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37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Un-realising a "perfect" world, December 29, 2007
It's not easy categorising John Gray. He's generally listed as a "philosopher", but he rarely delves into the roots of human behaviour. His philosophy is founded on recorded history. Like most modern "philosophers", his arena is the canon of Western European tradition and practice. That approach, at least in Gray's hands, makes him more political commentator than philosopher. The shift of emphasis doesn't erode his thinking prowess nor his ability in expressing what he has derived from it. His prose is clean and unpretentious, almost hiding the power of the thinking behind it. In this exciting little work, Gray examines the history of modern "utopian" ideas - their misconceptions and their persistence.
The idea of utopias has long diverted us from confronting realities, Gray suggests. This self-generated departure tends to hide consequences of our acts until it's too late to deal with them successfully. Naturally, one of his glaring examples of this situation is the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Gray demonstrates how it was planned intentionally long before the causes were manufactured for it. The planning was clearly utopian in that the intentions were delusionary and inappropriate. Both governments declared their intention - based on false pretenses - to "extend democracy into the Middle East". This ambition was expressed without any perception of whether it would be welcomed. It's an underlying principle of utopian thinking, Gray observes, that a society can be re-created from within or imposed from the outside. The failure of such thinking is readily apparent in Iraq - a war that has lasted longer for the US than WWII. Utopian ideas have been seeded on infertile soil.
In explaining how the utopian idea arrived in the Middle East by way of the US-UK "special relationship", Gray skips lightly over Thomas More's original idea to the Enlightenment era. There is a link, however, in that while we are generally taught that the Enlightenment thinkers were building a secular world, they were relying on Christian precepts to expound their ideas. "Improvement" was the means of overcoming disparities in the human condition, and the State could replace the Church in making beneficial change. Among other virtues of this thinking was that it seemed realisable within human timespans. In the 20th Century, a wide variety of such proposals were tried, and Gray brings Marxism, the hippie communes of the 1960s and the Fascist-Nazi movements into the same paddock. Once thought as a "Leftist" ideal, Gray is unsurprised that it is now the policy of choice of the "neo-cons" and their supporters on the "Christian Right". Yet, it seems that no matter where on the political spectrum utopians arise, they continue to commit similar blunders. The goal blinds them to the perils of trying to achieve it and utopia becomes tragedy.
It's easy to peg Gray as grim or dismal. That's a common label pinned on those who seek to have us confront reality and think more deeply about our decisions. In this sense, Gray takes a long view of the role of Christianity in Western thinking. The shift of utopia from heaven to Earth, while seeming to provide improvement, was just as likely to introduce anarchy. He compares two contemporary thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, in their approach to this problem. Modern liberals declare the unrestrained State as the greatest threat to freedom. Hobbes understood that anarchy was an even greater threat and government was needed to quell it. Spinoza, on the other hand, while unwilling to grant the state power to stomp on emerging anarchy, had a different proposal. Humans are part of the natural world, and turning to the state for salvation of any kind was erroneous. His realistic view was that disorder and peace are natural cycles of the human condition. We must approach this situation realistically, without any fixed or unattainable goals to repress the one to gain the other. Such simplistic thinking can never succeed. Gray has offered an exceptionally rational set of pointers on avoiding such single-mindedness. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Save us from salvation, December 3, 2007
Picking up where he left off in his genuinely iconoclastic book "Straw Dogs," John Gray turns his attention to the ineluctably human penchant for utopia and apocalyptic fantasy. His style here is less abrasive but no less bracing. A British commentator recently wrote of Gray, "He is so out of the box it is easy to forget there was ever any box" - which fairly describes the intellectual jolt he'll deliver to readers dulled by boxy thinking.
The previous reviewer has done a decent job of describing the argument, but any summary misses the electricity that hums in Gray's sentences. Gray's unsparing synopsis of the neo-conservative fantasy that led to the debacle in Iraq will have patriotic Americans grinding their teeth in fury at the waste of American and Iraqi lives and the betrayal of American ideals. He also lambasts liberals who delude themselves about "inalienable" human rights, and minces no words about born-again Christians who've sanctioned and supported the torture and carnage, which leads him to a grim conclusion: "Liberals have come to believe that human freedom can be secured by constitutional guarantees. They have failed to grasp the Hobbesian truth ... that constitutions change with regimes. A regime shift has occurred in the US, which now stands somewhere between the law-governed state it was during most of its history and a species of illiberal democracy. The US has undergone this change not as a result of its corrosion by relativism ... but through the capture of government by fundamentalism. If the American regime as it has been known in the past ceases to exist, it will be a result of the power of faith." (pp. 168-169)
Gray is explicit about the folly of religious myths, but he accepts that "the mass of humankind will never be able to do without them," just as he dismisses "militant atheism" as a "by-product of Christianity," mocking its pretensions at evading the conundrums of theology. He's equally clear on the ineradicable future of terrorism. "Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life." (p. 186) Following the bleak logic of these observations to their conclusion, he can only advocate a clear-eyed realism about the nature of human being - which he confesses may in turn be a self-deceiving hope: "a shift to realism may be a utopian ideal."
As I read "Black Mass," I couldn't help recalling the work of William Pfaff, who as a political analyst practices the realism Gray recommends, and whose fine study "The Bullet's Song" examines the "redemptive utopian violence" as it was envisioned by a rogue's gallery of 20th century artist-intellectuals. Neither of these books are comfortable reading; neither offer a panacea - because (as Gray puts it) "there are moral dilemmas, some of which occur fairly regularly, for which there is no solution."
It's December, the time of year when voracious readers start compiling their "best of" lists. "Black Mass" (despite its silly title) ranks at the top of my list for 2007.
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42 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Delusion and Danger of Utopia, November 23, 2007
Gray's work traces the origins, and shows the evolution of the two ideas that have intertwined together to spawn the modern horrors of the French Revolution, Nazism, Communism, and which have now infiltrated the U.S. and are guiding American foreign policy, with absolutely disastrous results.
The genesis of these two ideas is due to Christianity. The first of them is that the world was soon coming to an end, and with its end, all evil would be forever banished, and a new world would emerge that was utterly good and harmonious. The second of these ideas is that history is a teleological process - it has a goal, an end point, it is moving towards something, progress is possible. This idea is derived from the Book of Revelation, which depicts the world as eventually becoming a better place with the continual destruction of evil forces.
These ideas got secularized during The Enlightenment, and give rise to the idea of a Utopia - a place where all human conflicts have washed away and everyone lives in perpetual peace. Such a place is possible because with enough knowledge will can set up a society that will not give rise to any conflicts. In other words, a perfect society is an obtainable goal, one that involves eradicating the maladies that have continually plagued our societies. Gray contends this is impossible, and this type of thinking is the danger inherent in pursuing, any and all, utopian projects.
Utopian thinking views the world/society, as the source of ills and conflicts, and not humans, and by doing so, makes human life expendable; ultimately compels the people who are under it spell to engage in violence as a means to attempt to achieve their goal. After all, what's a little bloodshed if it leads to the world becoming a heaven on Earth?
This line of thinking also precludes them from grasping the fatal flaw in their thinking - that human beings are not capable of becoming conflict-less beings; they will always possess conflicting and competing needs and values. No amount of knowledge will ever be able to make humans that mutable. And as such, people will resist having their lives radically altered by someone else's utopian scheme, and if nothing else this would prevent utopias from working, even if they were viable.
Gray goes on to explain how a left wing idea, a utopia, became embedded in right wing thinking. And also to show this utopian brand in thinking in action in the Bush administration in particular in foreign policy ventures. Instead of viewing terrorist as a security threat, he instead saw them as evil forces, whose complete annihilation would make the world a better place. Since making the world a better place is the right thing to do, anything that advances that goal is also good, it is imperative that various torture methods be adopted to achieve this end. Moreover, democracy and human rights are a good thing, so a world that has more places with these things in them, would be better, so the right thing to do would be to invade Iraq, by any means necessary (lying about the WMDs) and liberate it by force.
Overall, this is a thought, wide ranging, insightful, and interesting book about the well intentioned, but exceedingly dangerous mind set that is currently guiding U.S. foreign policy.
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