Anybody with a word processor and an Internet connection can put together a sweeping treatise on the state of the world, but few writers have the gift for large-scale prophecy. John Gray, a political philosopher whose specialty is the history of ideas, writes astringently well and ranges surefootedly from the Pre-Socratics to the postmodernists, from computer science to science fiction. But his most impressive talent is his ability to foresee the future.
In works such as “False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism” and “Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia,” Gray has predicted the collapse of globalization and the resurgence of nationalism, the failure of the war in Iraq, the financial crisis of 2008 and the rejection of free-market liberalism by most emergent nations.
For Gray, what all these events and trends have in common is that they revolve around ideas that have been the bane of modern society: utopianism, rationalism and, above all, a belief in the idea of progress. Despite our embrace of reason and our worship of science, at our core we are illogical, violence-loving, mythmaking creatures.
In one of many unsettling passages in his latest book, “The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom,” Gray analyzes with a provocative respect the Aztec ritual of human sacrifice:
“The Aztecs did not share the modern conceit that mass killing can bring about universal peace. … The purpose of killing was what they affirmed it to be: to protect them from the senseless violence that is inherent in a world of chaos. That human sacrifice was a barbarous way of making meaning tells us something about ourselves as much as them. Civilization and barbarism are not different kinds of society. They are found — intertwined — whenever human beings come together.
In “The Soul of the Marionette,” Gray scrutinizes cherished ideas about free will, human exceptionalism, and our ability to control our environments and our destinies. While coyly declining to name it in the body of the text, Gray destroys Steven Pinker’s enormously popular and influential “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” a pseudo-scientific work that suggests that our age has been noticeably less violent than previous ones, while dismissing the mass killings by totalitarian regimes as statistical aberrations. About the statistical apparatus in Pinker’s book, Gray observes:
“Like the obsidian mirrors the Aztecs made from volcanic glass and used for the purposes of divination, these rows of graphs and numbers contain nebulous visions of an unknown future — visions that by their very indistinctness … comfort anxious believers in human improvement.”
Gray rejects the idea that knowledge necessarily leads to freedom — a foundational belief of Western humanism, which for him is a tangled, superstition-laden mixture of Socratic philosophy, Christianity and scientific optimism.
Anti-humanist, anti-rationalist, anti-progress, incendiary and aphoristic, and organizing his work poetically rather than logically, Gray owes a huge debt to Nietzsche. He also borrows extensively from J.G. Ballard, the dystopian writer who was a friend.
Ballard famously said that he was most interested in “the next five minutes,” in the implications in the present for the near future. It’s no surprise that for Gray most of these implications are grim. One of the possibilities that Gray suggests is that “cyberspace could … be the site of a radical evolutionary shift … our successors may not be rebellious robots but more highly evolved descendants of computer worms.”
If there is any tenderness in Gray’s otherwise forbidding outlook, it is directed toward animals. He writes with restrained outrage about the philosopher Descartes’ habit of throwing animals out of the window to observe their reactions.
What is unique about us as humans, he concludes in a powerful passage, is not our self-awareness but our divided natures:
“No other animal seeks the satisfaction of its desires and at the same time curses them as evil; spends its life terrified of death while being ready to die in order to preserve an image of itself; kills its own species for the sake of dreams.”
NONFICTION: HUMAN NATURE
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom
by John Gray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
