Book Review

Call for the return of realism

Black Mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia

John Gray, in his latest book, warns that as the era of liberal intervention in international affairs wanes, It is being replaced with "primitive versions of religion" that will be used to fuel apocalyptic violence. His is a world where faith-based violence will become the norm, where societies will plunge headlong into self-immolation and where desperate groups of people will soon battle in a Hobbesian struggle for dwindling natural resources.

Gray pleads, like a modern-day Cassandra, for us to heed the numerous warning signs, from the effects of climate change to the rapaciousness of global capitalism to the looming oil crisis to overpopulation. He fears, however, that as things worsen we will spurn pragmatic measures to blunt irreversible  ex-cesses, for fantastic, violent visions spun out for us by mad utopians. His book is a plea for sanity. I hope it works.

Gray is one of the most interesting moral philosophers since the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Gray would, I expect, label Niebuhr as an idealist given that Niebuhr, while conceding our animal natures and irrational delusions, did believe in the possibility of lim-ited free will. Gray is more sceptical. He sees us as all hostage to our animal instincts. "Actually, humanity cannot advance or retreat," he writes, "for humanity cannot act: there is no collective entity with intentions or purposes, only ephemeral struggling animals each with its own passions and illusions."

But Gray shares with Niebuhr a view of human nature that does not ignore our cap-acity for depravity and self-delusion. Gray seeks, like Niebuhr, to be a realist. This makes his writing, unlike that of many modern philosophers and theologians, worth reading. And he does not take refuge behind the jargon and dead language of academia that is, at its core, anti-thought. He builds his ethics on the foundation of the stunted capacity of human nature, rather than delusions of human perfectibility and human progress. He knows that we do not advance morally as a race and that the science and technology that have improved our world have also made possible the genocidal and environmental devastation of the last century.

Gray grasps that religious impulses do not go away, even in ruthlessly secular regimes such as the old Soviet Union. They simply mutate and transform. He warns that these un-examined impulses are more dangerous than those overtly embraced by traditional religion. He charts the decline of Christianity as coinciding with the rise of revolutionary utopianism. These eschatological hopes never disappeared. They mutated into a form of secular fundamentalism, peddled by fascism, Communism, liberal humanism and by the naive crop of new atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. "Like repressed sexual de-sire, faith returns, often in grotesque forms, to govern the lives of those who deny it."

The culprit is the Enlightenment myth of human progress and human perfectibility. It was this myth that underpinned the wide-spread embrace of pacifism in the aftermath of the First World War; but the delusion that human beings could advance morally led directly to despotism. "Theories of progress are not scientific hypotheses. They are myths, which answer the human need for meaning."

Gray, in his effort to be a realist, can stretch himself too far. He buys too much into E.O. Wilson's myth of biological determinism. And the defence of torture as an interrogation technique that Gray presents in a previous work, Heresies: against progress and other illusions, is the most egregious example of someone who needs to spend more time in the real world himself. Torture is almost always counterproductive. It is championed most energetically by those very radical utopians that Gray despises. The theory of the time bomb, the notion that a terrorist is in custody and torture must be used to extract in-formation that will save humankind, is a fantasy. Its proponents cannot provide one legal or historical example where such an event took place. The real purpose of legalising torture is to unleash sadists and killers and institute a reign of terror. In Black Mass, Gray at least understands the effects of the Bush administration's widespread use of torture in Iraq.

"The methods of torture employed in Iraq targeted the culture of their victims, who were assaulted not only as human beings but also as Arabs and Muslims," he notes. "In using these techniques the US imprinted an indelible image of American depravity on the population and ensured that no American-backed regime can have legitimacy in Iraq."

The world that awaits us will be difficult. It will require, as Gray understands it, "stoical determination and intellectual detachment". It is not a world where we want "missionaries and crusaders" like George Bush and Tony Blair who see every crisis "as a heaven-sent opportunity to save humanity". The coming world will require a return to realism, to the belief that we cannot mould and shape the world according to human desires, but must carry out only limited acts of social engineering to ward off the worst effects of the disasters that will befall us. Politics is not "a vehicle for universal projects but the art of responding to the flux of circumstances". We must give up our grand visions for humanity to "cope with recurring evils".

Gray notes: "There are situations in which whatever is done contains wrong - for example, the situation that has been created by American intervention in Iraq. Certainly we can avoid multiplying these situations: we may have to kill on a mass scale to defeat Hitler but we need not wade in blood to democratise the world. Realism is an Occam's Razor that works to minimise radical choices among evils. It can-not enable us to escape these choices, for they go with being human."

He concedes that religion, when not hijacked by fundamentalists or idealists, keeps us grounded. His work is a potent and powerful meditation on human nature and the concept of sin - the core of great theology. He writes that religion is an attempt to deal with mystery "rather than hope that mystery will be un-veiled". He calls this "a civilising perception" and fears that it is being lost.

What Gray fails to grasp is the transcendence and power that comes with achieving the moral life, a life that a realist, as Gray defines the word, has to concede is absurd. There is a meaning to existence: it is found, as Dostoevsky, Conrad and Vasily Grossman knew, in simple, blind acts of human kindness, especially towards the outcast and the stranger. It is discovered when we confront and acknowledge the in-evitable chains and limitations of human nature but do not completely succumb to them.

These small acts of compassion, never free from the taint of self-interest, do not make the world a quantifiably better place. We will not save ourselves from evil, suffering and death. But these acts mean that we have, if only for a moment, felt what it means to be fully human. We have reacted not as animals in a herd, but as individuals who rose above our baser instincts and the clamour of the mob to defy hatred and bigotry and to cherish life. These acts of compassion allow us to become conscious, if only for a moment, in an un-conscious world. And these acts define and sustain the religious life.  

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