Gray’s Attack on Secularism

Posted by: balthusbemusedbycolor on: April 21, 2009

• In: Secularism
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The central error of Western thought, according to the British political philosopher John Gray, is a belief in the possibility of progress emerging through history. This is the main thesis that Gray develops in “Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals” (his attack on all forms of humanism) and more recently (and from a slightly different vantage point) in “Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia.” The specific meaning of ‘progress’ that Gray argues against is the ‘modern’ belief that incremental gains in knowledge and technology have the potential to allow human beings to transcend their intrinsic limitations. According to Gray, belief in progress of this sort is a fairy tale that originates in the early Christian doctrine of an End-Time, a historical event with the capacity to redeem all of humanity (thereby restoring man to his imagined prelapsarian state). The illusive promise of redemption has haunted the Western intellectual milieu ever since and has provided the driving impetus for medieval millenarian traditions (e.g., the Joachimite tradition, with its tripartite view of human history). Moreover, says Gray, these ancient myths have not been eradicated by the supposed secularization of the Western world – they have merely reappeared in new forms. Enlightenment philosophy, and the secular versions of utopia that it has helped to engender, are sublimated versions of chiliastic medieval fantasies. Secular utopias are similar to the religious narratives of redemption, except that the future salvation of humanity is no longer under the direction of divine agency; rather, salvation emerges from the steady progressive march of science and technology. The geo-political upheavals that convulsed Europe and the rest of the world during the 20th century were off-shoots of utopian dreams – and so according to Gray, Bolshevism and Nazism too, were not counter-Enlightenment projects, but rather represented Enlightenment thinking in ‘its most virulent forms’. The most recent incarnations of these myths have re-emerged in Fukuyama’s thesis that global market capitalism and liberal democracy represent the ‘end of history’ and in the ‘Project for a New American Century’ drafted by Washington neo-conservatives. Gray even links radical Islam to a dominant Western tradition and claims to show how it is consonant with some forms of Enlightenment thought (this by a tortuous route of logic and heavy flourishes of rhetoric).
There is much that is intriguing in Gray’s writing, even if he is unremittingly bleak and pessimistic. Unfortunately, Gray is more interested in being a provocateur and offering hasty generalizations than in engaging his readers in nuanced argument. Under closer scrutiny, the theses put forward by him are over-simplistic and ultimately, not very original.

Gray is prone to making sweeping statements like these:
“Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world; but their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions.” “Humanism is not a science but a religion” “To believe in progress is to believe that…..humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals…but it is groundless.”

These sorts of unsupported assertions are all forms of non-argument, but they are repeatedly stated in Gray’s books (see “Straw Dogs”). It is only by relying on equivocal definitions of his terms that Gray can refer to secular humanism as a ‘religion’ – and he does this time and time again, without ever spelling out exactly how humanism and Enlightenment values that it promotes (values of free inquiry and thought, the exercise of rationality, universal rights) are ‘religious’. What is especially enraging about reading Gray is his dismissal of Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Diderot, Paine, Hume, Kant and others. Not only does he dismiss them as ultimately being delusional, but he links their philosophy to the terrors of modern totalitarian regimes and fundamentalist movements (even terrorist religious organizations are seen by Gray as forming a continuous link with an Enlightenment humanist tradition). There is something very offensive about attacking Enlightenment philosophy at a time when religious extremism is in the ascendancy. Curiously, Gray’s brand of ‘realism’ is more of a religion than the humanist tradition that he attacks; his ‘realism’ is a self-contained belief system that relies on an idiosyncratic reading of history and any opposition to it is, in some sense, evidence of its validity (this is somewhat reminiscent of the odd epistemology used by the neo-conservative Straussian seers whom Gray jeers). For example, in the context of defending the scientifically discredited Gaia hypothesis, Gray writes: “The truth is that they fear and hate it because it means that humans can never be other than straw dogs.”

Gray’s central claim – that a belief in progress is delusional – is only partially true. It is true in so far as we should be highly skeptical that we will ever be able to re-fashion human nature and be rid of all conflicts. Utopian thinking of this sort really is dangerous and technology really does have the capacity to amplify the worst elements of humanity. But the fact is that Gray uses this premise to generalize beyond what is warranted – and so, for him, notions of any progress are a fantasy. According to Gray, humans have no more control over their destiny than whales or gorillas – but this view has its direct refutation in history. He sets up so many straw man arguments that it becomes difficult to keep track of them. For example, his claim that humanists believe that rationally driven progress in science and technology can perfect human nature is just plain wrong. No one seriously advances the sort of argument that Gray spends inordinate amounts of ink attacking. One can claim that real progress in the socio-political and ethical domains is possible without committing to any claims regarding history as a teleological process or dialectical materialism. The idea that there is a shifting moral zeitgeist (promoted in part through writing, education and legislative action) is not an illusion – it is empirically verifiable (e.g., abolition of institutional slavery, universal suffrage, etc.). The statistics speak to the global reduction in violence that has been one outcome of modernity (e.g., http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html). As Jared Diamond writes had the modern warfare technology been available to a hunter-gatherer society, humans would have destroyed one another a long time ago. Gray does not square up to these facts because they do not agree with his philosophy. And rather than clarifying the terms that he uses (and making distinctions between different strains of humanism), he simply makes his points in broad strokes.

There are plenty other examples of straw man arguments and baseless statements. For example, in his brief discussion of memes he implies that, as advanced by its main theorists, the truth status of a given meme confers an advantage in the selection process (Dawkins, at least, has never claimed anything of the sort). By briefly mentioning some of the more dubious strands of Feyerband’s thinking, Gray also makes the tired claim that there is nothing inherently rational about the scientific enterprise (and science is really just another modern day ‘religion’). Also, by implying that the religiosity of Galileo and Newton somehow reveals the ‘concealed irrational’ origins of empiricism, Gray commits a fallacy of association. The scientific method, as an apparatus for ‘fixing belief’, has changed and improved throughout the years, from Bacon writing about developing ways to overcome the ‘Idols of the Mind’ to more contemporary developments in experimental method and analysis. To imply that the personal beliefs of scientific practitioners somehow vitiate the scientific method or have anything to do with it at all is pointless. If, as Francois Jacob has said, science represents a “revolt against the incoherence of the universe”, then science does share a common origin with religion but this does not devalue it in any way.

There is enough of a grain of plausibility in Gray’s writings to make them appear profound to some readers. In the final analysis, however, his attacks on humanism and rationalism, are never completely convincing – for the most part he does battle with an imaginary opponent. He advances a modish form of pessimism that seemingly takes pride in being bleak for the sake of bleakness. It is fine to be realistic about the flaws that exist in human nature and to be cognizant of the fact that all of our developments in technology can all too easily be put to the most brutal ends. However, at the same time, this does not mean that attempts to make improvements in our condition are delusional or that the Enlightenment values are worthy of being discarded all together. Fortunately, the world is not as black and white as Gray makes it out to be.