WHAT better way to start the year than countering delusional notions of optimism?
The New Leviathans is the latest jeremiad from John Gray, the Rev IM Jolly of British political philosophy. Subtitled Thoughts After Liberalism, the book is an extended muse on the relevance of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and his argument for – in the ever-hopeful words of Theresa May – “strong and stable leadership”.
Hobbes is the laughing boy who warned that if men live “without a common power to keep them all in awe” our lives would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Tell that to the victims of Hitler, Stalin, Mao.
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After the Second World War, it seemed liberal democracy had triumphed forever. But Leviathan is having a comeback in the 21st century – given the monolithic leaderships in Russia, China, Turkey, North Korea and India.
Gray is quick to quote Stalin’s idea that their propagandists are the new “engineers of souls”. We’d do well in the West to see crazed online “strategists” – the likes of Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings – in the same light.
Gray thinks “enclaves of freedom exist” but doesn’t say where – I’m guessing Iceland. Sweepingly, he announces: “A liberal civilisation based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history.” Well, doesn’t that bring joy to your January … He’s down on our universities saying: “Education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology.” The arts, he moans, are in hock to “approved political goals”.
Gray doesn’t provide specific examples, but one might counter his pessimism by citing Masha Gessen’s recent attack in The New Yorker on tortuous shifts in Germany’s remembrance culture. Liberalism may be under attack, but it still lives on in bits of Manhattan, London and Scotland.
So, what does Gray mean by “liberalism”? In 1986, he thought it was the primacy of the individual in an egalitarian society, one that was universalist, and melioristic. Things could only get better. But that was then; this is now. A now where – as John Cale has it – fear is a man’s best friend.
Hobbes himself was perennially scared. Gray quotes him saying: “My mother dear did bring forth twins at once, both me and fear.” Hobbes lived until he was 91 so maybe being a feartie confers survivability.
Much of Gray’s book is about Russia, both historically and in our time of Putin. Russia as Leviathan, a land ruled by tyrants, destroying and destroyed – a place that has never known liberty and with “little prospect of the country breaking with its tyrannical past”.
Gray sees Russia as Spectre for real, a “full-blown kleptocracy” slithering its avaricious tentacles over what’s left of functional Western democracy in a determined attempt at strangulation.
Then there’s China, a state inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon, a population under surveillance by an all-seeing, all-knowing, hi-tech system powered by databases, facial recognition and social credit controls.
President Xi’s version of Leviathan wants, in Gray’s words, to “avert the slide into the moral anarchy that has paralysed the US”. Xi is portrayed as the über-Hobbesian.
And what about Europe? Gray thinks the EU is “not an emerging super-state but a crypto-state lacking any military capacity to defend itself”. And if a re-elected Trump withdraws security, the EU will be “seen for what it is – a geo-strategic vacuum”. More good news for the UK!
Britain will be a real-life Airstrip One – an oversized aircraft carrier. Trump might buy us up in a package with Greenland. More parts of Scotland will belong to his golfing empire.
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Gray is even less hopeful about the planet: “Humankind is ceasing to be central.”
See him as Yin to Brian Cox’s Yang, Eeyore to the astronomer’s Tigger. Gray’s pessimism intensifies as the pages go on. Schopenhauer and Beckett are name-checked, ditto Stalingrad and cannibalism. Gray turns discursive. You might hear Adam Curtis’s Oxbridge tones in your head at times, a voice that makes you think: “Where’s all this going?”
America. Things always end up with America with their Brobdingnagian arsenal of A-bombs. Gray worries about Trump unleashing a low-intensity civil war, an America “consumed by internecine doctrinal enemies”. Well, that would be just dandy … I finished The New Leviathans with another voice in my skull – the sepulchral sound of John Laurie as Private Frazer: “We’re doomed!”
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