What an Ant Hill

Gray, who is in the London School of Economics faculty, argued in Straw Dogs that “those who struggle to change the world” are a pathetic bunch, trying to find “consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear”. That “truth”, simply put, is that secular, rational, Western liberalism-informed politics cannot change mankind’s lot, indeed by hypothesising that it can, this kind of politics has brought the world close to what Gray foresees as religious fundamentalism-led warmongering. Secular ideas of enlightenment are a religion in disguise, Gray argues, and not just because they can be traced back to Christianity. Liberal politics, as much as Stalin’s or Hitler’s Weltanschung, is a utopian project and by definition it corrodes, corrupts, distorts and disfigures, all of this because of a hopeless assumption that human will has genuine transformational capacity.

There are so many problems — almost as many as the number of ants on the jacket — with this argument that a thorough review will produce a book fatter than Gray’s thankfully slim volume. Let’s therefore take what seems to be the central problem.

For argument’s sake let’s grant that secular, liberal politics is utopian in that it rests on a set of principles that may never be achieved in totality for any country at any point of time. But, really, so what? It is these principles that have given such things as universal suffrage, rule of law, institutional accountability, and abolition of absolute monarchy, slave labour, segregation and untouchability, to name but a few things not an inconsiderable number of people in not a few countries now take for granted. Yes, nowhere is it perfect. But, wow, Professor Gray are you telling us all of this and more really means nothing? There’s a difference between madmen in power who ask for total submission in the name of some utopia — Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot — and relatively decent politicians working within a liberal constitutional framework. I am better off, as a citizen in a political context, than a guy in Somalia and Professor Gray, in a Western liberal democracy, is probably better off than I am. No amount of philosophy can change that fact.

Two more points. First, Gray never makes it clear when he dismisses ‘progress’ whether he does or doesn’t include material advances. Liberal politics is not separable from material progress.

Second, it is clear less than halfway through the book that Gray thinks George Bush is nuts. That’s his view, and he will find these days a large number of people on his side. But most of those other people, including those who can get books published, won’t use their anger about the Iraq war to construct an intellectual Ponzi scheme. The Iraq war was not an inevitable outcome of modern politics. It was a war of choice by a particular US administration and most likely it was informed as much by let’s-export-democracy zeal as by oil realpolitik. Not even John Gray can claim there’s anything utopian about oil politics.