This is the central theme of this book; if America cannot dominate the entire world, it is wise to listen to others with respect. Instead, Gray says Bush's ambition "to reshape the Middle East comes from the Christian fundamentalist belief that a major conflagration will fulfill biblical prophecies of a catastrophic conflict in the region. To the extent that it reflects this type of thinking, American foreign policy is itself fundamentalist."
Gray directly challenges a modern American myth that "Western societies are governed by the belief that modernity is a single condition, everywhere the same and always benign." Instead, he says modernity also produces organizations such as al Qaeda, and thus if we are to defeat modern terrorism we must recognize it as a fully modern development. No one would accuse Bush of being a throwback to the Puritans; likewise, al Qaeda is not a throwback to the Middle Ages or some earlier time.
The difficulty, Gray writes, is ". . . many Americans believe that all human beings are American under the skin. On the other hand, they have long viewed the world -- especially the Old World of Europe -- as corrupt, possibly beyond redemption." Thus, the ideal expressed by President Woodrow Wilson of exporting American ideas to Europe after World War I, and the subsequent isolationism of Republicans in Congress which lasted until Dec. 7, 1941.
How valid is this? Well, Wilson sent the US Marines to Haiti with the gift of democracy in 1915; US forces stayed until 1934, providing Haiti with its most prosperous and peaceful era of the past century. After the Marines came home, Haiti collapsed into chaos and then a tyranny which lasted until 1986. President Bill Clinton sent US forces to Haiti in 1994, then pulled them out six months later. The success of America's long effort at "nation building" is reflected in today's ongoing headlines of Haitian horror.
We live in a world of chaos. As long ago as Euripides, it was recognized that knowledge cannot undo fate and virtue gives no protection against disaster. Gray urges that we return to these values, and thus understand the complexity, diversity and tolerance of life. But he adds, "Though we can imagine such a world, it is hard to imagine anything resembling it coming about by design. The proselytising fury of faith -- religious and secular -- forbids any peaceful evolution.
He says, "The most that humans can do is to be brave and resourceful, and expect to achieve little. Very likely we cannot revive this pagan view of things; but perhaps we can learn from it how to limit our hopes."
It's a grim view of the future, something almost out of 'Brave New World.' Unfortunately, he supports his pessimism with clear, logical and frightening logic; in short, science gives us wonderful rewards at the cost of our souls. It's not a new idea; but, like the best of the science which he deplores, Gray thoroughly modernizes the old Faustian legend.
It's a somber view of the future. Interesting, and fascinating, if true. This book will give any reader a lot to think about.
This book is not about Al Qaeda.
For example, he discusses Saint Simon's ideas about intellect and physiology and claims that a right wing project is associated with these ideas. This would be an opportunity to discuss the notions of evolutionary psychology; of course this doesn't arise as Gray is (one presumes) unaware of it. At any rate his erudition is NOT such that one thinks he wouldn't show off his knowledge.
He makes throw away comments like 'in Gunratna's work' without having referred to "Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror -- by Rohan Gunaratna" previously, he talks about Judaeo-Christianity as opposed to Islam, when one can as legitimately talk about Judaeo Islamic thought (he doesn't know that though).
All in all Gray is a chancer who knows nothing about al Qaeda, peppers his work with rhetorical flourishes and intellectual tricks and spends alot more time trying to look clever than saying anything worth hearing.
Gray's book spends most of its time being unreliable about modernity, instead. Gray's attack on modernity, sometimes modernism, is his real project; al Qaeda was cited partly for sales considerations but also to associate Gray's real bugbears with things that people revile.
Gray's book exhibits three fundamental flaws. First, Gray tends to conflate the Enlightenment, "modernism" and modernity, assuming that modern (or modernist) thinking, like Enlightenment thinking, privileges rationality as a guide to truth, assumes that liberal democracy is the only sensible future for humanity, and is on the whole optimistic.
This is simply wrong; Gray's modernity, like modernism, includes strong respect for the irrational, nostalgia for the "primitive" both in discourse and in art, and is significantly more distrustful of technology and "progressive" politics, and less optimistic, than Enlightenment thinking.
Second, Gray seems to think that if he demonstrates that a set of ideas has a single silly aspect, then he has demolished that entire set of ideas. So Gray makes much of the quasi-religious aspects of the "Positivism" (not positivism in its current sense) of Saint-Simon and Compte. Fine; there's good comedy there. But Gray seems to think that showing that Saint-Simon and Compte said some silly things, among the many sensible things they said, and identifying them as Enlightenment figures, must necessarily discredit the whole Enlightenment project.
Here Gray is being bewilderingly silly. It's not even as if Saint-Simon or Compte were particularly central or important Enlightenment figures. Even if they had been, ridiculing their quasi-religious projects no more damages their other ideas than noting Newton's interest in numerology discredits Newton's physics. It's like singling out two learned divines of the late 18th century, who perhaps believed in God and phlogiston, and claiming that because those two clerics said some silly things therefore the whole of Christianity, all of it, must necessarily collapse.
I find it hard to believe that Gray took his own rhetoric seriously, here. He either made a very feeble logical mistake or he hoped to win at rhetorical sleight of hand. But successful sleight of hand requires speed; and though this is a short book it is ponderous.
Third, Gray's "modern" has no clear boundaries: it includes anything that suits Gray's argument. Gray's conflation of the Enlightenment, modernism and the "modern" helps his claim that Stalinism drew on Enlightment ideas, though the most important and nightmarish aspects of Stalinism had nothing of the Enlightenment in them. Moreover Stalinism embraced some aspects of modernist ideology and style, so it's not quite meaningless to claim Stalinism as modern. But Stalinism's anti-intellectual authoritarianism, bloody and millenarian, really dates back to totalitarianisms that long pre-dated the Enlightenment, or modernism, or "modernity". Examples include the Spanish-ruled Netherlands and Cromwell's republic, but really Russia's own ancient history provides the real ancestors for Stalin.
Gray counts Nazism as a modernist movement, a claim that would have offended both Nazis and modernists. Again, Gray's conflation of modernism and the Enlightenment makes it necessary to point out that Nazism was not a product of the Enlightenment except in the negative sense that Enlightenment ideas were among the things the Nazis most passionately rejected. Nor was Nazism modernist; modernists were people that the Nazis silenced, or exiled, or killed. Gray claims the Nazis as modern simply because of their well-earned status as villains: the same reason he has for claiming that al Qaeda is modern.
How does Gray argue that al Qaeda is modern? First, he seems to think that the idea of changing human culture, changing the world, is essentially modern, so that if al Qaeda has global aims (as it obviously does), then it surely must be modern too.
But both Christianity and Islam had projects for changing the whole world, also and changing human nature, long before modernism or modernity existed. Al Qaeda's fantasy of murderous conquest (enacted in real murders) is precisely Medieval in seeking the restoration of the 7th century Caliphate and the expansion of an early-Medieval version of Islam to the world.
Second, Gray makes much of al Qaeda's use of technology like the Internet. But Al Qaeda's use of technology no more links them to the modern, or modernism, or the Enlightenment, than the innovative use of gunpowder in combat, nearly a thousand years ago, by al Qaeda's predecessors in murderous religious irredentism, Christian as well as Muslim.
Third, Gray is right to say that important aspects of al Qaeda's ideology resemble those of 20th century movements like Stalinism and Nazism. But he overlooks the extent to which both Nazism and Stalinism have their roots in essentially religious and statist authoritarianisms that long pre-date the last few centuries: Nazism, Stalinism and al-Qaeda all have important common ancestors which are much older than modernity, or modernism. And the Enlightenment should not take the rap for any of them.
So this book is another example of a writer connecting their personal hobbyhorses to best-selling search keywords like "al Qaeda", "terrorism", "9/11", etc. The book's connection to the subject matter announced in its title is so slight as to be significantly misleading. But it's not a worthwhile book even in its own terms.
Finally, reading Gray has reminded me that the Enlightenment is looking pretty fresh, clean and attractive, from this vantage point in history. Certainly Gray has reawakened my interest in Enlightenment writers like Hume, Voltaire and others, all of whom write better than Gray.
Cheers!
Laon