Another good Rundle essay

I couldn’t disagree more. I was going to write a post about this Rundle essay/review; a commenter to one of your earlier posts commended it, so I went and read it.

Rundle’s essay is just an uncritical rehash of the pretentious, nonsensically nihilist ideas in Gray’s two recent books Straw Dogs and Black Mass. Rundle purports to review two other books as well, by Terry Eagleton and Eric Hobsbawm, but only manages to mention them in passing. The vast majority of his essay, as I say, concentrates on Gray’s book.

Rundle’s essay/review would be impressive in a confused, depressing polymath kind of way if the thoughts in it were actually Rundle’s own. In fact he is simply uncritically paraphrasing Gray. Troppo readers interested in more clear-thinking reviews of Gray’s two recent books would be well advised to read this review of Black Mass titled The Triumph of Smugism by Carlin Romano or this one by A.C. Grayling or this review of his 2003 book Straw Dogs by Terry Eagleton (NB marginal disclaimer – I’ve read Straw Dogs but not Black Mass, however judging by all the reviews the latter is merely a rehash of the former combined with a slagging of the Bush administration).

Here’s a little of what Grayling has to say about Gray’s recent work. The criticisms apply even more so to Gray’s uncritical admirer Rundle, it takes rather less ingenuity to swallow silly ideas whole than to invent them in the first place:

John Gray is a curious figure whose habitual assaults on humanism are all carried along with such breezy assertion and generalisation that his underlying bitter pessimism is cloaked in motley. For hes a Harlequin: everything is either black or white in his writings, and moreover when it is black it is white, and vice versa.

In his latest book, aptly titled Black Mass, things are appropriately dark. It tells us that the world is in a bad way and that there is nothing we can do about it. Perhaps we can infer from this that his aim is to keep us informed of the true state of affairs, so that we have a reason to feel depressed if depressed we feel. In a nutshell the book consists in the repeated assertion that modern secularist thinking is utopian in aspiration, has inherited this aspiration from Christianity, has failed because its belief in progress is false and has in fact been violently regressive. The only thing that will replace it is more apocalyptic religion-inspired conflict, and this with an Eeyore relish all is therefore doom and gloom.

Actually one must suppose that there are further points than mere iteration of pessimism and negativism, which is Grays preferred (see Straw Dogs) and here iterated pose. The chief of them is that he is against the progressivist ambitions of the secular Enlightenment, and he hopes to annoy its proponents by giving it Christianity for a father and that weary old canard Nazism and Stalinism for offspring. His case for this is so massively wrong in its premises and so contradictory in its details that, alas, I should need as much paper to correct the mistakes as he consumes in making them. So what follows goes to certain main points only.

In order to establish that secular Whiggish Enlightenment-derived aspirations are the child of Christianity, Gray begins by calling any view or outlook a religion. Everything is a religion: Torquemadas Catholicism, the pluralism and empiricism of 18th-century philosophers, liberalism, Stalinism. He speaks of secular religion and political religion. This empties the word religion of any meaning, making it a neutral portmanteau expression like view or outlook. He can therefore premise a gigantic fallacy of equivocation, and assimilate secular Enlightenment values to the Christian narrative of reformation aimed at bringing about a golden age.

For starters this misreads Christianity, for which truths are eternal and the narrative is a very short story indeed (obey, get to heaven; disobey, do not get to heaven); but more to the point, it utterly misreads the secular view. The secular view is a true narrative of incremental improvement in the human condition through education and political action. Gray thinks that such a view must of necessity be utopian, as if everyone simplistically thought that making things better (in dentistry, in the rule of law, in child health, in international mechanisms for reducing conflict, and so forth for many things) absolutely had to be aimed at realising an ideal golden age to have any meaning. But it does not: trying to make things better is not the same as believing that they can be made perfect. That is a point Gray completely fails to grasp, and it vitiates his case. Since that is so, the point bears repeating: meliorism is not perfectibilism.

But in making a nonsense of the word religion Gray blurs and blends just where important distinctions are required. A religion is a view which essentially premises commitment to belief in the existence of supernatural agencies in the universe, almost always conceived as having intentions and expectations regarding human beings. Such is the myth derived from humankinds infancy, a myth that survives for both institutional and psychological reasons, largely to the detriment of human affairs. Most religions, especially if given the chance, share the totalitarian impulses of Stalinism and Nazism (think Torquemada and the Taliban) for a simple reason: all such are monolithic ideologies demanding subservience to a supposed ideal, on pain of punishment for non-conformity.

Now let us ask whether secular Enlightenment values of pluralism, democracy, the rule of independently and impartially administered law, freedom of thought, enquiry and expression, and liberty of the individual conform to the model of a monolithic ideology such as Catholicism, Islam or Stalinism. Let us further ask how Gray imagines that these values are direct inheritances from Christianity the Christianity of the Inquisition, which burned to death any who sought to assert just such values. Indeed, the history of the modern European and Europe-derived world is precisely the history of liberation from the hegemony of Christianity.

Now Grayling overstates his case here and is far more scathingly critical of Christianity than I think can be justified. By characterising the Inquisition as the archetypal example of Christianity and ignoring its many more beneficent intentions, teachings and outcomes, Grayling builds a straw man every bit as silly and misleading as Gray’s own efforts under review. I much prefer Terry Eagleton’s nuanced take on Christianity, which I recall Nicholas has previously posted about. Nevertheless, Grayling and Eagleton are rightly united in their scathing condemnation of John Gray’s nonsense.