KEY POINTS:
Philosophers once aimed to teach us serenity. Buddha smiled as he contemplated the void and Socrates drank his hemlock in the same spirit of wise acceptance. Philosophy today has a different agenda: its gift to us is a contagious fear, as it terrorises us into awareness of our
world's dangerous fragility.
Even before you open John Gray's book, its cover tells you to be afraid, be very afraid. The design couples a black mass with a bloodbath. Ants pullulate in the mire and gore - the lord of the flies has unleashed an infestation of pests. Man, seeking to unseat God, imagines heaven is within his reach. Instead he creates hell on Earth.
The 9/11 atrocity licensed a succession of scare-mongering savants. Jean Baudrillard declared the catastrophe was the West's moral suicide and announced, as the World Trade Centre collapsed, that God had declared war on himself. Slavoj Zizek, channelling the metaphysical terrorist Morpheus in The Matrix, welcomed us all to the desert of the real, where we eke out our remaining days as Nietzsche's "last men".
John Gray has a cooler and more logical head than these prophetic obscurantists, but his conclusions are no less unsettling.
History has not ended, as Francis Fukuyama fatuously predicted, in a Utopia of contented globalised commerce. According to Gray, what lies ahead is a series of terminal convulsions. On an overheated Earth, expiring humanity will squabble over diminished resources, goaded to frenzy by politicians who, like George W. Bush, take orders from a God created by their own demented delusions. Failed states will go on trafficking in nuclear or biological weapons, and the person beside you might be one of Armageddon's special agents, an apocalyptic freelancer. We can expect the breakdown of civil society to begin at any moment.
My instinctive preference has always been to think of Bush and his lackey Blair as pious hypocrites rather than fanatics. Surely their wars are about the lust for oil, not the quest for righteousness? Gray, however, almost persuades me that these men are crazed millennarians, whose policies - like the revolutionary terror of Robespierre or the institutionalised massacres of Stalin - rejoice in advancing the eschatological "End-Time".
He quotes a frothing Marine who led the assault on Fallujah: "The enemy has a face. He's called Satan. And we're going to destroy him."
Bush's under-secretary of defence identified Iraq as "the principality of darkness", the homeland of "a guy called Satan", which of course incontrovertibly justified the invasion. We have heard more than enough about Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil"; Gray, examining a foreign policy based on demonology, underlines the asininity of goodness.
I'm less convinced by the way he annexes recent political history to this doom-laden narrative. Margaret Thatcher may have believed that the market economy was a divine imperative, but I don't recall any "millennialist optimism" in her reforms. Nor do I altogether trust Gray when he argues that Blair's fibs were wish-fulfilment fantasies, "prophetic glimpses of the future course of history". Certainly Blair saw "the shaping of public opinion as government's overriding purpose", but for me this shows him to be a politician of the slick, elastic media age, not a messianic zealot.
All the same, Gray is right to scoff at the misplaced faith in progress propounded by Enlightenment philosophers. Our knowledge may increase, but that is no guarantee of moral improvement. We remain barbarians in business suits or in military uniforms.
At the end of the book, dispensing with the fiction of secular hope, Gray reminds us about more ancient and truthful myths, which predicted that our reckless pursuit of knowledge and power would lead to disaster: the fatal apple in Genesis, the fire Prometheus stole from the gods.
As Gray hints by reverting to stories that scared early mankind into obedience, a peculiar and somewhat depressing conservatism underlies his radical critique. He points out that "the few indisputably multinational democracies that are thriving at the start of the 21st century - such as the UK, Spain and Canada - are monarchies and relics of empire". He adds that it's "absurd" to believe that democracy can be self-legitimating, which is why most democracies, with the notable exception of the United States, rely on monarchs to stabilise them.
The notion of absurdity, of a world ludicrously abandoned to unreason, recurs often in Gray's book. The spectacle of this muddled brutality turns him from a philosopher into a satirist, violently amused by the self-defeating antics of the human race.
He cites Gulliver's Travels as proof that we are unfit for residence in Utopia. In an attack on the evangelising atheism of Richard Dawkins, he sourly smiles at "the comedy of militant unbelief", which retains a Christian confidence in our uniqueness and perfectibility.
This is as much comfort as his book offers: as a respite from fear, why not try being amused? Philosophy has given up teaching us how to accept death. Instead it encourages us to enjoy universal extinction.
* Published by Allen Lane
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