John Gray on Liberalism

 John Gray on Liberalism

 

 

John Gray demolishes the myths and self-deceptions of liberals with gleeful rhetorical flourishes. History-as-progress is bunk. Especially, the Enlightenment project of universal liberalism as the endpoint of historical progress is shot, finished, dustbinned by the intractable vagaries and contradictions of human nature and societies.

 

Values are irreducibly plural and contingent. The best we can hope for is modus vivendi,rubbing along in vague tolerance (with limits) of one another’s ways of life, both within and between societies. Modus Vivendi is the last, feeble gift of the Enlightenment’s project of the emancipation of the rational autonomous citizen, agreeing rationally between themselves on all ethical and political matters.

 

Gray’s core message has remained the same for many years. But between the publication, in the 00s, of Two Faces of Liberalism, his major critique of liberal philosophy (especially JS Mill) and 2023’s New Leviathans (a repeat with obscure historical flourishes and attacks on “wokery”), there is one major change. His pessimism has darkened.

 

In TFL, Gray ends with something of an about turn (about face?). Having denied that liberalism as a philosophy has any universal purchase, he nevertheless claims that are some universal human goods (not to be killed, for example) that any decent society of whatever stripe should promote.

 

How these goods are to be theoretically underpinned is an open question. Gray praises the UN Convention on Human Rights (or most of it), as broadly covering the human goods to be protected. But nothing grounds the Convention except voluntary agreement. But modern history shows just how contingent and precarious adherence is, both within and between nations.

In The New Leviathans, Gray invokes Thomas Hobbes to support his continuing view that many different political arrangements can deliver that most basic human requirement – freedom from the “war of all against all”. But no longer does Gray explicitly promote a bloodied but unbowed idea of human rights, hard-won but never guaranteed.

 

He turns to the absurdism of Samuel Beckett (having rejected the heroic existentialist absurdism of Camus’s Sisyphus). We must be stoics. We can’t ultimately make sense of things in the world. Progress is an illusion (Gray doesn’t have much to say about progress in medical science). Though Gray doesn’t quote it, Beckett wrote: “Ever try. Ever fail. No matter. Try again. Fail better.” Contrary to self-help motivators, to Beckett “failing better” is still failing- always. He and Gray Wait for Godot- and wait, bleakly.

 

December 2023