Going nowhere fast

John Gray's assault on Enlightenment ideals of progress is timelier than ever, says John Banville

From The Guardian :

John Gray is far too forbearing to tell us that he told us so, but he did. The title of one of his key works indicates his foresight: False Dawn: Delusions of Global Capitalism. What is significant is that this closely reasoned polemic came not from the pen of some hot-eyed zealot of the left or a green-fingered son of Gaia, but from a liberal conservative thinker of a quietist cast of mind, an admirer, albeit in a qualified way, of Margaret Thatcher, a shrewd commentator on the likes of Friedrich Hayek and George Soros, and a dedicated foe of Enlightenment values. He is surely the most incisive political philosopher that we have, and one whose time has, sad to say, definitely come.

Sad, because no one wants to be around when Cassandra's prophecies come true, not even Cassandra herself. Gray excoriates the follies of our globalised world more in sorrow than in anger. He has no grand solutions to offer for the troubles of our apocalyptic age, and urges a programme that is radical only in its mutedness: "Other animals do not need a purpose in life ... the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"

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One of Gray's abiding themes is that spilt religion inevitably leads to spilt blood - "modern revolutionary movements are a continuation of religion by other means" - and he sees a more or less hidden religious impulse in all the great secular movements of the modern age, beginning with the Enlightenment. One of the most characteristic and representative essays gathered here, "The Original Modernizers" - a masterpiece of conciseness, wit, insight and lightly worn learning - traces the unbroken seam of positivism that runs from Saint-Simon and August Comte to the present-day architects of the global free market. He writes: "Without realising it - for few of them know anything of the history of thought, least of all in their own subject - the majority of economists have inherited their way of thinking from the positivists." Although Saint-Simon and Comte "envisaged a unified science in which all of human knowledge would be reduced to a single set of laws", the positivists did not aim merely to revolutionise society. "Their aim was to found a new religion. Saint-Simon believed the 'positive doctrine' would become the basis for a new 'church' when all scientists united to form a permanent 'clergy'. He envisaged an assembly of 'the twenty-one elect of humanity' to be called the Council of Newton ... In Saint-Simon's new religion, however, it was not gravity that replaced the Deity. That place was filled by humanity."

Gray has been having fun for years with that poor old crazy coot Comte - one of whose initiatives for a new world order of brotherly love was a waistcoat with the buttons down the back so that it could be put on and taken off only with the help of others - yet he points out too that, for instance, the authors of The Communist Manifesto, the proponents of "modernisation" after the second world war and the theorists of globalisation were alike animated by the positivist creed. With rueful mockery, he notes that "For Saint-Simon and Comte, technology meant railways and canals. For Lenin it meant electricity. For neoliberals it means the internet." The conviction that our own time is at last "modern" and that we are the "last men" is, for Gray, one of the most lamentable of the many delusions that humankind allows itself. We imagine ourselves original yet are mired in the past. He quotes Keynes's apposite insight: "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling the frenzy of some academic scribbler of a few years back."

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