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Interview with John Gray

Text Sergi Doria

© Anna Boyé

© Anna Boyé

"When utopia takes over power, it leads to a catastrophe”

If he were to recommend a few of his favourite authors, John Gray would choose Chamfort, Benjamin Constant, John Stuart Mill and Hobbes. Raised in the origins of the new right that supported Thatcher's conservative revolution, today he is a harsh critic of neo-liberalism as can be seen in the dozen essays (edited by Paidós in Spain) that have consolidated a thinking far from conventional.

         In False Dawn he denounced the frauds of global capitalism when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, riding on the crest of the wave, supported it. With Straw Dogs, John Gray -professor of European Thought in the London School of Economics- once again spoiled the party: he questioned the protagonism of a humanity endorsed by the Enlightenment in their domination of nature.

         After the 9/11 attacks, in Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (2003) Gray analyzed the different attempts to reorganize humanity. Modernity with license to kill: from Jacobinism to Comtian positivism; from the Bolshevik and Nazi genocides, to the globalizing utopias and the "martyrs" of Bin Laden.  Gray admonishes that, far from medieval chant and their anti-occidental verbosity, radical Islam is modern and relies on technology. "The same as Marxists and neoliberals, radical Islamists consider history to be the prelude to a new world..."   

        With reproach for myths, in his most recent book, Against Progress and Other Illusions, he puts forth a new reprimand against faith in science as a liberator of humankind. Liberal humanism seems to him "a secular version of a Christian myth". Listening to Gray causes a sense of unease that is perceived at the end of his conferences: right when it is time for questions, and he has popped the last floatershis audience,witnessing the sinking of last certainties, are desperately clenching onto. 

         His pessimism leaves an opportunity for British humor. Even though neither a knowledge society nor Internet will make us free, the author of False Dawn acknowledges that now there is no toothache: "One can't be a radical relativist with a toothache...¨. Irony finishes it off with a Polish proverb from the eighties: "Don't put too much hope in the end of the world".

 
Your biography as a thinker illustrates the transition from liberal Thatcherian thought to a severe criticism of global capitalism. How did this come about?

It was a moment in which Great Britain was having certain economic difficulties and the world was divided into two blocks. My opposition to communism constituted the fundamental element to support the politics of Margaret Thatcher. My criticisms came between 1987 and 1988 and were confirmed in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. I continued opposing Marxism and communism, but I felt the same opposition towards neo-liberalism. I remember in August 1989, Francis Fukuyama published his praised article The end of history in National Interest; then, in October of the same year, I responded to him from the pages of the National Review with another article that ended up becoming an essay on post-liberalism.

 

What did it say?

That we were going back to a historic phase in the classical sense, and not forward, to an empty and post-historic period that Fukuyama projected. That ours is an age in which political ideology, both liberal and Marxist, have less and less influence over acts, while older and more primitive forces, of nationalistic and religious nature, fundamentalist and soon likely to be Malthusian, are faced against each other. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, this beneficial catastrophe, did not unveil a new era of post-historic harmony, but rather a return to the classic terrain of history, a territory of rivalries between the greatest powers, secret diplomacies, demands and irredentist wars.

 

We are talking about liberalism, a polysemous concept... What is your profile of a liberal in the twenty-first century?

The concept of liberalism allows for many interpretations, but what I am certain of is that being a liberal does not mean giving total freedom to a capitalism that has no limits. We could say that John Stuart Mill, one of the thinkers I admire the most, was a liberal socialist, and at the end of the twentieth century, this position was seen as anachronistic. Some meanings of liberalism will continue to be effective; for example, tolerance. Spinoza and Hobbes are liberal philosophers. They were writing in periods of civil wars and religious conflicts, as is happening now. The idea of tolerance is more necessary now than ever...

 

In your essays you point out the need to go back to Hobbes, author of Leviathan, or Homo homini lupus...

Hobbes was a man of peace; he believed that all human activity should be guided by peace. His thought is diametrically opposed to neo-liberalism. And now his relevance is increasing because, as opposed to what the majority of liberals postulate, he warns that anarchy threatens freedom as much as tyranny , or even more so, . In Iraq they overthrew a tyrant, but they have not been able to establish a democratic system, but rather a hodgepodge of anarchy and theocracy. Currently in Iraq, if you are Christian, Jewish, a woman, homosexual, or simply agnostic, you suffer more persecution than in the period of Sadam Hussein. The chaos linked with religious fundamentalism produces a terrible cocktail that liberals have still not been able to absorb. Four years ago, on the eve of the invasion, I had already warned that the Iraqi State, a ramshackled,  improvised, and rushed structure by the British civil servants, would break up and disintegrate in the purest Yugoslavian or even Chechnyan style.

 

But... praising Hobbes, doesn't the State grow stronger in detriment of the individual?

The monopoly of Sate violence proves to be less harmful than chaos, without a doubt. And Hobbes doesn't consecrate the State, he sees it as an instrument for peace. The main problem right now is the proliferation of nuclear weapons, without any State control. Iran and Syria are dangerous, but the danger is even greater if these arms fall into the hands of terrorist groups... Without security we can't be free.  

 

In your book about Al-Qaeda you point out that radical Islam is "similar to fascism in the sense that it is unmistakably modern"...

Bin Laden and his followers have a very modern vision of the world. They are fundamentalist Sunnis that, on paper, want to return to the origins of Islam, but are influenced by Leninism and anarchy. They come from these movements and they use concepts that don't appear in the Qur'an: they talk about a society without a government, for example. Their mentality has something to do with Jacobinism: they believe that the world must be purged with spectacular violence...

 

Like the Committee of Public Health of Robespierre y Marat...

Jacobinism, communism, anarchy, and fascism are movements as dark as they are purely modern and anti-liberal. Al-Qaeda can not be reduced to the denomination of Islamic fascism. Gas chambers and gulags are modern products. Only in modern times has mass murdering been considered as a means of perfecting humanity. Therefore, there is no worse cliché than presenting Al-Qaeda as a backward movement towards medieval times.

 

Talking about clichés, in your essay Straw Dogs, you denounce the use and abuse of the word "humanity".

We can talk about "humanity"..., without a doubt. Nobody is going to deny the existence of universal values such as tolerance, and universal evils such as genocide, or deportation... But it is dangerous to use humanity as a symbol of concrete or particular projects, for the simple reason that human beings are very diverse: languages, religions, ways of life...

 

This would lead us to think that a universally applicable form of government does not exist, that democracy can be interpreted in many ways... It would be a way of revisiting Montesquieu of L'esprit des lois. The Bolivarism of Hugo Chavez or the indigenism of Evo Morales, are they an original version of popular democracy or simple derivatives of Castroism?

They are universally bad governments, but this does not mean that other valid forms don't exist, and that it limits us to establish only one model. Extending democracy throughout the world always gives precedence to the most powerful in each society. I'll give you another example: the governments of Iran and Iraq are an expression of the idea of democracy propagated by Rousseau, an anti-liberal philosopher. It is important to say that Rousseau was a brilliant writer, as seen in his Confessions, but on the political level, he was completely insane, and his ideas have inspired totalitarianists, on the right and the left. Going back to the question, since the 1990´s, with the Algerian case, they should have foreseen that in many countries, anti-liberal democracies would emerge. Another example is Russia; Putin's regime is dangerous, however, he is popular and is more legitimate in the ballot boxes than Yeltsin.

 

China, who maintains communist paraphernalia, and recognizes the right to private property...

Western opinion fluctuates between two absurd concepts: one is that when China is richer, it will adopt a completely western format that many European and North American politicians see as inevitable. The other is that, when this doesn't happen, the western analysts get scared and give racist and hostile opinions towards a country that even if it tried will never be Western. The Chinese regime isn't benevolent: it pursues religion, it promotes a political genocide towards farmers, and it has many defects of communism. But it is internally legitimized, like Putin in Russia, more so than when Mao ruled. For the past twenty years, whenever I make this statement, my interlocutors keep telling me that Russia and China will end up being western democracies. They say it like a dogma of faith, between fantasy and hysteria.

 

Your most recent book entitled Against Progress and Other Illusions, states that faith in progress is a superstition...

It is an affirmation of those who have similarly distanced themselves from Marxism and the green party because they are two utopian solutions: utopianism is entrenched in contemporary thought. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was linked to the left, anarchists, communists, and unionists that were trying to overcome and transcend existing societies. But at the end of the twentieth century, the utopian impulse had gone from the left to the right. Utopia is located in the United States and is postulated by the neo-conservatives with a tone of radical utopian movement, maybe the last utopian revolution. One will think that utopianism is positive, that without a utopian vision our conception of the world would be missing something... I maintain exactly the opposite: when utopia takes over state power, it ends up leading to catastrophe. Once again I will reiterate the example of Iraq. Apart from being a geopolitical and economic project, the invasion of Iraq advocated for a utopian project:  to destroy a society and replace it with a newly-coined one. Four years have gone by and infinite catastrophe and violence have been confirmed.

 

You question science and technology. You are going to be accused of being anti-modern...

Science and technology presume accumulative advances that I'm not putting into question. I don't agree with the postmodernists when they present science as a  system of beliefs; it is a fact that the increase in life expectancy and population growth is due to scientific and health progress. What I am saying is that in political science, the word "progress" is a myth, an illusion. I accept that universal values exist, that peace is preferable to war, and prosperity better than poverty, but I identify with pre-modern thought that shows that history is cyclical and that the goods and rights that we have obtained will end up being lost... There is no right that can't be taken away.

 

Are they the "deceptions of global capitalism" that you list in your book False Dawn?

Slavery was abolished in the middle of the nineteenth century, but in the twentieth century it reappeared in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and China. And now, in the era of globalization, human trafficking has reappeared. Another example is torture. The campaign against torture started during the Enlightenment, and culminates in the rights of man. In the last two or three years, torture has reappeared. In February of 2003, I published an article in the style of Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal around torture. Torture has become a weapon in the global battle against terrorism justified by many liberals. Prohibition of torture is a demand of civilization and a fundamental advance in moral thinking. And I believe that belief in progress anesthetizes us and the old evils come back to reappear as normal situations: when someone plays down that in an interrogation they plunged the head of a detainee in a bucket of water, we need to worry about the health of our democracies. And going back to Stuart Mill: real progress, apart from offering wealth, should be ethical and political.

 

Another of your statements, let's say subversive, is that knowledge does not make us free...

It is a thought as remote as the Genesis, and part of the fact that human knowledge is ambiguous by essence. Once we have eaten from the tree of Good and Evil, we can't go back. They will tell me that genetics allows us to cure illnesses, but I will answer that in the twenty-first century, biotechnology will be used, once again, to perfect weapons, to maintain wars between States, or to cause terror. The world contains around two hundred sovereign States, many of them falling apart or seriously corroded by crime and corruption... Military use of biotechnology could pose a threat comparable to that of nuclear war. And the same thing happens with genetic engineering. If we try to redesign human beings, it will not be based on an enlightened international consensus, but rather in a greedy and irregular manner, as a result of competition and conflict among States, business corporations, and criminal networks. 

 

Your criticism of environmentalism is also politically incorrect...

It is framed within a wider vision. I establish three conceptions of technology. The first is the classic enlightened: technology as an emancipating contribution, which I already said I reject for its ambivalence. The second is the "techno-primitivism" of environmentalists. The green party attacks the technology they consider to be an environmental trap. They think that we have to keep distances from industrialization and promote local economies, in the tradition of Tolstoy and Gandhi, the praise of the simple life. They design wind parks and talk about a sustainable economy, but nine billion inhabitants will not be able to survive with wind parks and ecological organic agriculture... We have to take advantage of our entire technological arsenal and we can't part that easily with fossil fuels and nuclear energy. And this would be the third interpretation of technology: promoting high technology to reduce impact on the earth and not taking a step back; agriculture has been as destructive as industrialization, as can be seen in the Amazon. Going back to agricultural life is the recipe for an even bigger disaster.

 

And climate change and bio-fuels...

Climate change is irreversible, although many politicians don't dare admit it. If we can't stop it, we have to think of how we will avoid floods. Believing that human action can remedy a physical process that doesn't take place in a gradual way, but rather in great leaps, seems to be a display of presumptuous anthropocentrism. Regarding bio-fuels...We would convert what is left of forests into fields. Thousands and thousands of hectares of sugar cane, as they suggest in Brazil and the United States... The only thing we are going to bring about by doing this is an immense green desert. We shouldn't be afraid of nuclear energy and abolish traditional agriculture. Let's not reinvent agriculture, please! High technology can supply us with artificial food in the future!

 

Seventy years ago, a fellow citizen of yours, Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, fought in Spain's civil war. Now they are promoting a historical memory law that is leading to a certain tension in a democracy that is only thirty years old...

I don't believe that historic memory is detrimental to democracy, because it is consolidated. The reaction of the Spanish citizens to the atrocities of Al-Qaeda in Atocha station was very mature; perhaps the most mature in the world.

 

How do you see the city of Barcelona?

I have been several times in the last five years. The planning of industrial cities shows that urban living can be elegant and relaxing. Cities are very valid forms of human ecology, that shouldn't turn into a megalopolis.

Autumn – Winter (October 2007 – March 2008)