Our Troubled World Today

Is John Gray, as Bryan Appleyard seems to believe, "the best theorist about our troubled world today"?

When "Straw Dogs" was published it was on the whole well reviewed, if I remember right: at least enough to persuade me to get the paperback when it came out. I managed, I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 pages. I should've been warned by the encomium from J.G.Ballard, another purveyor of chic cynicism. Not that I can't handle cynicism, mind, chic or otherwise: what put me off was the constant effort to appear controversial while coming up with the most inane nonsense. Sadly I can't reproduce examples from the book, having sold it in the sure knowledge that I'd never want to read it again, but there's enough in Appleyard's article to remind me. Take this, for example:

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.

There it is, that's what I remember from Straw Dogs: a supposedly daring thesis which is in fact almost sublimely fatuous. Atheism as a late Christian cult? It's not often you come across pearls of stupidity of quite that quality. And that dismissal of the "idea that by changing people’s beliefs, you change their behaviour" - is it not possible that some beliefs, like religion, like communism, like nazism, have influenced people's behaviour just a teeny bit? - you know, looking back at the last few hundred years? I mean, are we meant to take this seriously? That "He finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists...particularly funny" is a nice touch, incidentally. This guy is so sophisticated, so far ahead of us, that he's past caring, past arguing. Like some wry Zen sage he looks down on the struggles of us humans....and he laughs.

He also sees an irony here. “They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists.”

An irony? An irony? That's the lamest thing I've read since.....well, since the previous sentence.

It doesn't get better:

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.

It depends what you mean by the Enlightenment of course, but so far from being controversial, so far from Gray's being a lone brave voice daring to challenge the mainstream, this is an entirely commonplace view. The road from Rousseau to Robespierre to Marx to Stalin is one of the most well-trodden in political philosophy, thanks not least to the work of Isaiah Berlin: someone who features in the article, and who did genuinely have interesting things to say about liberalism and its relations with totalitarianism.

Search for "John Gray" at Amazon, and the top title is "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus". For me it's a toss-up which of the two Grays is the better theorist about "our troubled world today".

Update: I was alerted to this by a comment at the bottom of the online article. Appleyard writes:

In the 1980s, he [Gray] 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.”

In the 1980s, note. Dawkins published "The Selfish Gene", which introduced the meme, in 1976.

Comments

[Matthew Kramer]

I like both the tone and the substance of your post. It's regrettable that John Gray has degenerated into such a fatuous charlatan. Much of his work as a historian of political thought during his years at Oxford was of a high quality.

[lupin]

Last I heard Gray had thrown his lot in with Earth First/Green Anarchist types and was proclaiming that there were far too many people alive and we needed to save the planet by getting rid of some of them...

[DaninVan]

Lupin; no worries, we'll do it to ourselves.