Heresies - John Gray
"The twentieth century was an age of faith, and it looks as if the twenty-first will be as well." So begins Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, the new collection of essays (written first in the New Statesman) by John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics.
Gray is one of the most provocative, original and heretical thinkers today, particularly in his critique of secular humanism. Heresies ranges from the Iraq war to Joseph Conrad, but is unified by one big idea.
He attacks the prevailing belief that scientific progress necessarily entails moral and political progress. The idea that the more we know, the better we become is, according to Gray, not only nonsense but dangerous nonsense. It helped to justify last century's grimmest enterprises in social engineering and, in driving the policies of the liberal humanist establishment, threatens the same in this.
In place of progress, Gray emphasises the reality of the Fall. Although not a Christian, he has sympathy for the concept of sin, which he sees confirmed not only by history but also by psychoanalysis and sociobiology. The human animal is intrinsically flawed and no amount of education or technology will change that. Indeed, technological progress threatens to exaggerate the effects of human vice rather than eradicate them.
Heresies is not without its problems. Gray's fondness for intellectual demolition jobs and for dramatic negations ("nothing could be further from the truth" is one of his favourite devices) makes it easier to understand what he is against than what he is for. His acknowledgement of human fallibility is not matched by any substantive hope.
Yet his willingness to take the fight to liberal humanism, which he describes as "very obviously a religion, a shoddy replica of Christian faith markedly more irrational than the original article", is both bracing and refreshing.
Gray - who is speaking at LICC on December 6th on The Dangers of Secular Humanism - is indeed heretical in his willingness to recognise and even champion the concept of sin. For the socialists, communists, progressives and neo-liberal economists who have driven social change in the West for much of the last 80 years it is a wicked idea, as Tony Benn recently suggested.
But for those with eyes to see, such recognition is not only liberating but the first step towards salvation.
Nick Spencer
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