From Uncle Joe To Boy George

By Damian Thompson
Daily Telegraph, July 5, 2007
 

Edited by Andy Ross
 

   Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
  By John Gray
  Allen Lane, 256 pages

The human project to create a perfect society has died in the sands of Iraq. The attempt to export democracy to the Gulf was so crazy that its failure has killed off not just neoconservative ideology but also utopia itself.

That is the central thesis of John Gray's new book, and it really is a load of bollocks.

Gray, a professor at the LSE who is described on the front cover as "the most important living philosopher", has had a fit of Bush-hatred spectacular even by the standards of important living philosophers. But the silly man has gone and built an entire theory of history around it.

Here's the argument. Jesus and his early followers believed that a perfect world would come to pass after an earth-shattering confrontation with Satan. This apocalyptic belief was given a makeover by the Enlightenment.

So far, so good. The link between Christian millenarianism and Nazism is well established. But Gray also sniffs out a trail from Auschwitz. This is interesting, as is the information that Stalin had peasant women inseminated with ape sperm in an attempt to produce soldier ape-men who would be resistant to pain.

Then, unfortunately, Gray goes almost as nuts as Uncle Joe. He thinks that the apocalyptic torch has been passed from Pol Pot to George W Bush, who practises mass terror to create an Iraqi utopia dreamt up by shadowy neoconservatives. And most of them stay in the shadows, because Gray can't come up with more than a few names: Wolfowitz, Kristol, Perle and a couple of other Jews (he is sufficiently nervous to leave out this detail).

Perhaps aware that he is running short of neocons to man his conspiracy, Gray presses Tony Blair into service. The former Prime Minister was not only a classic neocon, we learn, but one whose mendacity bore the stamp of Soviet disinformation.

Although Gray is by no stretch of the imagination our most important living philosopher, he does slightly remind me of Bertrand Russell in his dotage — a clever man playing to the gallery.

But it's getting late, professor. Go home and sleep it off.
 

AR  Well done, Damian. You've deployed some fine rhetoric to debunk the ravings of a rabid loony. Gray and I were at college together but I don't think we ever spoke.
 

Only Science Can Save Us

By John Gray
The Observer, January 20, 2008
 

Edited by Andy Ross
 

No reasonable person any longer doubts that the world is heating up or that this change has been triggered by human activity.

When it comes to deciding what should be done, most people shrink from the discomfort that goes with realistic thinking. Greens put their faith in sustainable growth and renewable energy. The root of the environmental crisis is our addiction to fossil fuels. If only we switch to wind, wave and solar power, all will be well.

The environmental crisis cannot be resolved without a major reduction in our impact on the Earth. This means curbing the production of greenhouse gases, but here fashionable policies can be self-defeating. The shift to biofuels involves further destruction of rainforest, a key natural regulator of the climate. Unsightly and inefficient wind farms will not enable us to give up fossil fuels, while large-scale hydroelectric power has major environmental costs. Moving over to organic methods of food production does nothing to stop the devastation of wilderness that goes with expanding farming to feed a swelling human population.

The uncomfortable fact is that an energy-intensive lifestyle of the kind enjoyed in the rich parts of the world cannot be extended to a human population of nine or ten billion. In terms of resources, human numbers are already unsustainable. Global warming is the flipside of worldwide industrialisation. No expansion of renewables can satisfy the demand for energy in China and India. Anyway, does anyone really expect the countries getting rich from hydrocarbons to give them up? As long as there is enough demand, these countries will continue extracting fossil fuels.

The only way forward is to make full use of technologies many environmentalists view with superstitious horror. Nuclear energy has well-known problems of security and waste disposal, but demonising it is conventional green thinking at its delusional worst. Though solar power has potential, no type of renewable energy can replace the dirty fuels of the industrial past. If we reject the nuclear option, we will inevitably end up going back to coal. There are emerging technologies that can make coal cleaner. That is no reason for turning our back on nuclear, which is already virtually emission-free.

Any feasible remedy for the environmental crisis involves high-tech solutions. Given the legitimate aspirations of people in developing countries, only a high-tech strategy has any chance of reducing the human footprint.

But it will also be necessary to face up to the reality of population pressure. Malthus argued that population growth would finally overtake food production. Industrial farming turns out to have been heavily dependent on cheap oil, and limits on food production are re-emerging. Far more than renewable energy, we need to ensure that contraception and abortion are freely available everywhere.

While there is no technical fix for the human condition, intelligent use of technology is indispensable in coping with environmental disruption.


John Gray is a prominent liberal British political philosopher and author. Born in 1948, Gray studied at Exeter College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) and completed his doctorate. He has taught political theory at the University of Essex and the University of Oxford. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale and other universities. Since 1998, he has been School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

"The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run."
 

AR  Gray's grasp of the relevant technology is weak to nonexistent. If it were stronger, he would push more strongly for nuclear power.