John Gray and the End of Liberalism
John Gray and the End of Liberalism
British philosopher’s new book argues that we are entering an age of competing enclaves.
When Francis Fukuyama proposed that history had ended in the summer of 1989, for liberal democracy would now prevail as the final form of human government, there was one voice that objected the idea. It was that of a British political philosopher John Gray who thought that with the end of the Cold War, conflicts frozen in it would re-emerge and the world would carry on as it used to before its division into two major blocs. For that view, some called him apocalyptic. But time seems to have lent more credence to Gray than most of his critics.
Gray’s new book, “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism”, lends its name from the work of Thomas Hobbes, dated back to 1651. Hobbes’s notions and ideas function as a kind of a framework for Gray’s treatise, each new chapter opening with a quote from him. Yet the book itself is well steeped in the present day sociopolitical reality, observing its trends and predicaments in view of Hobbes’s theory. “Twenty-first-century states are becoming Leviathans,” Gray claims in the opening, referring back to the biblical sea monster that Hobbes used for picturing “the sovereign power that alone could bring peace to unruly humankind”. “Only by submitting to unlimited government could [one] escape the state of nature,” Hobbes said.
It is worth noting that, for Hobbes, ‘the state of nature’ was not a denominator of some prehistoric unity with nature before the emergence of society, but a state of anarchy and chaos, a warlike state of society, which, he believed, could occur anywhere at any given time. It was precisely in attempt to overcome that threat that man had established social structures and laws and abided by certain morality. Even liberalism was thus based on restraint – an abidance to commonly accepted rules of conduct. As history shows, however, such order of things threads a fine line of balance.
Hobbes’s Leviathans were those that sought to guard its subjects against external enemies and harm from one another. They were leaders who saw it their duty to provide social conditions for personal and cultural flourishing. “The purposes of the New Leviathans,” Gray finds in comparison, “are more far-reaching. In a time when the future seems profoundly uncertain, they aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects.”
The unlimited government of new sovereigns seems to be fast approaching our doorstep, for it has become all the more common to hear global leaders talk of global problems with only global solutions – in other words, of things only they can fix, if we abide by their order. Of no small import is also the fact that the elected leadership is at times hard to distinguish from the self-appointed leaders amongst the ultra-rich of the world, both jointly gathering at most of the global summits where new policies are divised. However, this new elite seems to be extending its interest and reach from the mere establishing of conditions of safety into “an unrelenting struggle for the control of thought and language”. Gray also notes that even though these new Leviathans “promise safety”, they “foster insecurity” – ever stricter control is claimed necessary in order to contain an ever more insecure situation, which the Leviathans themselves have, in one way or another, contributed to. And as more and more of the ideology is converted into law, the meaning of one’s existence becomes ever more prejudged or predetermined. “In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology,” Gray writes. “The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxy on race, gender and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased.”
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John Gray spends a significant amount of the book in retelling various personal stories from the early and mid-twentieth century totalitarian regimes, particularly from the Soviet Russia. Gray himself has, of course, vast and nuanced knowledge about those conditions, having not only studied it, but visited Eastern Europe repeatedly back in the day. The exact intent of the stories is largely left to the reader to define, but whether by design or consequence, they do enlighten the Western reader on the realities of the Communist regime. No doubt, this is a part of history that is often poorly understood in the West, not to mention it is often misconstrued in Russia itself, which has never really acknowledged its colonialism of the past. That aside, the stories offer unique psychological insight into what it can be like to find oneself in the grip of a Leviathan – to be guiled by it, and eventually devoured by it. In it, it is quite telling that Gray presents cases of relatively little known personalities, yet those of remarkable import and amplitude. They should probably function also as reminders as what to look out for when steering towards new “unlimited government”.
In some ways though the stories can also be viewed as witness to the ever shifting, and shiftable political centre. An extremity is such only in relation to what is agreed upon as the middle ground; if an extremity itself is placed at the centre, whatever used to hold that position before can easily be made an outlier, and vice versa, a former extremity can be presented as the neutral position or commonsense. After all, most of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century were, in their time and circumstance, also presented as the most sensible and moral strategies, something necessary for the upkeep and progress of the society, and even harshest of violence could thus be thought of as righteousness. This is, perhaps, something to keep in mind when observing how the political centre has heavily shifted again in the last decade or two, with more than one notion that used to stand at the centre of political spectrum, like traditional identities or values, or perhaps even faith in the priority of one’s personal liberty, has now oftentimes viewed as far-right.
Perhaps not unnoteworthy in this regard is John Gray’s remark in a recent interview to Freddie Sayers that in the Soviet times, in his experience, there were usually “real people” there underneath the conformist veneer, but he is not sure they are “there are anymore” in the heavily left-leaning West. Aside from the few real true believers, people in the Soviet bloc we’re usually aware, for example, that the news they were fed were in most part lies. Now in the West we have rather given up such critical thinking and at times succumbed to ideological identifications even more than people generally did under the yoke of Communist totalitarianism.
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However, the centrepiece of Gray’s argument against today’s policies seems to be their unwillingness to accept and accomodate the inherent tragedy of human life and hence the same of our political dilemmas. Any attempt to build a faultlessly tolerant and good-willing society is always delusional in its denial of collaterals, for there will never be a world without tragic choices – those which one cannot avoid, but which will in any case carry irreparable losses. The end of World War II was a victory as much as it was a tragedy, for parallel to saving the liberal West, the Stalinism of the Soviet Union was hardly more sparing or humane to its people than was the Nazism of Hitler’s Germany. Moreover, it seems to have handed the Russian leaders a long-standing self-image of saviours, or as Gray refers to that in the words of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, in the contemporary context of the Ukraine war, “evangelical love for neighbours”. The overthrow of regimes in Iraq or Lybia was similarly as much a dethronement of a tyrant as it was an ushering in of chaos, new extremism (in the form of ISIS or rivalling jihadist militias) and even greater loss of heritage and lives, etc.
When Gray argues that “a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history”, the claim seems to stem precisely from the idealistic failure of the new ideologies to accommodate tragedy and human imperfection. It was “an acceptance that humankind is flawed,” he says, that “enabled liberal societies to make a common life in which differences in beliefs and values could be accepted. Hyper-liberals reject such compromises.” While denouncing much of the religious history and its achievements as wrong or evil, the new Leviathans flung themselves forward with much the same religious fervour as the many of the reformist churches of the past. But while in the Christian tradition, which Gray believes liberalism to be constitutionally a footnote to, “divinity joins itself with broken humanity”, “the work hyper-liberalism” of today, in the shape of cancel culture etc, is “Puritan moral frenzy unrestrained by divine mercy or forgiveness of sin. There is no tolerance for those who refuse to be saved.”
This is perhaps precisely why “states have cast off many of the restraints of the liberal era” and, in their self-assigned power of meaning-making, “aim to deliver their subjects from the burdens of freedom.” Freedom has always presumed responsibility – but it also works vice versa. By removing choice, responsibility and hence freedom will soon become corrupted. Having defined its hyperbolic forms as its core, liberalism is quickly eating its own tail. Striving for the absolute liberty of self-defined identities which are supposed to deliver us from the hurt of tragic choices, we have only moved away from actual tolerance and peaceful co-existence. In the concluding chapter of the book, Gray offers us repeated examples of this, most tellingly perhaps in the case of the University of California Berkeley’s Rubric for Assessing Candidate Contributions to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, which now requires “a low score be given to any candidate who ‘states the intention of ignoring the varying backgrounds of their students and treating everyone the same’.”
“Unmoored from their theological matrix”, Gray says, the once liberal values have “become inordinate and extreme”. And once its avowed goal is “to liberate human beings from identities they have accidentally acquired,” the result, unrestrained by “insight into human imperfection”, is inevitably a “prelude to a state of chronic warfare among the [new] identities they embody.” If there will never be a world, and there never will be, albeit an artificial one, that is devoid of people with views opposite to one’s own, the only chance for harmony is either an acceptance of our differences and imperfections, or else the elimination, be it direct or emotional, of those who do not concur with the presupposed truth.
Believing Hobbes, there is “no final deliverance from the state of nature”. Hence the only question is how do we negotiate our conflicts. The more that process is imbued with honesty and humility, the better the results are going to be. Now, it is true that Gray offers us very little hope for the liberal values to be reinstated as an overaching paradigm in any foreseeable future. If it will happen, he thinks, it will only be as a result of an immense effort. And yet his book is still a work of encouragement – if not for anything else, then for its attempt to ponder on our realities, as much as possible, without bias, to do it in intellectual integrity rather an in some ideological pursuit. Gray thus takes a strong stand against “the poverty of political thinking”, which he places quite at the heart of today’s political disruptions. “The belief that a single form of rule is best for everyone is itself a kind of tyranny,” he reminds us in conclusion.
[John Gray. The New Leviathans. Thoughts After Liberalism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York, 2023. 192 pages.]