalists such as Fichte, Hegel and Marx. Infecting Russia's elites with a utopian mentality, the quasi-religious view of history advanced by these European thinkers has had a disastrous impact on the development of the country. Politics became a matter of absolute choice, rather than the piecemeal borrowings and evolutionary adaptations through which other countries have edged towards their own distinctive versions of modernity.
The misfortunes of Russia in the 1990s came from the interaction of its indigenous tradition of pro-western Romanticism with the new right's victory in the west.

For the bureaucrats of the IMF, there was only one route to modernity, for Russia or anywhere else, and that was the narrow path of free-market development prescribed by the "Washington consensus". Never mind that the US had achieved economic development behind the high walls of protectionism. The only salvation for Russia was in joining the global free market. Many other factors lie behind the tragic comedy of Russia's "market reform" - not least spectacular corruption. Its ultimate source is in the deadly combination of the west's ideological enthusiasm for free markets with the Russian belief that modernisation can be achieved only by adopting western models. Now that the era of the free market is nearly over, it remains to be seen whether Russia - under the aegis of Vladimir Putin's subtle and flexible authoritarian regime - can at last discover a version of modernity that matches its own peculiar history.

Letting Climate Change Happen.

The New Statesman, 29 May 2006

All shades of opinion are in denial about the magnitude of the environmental challenge facing us. Our need to be comfortable may be stronger than our will to survive, argues John Gray
During the present century, human beings are likely to experience a change in the planetary environment unlike any in history. Climate change is irreversible, and accelerating fast. No one, apart from a few cranks speaking on behalf of the Bush administration, doubts that global warming is a side effect of human activity. Accumulating scientific evidence suggests strongly that climate change is happening on a larger scale and more quickly than was suspected even a couple of years ago. Observable processes such as the melting of the Antarctic ice cap point to rising sea levels that will wipe out much of the world's arable land and flood many coastal cities. The face of the planet is changing before our eyes.

The message of science is clear: humans will soon find themselves in a world different from any they have ever lived in. Altering our way of life to cope with these conditions will be phenomenally difficult - if it can be done at all. Yet all sections of opinion are in denial regarding the scale of the shift and the magnitude of the challenge it poses. Mainstream politicians and green activists differ on many points; but they all believe that climate change can be halted or rendered innocuous, if only we adopt the right policies. They are at one in rejecting the fact that runaway climate change is a result of the toxic mix of rapidly growing human numbers with worldwide industrialisation. Across the whole political spectrum there is a refusal to face up to this reality. This is nowhere clearer than among the Greens, who persist in a delusional faith that sustainable development and renewable energy can save the day.

In this consensus of denial, there are some who tell us not to worry. So-called "sceptical environmentalists" suggest that the scientific consensus is not to be trusted, and counsel inaction until the damage done by climate change is undeniable. That is the view of Nigel Lawson, who recently advised a business-as-usual strategy. Preparing for climate change is costly and troublesome, the former chancellor said, and we should alter our way of life only when the evidence is incontestable. The trouble with this view is that climate change is not doom-mongering speculation: it is already happening, and it is foolish to shut one's eyes and hope it will go away. If it takes the abrupt and radical form that many scientists believe is now likely, it will have disastrous effects on the lives of millions - possibly billions - of people.

Under the leadership of David Cameron, Lawson's own party is not so complacent, but it, too, is in denial. Cameron talks lightly of "green growth", and has demonstrated the seriousness of his environmental commitment by riding a bicycle and installing a wind turbine on the roof of his house. The underlying assumption of his approach is that the crisis can be tackled without doing anything difficult or unpopular. The facts tell a different story. Wind power is not terribly efficient, and certainly cannot replace fossil fuels as the source of most of our energy. Even if combined with other types of renewable power such as solar and geothermal and implemented together with rigorous policies of energy conservation, the output of the hideous windfarms springing up across the country could not meet the rising demand for energy that goes with current patterns of economic growth.

Nor would a large-scale shift to renewable energy in Britain have any perceptible impact on global warming, which is far more affected by emissions originating in China, India and the United States. It might be argued that Britain should do what it can to reduce emissions regardless of the behaviour of other countries; but there is only one existing technology that can provide energy on the scale Britain needs while reducing its production of greenhouse gases, and that is nuclear power - which is highly unpopular. Images of Chernobyl and its aftermath are potent antidotes to rational thought, even if all they tell us is how horribly unsafe nuclear technology was in Soviet times. We live in a culture in which personal emotional comfort counts for more than any objective assessment of risks and consequences, and public attitudes to nuclear power reflect this. As a type of psychotherapy for shopped-out consumers troubled by occasional pangs of environmental guilt, renewable energy may be quite effective. As an appropriate response to environmental crisis it is a non-starter.

It may be too much to ask from electorates that they confront unpalatable environmental realities. This month Tony Blair declared that nuclear power was "back on the agenda with a vengeance". In a speech to the Confederation of British Industry, he suggested that the replacement of nuclear power stations - in conjunction with "a big push on renewables and a step change on energy efficiency" - must be considered as part of Britain's long-term energy strategy. Blair is to be congratulated on attempting to thrust the real energy options we face into the forefront of public debate. His intervention comes near the end of his political career, however, and, given his disastrous role in the Iraq war, nothing that he says on any controversial issue will be taken seriously - even if, as in this case, it deserves to be.

In speaking out in support of nuclear power Blair runs up against the feel-good mentality: most people want to believe that the environmental crisis can be solved by policies which involve no risk - to them or anyone else. Green thinking encourages this mentality. For example, the Kyoto treaty may have symbolic value in acknowledging the anthropogenic origins of global warming, but it hardly deserves the iconic status it is given by the green lobby. None of the big three producers of greenhouse gases has signed up to it, and even if it were fully implemented it would do very little to alter the climate shift that is already under way. Above all, such a treaty cannot halt the stampede to industrialisation that is the human cause of global warming.

Global warming as we know it today is a by-product of the industrial revolution. The temperature of the planet has been rising since roughly 1800, when the use of fossil fuels began on a large scale. Industrialisation and fossil-fuel use are different sides of the same process, and it is the rising demand for energy that is fuelling global warming. Our present industrial civilisation began with coal, and it may well end there. Oil gained in importance in energy use throughout the 20th century, but as light crude oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, industrial societies are beginning to look to other fossil fuels which are still abundant - notably coal and tar sands. If the oil price remains high over the coming years, market processes will make these other fuels economically viable, and many economists think this will solve our problems. They have failed to factor in the increase in global warming that such a shift will entail. There are new technologies that can make coal cleaner, and we would be well advised to develop them further if we want to limit its environmental risks; but a global shift from conventional energy sources to coal and tar sands is bound to increase greenhouse gases. While shifting to other fossil fuels may make economic sense, there is nothing in the operation of the price mechanism that registers costs to the planet as a whole.

Green activists say they want a new global economic system in which fossil fuels play a much smaller part and damage to the planet is fully accounted for, but here again we are in the realm of denial. The type of energy-intensive industrial economy that is being adopted in India and China is clearly unsustainable. At the same time there is not the remotest prospect that the rush to industrialisation will be abandoned. The ruling elites of China are well aware of the hideous damage that their breakneck industrial growth has done to the country's fragile natural environment - far more so than the western investors who gush on about the Chinese economic miracle. China's rulers also know they cannot risk slowing economic expansion. Even with the one-child policy and rapid ageing, China's population will continue to grow for the next 50 years, and the hundreds of millions who are moving from rural areas to towns will need jobs, housing and transport. If enormous social upheaval and political instability are to be avoided, economic expansion must continue whatever the environmental consequences. The same is true in India, and throughout the poor countries of the world.

Worldwide industrialisation has an overwhelming momentum that cannot be stopped by political means. Part of this momentum undoubtedly comes from continuing population growth, but any mention of growing human numbers is now taboo in environmental debate. In the affluent west, religious fundamentalists, neoliberal missionaries for free markets, development economists and the few remaining Marxists are as one in denouncing the idea that there can be too many people. Curiously, this view has not been adopted in poor countries. China, Egypt, Iran, India and many other developing countries have population policies. In per-capita use of resources, it is the richest countries that are most overpopulated, and this is often used to suggest that it is distribution of resources rather than the global human population that really matters. The inequalities are real and troubling. Even so, no redistribution of resources could enable the earth to sustain over the long term the human numbers projected for the second half of the present century, or even those that exist today.

The present human population of more than six billion people is supported by a type of industrialised farming that relies on rapidly depleting supplies of petroleum. Contrary to the romantics among greens who look back with nostalgia to an imaginary peasant culture of harmony with nature, farming has always been, ecologically, a highly disruptive human activity, and this remains true today. It is mainly the expansion of agriculture, not industry, which is destroying the Amazon rainforest; but agriculture everywhere is critically dependent on oil-based fertilisers. The green revolution was at bottom a process whereby food was extracted from petroleum. A human population of roughly nine billion - the UN estimate for the world in 2050 - would be even more dependent on fossil fuels, with all the harmful effects on global climate.

In a century or so, human numbers may decline as falling fertility spreads throughout the world. In the meantime there is a bottleneck, and governments are scrambling to secure control of the world's remaining reserves of oil and natural gas. The resource war that is being fought for oil in the Gulf is likely to be one of many in the coming century, and will be accompanied by conflicts over fresh water. Population growth, resource war and climate change are intertwined. Without a smaller human population there can be no solution to the environmental crisis, and one way or another human numbers are sure to fall. Greens shy away from these facts, and insist that climate change and conflict over natural resources can be avoided by adopting a low-tech lifestyle. But organic farms and windmills cannot stop the destruction of the natural world, or support the present human population.

Rather than flirting with the fantasy of a low-tech society we need to focus on high-tech solutions to environmental crisis. Technology cannot change the human condition. It cannot repeal the laws of thermodynamics, or make human beings less prone to folly or illusion than they have always been. It cannot even deflect the current wave of climate change, which will go on for centuries whatever we do now. What technology can do is help us cope with the abrupt alteration in the planetary environment that human activity has triggered - a process of adjustment that is sure to be forbiddingly difficult. We cannot stop climate change. If we make the most of technologies that limit the need for fossil fuels we can avoid accelerating it.
James Lovelock has argued that we need to move away from traditional modes of farming to the production of synthetic foods, and it seems to me that, here as elsewhere, he points a way forward. Lovelock is best known for his support of nuclear power - a view I have shared since 1993, when I endorsed it in my book Beyond the New Right. Despite Chernobyl, the risks of nuclear energy to human beings have been greatly exaggerated. Just as important, nuclear power is vastly less harmful to the non-human environment than fossil-fuel extraction. For this reason alone, green activists should support it. Yet they remain deeply hostile to high-tech solutions, and part of the reason may be their well-founded suspicion of the idea that humans can master nature by means of technology.

In the past, high technology has been linked with Promethean philosophies that seek to subject the natural environment to human will. This was the philosophy that produced ecological catastrophe in the former Soviet Union and in China during the Maoist era - and which, in a different ideological guise, is continuing the destruction of the environment in those countries. In western countries, the Promethean view is to be found mainly on the right, among neoliberal boosters of the free market and Bushite deniers of climate change. Given this background, it is hardly surprising that green movements should reject technical fixes, but by doing so they have become part of the problem rather than its solution.

Today, high technology offers the only way the human ecological footprint on the planet can be reduced. Nuclear power has risks, not least of terrorist attack; but it is vastly less harmful to the planetary equilibrium than the continued reliance on fossil fuels that is the realistic alternative. The environmental dangers of genetically modified crops are as yet unknown, so it is right to resist their use at present; but it is not difficult to envisage a time when they could be less destructive of the natural world than the further expansion of petroleum-based intensive agriculture. Far from rejecting these new technologies, we should be developing and improving them - not in order to further our domination of nature, which has always been an illusion, but as ways of retreating from our hugely overextended position in the planetary system. Green movements look to political solutions to the environmental crisis. For them, its source is in a defective economic system and in abuse of corporate power. However, the planetary rebalancing that is under way cannot be prevented by any transformation of human society, however revolutionary. Adapting to the situation requires political decisions, but there is no political solution to the problems we face. The human species has overshot the planet's resources, and it will have to use all its technological ingenuity if it is to avoid catastrophe.

It may be that the shift in habits of thinking that is needed is beyond human powers. We owe our evolutionary success partly to our capacity for denial. Blind hope has often been more useful than a rational estimate of danger in promoting human survival. Today the tendency to shut out from conscious thought the dangers we face has itself become dangerous, but it is a tendency that is encouraged in a culture which prizes emotional comfort over everything else. In the worst-case scenarios that are now looking increasingly realistic, the result could be a change in the way we live that has no precedent in human experience.

Abrupt climate change seems an apocalyptic prospect, and rather than face up to it and do what can be done to mitigate its effects, humanity may well opt to let it run its course. It is only in human terms that climate change can be viewed as apocalyptic, however. In the life of the planet, it is normal. A dramatic climate shift took place 55 million years ago, at the start of the Eocene era, in which most of the species that then existed became extinct. The planet revived and became the richly diverse biosphere human beings are at present destroying. The environmental change that the world is undergoing is another such shift. Much biodiversity will be lost, but the earth will renew itself. Life will continue and will thrive - whether or not humans are around to see it.

Bryan Appleyard on John Gray

Bryan Appleyard

The Sunday Times, 24th June 2007.

In 1994, John Gray, then professor of politics at Oxford, published an essay entitled The Undoing of Conservatism. It made my hair stand on end. It was, in places, exactly what I had been writing. I rang him. Professor Gray...” “Oh, hello. Good to hear from you.” Odd: somehow I wasn’t expecting a Geordie accent. “What you have written seems perilously close to what I have written.” “Synchronicity. Let’s have dinner.”

And so, for the next 13 years, I was to be entertained and dazzled by one of the most brilliant – and funny – men I have ever met. Gray doesn’t present himself as funny, and is never reported as such, but he is very funny indeed. In conversation, he veers off into fantasies, usually about people whose world-view has collapsed. In the 1980s, he advanced the destruction of academic Marxism by publishing a review of a book entitled The Word as Deed: Studies in the Labour Theory of Meaning, by a widely ignored Hungarian thinker named L Revai, a man who had significantly influenced Wittgenstein, apparently. People wrote in to applaud this reevaluation of a shamefully underrated thinker. Some said they had known his family; others that they had met the man himself. This was strange, because Gray had invented Revai. “I was beginning to expect to meet him myself.”

It is a sign of Gray’s remarkable prescience that one of Revai’s “discoveries” was the “ergoneme”, a primitive atom of meaning that exactly anticipates Richard Dawkins’s idea of memes. “I intended it as a joke, but, sadly, he doesn’t. I intended to create something as far away from genuine science as possible, something akin to creationism or alchemy.”
Only one reader was not taken in. The intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin simply said: “Too perfect, my boy, some kind of spoof.” Gray was a friend of Berlin for the last 25 years of his life, and has written a definitive guide to his thought. And Berlin is the best place to start when trying to understand Gray. But, first, a warning: he is, for the conventionally minded, difficult to understand or to appreciate. He is so out of the box that it is easy to forget there was ever any box. He is also impossible to categorise. He can’t be seen as an orthodox political thinker because his perspective is far too broad. And he can’t be seen as a philosopher because he is too impatient with the “arguments about arguments” in which philosophers tend to indulge. He says philosophy is just a way of finding good reasons for holding utterly ordinary opinions.

So, what is he all about? What Berlin repeatedly described was a central problem of liberalism. The liberal state’s job is to hold different world-views in balance, but it cannot resolve conflicts between them. It cannot, for example, say to Muslims “You are wrong” and to Christians “You are right”, because it then ceases to be liberal. At its most effective, it holds back the instinct of humanity to form itself into competing tribes. But the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe. True liberalism is, therefore, necessarily a tragic view, sceptical of all notions of progress. Gray calls it “agonistic liberalism”. He believes in the liberal state, and believes it is worth defending, but does not do so with empty optimism or with any belief that it should attempt to impose its ways on others.

Gray transforms Berlin’s basic insight into a refutation of all notions of progress or perfection and of the special destiny of humanity. Man, he asserts, is a tribal carnivore possessed of reason. His reason may give him science, a progressive, cumulative enterprise, but it cannot give him the wisdom to transcend his nature. Science, like everything else in the human world, will be used for evil as often as good. Conflict is eternal and all utopian thinking is fantasy. The best we can hope to do is protect, for a time, our cherished ways of life.

Because forms of utopianism are either implicit or explicit in most human projects, Gray’s is a world-view that causes vertigo when it does not cause outrage. Antiutopianism is the deep consistency in all his thought. It led him to support Thatcher in her efforts to save the British economy from the near-anarchy of the late 1970s, but mostly in her resistance to communism, that supremely lethal utopian project. Yet he also observed the agonies of liberalism in her deluded attempt to impose free-market reforms and intense social conservatism, nostalgic for the bourgeois discipline of the 1950s. “It was an impossible task. She produced a society that was almost the opposite of the one she intended. The free market dissolved the very values she espoused. I think our society is better for having escaped the tightness and oppression of the 1950s. But it left conservatism incoherent. It has still not recovered.”

The collapse of communism in 1989, and the publication of an academic paper and subsequent worldwide bestseller, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, signalled the start of Gray’s next campaign against utopianism. This involved a more radical assessment of the prevailing mythologies of the West. Fukuyama’s argument that liberal democracy was the final political state, the end point of history, reeked of precisely the belief that history was a story with an ending that Gray so loathed in his colleagues.

“That phrase ‘the end of history’ was like a red rag to a bull. It was an apocalyptic notion, and it was to me a sign that when the Soviet Union collapsed, we would not have a move towards prudence and realism, we’d have a politics of faith. I was adamantly opposed to that – it was what I had been opposed to in communism.”

Uncovering the faith base of seemingly rational opinions is a Gray speciality. He finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens particularly funny. He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people’s beliefs, you change their behaviour. He also sees an irony here. “They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists.”

The road from Fukuyama led him directly to a series of what to future generations will seem classic works. The best are Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals – a coruscating statement of our inability to free ourselves from human nature – and his latest, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Gray was, in the later stage of this phase, driven by what seemed to him to be collective amnesia. “I had been puzzled by the intensity and systematic and methodical character of the violence of the 20th century, because that century was dominated not by religious belief, but by secular belief in progress or the capacity of human beings to create a better world. It also featured unprecedented levels of mass murder.

“But I was even more puzzled by how quickly the memory of the 20th century began to fade; that, with the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China – and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal – seemed to be completely forgotten. And the reason those terrors have gone into the memory hole is that they illuminate cracks and absurdities in the beliefs of the secular humanist faith in progress.” The point is that what appeared to be secular projects were as founded upon belief as any religion. The lesson was that any human project could be used to justify slaughter: “Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”

That 20th-century amnesia, Gray says, led to new, faith-based utopian cults, but this time the primary one, neoconservatism, was of the right rather than the left. He shows, in Black Mass, how many of the neocon prophets were originally Trotskyists, a clear sign of the utopian linkage between Marxism and the neocons. And, most hilariously – though the comedy is very black indeed – he demonstrates the quite fantastic depths of neocon irrationality.

In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the neocons convinced themselves that the CIA, which was largely sceptical about the project, was too evidence-based. What was needed, they posited, was not empirical but rational analysis. So, Bush was told by a neocon CIA shadow organisation that Saddam had WMDs, not because there was evidence for it, but because it was logical that he must have them. A deranged Platonism had its finger on the trigger. Now, as Gray forecast, the Iraqis are blamed for the failure of the mission, just as the Russians were blamed for the failure of communism and Hitler blamed the Germans for the failure of Nazism. Nobody, he points out, seems ready to face the obvious conclusion: the goals of these projects were unattainable from the outset.

Perhaps Gray’s most controversial point is that the roots of modern terror lie in the western Enlightenment. Before the 18th century, he argues, wars and terrorist campaigns were not conducted as if they were mechanisms of general improvement. It was the French revolution that introduced the idea of terror as a tool of progress, and we have been living with – and dying from – that legacy ever since. Al-Qaeda, he argues, is a very modern organisation, precisely because it has learnt the lessons of the West.

Gray is a great sceptic, to be judged alongside his heroes, Montaigne, Hume, Schopenhauer and Berlin. Like them, he believes our only freedom lies in the most honest assessment possible of our predicament. And in his style, his humour, his empiricism, his realism, he’s a very English thinker. He has in common with the ecologist James Lovelock an English delight in exposing misconceptions and in the comedy of human folly.

Gray is soon to retire as professor of European thought at the LSE. Perhaps he will write more, perhaps less. You can’t tell with him. But, as his work makes clear, you can’t really tell with anybody. We’re going nowhere, our rationality is largely an illusion and, to each other, we are alarmingly opaque. But at our best we learn, tolerantly, liberally and realistically, to live with that. Read John Gray, and remember to laugh.

How Marx Turned Muslim

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.

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.

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.

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.