© Dr M D Magee 2007, Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Friday, 19 November 2004
That Strauss was a great defender of democracy is laughable… Strauss disciples consider it a noble lie.Shadia B Drury
In the middle of his book, Gray moves into the areas where he is good—in this book anyway—modern political analysis. Even an I-Speak-Your-Weight professor is good at something—speaking weights. Whether it is that Gray understands the Bush and Blair neocon lunacy better than most because he is one at heart, who knows? But he is exceptionally frank about it, much more so than most political correspondents. He begins by stating what few of them would have said, but which surely is true:
Blair was always closer to neoconservative thinking, and after the 9/11 attacks, he shifted decisively to neoconservatism.
Gray is fond of the modern habit of calling unreconstructed tories neoliberals, explaining that it is a desire for pure liberal values, namely rampant uncontrolled capitalism and strictly limited government. It is not liberals who want this. They learn form history and know that markets cannot be unrestricted if only because they then do not work. Governments must have the task of regulation and cannot be restricted in this regulatory role. The ones who want absolute freedom in the markets are the ones who think they will benefit at everyone else’s expense—the rich, the corporate bosses, and their servants, the managerial classes who know better but dare not risk offending their paymasters. Leo Strauss called them the Philosophers and the Gentlemen. Neoliberal means neocon and fascist in fact, not liberal, and the perpetual use of a term which has nothing to do with what it seems to mean, but is actually its opposite, looks like more Straussian obfuscation. No liberal will claim to be a neoliberal any more than a British socialist will claim to be New Labour, or even a one nation Tory would claim to be a neocon. It is disinformation meant to fool ignorant voters—hoi polloi.
Having identified Blair as a neoconservative, Gray reverts to using neoliberal, so it is plain enough that neoliberalism is neoconservatism, in fact. Now, political philosophers might have decided that neoliberalism is a return to the liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but liberals have evolved from whiggery so it cannot be right today to falsely imply that neoconservatism is in any way liberal. Maybe professors of political economics can write sensibly to each other knowing that by neo-black they mean white, but anyone intelligent among them must protest. Not the neoconservatives, though, because childish trickery and misinformation for the plebs is part of their stock in trade. Both Bush and Blair are liars in the common sense of the word, but lying is not lying to them. They are Christians and God ensures that they only speak truth!
Neoliberals, so-called, like F A Hayek and Milton Friedman, essentially wanted to return to a Golden Age before capitalism was spoilt by government regulation. All attempts to restore the past are by definition reactionary. The reason these old tories liked the idea they were new liberals was that they liked Adam Smith, the eighteenth century Scottish political economist, whom Gray says was driven primarily by religion, yet whose idea of free markets as a utopia did not imply any degree of perfection, but the best attainable economic system despite whatever flaws remained. It sounds fairly realistic, but actually modern mixed economies are better than unrestricted markets, purely motivated by capital accumulation. The reason is simply that important aspects of a modern economy would be ignored by get-richer capitalists because there was not enough profit in them. Examples are the health and education of the poor, people who cannot afford to pay much, and so there is little profit in them, yet without full health and education, the system suffers both a burden and a loss of talent.
Governments therefore have to ensure that these sorts of areas are adequately covered. In the last century, there has been a consensus that such interference by governments is beneficial, but the neoconservatives are nowhere as liberal or as intelligent as their conservative forebears, though Gray thinks otherwise—neoconservatives are more intelligent than neoliberals, though they are the same, a confession by someone, not intellectually modest, of where he stands. Neoconservatives want no interference, and that means dictatorship—fascism. If Adam Smith was influenced by religion, it was because it was difficult for anyone then not to be, but there is nothing in liberalism per se that is religious, and for most people, it is essential that political systems should not favour or ill-favour any religion. Religious freedom is at the heart of liberalism, and so it is quite irrelevant that it grew out of a religious society. It grew as a protest and a corrective to the wrongs and excesses that religion had favoured, or at least condoned.
In Britain, neoconservatism’s political vehicle was not the Conservative Party, but the new party that Blair created when he seized the Labour Party.
There is a book to be written on how the coup was effected, because it must have involved a lot of planning and resources behind it for it to have been done without anyone in the Labour Party noticing. Sure, many “old” Labour members realized that Blair was no socialist, but not enough, and none of the ones who obejected to the new leader saw how anti-socialist and even anti-liberal he was. Once in power, he did what all dictators do, changed the rules to consolidate his position, and hand picked candidates, most of whom were loyal to their sociopathic boss, but were far too stupid to run political departments and have left the party bereft of talent. The whole regime was a disaster except economically, where Brown, for ten years Chancellor of the Exchequer, claimed prudence, but benefitted from the global boom and particularly the absurd levels of lending. Blair was an opportunist, but his political beliefs were neoconservative:
His career in politics is testimony to the power of neoconservative ideas…
A role of government readily accepted by conservatives and more so by neoconservatives is policing. The right wing always emphasize discipline and punishment and religion, of course, as the basis of it all, religious people being obedient people who accept their lot on earth so as not to jeopardize their ticket to heaven. The traditional labour party was always chary of the Tory emphasis on “law and order” as a cover for oppressive measures. Blair seized on it, and pushed through a vast programme of largely oppressive laws, especially after 9/11, when the excuse of the “war on terror” was created. He also began openly supporting faith schools, some of which taught biblical creationism as science. Anyone who thinks creationism is to be preferred to science, or even equal to it, is either dim-witted or is motivated to destroy our society by returning it to religious obscurantism. No one who has any historical knowledge of religion could do it, but there is one thing that faith schools never teach and that is the true history of their own religion.
Blair is an American neoconservative and has been most of his political life.
He is not another neoliberal prophet of the free market, Gray says, and it is true, but he is closer to a biblical prophet. Like Bush, he is convinced God is on his side, so he can do and say no wrong. He deployed the British Army to dangerous and fruitless expeditions, even when it was participating in the slaughter of thousands of innocent people, convinced the outcome would be guaranteed. War is an instrument for good, and history is providence. He has done the innocent dead a favour because they go straight to heaven, and he brags that he is happy to meet his maker and be judged. He is incapable of self-doubt or criticism, or can cast any slight doubts off with a prayer. It is quite impossible to be wrong because he is convinced he is doing what God wants. In short, he is deranged! So is Bush, and he has his finger on the nuclear button, and has his missiles trained on Iran! We have reason to be scared, but no one is.
This is the most dangerous sort of insanity, the messianic insanity of Jesus himself, and of his imitators since, like Hitler. Jesus thought he knew that God was about to end history, and led his opposition to the authorities in that light, but he was wrong. Bush and Blair also think that their faith gives them a privileged knowledge of God’s design. The subjective confidence these deluded people have that they are right about history makes it objectively so. And when lying is necessary to further God’s providential plan, it is not lying. Surely no one, other than similar lunatics, can see anything but lunacy in this, yet we have allowed two of the most powerful countries in the world to be ruled by demented men. Surely, too, even the vast bulk of Christians accept that only God knows His plans, and anyone who thinks otherwise is in Satan’s grip. Any truly analytical Christian must see that the crucifixion of Jesus is a warning to us all that no man, even a supposed son of God, actually knows what God thinks. Christians, above all, should be protesting that madmen are operating in their name. Where are the protests, if they do?
And the madness of our neocon Christian leaders extended into serious matters of state, as is plain now, but it involved gross deception in senior government departments, and the subversion to personal whims of departments that ought to have been objective. The spying services called military intelligence are useless unless they are based on reality, but Bush, Blair and their neocon advisers believed in faith-based intelligence—intelligence based on telepathic messages from God—intelligence that fitted Christian delusions and particularly their own schemes. Bush decided to invade Iraq for reasons that had no connexion with 9/11. Supposed Iraqi involvement was for public consumption. Even in the US, millions did not buy it, but, once the war began, Bush depended on the mindless support of his army of Christians and the patriotism of the rest, and the protesting ended through a national wish not to undermine “our boys” however unjust, idiotic and unnecessary the venture. Never mind that Christian nutcases have sent our boys on another fool’s errand to suit corporate armaments manufacturers and oil theives. Better they should die with dubious honour than be demoralized by truth.
It was harder for Blair, but somehow he subverted the intelligence services, meant to be non-party political, and turned them into an arm of his demented fancies. Some future leader will have to try to restore the civil service to what it was, a conservatively inclined but generally independent servant of any and all governments whatever their complexion without compromising their own neutrality. British intelligence failed in this, evidently because its leaders too had gone neocon. Blair committed himself to Bush’s neocon tune on Iraq, even though Bush allowed him less than full invovement. All of this bypassed the UN. The posturing at the UN was again for hoi polloi and meant nothing. In the British parliament, Blair continued the posturing until the very end, pretending that war was avoidable even though he had already agreed it with Bush.
Truth is whatever serves the cause.
Our Christian leaders were not lying in their Christian world, but it is still lying in the real world. Gray seems to be absolving Bush and Blair on the grounds of insanity, for he says they did not think they were lying. They lacked the “normal understanding” of it, though it has been the Christian understanding since Christ told them they could say what they liked and God ensured it was true (Mt 10:19-20), a Christian encouragement to delusion. Either way, they should both be impeached for taking us to war on the basis of lies. Everyone complicit in the scheme should be jailed for conspiracy. Only this would send the right messages to future madmen and liars in senior government offices. The whole lying charade was cheerily called spin in the press, simply presentation, according to the liars themselves, and the chief architect of it in the UK was Alister Campbell, a tabloid journalist who cannot be expected to distinguish truth from mendacity.
Both Bush and Blair are utterly ignorant of history, particularly of Christian history. All practising Christians have to be, because they could not bear to be associated with the crimes of Christianity’s past, or they are perverts and sadists. Christ saw the end of time coming, and since then it has been a regular occurence among cracked Christian pots. So far, it has not come, but deranged people like Bush have the power to bring it about. That ought to worry us. American Christian fundamentalism has made it possible, a strand of Christianity with a self-righteously deep, but theologically shallow, indeed unsound, religiosity. Few of them know anything about Christianity other than what they are told, mainly by power hungry get-rich-quick pastors whose image of the life and teaching of Christ bears no relationship to what anyone not illiterate can read in their bibles. The fundamentalist Jesus is more like the murderous Joshua, who suits their gun-happy Rambo mentality much more than the parable-telling pacifist of the gospels. The US stands out among western democracies for its supposed religiosity, but it is a satanic religiosity. They worship a war god.
The reason is that the political right wing, the Republicans, are using Christianity for their own ends, and Bush would never have been elected or remained in power without the double whammy of Christian support and outrageous jerrymandering—further proof of the opportunistic dishonesty of the Christian tribe. It certainly never seems to occur to any of them why the poor old US of A is always under threat from evil empires. For seventy years, all bar the joint war against the nazis, communists were America’s demons. In 1991, the center of communist world power, the USSR, fell, and Americans could rest easy in their beds for the first time in three generations. Not so! The American right always needs an external threat to keep civilian attention from domestic ineptitude and callousness, and to justify industrial and military spending overseas that many US corporations depend on for their profitability.
For neocons, it was an item of their theology that the US must have an enemy, and what better than Christianity’s main rival in religion for the last 1300 years. The US had supported Saddam as a counter to the influence of Iran in the middle east for thirty years, but now he was the ideal scapegoat. The people behind 9/11 were mainly Saudi nationals, not Iraqis, and the head of the new demonic empire, Al Qaida, was Osama bin Laden, whose family had long had close ties with the US, as many rich Saudis had, and even with the Bush family. It excluded Saudi Arabia as a target of revenge, even though it was the obvious suspect, and had spread a militant and oppressive form of Islam for years. The US pays out tens of billions of dollars in “aid” to the incredibly rich Saudi ruling class to keep them sweet, not really aid, of course, but bribes, and, to do it, who pays but the American people? The corrupt leadership caste of the US openly robs its own people to keep them and their equally rich overseas friends in power. Religiosity helps to keep them submissive and resigned to this robbery. Anyway, the neocons portrayed Saddam as the latest devil, rather than the Saudis who had really nurtured Islamism. Saddam was an atheist or, no more than a token Moslem, but the real culprits were Bush favorites so could not be targetted, and Saddam could be with advantage, greedy men like Bush and Cheney thought. The ignorant Christian masses of the southern US would readily accept him as the new Satan, and Bush as a saviour, and so it proved. Gray cites Dick Clarke who served four presidents as an adviser on terrorism:
Paul Wolfowitz had urged a focus on an Iraqi sponsored terrorism against the US, even though there was no such thing.
Wolfowitz was a leading neocon, and they had taken to the philosophy of Leo Strauss which required myths—read lies—to feed to the masses, and religion as the vehicle of the myths-come-lies. Straussists are too clever to believe in religion themselves but they have to pretend to for the sake of the masses who cannot bear not to be religious. So, the neoconservatives of the Republican party’s Washington caste of politicos had natural allies in the fundamentalist evangelists of the deep south who were also Republicans:
They were the political base of the Bush administration, and the contemporary, Southernized Republican Party.Michael Lind, Made in Texas, cited by Gray
Apparently paradoxical is that leading neoconservatives in the Washington political caste were ex-Trotskyites. Americans are supposedly sensitive in the extreme to communism, yet here they cheerfully accepted a bunch of former commies pulling the strings of government. The phenomenon of Trotskyites being on the right is however not peculiar. Trotsky was always anti-Stalin, and so Trotskyites were anti-USSR, and therefore perfect allies of the US. The US used them to divide the communists in countries within their sphere of influence thus preventing any build up of popular support for communism and thr USSR when the USA was indulging in the shockingly anti-democratic foreign policy it pursued after WWII, but especially at the time of Vietnam. When Reaganomics eventually did pull down the USSR, the Trots had nothing more to do, and nowhere to go, so they headed to their proper place, the far right.
Had they been sincerely anti-capitalist, they would have turned their full attention to creating a genuinely anti-Stalinist world wide communist movement. They did not and so that was never their real aim. They quite naturally turned to the branch of neo-fascism called neoconservatism, and found a welcome in the Republican Party’s Washington lobbies. Not a few of them were former students of Leo Strauss himself, and Strauss, following the Greek academies he admired, was one of the few modern academics to self-consciously create a school of followers. Strauss himself was a nazi sympathiser who had the misfortune to be a Jew at the same time, so he escaped from Germany in good time under the patronage of Carl Schmidt, a Catholic who became a leading nazi legalist.
Law is never permanent, despite the beliefs of Jews and Moslems, it is at the whim of time and political choice. Liberalism expresses the rights of the individual over the coercion of the lord or the state, but no liberal wants to dispense with the law all together. That might be an ideal of libertarianism or anarchy, but the liberal accepts the need for law to hold society together so that it does not spallate into every man for himself. The law, according to the liberal, always has to balance rights against duties or resposibilities, and freedom against virtue, where virtue is a moral obligation to others in society—morality. If one’s freedom or rights is exhalted way above duty and virtue, society becomes chaotic—every deed is as good as any other, there is no right and wrong nor good and bad. We have post-modernism.
So personal freedom, though especially valued, is not valued exclusively by liberals. It cannot be absolute as long as human beings remain social animals. Human beings live collectively like wolves, not separately like coyotes, so absolute freedom destroys society, destroys the collective, and leaves us all living separate lives with no thought for others. Solitary animals have no cause to want laws or morality, it is social animals that need laws and morality, and liberalism accepts that we all have duties to others as well as our individual rights. Liberals tilt towards the importance of rights, but recognize that we cannot avoid our duties to society in return for them.
Latterly, rights have been emphasized to the exclusion of duties. Every punk kid knows their rights but none of them are concerned about their duties. It has suited politicians grubbing for votes to emphasize rights and not duty, but society is getting chaotic and the consequence will be a reaction that might take a fascist shape. The neocons are on to this trend. If it is to be avoided, rights should not be divorced from duties, and school kids should be taught that they have a duty to society as well as rights within it. The anti-social neighbour from hell has no right to keep his home while neglecting his duty to be neighbourly. The drug baron has no rights when he is destroying society by selling anti-social, life wrecking drugs contrary to his social duty. The same is true of the gunrunner and all criminal activity. Society has itself the right to restrict any of its citizen’s human rights, if they neglect their duty to society, but the liberal is chary about society using its rights in this respect unless it is necessary. That is the meaning of liberal. It is not at all a difficult principle.
Gray wants to pin all the problems of modern liberal democracy on to liberalism, a product and synonym of the Enlightenment, again joining liberalism’s enemies. He has to use very dark glasses to shade out the light to “see” what he wants to see. Hitler was beaten but refused to make peace, making the German nation fight on to the bitter end. It was the “negative eschatology of pagan traditions” not the far more obvious traditional eschatology of the religion that espouses it, Christianity. Hitler is the prime example of the basis of Gray’s thesis that political utopias stem from Christian eschatology with no need to introduce intervening levels of propagation merely to denigrate them. Hitler was a Catholic, but admired Luther’s anti-Jewish bigotry, thought Germans were a type of chosen people, and believed himself to be a type of messiah. His eschatology was entirely of the pure Christian kind. The outcome could only be a victory for good—in Hitler’s view a nazi utopia—or evil—the utter destruction of the good! Hitler’s view might have been too incoherent to be nihilistic, as Gray thinks, but it was made in the perfect image of Christian belief.
That political order rests on the acceptance of moral contraints that lie outside the human sphere matched the creedal character of American public life. America has always been hospitable to the belief that its values are God-given…
So says Leo Strauss, Gray notes. For Strauss, morality had to have a metaphysical origin—ie God—and without it liberalism decayed into chaos. As there was no God, He had to be preserved mythically—ie by lies—because ordinary plebeians would cease to be moral once they realized that God did not exist to keep an eye on them. It is the ancient social purpose of religion. In truth, morality is entirely a human concept and is only “metaphysical” to the extent that it depends in some respects on our physical nature through evolution. As noted already, a race of solitary human beings would need no morality. It is imposed by society to regulate how we must behave in society if it is to be preserved. Even many intellectuals cannot seem to grasp this, and continue to see God reflected in social behaviour.
The contradiction in society is between society and the individual. Society required morals and so devised them as it developed. Chaos, what Gray calls anarchy and nihilism, is ignoring the social dimension and returning to solitary living. Liberals do not ignore society, fascism does, in that it favours a few individuals as an elite oppressing the rest who are üntermenschen. Strauss and his neoconservative followers are enemies of liberalism in its modern realistic form because they are liberal fundamentalists, for the elite class of philosophers are free to do as they like to the rest who are merely slaves and cannon fodder. H J Eysenck, the British psychologist, has shown decades ago that fascists are simply tough-minded liberals, meaning they are liberals convinced that they are right, and their views are more important than anyone else’s in society. This is the sense that neoconservatism equates with neoliberalism. Both are liberal for the few, the elite or the philosophers, but everyone else are slaves! For liberals everyone must be equally free.
Gray seems to be an admirer of Strauss though he ostensibly rejects neoconservatism—Strauss would not have been a neocon and cannot be blamed for his disciples. But his notion of coded meaning behind plain speaking is itself a license for nihilism and confusion—unless someone has the key to the supposed code—for it permits any interpretation to be made. It is just like biblical interpretation, which is true history except where it is barbaric and contrary to the mores of modern Christians when it suddenly becomes allegorical, and can then mean anything that a clever pastor can read into it. Of course, God’s ministers are guided by the Holy Ghost, God’s guide to the truth. It proves that post-modernism is not at all modern but a reversion to dark age methods. Strauss has now given a right wing cod philosophy to justify it.
Another name for the Enlightenment is science and Gray is always pleased to have an irrational go at it, something surprising for a realist, one might have thought, but entirely in line with Straussism:
Strauss’s attack on the belief that the study of society could be conducted by the methods of natural science was well founded.
All, right, this is not an attack on science, but it is an attack on the utility of its methods which, in the real world are general. Gray is just too fond of spouting in fields in which he is incompetent, doubtless a reason why Will Self, the writer and critic, eulogises him. Storm Jameson, novelist and critic of an earlier generation, sensibly wrote, “I cannot pretend to be competent to judge any but English fiction.” Literary critics, if they are necessary at all, when content is important and not merely made up, should confine themselves to style. Here we learn society cannot be studied by the scientific method because it is a mixture of fact, values, cultures and random processes, all of which can be studied scientifically, so why cannot the assembly of them? Gray simply does not understand science. The I-Speak-Your-Weight machine thinks he is a Cray computer. But the simple weighing machine has a value as a weighing machine—not as a computer. Sadly, Gray does not get it. Yet, to judge from this book, he is good on modern politics, but fails consistently as the renaissance man he thinks he is. Clever men today stick to their knitting.
Abram Shulsky, the Straussist put in charge of intelligence gathering at the Office of Special Plans (OSP) is a great believer in making it up as he goes along, otherwise known as “faith based intelligence”. Since 2006, he has been in the “Iranian Directorate”. Uh oh! It is a scary prospect, especially as Cheney’s daughter receives the reports from the State Deopartment’s Iran Desk. The fear is that these insane people are planning to nuke Iran. Cheney too was a firm believer in “faith based intelligence” in pushing for the war in Iraq, and fortunately it tied in precisely with Halliburton based intelligence.
The neocon analyst Michael Ledeen wrote that “creative destruction is our middle name”, reflecting the dictum of Bakunin, the Russian anarchist who had written, “The passion for destruction is a creative passion.” You have to admit, particularly if a conservative, that this is a dangerous principle to hold, if it is not another symptom of insanity. And it simply invites retaliation from those the neocons are out to destroy, creatively or otherwise. Liberal principles are peaceful coexistence of states with different governments, and non-interference. Moreover, neocons have brought back torture and terror. Their dim-witted supporters—dim-witted in the neocons own view—assume that anyone being tortured is guilty, though there is no evidence that the authorities are willing to put before a court of law that they are.
A reason for torture is to get evidence, but everyone knows that such evidence is the most unreliable evidence. Someone being tortured will confess to what they have not done and will name innocent people to get the torture stopped. It is what happened during the European inquisition and witch hunts, and myriads of innocent people cruelly died because of it. Anyone who had read Christian history would know it, and not want it repeating, but Christians do not know it, and so they repeat it, convinced that God wants it done. The victims deserve it, they say, as ever assuming guilt, and vomiting on our democratic principles. Monsters like Bush, Blair, Rumsfield, Cheney, Wolfowitz and so on should be subject to the punishments they have imposed on others. They should be themselves torured, but they know that no one with any humanity will do it. So, they should be locked up for life in their own prison, and with no privileges. Can a future president of the US undertake to do this? The evidence is uncontrovertible and is known world-wide, so they can be granted a fair trial. They know full well that they will never have to face God, because despite their crocodile piety, they couldn’t care a fig for God. So it is up to some just leader, in the near future, let us hope.
Beginning a discussion of the Bush armed mission to civilize Iraq, Gray gives a most apt quotation from Robespierre, a man hardly admired by conservatives, but who wrote…
…no one loves armed missionaries. The first lesson of nature and providence is to repulse them as enemies. One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force.
No political thinkers should imagine they can export their own laws and constitution. Marxists had a similar dictum, that you cannot export revolution, and Che Guevara learnt it as a fatal lesson. Bush and Blair knew nothing of history, only their disastrous religious fantasies. Sensible rulers will take sound advice in matters that they have no knowledge of, but not religious fanatics with a mental phone-line to God. A basic flaw in the US system is that each president appoints his own administrative and executive staff. Idiots can surround themselves with idiots, or fascists with fascists, leaving a take over all too easy should anyone be ruthless enough to want it. The time has come. The British system was that all governments had the same set of civil service mandarins, well educated and trained into the system, able to offer tried and tested advice to government ministers however green or undemocratic they were. Blair subverted it with the most astonishing ease, the top mandarins rolling over like cowardly puppies. So Blair got the American system instituted in the UK. It is difficult to see any future government restoring the system.
Robespierre’s dictum reflects history and psychology. People like to do things for themselves, and not to be dictated to or have things imposed by bullies. Just as a child trying to build a house of cards resents the adult who does it for him, thinking the child wants to see the finished house, so too people like to build their own freedoms. The child sulkily knocks over the house of cards his uncle built for him, and equally people will resent and destroy what is forced on to them. The child did not want a house of cards, it wanted to build one. People building a nation are the same. The US maintained Saddam in power for decades because it suited them. They could have gotten rid of him much more effectively than by invading, causing the deaths of myriads of innocent people many of whom would have been glad to see the back of him. But the bully is never interested in justice. They want their own way, just or not. When Christians have been in positions of power they have been the same, and, as Gray notes, “terror has always been a part of the modern west”.
Now Gray claims an ingredient of the US invasion of Iraq was “liberal imperialism”, and oxymoron if there ever was one. He means the declaration that the war was over human rights. He admits it is not a realistic objective, but nor has it anything to do with liberalism, and is only another attempt by Gray to besmirch it. The real question is to what extent Straussists and neocons espouse any principle they claim. They are atheists but profess Christianity to control and manipulate. They espouse liberal and humane objectives when their aims are anything but these. They openly espouse a policy of deception. To pretend they are sending troops to fight for human rights gets popular support when to admit they were really sent to get oilfields for Halliburton would not. Surely Gray can see this, or is he adding his own tenpennyworth to the obfuscation?—that it is not the fault of fascists but the fault of liberals the neocons claimed the war was over human rights. Liberalism does not favour tyranny, and its values cannot be excluded from any section of humanity. Only a fascist can justify the imposition of supposed liberal values by force. For the fascist, there is no contradiction here. They lie on principle, and use force on principle, liberals do neither. Liberals know that no one forced to do something is free. Societies accept laws suitable for themselves, at their own phase of maturity. Only fascists impose laws, and then pretend they are democrats really.
The very basis of liberality is people’s soverieign rights, and that is why it is absurd to force people to be free. It can only be anti-liberal propaganda to maintain it is a liberal duty to do it. People must liberate themselves, and it usually means they have to free themselves from some tyranny. Europe had to free itself from the tyranny of the church, and the US is now trying to force a Christian tyranny on to others again. Certainly, free countries can help to free people, but invasion and mass murder by carpet bombing, or even by precision bombing, is not included, and the US has consistently helped tyrannies since it became a neo-imperialist power after the world war.
Leo Strauss rejected the Enlightenment, and it takes some swallowing that his neocon disciples committed to a doctrine of lying have suddenly adopted it, for the Enlightenment is the basis of modern democratic government. The policies of their puppet president belie it, as do those of his puppet, Blair. The Senate has abrogated its own responsibilities, allowing even the basic right of habeas corpus to be decided by a president who wants to perpetuate a war on terror as a matter of Republican Party policy. No evidence or even any crime is needed to lock someone up indefinitely. He has also been given the right to decide what constitutes torture, allowing him to order the torture of captives while pretending that it is not torture. The Patriot Act leaves everyone open to any accusation of terrorism. Anyone can now be locked up and tortured with no access to any legal procedures. An official witch hunt is on the cards. The US has plunged into the inquisition, and only a few have the courage to speak out about it for fear of militaristic and Christian pickets blockading them wherever they go. The US government is no longer subject to the rule of law. The president and his neocon cronies have absolute power, and it is just a question of when it will be used. Another manufactured crisis is all that is needed for Bush to suspend the constitution and rule by diktat, all in the interest of democracy and homeland security, you understand. Hail to emperor Bush, the Nero of the new imperium.
Only an I-Speak-Your-Weight professor can put any of this at the door of liberals. Liberals are among the few who are speaking out against all this state terrorism. It is entirely Straussist to blame victims for the crimes they suffer, and then accuse those who protest of supporting terror. Yet it is precisely what Christians perfected with the inquisition. Until Bush and Blair took power with their insane fancies, most of us must have thought all that was behind us. It shows how thin our veneer of civilization is, and it seems entirely appropriate that it is Christianity that is pulling it off in wide strips.
Gray supports the British attitude to terrorism in northern Ireland, though errors were made. It was to consistently treat terrorists as criminals not as they wanted to be seen, as an army opposing injustice, seeking to bring them to justice as often as possible, and having a great deal of patience and persistence doing it. Speaking of war gives the terrorist just what he wants. He wants to think he is fighting injustice, and his enemy admits it is a war! Military tactics simply enoble terrorists as freedom fighters, and an invasion justifies them from the outset. Only brave men can stand up to a bully, and they automatically have public sympathy and justice on their side as underdogs. But freedom fighters that fail to achieve their aim inevitably transmute into criminal gangs, and though all the media attention was on the IRA, the opposing Protestant gangs were criminals all along. The corollary of this approach is to encourage terrorists to use legitimate political expression, conceding to them a “political wing” as open representatives of the movement with whom some dialogue could always be had. Electoral failure isolates the “army”—the active terrorists—and demonstrates their lack of popular legitimacy, while any degree of success shows them that political aims can be achieved without violence.
Evil is not just a word meaning bad, it has the religious implication—that the act is part of the cosmic war against God. US leaders for decades have seen international affairs as part of this cosmic war. The US is God’s own country and Americans the chosen people. The rest are the evil empire whose people are “gooks” or otherwise üntermenschen with a supernaturally induced hatred of the master race and their Holy Land, the USA. Now the “evil empire” has become the “war on terror”—prophesied by Terry Gilliam in his filmed dystopia Brazil a quarter century ago—but the cosmic religious overtones are retained as part of the myth devised for consumption by Christian woodentops.
For much of the twentieth century, far from hating American culture and lifestyle, most people in the world aspired to it, and millions sought to get to the US or the west generally to join the American dream. Millions are still coming, so their is something plainly wrong with the assessments made by US politicians and media. Increasingly, though, the truth in it grows, for US foreign policy has been based on the ridiculous fundamentalist Christian conception of cosmic warfare for far too long, and has succeeded in offending everyone intelligent everywhere. Now there is indeed a deep resentment that such a gifted nation chooses to be obnoxious to everyone else in the world, except their most obsequious allies. If the yanks had adopted a foreign policy that could conceivable have been advocated by Christ rather than Pontius Pilate, the whole world would have been pro-American. The evil empire, so-called, would have been converting to the American way by example, not having to fight off US stormtroopers invading their own country allegedly “to export democracy”. What Americans are too self-righteous to notice is that they are the anti-Christ, they are the ones who do Satan’s work in the name of Christ. Now the Bush neocon administration is posturing against Iran. Bush seems determined to bring about the apocalypse convinced of his heavenly seat to view the spectacle, but, if he succeeds as he might, it will not be God’s apocalypse but the Devil’s, history will not end, and Americans just as much as anyone else will suffer, and be scarred and deformed by radiation. Christianity will have succeeded in roasting more flesh than it has ever done in its whole gory history.
Against this background, Gray amazingly sees his particular imaginary demon, secular utopianism, finally defeated with the emergence of old time religion, can you believe? Presumably, now our utopianism will no longer be the ersatz secular type but the genuine religious article. It does not bode well:
What presents itself as the secularization of theological concepts will have to be understood, in the last analysis, as an adaptation of traditional theology…Leo Strauss
Gray cites this in his last chapter showing that Strauss’s idea was the basis of this book with its phony identification of secular dreams with religious delusions. And he persists, having finished the useful core of the book, in justifying his false thesis to the end. Now he turns to Hobbes as proof that liberalism leads to anarchy. As a political observer, one assumes he means “anarchy”, an extreme form of liberalism in that people govern themselves, so there is no government, but he seems to intend “chaos”, a total breakdown of society. Anarchy is not realistic because it is unlikely to be stable, if it is possible at all. Some co-operative or social amalgam in the putative anarchic state will inevitably gain an advantage, force itself on to weaker ones, eventually dominating, and anarchy is over. The minimally governed liberal society cannot be anarchy. The state cannot be abolished, because law and a state to administer it will be necessary in the foreseeable future, but the law must be one that permits freedom of its individual citizens, while preventing its abuse whether by a lawless minority of criminals, or by an elite outside the law. In the UK and doubtless the US too, we might have lived through the the optimally liberal society in the post war years when capitalism was fettered by the fear of a spreading world communist revolution. The defeat of communism lifted that fear and immediately capitalism headed towards fascism under the guidance of the crypto-Trotskyite neocons. The victory of old fashioned religion looks to have just ended liberal society under Bush and Blair. The ancien regime is feeling its way back.
Now we can look forward not to anarchy but to unmitigated chaos in a new dark age. Gray points out himself that when religion dominates, so do religious wars. In the European Thirty Years’ War, as many as a third of people in some places died. We are seeing the same now in Iraq, with Shias bombing Sunnis, and Americans and Sunnis bombing Shias. Curious that Saddam, the fomenter of Islamic terror, according to Bush and the neocons, was a Sunni, and that the people Saddam, under US protection, had previously oppressed were the Shias. The reason is that the Shias are of the same Islamic sect as the Iranians, and it is the Iranians that the American ruling elite cannot stand. Maybe it is because the evidence that the Iranians founded Judaism is still to be found in Iran.
Gray is correct that in well governed societies, the power of religion is curbed. It is the reason why the founders of the US constitution were so keen to keep religion out of it, and set up a secular state. It was meant to save America from repeating what had happened in Europe. Christians refused to learn the lesson, and always tried to undermine the Constitution in this respect. Now they have seized power, and will succeed in overturning the constitution unless some future president, under popular pressure, curtails the political power of the Christian right wing. As Gray says, no law has any strength in itself, for any determined administration can find a pretext for repealing it. A system of laws has to be accepted by all to work. It is a voluntary standard, and that is why tinkering with them should be resisted by democrats, for the tinkerers do it to find ways of using the law against the people it should protect. That is what Bush and Blair have done. Chaos can only be prevented if people seek to restore what doctrinaire Christians have deliberately spoiled. Unless they do, fascism will emerge openly, and before long religion will become a reason for internecine strife again. It is better to think life has no purpose than to murder each other over what different religions think it is.
Gray reiterates that the belief human beings have that they can transcend their natural condition is Christian. It is nonsense however many times it is repeated. Christianity itself has the idea because human beings felt it could be done. People yearn for self-improvement quite naturally and quite independently of religion. When we imagine things can be better than they are, we do not think it because Christianity has influenced us. People thought it long before Christianity was invented, and Christianity has always served to hold back progress. Christianity teaches that the order of creation is ordained by God, and to try to change it is contrary to God’s will. So, employers like to encourage Christianity among their employees because they are less likely to strike for better pay and conditions. They accept their lot in life. Progressives do not. They fight for improvement. Progress preceded Christianity, and all religion, and the Christian hypothesis of a fall and a restoration of paradise is a Christian attempt to explain the human yearning for progress. Nor is there anything impossible about the dream of progress, even if the Christian explanation is fantastic. Humans transcended their natural condition long ago. When some ape invented tools, the process began, the human controlled fire, built dwellings, invented agriculture, developed villages, towns, cities, until we got where we are now—far removed from any “natural condition”. The comfortable life of most of us in the west must seem like paradise to most earlier human beings, unnatural as it is. We have transcended the natural condition and already live in paradise. Indeed, our aim now is to preserve what we have while trying to restore as much of the pristine earth as possible. It will mean we have to stop breeding like rabbits, exploiting the earth like vandals, and blowing each other to smithereens.
Gray gets more absurd. Atheism and humanism are both Christian, dontcha know, even though everyone was necessarily atheistic before gods were invented to enslave us, and we are all human irrespective of whatever fancies we adopt as our religion. Society is independent of Christianity, but Christianity is not independent of society. Humanism is using your head instead of thinking we must not use it for fear of offending God. It is liberalism. Humans among all animals are rationally conscious and so aware of our own motives. According to Gray, this is a Christian world view, even though Christians are forbidden to use their heads in case it leads them into infidelity. Free will, dontcha know is Christian, even though the Christians got it from the Jews and the Greek philosophers, and they got it from the Persian dualistic religion of Zoroaster, where the individual’s role in the cosmic conflict was entirely and nothing more than what side they personally chose to live by.
Gray tells us we should not assume we have attributes that other creatures do not, apparently merely a religious view, yet what animals other than humans can write, paint pictures, or talk incessantly on mobile phones? Perhaps it shows too clearly for him that we have stepped outside of our natural condition, and it is progress and dreaming that brought us here. Truth is closer to religion than science, dontcha know, and is inconsistent with Darwinism. Yet rational minds can distinguish truth from falsehood given the chance to enquire about it, and that counts out religion. As science is designed for testing for falseness, and evolution necessitates the adaptation of organisms to their environment, meaning the reality of the world they inhabit, the rest of his point is as usual empty and incomprehensible. If reality is what is true, then Darwinism is the natural and automatic means whereby organisms fit themselves to it. Darwinism is the scientific method in Nature.
The US is a model secular regime, says Gray, but religion is too closely entwined with politics in the US for this to be true, and it is secularists who are to blame, dontcha know. They are the ones ignorant of history and responsible for making religion emerge in grotesque forms—presumably US Christian fundamentalism—by suppressing it constitutionally. Gray knows that the US is unique among advanced democracies in being imbued with a cloying religiosity, yet it is his typically secular state. Where has religion emerged in grotesque form elsewhere among secular democracies? Gray is the one who ignores history in refusing to see that the US was a model secular state, but is not now, and it is the machinations of the Christian right that have changed things, not any secularists. The secularists have not been willing to defend the constitution they treasure, but, if it was out of cowardice in the face of Christian aggression, it is time they stood together and upheld what has stood them in good stead for 200 years. Though Gray claims to be a realist, he too often seems unable to distinguish reality from intent.
Despite 200 pages denigrating the Enlightenment and all it stands for, humanism, science and liberalism, by painting them in the dingy colours of Christianity, Gray incoherently produces with a sentence of faint praise:
Liberal societies are worth defending, for the embody a kind of civilized life in which rival beliefs can coexist in peace.
It is generous of him, but what then was the purpose of the 200 pages of denigration—an indulgent, selfish venting of the spleen? If liberal societies are worth defending then any honourable man would defend them, and the principle of them, when they are under attack!
Gray ends with a plea for realism, and liberals will go along with it except that Gray is himself a fundamentalist—a realist fundamentalist—a utopian one! The utopian realist cannot allow ideals to pollute the pristine purity of their philosophy—a fundamental realism excludes all ideals and dreaming is verboten. He is right that dreams of perfection are not realistic, and so not realizable, but why is the dream to blame? What is wrong is not the dream of a better society, but that it is realizable absolutely or quickly in practice. Dreams are to be worked towards, and they change in the effort involved. That is the realism coming in. Even revolution cannot be universally condemned. How can Americans condemn revolution when they began with one, yet US foreign policy has constantly opposed democratic revolutions around the world? The reason is plain. They do not like other people’s democracy because they do not elect the right candidates! It means they are not democrats at all. In Iraq, they forced elections, then did not like who was elected. Vietnam was the same. They did not want communists elected, so they killed two million Vietnamese to stop it. They do not seem to realize that revolutions are needed to clear the obstacles to the reform that follows when societies are allowed to evolve. Revolution is followed by evolution, and the two cannot be separated. The evolution brings the progress, not natural if unrealizable fancies of Great Leaps Forward, or insane supernatural interventions by that supreme being who never shows any signs of doing anything useful, especially when it is needed.
Realism can never be pure because human beings dream everything they do, but, as Gray points out, such dreaming is practical and often known from experience to be realistic. It is utterly unrealistic to think that God will do what you, as an individual, dream. It is so unreal that it is insane, but the US colonists were realistic in dreaming of independence, though it meant a struggle, and now Americans will have to struggle again to wrest it from the grip of the Christian fundies!
Realism, Gray adds, recognizes that problems might not be soluble at all, at least in the sense of smoothing out every bump, but that is just what is true of dreams, so the dreamer who appreciates it is just as realistic. It shows the importance of compromise, of consensus, the liberal and humanistic outlook. Those for whom God is a personal chum, delude themselves that their God-given ideas are absolutely right and they will accept no compromise. God can square the circle—eveything is possible for God. Always we return to insanity, when we meet Christianity. If it is not insanity, it is the next padded cell to it. Faith is too unrealistic to be trusted in any practical endeavour. It is entirely for individual motivation, not for practical solutions, and Christians should confine their faith to themselves and their God. Heads of state who begin acting on the basis of God-given instructions, however received, must be put in the padded cell before we all suffer the consequences.
There is a good deal of regularity in the behaviour of states that can be identified by a study of history, but these regularities cannot be formulated as universal laws.
It is bold to claim any law as universal, so is not something that any realist should do, no doubt the reason he adds the impossible adjective “universal” at all, but as soon as some phenomenon is regular, it can be expressed as a law. The main job of the scientist is to formulate laws that work when tested against reality. Gray hates science, though he claims it is scientism he hates, like most of its critics, because science is too obviously successful, and it is successful because it is based entirely on reality.
He says the world does not become more uniform as it becomes more modern, surely more manifest nonsense. States obviously have different ends, but globalization, driven by capitalism, technology and science is making the world more uniform in most practical ways—real ways, one might say—and the states, or economic units and trade cartels are encompassing more and more different people making them live more and more similar lives.
A few pages from the end, just as he did with liberalism, he concedes that humanity has universal values, but claims they are “discordant”. It is a puzzle to see how discordant values are universal. Perhaps the discordance is not in the values but that everyone has not come to see them yet. Well, until everyone holds them they are not universal, so their universality remains a dream and a utopian one, but one worth having! The task is to persuade others of these universal values—not to shove them down their throats—and immediately we see they cannot be universal, because the aims of the powerful and rich are not those of the weak and poor. The acceptance of universal values means the acceptance of sub-optimum conditions for many, particularly the most powerful people. The rich and powerful in the west will have to concede fair trade agreements that will help poor Third World countries improve themselves, and will have to accept curbs on their usage of energy to stop the world from overheating. What sign is there that Bush and Cheney even understand this?
Gray is fond of restricting apparent generalities that would be untrue to make them true. A regularity did not imply a universal law even though it imples a law. Here, towards the end, “no change in human institutions can resolve the contradictions of human needs”. Indeed, nothing can resolve inherent contradictions, but his implication is that any attempt to resolve them is a waste of time. It is not so! The attempt can ameliorate the differences, and then, with good will on all sides, though the contradictions might not be resolved, a compromise can be reached. The idea of a fixed solution is certainly utopian and religious, and it has been a mark of US foreign policy that compromise is out, because the Americans are always right. It can only be symptomatic of their God delusion. No liberal will take such a view, or at least will not unless one party is constantly moving the goal posts in an unfair attempt to gain the advantage. Liberals oppose crookery and unfairness. For Christians, and Christian driven people, it is a badge of honour to be immovable, and if a move is needed, to keep trying to revert to the old position.
Gray’s ignorance of science has him advocating nuclear power and GM crops as not offering any “further destruction of the biosphere”. The point about GM crops, scientifically speaking, is that adding genes to organisms artificially then releasing them into Nature is to do an utterly uncontrolled and uncontrollable experiment on the world. Once the alien gene is in the genetic mix in the wild, no one knows what can happen. Scientists are not against GM per se, it is a great scientific achievement, but sensible ones are against universal experiments with unforeseeable consequences. Simply moving an animal or plant species from one environment to another has been disastrous in several instances, but the scope in GM is far greater. Big corporations see vast profits in GM crops, and do not want to be held back, but the most rigorous and extensive checking of possible consequences of cross hybridization carefully peer reviewed should be done before anything is released into the wild. It would take a long time and be hugely expensive and that is what the corprations want to avoid.
As for nuclear energy not destroying the biosphere, nothing could be more stupid. Nuclear wastes accumulate in proportion to the energy produced. These wastes are radioactive, and much of it will remain radioactive for thousands of years. These wastes can only be safe as long as society is willing and able to keep them safe, and it is certain that they will be still dangerous centuries after they have been forgotten. Once released into the biosphere, the consequences can only be guessed, but cannot be good for the people alive at the time. Maybe Gray has some knowledge the rest of us have not on how these wastes can safely be disposed of. What bunker can remain intact for maybe ten thousand years? If human beings survive that long, civilizations will have grown and collapsed several times, who is to know what the bunkers contain. If there were war in this time, they could easily be broken open and the world polluted. Perhaps Gray doesn’t care because he will be long forgotten. Bugger the future world, eh?
In his final section, he returns to slagging off secularism. History is a meandering flux with no purpose or direction, so there is no point in trying to interfere with it, dontcha know. The messianic force in secular apocalypse is humanity battling ignorance and superstition, so we should just yield to them. Millennial movements are purely random, so religion, Christianity, is absolved from responsibility for them. We should avoid the need for narrative, that is trying to see any sense in history, and instead value mystics, poets and hedonists. Whatever the merits of sticking to poetry and hedonism, Gray has to be perverse in recommending mystics as any sort of guide. Mystics are the maniacs who have visions of the End, the very fantasy that Gray puts at the root of what he hates, enlightened dreams. Yet despite his flailing at everything to do with the Enlightenment, he again contradicts his thesis by unexpectedly defending science! It is not merely an arbitrary belief system he tells us, but offers reliable belief in the world, whereas religion is arbitrary and untestable. Science is a method of securing agreement by offering evidence, testing it and making predictions. Religion has nothing to do with any of this except as a lure for unsuspecting victims. Even so, religion is a necessity of being human, Gray decides, as necessary as food and sex. Having spouted on about not building false narratives, he defends religion as being necessary so that people can find meaning in the randomness of life. He uses the apologist’s trick of beginning a prescription with a condition which is immediately ignored or assumed to be met:
If religion is a primary human need, it should not be suppressed or relegated to a netherworld of private life.
If it were a primary need, we might be obliged to agree with him, but it is not something he has shown to be so, despite his assertions of it being like food and sex. Plenty of people can get through life very well without religion, but Gray thinks it should be integrated into the “public realm”. He means it should be forced on to us all, like it or not, because, for him, it is a primary need. Now we see that his absurd and utterly monstrous attacks on the Enlightenment are childish attempts to put the blame of religious wickedness on to secularism. He is nothing but a crude apologist for Christianity, in fact.
In the USA, it is certain that many people pay lip-service to Christianity because of the oppressive Christian religiosity of the country. In most of Europe and many of the advanced Asian countries, religion is unimportant to the majority. Only apologists or I-Speak-Your-Voice professors could argue that religion is a primary need of humanity, yet be a supplier of lying narratives that uncritical people are led to believe are true, and these are the narratives responsible for what this incoherent man has railed at for 200 pages. He prescribes religion rather than secularism, though religion is at the root of what he sees as dangerous secular constructions. If secular constructions are dangerous, they are not a fraction as dangerous as the narratives or, let us by-pass the Straussism and be frank—lies—at the heart of religion. To avoid a dangerous secularism, Gray’s answer is for governments to enforce religion!
Gray is incoherent every time he tries to philosophize, or even simply discourse on anything outside of his central field, which on the evidence of this book is contemporary political analysis. For its treatment of the neoconservative take over of the UK and the US by Blair and Bush, this book, The Black Mass, is worth reading, but on everything else, he is simply embarrassing.