HALF 0 000002006 TITLE The 10.1080/ FCRI_A_PRE.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 2 9 Political and & Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis TheoryLtd of John Gray (online)
The Political Theory of John Gray
John Gray is one of todays most brilliant, bestselling and controversial political thinkers. This new collection examines his work from a variety of stimulating angles. This new volume, comprising original contributions from a number of distinguished political theorists, in addition to a reply by Gray himself, is the first book to systematically review the general significance of his work. He is much cited and discussed within political and social theory, but he also has a much wider audience, being one of those quite rare creatures in British academic life, a public intellectual, writing regularly for the quality press and appearing on both radio and TV. His books sell in large numbers; Straw Dogs reached the top five in The Sunday Times bestseller list and was very widely reviewed in broadsheets and weeklies. It was extravagantly praised by Will Self and chosen by novelist, Monica Ali as her book of the year. This book was previously published as a special issue of the leading Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. John Horton teaches political theory in the School of Politics, International Relations and the Environment, Keele University, UK. Glen Newey teaches political theory in the School of Politics International Relations and the Environment, Keele University, UK. FULL TITLE
The Political Theory of John Gray
Edited by John Horton and Glen Newey London and New York
First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
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CONTENTS Notes on Contributors
vii
Acknowledgements
xi
1 John Gray: A Political Theorist Of and Against Our Times John Horton & Glen Newey
1
2 Utilitarian Liberalism: Between Gray and Mill Jonathan Riley
5
3 The Social Theory of Anti-Liberalism Paul Kelly
25
4 John Gray and the Political Theory of Modus Vivendi John Horton
43
5 Gray and the Politics of Pluralism George Crowder
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6 Toleration, Value-pluralism, and the Fact of Pluralism Peter Jones
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7 Pluralism and its Discontents: John Gray’s Counter-Enlightenment Peter Lassman
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8 Gray’s Elegy for Progress Glyn Morgan
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9 Straw Dogs, Blind Horses and Post-Humanism: The Greening of Gray? John Barry
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10 Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project Glen Newey
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11 Liberalism, Nihilism and Modernity in the Political Thought of John Gray Noël O’Sullivan 173 12 Is John Gray a Nihilist? George Kateb
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13 Reply to Critics John Gray
211
INDEX
237
Notes on Contributors John Barry is a Reader in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast. His areas of research include - normative aspects of environmental policy, politics and sustainable development; environmental governance; the governance of science and innovation; the link between academic knowledge and policy making; trust, legitimacy and public policy; citizenship, public policy and governance; theories and practices of reconciliation in Northern Ireland. His books include: Rethinking Green Politics (1999), which won the Political Studies Association Mackenzie prize for best book published in political science; Environment and Social Theory (1999); and Citizenship, Sustainability and Environmental Research (2000). His co-edited books include: The International Encyclopaedia of Environmental Politics (2001); Sustaining Liberal Democracy (2002); Europe, Globalisation and Sustainability (2004); and The Nation-State and the Global Ecological Crisis (2005). 0 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600654928 FCRI_A_165466.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 2 9 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
George Crowder is Associate Professor in the School of Political and International Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. He is the author of Classical Anarchism (1991), Liberalism and Value Pluralism (2002), and Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (2004). He is currently working on a co-authored study of multiculturalism, and is co-editing with Henry Hardy a collection of essays by several contributors on the work of Isaiah Berlin. John Horton is Professor of Political Philosophy and Head of the School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy at Keele University, UK, having formerly taught at the University of York, where he was for many years Director of the Morrell Studies in Toleration. He is the author of Political Obligation (1992) and numerous articles and chapters in political philosophy, especially in the areas of toleration, contemporary liberalism, multiculturalism, justice, political authority, political theory and literature, and on many leading theorists, including John Rawls, Brian Barry, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Oakeshott and Peter Winch. Peter Jones is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Newcastle, UK. His published work ranges over a number of subjects, including human rights, group rights, cultural diversity, freedom of belief and expression, political equality, distributive justice, democracy and liberalism. His current research focuses on issues of toleration and recognition.
viii Notes on Contributors George Kateb is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He received all his degrees from Columbia University. He is the author of, among other works, Utopia and Its Enemies (1963, 1972); Political Theory: Its Nature and Uses (1968); Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (1984); The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (1992); and Emerson and Self-Reliance (1994, 2002). His most recent publication is Mill’s On Liberty (co-edited with David Bromwich, 2003), to which he contributed “A Reading of On Liberty”. He is a long-time admirer of Gray’s books and articles. Paul Kelly is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is editor of the Journal Utilitas and was previously joint editor of Political Studies. His research interests include nineteenth-century British political ideas and contemporary political philosophy. His most recent books are Multiculturalism Reconsidered (Polity Press 2002) and Liberalism (Polity Press 2004). He is currently completing a book on Ronald Dworkin. Peter Lassman teaches Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. His main interests are in modern political thought and political philosophy. He is an editor of the European Journal of Political Theory. He has edited Max Weber: Political Writings (1994) and is currently working on the problem of value pluralism and a study of twentieth century political thinkers. Glyn Morgan is Associate Professor of Government and of Social Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration (2005) and Freedom, Toleration, and Civic Integration (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). He is currently co-editing with Melissa Lane a book on security, and co-directing with Margarita Estevez-Abe a research project on Social Justice and the Varieties of Capitalism. Glen Newey is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Keele University, UK. His books are Virtue, Reason and Toleration (1999) and After Politics (2001). He is currently working on books on political deception and on Hobbes’ Leviathan. Noël O’Sullivan is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Hull, UK. His undergraduate and postgraduate study was at LSE and Harvard. His most recent monograph is European Political Thought since 1945 (2004). Others are The Problem of Political Obligation, Conservatism, Fascism, and The Philosophy of Santayana. His edited books include Aspects of India (1997) and Political Theory in Transition (2000). His work has been translated into Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Italian and Spanish. Jonathan Riley is Professor of Philosophy as well as of Political Economy, Tulane University. He received his D.Phil from Oxford University under the supervision of
Notes on Contributors ix John Gray and Amartya Sen. His most recent book is Mill’s Radical Liberalism, to be published by Routledge in 2006. He is currently completing two book manuscripts entitled Pluralistic Liberalisms and Modern Democracy in the Spirit of Ancient Athens.
Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank a number of people for their assistance in the preparation of this collection. Richard Bellamy, co-editor of CRISPP, was responsive to our initial idea for this special issue of the journal, and has provided helpful advice and guidance throughout. We are also obliged to the organisers of two conferences in September 2004 at which we were able to convene panels on Gray’s work, and at which some of the essays in this collection were presented: the Political Theory Workshops held at Manchester Metropolitan University and the American Political Science (APSA) annual meeting in Chicago. These sessions provided a valuable opportunity to air some of the ideas discussed here, and we are grateful to the participants for the helpful discussions. The Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom generously provided financial support to some of the participants in the Chicago panel, and special thanks in this connection are due to Dr Paul Furlong, APSA, and particularly Bahram Rajaee, who offered invaluable administrative support. Especial thanks are owed to Mark Unsworth, who provided help with the onerous task of copy-editing the contributions and ensuring formal and stylistic consistency. Last, but certainly not least, we also wish to record our debt to John Gray himself for agreeing to write a response to the essays collected here, and for his unqualified and tactful support for the project throughout. 0 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600654936 FCRI_A_165467.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 2 9 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
John Gray: A Political Theorist Of and Against Our Times JOHN HORTON & GLEN NEWEY SPIRE, Keele University, UK JohnHorton 0 2 9
[email protected] 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600654951 FCRI_A_165469.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
John Gray is one of the most challenging and controversial political theorists in the English-speaking world. He is currently Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, having previously been for more than 20 years Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. A prolific writer, whose output now stands at more than 15 volumes, including monographs, polemical tracts and collections of papers, essays and articles, his reputation rests in part on his status as a public intellectual, a rare breed in England. He is an iconoclastic thinker, who has consistently challenged orthodoxies in academic political theory and wider political debate, having produced distinctive work inter alia on social justice, globalisation and progress, liberalism and conservatism, and on the nature of value in general, and liberty in particular. Gray is also a leading interpreter of thinkers like J.S. Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. Probably his deepest and most sustained engagement has been with his former mentor, Isaiah Berlin, whose influential doctrine of value-pluralism he has radically reoriented (Gray 1995a). He shares Berlin’s historical literacy and essayistic style, as well as his disinclination to join or found any identifiable school. Outside the scholarly community Gray has remained politically involved. He has been active in policy forums and informally advised politicians, though his early enthusiasm for the Thatcherite project and his subsequent warm but brief relationship with New Labour have been superseded by coruscating criticism of both. Gray has communicated to a broader public through his columns in the Guardian, New Statesman (Gray 2004) and elsewhere; and he has written pamphlets on public policy, some of which are reprinted in his collection Beyond the New Right (Gray 1993). In his more popular writings he has amplified the critique of the theory and practice of Anglo-American liberalism developed in his academic work, as well as contributing more ephemeral political commentary. Recently, he has moved beyond political theory, and indeed beyond politics, to what, for want of a better term, might be called ‘cultural critique’, and in particular a concern with ecology (Gray 2002).
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Introduction
However, Gray has remained a fertile political theorist, constantly developing and modifying his thinking. It has, though, become increasingly hard to draw a clear line between Gray’s work for academic specialists and his writing for a wider audience. His commitment to politics in the broadest sense, not just in his journalism but also in his more academic or theoretical work, flows from his view that political realities are an indispensable test of the adequacy of theory. This view sets him apart from most of his fellow theorists, and also underlies his lack of any settled ideological abode. He excoriates his fellow professionals, especially liberal political philosophers, for wilfully ignoring political realities and for wasting their energies on purely internal theoretical disputes, and is fiercely critical of what he sees as the presumptuousness of most contemporary liberal theory. This hostility is largely reciprocated. The velocity of Gray’s own ideological journey is a source of deep mistrust among many of his contemporaries. At the very start of his academic career in the mid 1970s, an apparently fairly orthodox Millian liberal, Gray gravitated towards the political philosophy of Friedrich Hayek (Gray 1984), and rapidly became enamoured with the neo-liberal project that dominated Anglo-American politics in the 1980s. It was at this point, too, that Gray’s profile began to reach significantly beyond the academy, and he became identified as one of the leading intellectual forces behind these new developments. However, already by the mid 1980s he was coming to have doubts about the neo-liberal project, troubled by the inflexible certainty of its advocates and increasingly fearing its destructive social consequences. These doubts pushed him towards a brief flirtation with the more traditional conservatism of Michael Oakeshott, and then, more surprisingly perhaps, to New Labour and the early years of the ascendancy of Tony Blair. Since his disenchantment with Blair and New Labour, surely rendered terminal by the invasion of Iraq, Gray has cut a more solitary figure, with no intellectual attachment to any political movement. In fact, his thought seems to have moved along twin tracks. On the one hand, his political theory has been concerned to articulate a form of liberalism to counterpose to the dominant liberalism of Rawls, Dworkin and their like. On the other hand, his disenchantment appears to have broadened considerably, encompassing politics as a whole along with much of modern life; and his thought has taken an ever more pessimistic turn. Indeed, some, including contributors to this collection, have seen his sympathy for James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock 1991) and his increasingly strident anti-humanism as signs of a worryingly nihilistic tendency (Gray 2002, 2003, 2004). More generally, however, this rapid ideological migration from one position to another has led some political theorists to dismiss him as a dilettante and fundamentally unserious. No doubt this helps to explain why this collection is only the second on Gray by fellow political theorists; the first being a special edition of the journal Social Research over 15 years ago (Social Research 61/3, 1994). It is, though, in our view possible to offer a more sympathetic and appreciative reading of Gray’s work. First, his ideological promiscuousness is often greatly exaggerated. There have been some notable fixed points, among the most important
The Political Theory of John Gray 3 being his consistent rejection of the political aspirations of Marxism. This may be common enough now, but was much less so, at least among British political theorists, when Gray began writing. Moreover, notwithstanding his often trenchant criticism of some interpretations of it, all of the positions that Gray has at various times embraced can be located within the liberal tradition, broadly understood, including his political theory of modus vivendi, which he has spent the last decade or more elaborating and refining (Gray 2000). Indeed, it is plausible to read Gray’s work as a thoroughgoing, if restless, excavation of the resources of liberal thought for an adequate political theory for the modern world. His refusal to be satisfied with easy answers, his unwillingness to follow the fashion in liberal political philosophy and the remorselessly probing quality of his approach lie at the root of what is most distinctive and valuable in his work. This collection does not attempt to address all the multifarious aspects of Gray’s œuvre, nor even all aspects of his political theory. A notable omission, for example, is any sustained discussion of his neo-liberal phase, and generally we have ignored ideas to which Gray himself no longer adheres. It engages primarily what we believe to be the most significant and enduring themes in his work: value-pluralism; liberalism past and present; and his critique of Enlightenment faith in humanism and progress. There is a particular focus on what is, perhaps, his most important constructive contribution to political theory: his defence of value-pluralism and the associated agonistic conception of the politics of modus vivendi, although inevitably his critiques of conventional political theories also receive considerable attention. In his extended response to the contributors, Gray not only replies to some of the central criticisms of his work, but also provides a systematic summary and restatement of the key elements of his political theory. References Gray, J. (1984) Hayek on Liberty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Gray, J. (1993) Beyond the New Right. Markets, Government and the Common Environment (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1995a) Berlin (London: Fontana Press). Gray, J. (1995b) Enlightenment’s Wake. Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity). Gray, J. (2002) Straw Dogs. Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books). Gray, J. (2003) Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Faber and Faber). Gray, J. (2004) Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (London: Granta Books). Lovelock, J. (1991) Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (London: Gaia Books).
Utilitarian Liberalism: Between Gray and Mill JONATHAN RILEY Tulane University, New Orleans, LA USA JonathanRiley 0 2 9
[email protected] 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600654977 FCRI_A_165471.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
Introduction John Gray is among the most trenchant critics of Mill’s utilitarian liberalism. His criticisms, which receive their most refined statement in Two Faces of Liberalism (Gray 2000), are of special interest because, in his earlier Mill on Liberty: A Defence (Gray 1996), he offered a sympathetic and influential reconstruction of Mill’s
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approach. In particular, he suggested that Mill’s utilitarianism should be interpreted as an ‘indirect’ version of the doctrine which confines application of the utilitarian criterion to the selection of, say, an optimal code of rules. Instead of requiring individuals to calculate directly and perform the best acts in every situation, such a rule utilitarianism requires individuals to comply with the relevant rules to promote the general good. Given that an optimal code contains rules of justice which distribute, and give suitable priority to, equal rights and correlative obligations, rule utilitarianism seems compatible with liberalism and pluralism. Indeed, a case can be made that pure maximizing utilitarianism itself is properly conceived in terms of this sort of liberal rule utilitarianism (Harsanyi 1992; Riley 2000). In his criticisms, Gray seems unconcerned about whether the general welfare would be higher under liberal rule utilitarianism or a sophisticated act utilitarianism like Hare’s (1981). He does not insist (although he may well believe) that Mill’s indirect utilitarian defense of individual liberty involved a retreat from the maximizing spirit of the utilitarian enterprise. Rather, his main charge is that Mill’s project in On Liberty ‘was foredoomed to failure’ because his principle of liberty, like all other liberal principles that attempt to prioritize liberty by setting out conditions for justifiable restraint, is ‘defeated by conflicts of values’: When we ask which liberties are to be promoted and which restrained, none of the principles advanced by liberal philosophers gives much guidance. Since reasonable people differ in how they resolve conflicts of value, they apply these principles in different and sometimes incompatible ways. (2000: 90) In short, Mill’s liberal principle is unworkable because of what Gray, Isaiah Berlin and others call ‘value-pluralism’, the doctrine that reasonable people accept plural conflicting and (sometimes) incommensurable basic values (as well as systems of values, that is, cultures or ways of life) such that there may be no rational means of conflict-resolution with universal appeal. Before assessing Gray’s charge, it is important to review how he interprets Mill’s doctrine of liberty. Mill’s principle of liberty is ‘founded on claims about human interests’, Gray says, and ‘it tells us that liberty may be restrained only for the sake of preventing harm to others’ (2000: 85, emphasis original). More needs to be said about the human interests at stake and about their relation, if any, to the idea of harm. Evidently, the interests on which the liberty principle is founded are the ‘permanent interests of man as a progressive being’, in other words, the principal ingredients of human happiness as Mill conceives it. Gray suggests (rightly, in my opinion) that these vital interests include individuality (or personal autonomy), negative liberty and security. The notion of harm which he attributes to Mill is not entirely clear, although in his earlier work he seemed to view it as a wrongful set-back to these vital human interests, where the interests ought to be construed as basic rights. Given such an idea of harm, the liberty principle stipulates that any person’s liberty of conduct may be restrained only for the sake of preventing violations of others’ rights, with the understanding that some system of equal rights and liberties must be
The Political Theory of John Gray 7 established to promote and protect the vital human interests that comprise ‘utility in the largest sense’. Gray insists that Mill’s liberty principle per se does not prescribe ‘any fixed set’ of liberties protected by right: ‘True, Mill’s principle rules out entirely restraint of liberty in the absence of harm to others; but in doing so it specifies only a necessary condition of justified restraint. It does not tell us which liberties to protect’ (2000: 85). In effect, the naked liberty principle merely tells us that a person’s liberty should not be restrained unless others’ rights are at risk of being violated. But it does not tell us what anybody’s rights ought to be, and thus it does not tell us how liberty ought to be restrained to prevent rights-violations. It does not tell us which particular liberties ought to be protected by equal right to foster the general welfare. Rather, to figure out which liberties ought to be protected and which restrained in a given social context, we must turn to the principle of utility itself: ‘Which liberties Mill’s [liberty] principle protects is determined by applying the principle of utility’ (2000: 86). The utility principle alone can tell us the specifics of an optimal code, including the nature of the rights and correlative obligations distributed to promote the general good. The best code may also vary in content across social contexts. Thus, Mill is able to recognize that ‘different combinations of liberty and restraint will be right in different circumstances’, something which Gray regards as a matter of ‘commonsense’. Gray illustrates his reading by claiming that Mill’s utilitarian liberalism ‘underwrites different regimes for the control of drug use in different historical and social contexts’. Mill could defend legal rights to use cocaine and other dangerous drugs in some contexts ‘like that of the United States today’, for example, ‘where drug use is pandemic and a policy of prohibition is ineffective and costly’. At the same time, he would not protect the liberty to use such drugs in other contexts ‘such as contemporary Japan, in which the use of such drugs is limited and a policy of prohibition is effective at low cost’ (2000: 86). The claim seems to be that, for Mill, the desirability of protecting particular individual liberties generally varies across different civil societies. The desirability can only be known after performing a utilitarian calculation that can come out differently in different contexts, depending on such variables as the number of people who want to use drugs as well as the social costs of implementing an effective restraint policy. I shall argue in a moment that Gray’s way of interpreting Mill’s approach does not capture what Mill had in mind. With that crucial caveat, Gray goes on to mount an impressive attack against the version of utilitarian liberalism which he mistakenly associates with Mill. The gist of the attack is that Mill’s approach thus understood breaks down in practice because we have no scientific notion of harm which could be accepted by all reasonable observers as uniformly applicable across different civil societies: ‘whether someone has been harmed cannot be determined just by examining the facts of the matter’ (2000: 86). The difficulty is that people with conflicting ideas of human good will inevitably make conflicting value judgements about whether a wrongful set-back to human interests has occurred in particular cases: ‘Even where there is agreement on the facts of the matter, people with different
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views of human well-being will disagree on whether harm has been done. Or, if they agree that harm has been done, they will differ on its severity. Accordingly, if they attempt to apply Mill’s [liberty] principle they will differ as to whether restraint of liberty is justified’ (2000: 87). Since it requires moral judgements to determine whether unjustified harm has occurred, utilitarian liberalism becomes muddled to the extent that reasonable disagreement persists about the requisite moral judgements: ‘The real problems of Millian liberalism arise in making the utilitarian assessments that the principle of liberty requires … We cannot apply Mill’s principle of liberty without comparing harms; but we will make different comparative judgements of harm according to our different views of human interests’ (2000: 87–88). Ultimately, the alleged simplicity of the liberty principle is destroyed by the irreducibly plural and conflicting values which are embedded in different people’s divergent judgements of harm. Gray’s example of alternative drug control policies can be used to underscore his point that value-pluralism renders Mill’s liberty principle generally inapplicable. Rival views of human good generate incompatible moral judgements of harm, he insists, even if agreement exists on ‘the numbers of addicts that are likely under each policy and on other salient facts’, because these rival views of the good embody rival evaluations of human interests (2000: 88). For liberal utilitarians like Mill who view personal autonomy as ‘one of the most vitally important human interests’, for example, prohibition can be rejected as a sub-optimal policy because, for them, a set-back to this highly valued interest counts as such a serious harm. For others, including classical utilitarians like Bentham and Stephen who do not assign such high value to individuality, however, prohibition can be accepted as the best policy for protecting the human interests, including life and safety, which, for them, are far more weighty than individuality (2000: 89). Given that the conflicting values recognized within competing conceptions of human happiness may sometimes be incommensurable, conflicting and incommensurable moral judgements of harm are generated which destroy the putative simplicity of Mill’s liberty principle. Mill’s Principle of Self-Regarding Liberty Mill might well have some explaining to do if his liberal doctrine took the shape supposed by Gray. But the picture Gray paints is deeply at odds with the text of On Liberty. Indeed, he seriously misinterprets Mill’s liberalism and, in so doing, obscures how it celebrates and protects plural ways of living. The core of Mill’s doctrine is that every mature member of any civil society ought to have an equal right to complete liberty – in the sense of choosing whatever seems best in terms of his own judgement and inclinations – with respect to a ‘sphere of action’ which Mill variously calls ‘purely personal’, ‘private’, and ‘self-regarding’. The individual’s self-regarding sphere consists of conduct that ‘directly … affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation’ (1859: 225). He subsequently qualifies that statement by emphasizing that self-regarding conduct can, and should, affect others’ feelings, including their
The Political Theory of John Gray 9 likes and dislikes (1859: 277–278). But it does not alter their personal circumstances in the sense of directly causing them any perceptible injuries or benefits without their consent and participation. Society has no legitimate authority, he insists, to regulate self-regarding activities. Its authority to compel obedience to rules is properly restricted to a so-called ‘social’ sphere of action comprehending all that portion of the individual’s conduct which does directly affect others without their consent and participation. Properly defined, an individual’s social conduct, or what some commentators (though not Mill) call ‘other-regarding’ conduct, includes any activity that directly causes others to experience perceptible changes in their personal circumstances without their own consent and participation. Mill’s self-regarding liberty principle unquestionably does tell us which liberties ought to be protected by right in every civil society, namely, purely self-regarding liberties. True, clarification is needed to identify self-regarding activities that do not affect others unless they consent and participate. But it is crucial to see that the principle of self-regarding liberty is already the product of a utilitarian calculation that, in Mill’s view, applies to every civil society: ‘No society in which these [selfregarding] liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is free, whatever may be its form of government; and none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and unqualified’ (1859: 226). The liberty principle can be understood and applied without examining its utilitarian foundations, even though Mill himself argues that all justified rights, including the right to complete self-regarding liberty, are ultimately grounded in general utility (1861a: 250). We need only to define what is meant by a right to complete liberty of self-regarding conduct. Indeed, somebody might wish to provide non-utilitarian foundations for the self-regarding liberty principle. The principle might be grounded in natural law and natural right, for example, even though Mill ‘forego[es] any advantage which could be derived to [his] argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility’ (1859: 224). Kateb (2003) has also argued that a self-regarding liberty principle can be grounded in considerations of human dignity which transcend utilitarian calculations. The implication is that, for Mill, every adult member of every civil society has a moral right to consume or not consume dangerous drugs in accord with his own judgement and desires, if such drugs can be used without directly affecting others except when they consent and participate. The only question is whether drug use is ever a self-regarding activity. If it is, then there is no need for further utilitarian calculations. Rather, the individual should have complete liberty. Prohibition could not be an optimal policy in a society like contemporary Japan. Nor could the optimality of legalization be restricted to contexts like that of the United States today. Legal rights to the self-regarding use of drugs without restraint by others (including government officials) would be justified for adults in every civilized setting. To identify self-regarding conduct, and confirm that self-injurious drug consumption can be a self-regarding activity, we need to dispel any remaining confusions about what Mill means when he says that self-regarding conduct does not directly ‘affect’ other people unless they consent and participate. On the one hand, he says
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that self-regarding conduct ‘affects’ others if and only if they consent. On the other hand, he tells us that social conduct ‘affects’ others when they do not consent to be affected. Clearly, ‘affects’ must be referring here to something besides effects on others’ judgements and inclinations (or, more generally, their feelings), which determine whether they consent or refuse to consent. Changes in their feelings will transform their consent into refusal to consent (and vice versa). Yet they must be ‘affected’ independently of whether they consent or refuse. ‘Affect’ refers here not merely to effects on their feelings, I suggest, but to effects on their ‘personal circumstances’ apart from their feelings. Persons’ circumstances can be defined broadly to include their bodies, finances, contractual relationships, public reputations, and so forth. If this is right, self-regarding conduct does not affect others in the sense that it has no perceptible effects on their personal circumstances thus conceived, or if it does affect them in this way, only with their genuine consent and participation. If they prefer not to participate, then they can veto the conduct and its effects on their circumstances. Self-regarding conduct typically will, and should, affect others in the distinct sense of merely having an impact on their feelings, including their convictions and likes or dislikes respecting the agent of the self-regarding conduct. Indeed, Mill emphasizes that certain ‘natural penalties’ are inseparable from self-regarding liberty because other people have equal rights to avoid the company of any adult whose self-regarding conduct displeases them: ‘We have a right … to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours … A person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself’ (1859: 278). But others’ mere dislike never justifies coercive interference with an individual’s self-regarding liberty. Those who are merely upset by the self-regarding conduct have equal rights to avoid the agent and warn their acquaintances against him. Their acting on their aversion does not injure them without their consent, though it may result in harm to the agent of the self-regarding conduct: ‘the natural penalties … cannot be prevented from falling on those who incur the distaste or the contempt of those who know them’ (1859: 282). Given that all parties involved form their own beliefs and preferences without coercive interference, these consenting adults are reasonably held responsible for any actions they choose to take based on these feelings. But what about Gray’s objection that no scientific notion of harm is available which is applicable across different moral viewpoints? In this regard, any reasonable person, whatever his moral viewpoint or social context, divides perceptible effects on personal circumstances (excluding feelings) into improvements and set-backs, or benefits and harms. True, reasonable people may not classify all of the possible effects in the same way: some effects may be viewed as benefits by one but as harms by another. Moreover, reasonable people may disagree over the relative weights to be assigned to the effects that all of them view as harms or benefits. Nevertheless, self-regarding conduct is not touched by these difficulties because such conduct has no perceptible effects at all on others’ circumstances unless they consent. Which effects are classified as harms and which as benefits does not matter since all such
The Political Theory of John Gray 11 effects either do not occur (at least ‘directly, and in the first instance’) or they are consensual. Whatever classification is adopted, self-regarding conduct does not directly benefit or harm others, or, if it does, only with their genuine consent and participation. Of course, this response to Gray assumes that harms can only reasonably be defined as perceptible effects on personal circumstances apart from feelings. Harm cannot be reduced to mere dislike or distress, just as benefit cannot be reduced to mere like or satisfaction. An objective element enters into the phenomena, which can in principle be perceived by anybody who, whatever his preferences or moral perspective, is capable of appreciating scientific evidence of effects on personal circumstances. That does not mean that these effects can be perceived without reference to any values or norms whatsoever. But the relevant norms of correct observation and inference are supplied by the phenomena themselves, and are invariant across different moral viewpoints or criteria of human good.1 Moreover, it cannot be overemphasized that self-regarding conduct can directly harm others in this empirical sense, as long as they consent to the damage, whatever conceptions they may have of their vital interests as human beings. Strictly speaking, Mill’s concern is not to prevent harm to others but rather to prevent harm inflicted on them without their consent. As he indicates, society does have legitimate authority to check in non-coercive ways whether people are genuinely consenting to participate in activities that directly cause set-backs to their personal circumstances. This is so even when others are not involved but the individual is inclined to engage in selfinjurious behaviour. Thus, public officials may take a number of expedient steps, including: discussing with any individual whether he really knows what he is doing and even attempting to persuade him to abandon potentially self-injurious courses of action; posting signs, product labels and other warnings of potential injuries; and even demanding that he provide formal evidence of his wishes before allowing him to venture on some highly dangerous course of conduct. Once society has assured itself that an agent is genuinely consenting to self-harm, however, that is the end of the matter: society has no proper authority to coercively interfere with the selfregarding conduct that is the source of the consensual harm. Society’s authority to scrutinize whether consent to self-injury is genuine shows that the self-regarding sphere is not properly a matter of social indifference. Moreover, if society determines that an individual’s consent is not really ‘free, voluntary and undeceived’, then it may resort to coercive interference, if necessary. If the individual is being misled by others, for example, then society has a right to employ coercion to prevent the other people from inflicting harm on him without his consent. Similarly, if an individual is found to be a child or otherwise incompetent, then society can rightfully interfere with his own behaviour to prevent him from harming himself unintentionally. Strictly speaking, the interference with self-injurious behaviour is not coercive in these cases because the behaviour is not truly intended by the individual. Rather, the individual is being forced by others or by his own incompetence to engage in unintentional behaviour that carries a definite risk of harm to self. He does not genuinely consent to engage in such behaviour.
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Society may also reasonably decide that genuine consent is simply impossible in some situations such as slavery contracts or even marriage contracts in perpetuity, in which case it may enact into law its disapproval of such contracts, its refusal to enforce them, and its guarantee that one party will not be permitted to force another to keep to the terms of such contracts. These measures do not imply, however, that practices like voluntary slavery and marriage without possibility of divorce will be completely stamped out. Such practices may well persist, despite society’s disapproval, until all individuals learn that they have better ways to manage their self-regarding affairs. Despite what has been said, some may continue to object that the Millian distinction between harm and mere dislike, and the essential role it plays in the definition of self-regarding conduct, depends on a contestable view of human good. Unless we accept that liberty and individuality are vital interests, so the objection runs, the Millian apparatus is pointless or worse for promoting human welfare. But why should we accept this contestable view of the good, given that an individual’s intense dislike of another’s self-regarding conduct can be so painful as to send him into an emotional tailspin, and perhaps even ruin his life? It can hardly be denied that the vital interests in liberty and individuality play a prominent role in Mill’s utilitarian form of argument for equal rights to complete self-regarding liberty. He stresses their importance as ingredients of human happiness. For anyone who agrees with him, it is a crucial consideration that another’s self-regarding conduct per se in no way impedes us from acting as we please, in accord with our own judgements and preferences. Though it may provoke our intense dislike or disgust, the other’s self-regarding conduct in no way coercively interferes with our liberty, where liberty means acting in accord with our own judgements and preferences, that is, doing whatever pleases us or avoiding whatever displeases us. In other words, though it can and should affect our judgements and preferences, his self-regarding conduct places no external obstacles in the way of our acting in accord with our own judgements and preferences. In a free society, others cannot reasonably be expected to refrain from self-regarding acts that cause us to feel mere dislike, however intense. But they can reasonably be expected to refrain from social acts that cause us to experience some form of perceptible injury without our consent. That injury to our personal circumstance does constitute an external impediment to our acting in accord with our own judgements and preferences. There is no doubt that exercising our self-regarding liberty, in particular, avoiding another’s self-regarding conduct of which we disapprove, may be costly to us as well as to the agent of the conduct. If an individual learns to his disgust that his girlfriend is a cocaine user, for example, and he decides to cut her out of his life because he cannot tolerate her drug-using lifestyle, then his exercise of his liberty – his avoiding her in accord with his own judgement and preferences – implies for both of them a loss of friendship and its associated favours. This loss of friendship may be a very heavy cost. But it is entirely compatible with the self-regarding liberty of both individuals since both are in no way impeded from acting in accord with their own judgements and preferences.
The Political Theory of John Gray 13 We can always avoid the costs of avoiding another’s self-regarding conduct merely by refraining from acting as currently seems best to our own judgement and desires. The costs do not arise if we refrain from exercising our self-regarding liberty. That is not to say that we should refrain from exercising it – on the contrary, for Mill, we have a moral right to complete self-regarding liberty. People might be able to persuade us to change our mind, however, so that we no longer abhor the other’s self-regarding conduct. If so, the costs of avoiding that conduct no longer arise, simply because we no longer wish to avoid it when acting in accord with our revised judgement and preferences. In contrast, we cannot avoid the costs of another’s harmful social conduct in this way. Another’s social conduct that directly causes us to suffer perceptible injury without our consent presents costs to us which we cannot simply avoid if we like. Of course, we may take all sorts of precautions to avoid experiencing others’ harmful social conduct, and these precautions may be very costly to us. But that is beside the point. The point is that, if we do experience it, such conduct directly and immediately causes us some form of perceptible injury that does constitute an external impediment to our acting in accord with our own judgements and preferences. The individual who slices another’s arm off or steals the other’s wallet, or who credibly threatens to do these things, coercively interferes with the other’s liberty by placing external obstacles in the way of that person’s doing as he prefers or avers. The obstacle – the (credible threat of) perceptible injury suffered without genuine consent – may not always be as important to us, however, as the loss of friendship suffered by virtue of exercising our liberty to avoid another’s self-regarding conduct. Losing a few dollars in a stolen wallet may be trivial in value in comparison to the loss of a lovely girlfriend. But the one cost interferes with our liberty whereas the other does not. Mill’s distinction between harm and mere dislike is an ingenious move for a liberal rule utilitarian to make. A society that takes steps to prevent people from feeling mere dislike at another’s self-regarding conduct cannot pretend that it is thereby preventing people from suffering perceptible injuries to their personal circumstances. Rather, by taking such coercive steps, the society harms the interests that all parties involved have in liberty and individuality. The individual who would like to choose some self-regarding act is prevented from doing so. Moreover, those who would prefer to avoid that individual if he chose the act that offends them are prevented from doing so because they never get to observe the offensive act. Rather than suppress all this, Mill insists on complete freedom so that all can learn what makes them happy or unhappy and, if necessary, correct what they see as their mistakes. Evidently, the pain and dislike experienced by an individual from his own or anyone else’s self-regarding conduct does count in Mill’s utilitarian liberalism. But it figures into the individual’s liberty to avoid what displeases him, and to shape his own character in his own way. Allowing reasonable people to experience such pain and dislike does not injure their personal circumstances. It directly improves their circumstances, by increasing their knowledge of their own and others’ feelings, thereby encouraging further reflection and self-development.
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Nevertheless, despite its strong appeal for anyone who accepts a Millian conception of human good, the liberal utilitarian argument for self-regarding liberty does not presuppose that everyone must agree that he personally has vital interests in liberty and individuality. Mill recognizes that most members of civil societies may have no desire for individuality, so that reasons other than the promotion of their own individualities must be supplied to make the utilitarian case. What social benefits can the many expect if the few are guaranteed the complete self-regarding liberty required for self-development? He points to such benefits as: new and better ideas, practices and technologies discovered by the few individuals of ‘genius’ through their ‘experiments of living’; more effective government as a result of critical advice supplied by the intellectual and moral elite; the encouragement of personal diversity and tolerance as opposed to a totalitarian uniformity; and the prevention of a complete ‘despotism of custom’ such as that found in contemporary China, which he associates with social stagnation and decline (1859: 267–275). Evidently, Mill believes that every reasonable person, whatever his conception of good, can appreciate these sorts of benefits. The argument does not presuppose that everyone views his own good in the same way, such that vital interests in self-regarding liberty and individuality are seen as principal ingredients of his well-being. Liberty of Social Conduct I have argued that drug use by mature individuals can be a self-regarding activity. This is not to say that drug use is always self-regarding, irrespective of circumstances. An individual cannot plead that his drug use provides an excuse to avoid his recognized obligations since failure to meet his obligations constitutes a serious harm to others without their consent, although we must keep in mind that society cannot properly create obligations to refrain from choosing self-regarding acts. Society legitimately prevents an individual from taking drugs if this is required to enforce his recognized obligations to support his family, for example, just as it properly punishes a policeman who takes drugs on duty (Mill 1859: 281–282). Society also rightfully enforces special measures against any particular individual to prevent him from consuming drugs if his past behaviour displays an abnormal personal tendency to be stimulated by the drugs to inflict harm on others (Mill 1859: 295). Even where there is no risk of harm to others, society can legitimately employ coercion to treat drug addiction if the addict is convincingly shown to have been rendered incompetent by his addiction. In that case, the addict does not genuinely intend to consume the drugs, or consent to buy them from his supplier. Despite these various caveats, however, drug use is clearly self-regarding activity when performed in private homes or clubs by competent and responsible consenting adults who have no unusual histories of drug-induced harm to others. Complete freedom to engage in such self-regarding activity, Mill insists, ought to be protected by equal right in every civilized society. But the self-regarding liberty principle is not the sole component of Mill’s utilitarian doctrine of liberty. Even though the individual’s social conduct is legitimately
The Political Theory of John Gray 15 subject to external regulation by society, society can rightfully decide to forgo exercising its regulatory authority for some types of social conduct. Society’s possession of legitimate authority to consider regulating social conduct does not imply that society should always establish and enforce rules to govern every type of social action or inaction that poses a risk of harm to others without their consent. If the social conduct is reasonably expected to yield more social benefits than harms to other people under certain conditions, for example, then it is generally expedient for society to adopt a policy of laissez-faire with respect to that type of social conduct, subject to the conditions being satisfied. Trade and expression are types of social conduct which, with some exceptions, ought to be left unregulated by a society that seeks to advance the general welfare, Mill suggests, even though these types of social conduct do pose risks of direct harm to others without their consent. When some sellers gain market share over their rivals, or when some speakers are preferred to others by an audience, ‘society admits no right … in the disappointed competitors, to immunity from this kind of suffering’ (1859: 293). Indeed, a social policy of laissez-faire may be utilitarian even if the relevant social conduct is reasonably expected to generate more social harm than benefit. This may happen when the various costs of establishing and running a regulatory regime exceed the net harms to be prevented by regulating the conduct. The upshot is that any civil society can rightfully permit individuals and voluntary groups (such as business firms) to enjoy some liberty with respect to some types of social conduct, even though the moral right to absolute liberty is confined to purely self-regarding conduct. This moral and legal permission to choose among a limited set of social actions is contingent on relevant social benefit-cost estimates which may vary across different social circumstances. Moreover, even if individuals and groups are entrusted with legal rights to perform these social actions, the legal claims are properly qualified in such a way that the right-holder remains obligated to obey society’s rules of justice. Sellers who are permitted to freely compete with others in the market remain obligated to obey laws that forbid fraudulent dealing, for example, just as speakers remain obligated to obey laws that forbid malicious libel or incitement to violence. Nobody has a moral right to complete liberty with respect to social conduct. Given his endorsement of broad (though not unqualified) policies of laissez-faire for social conduct such as trade and expression, it is a fatal error to interpret Mill as confining individual liberty to self-regarding conduct. Contrary to an influential reading of his purpose, he is not attempting in the Liberty to mark out in detail an optimal boundary between individual liberty and social regulation. The self-regarding sphere is, he implies, a minimum sphere of human liberty which ought to be recognized and protected by every civil society as a matter of justice and right. He is very clear that individual liberty may also be appropriate in some parts of the sphere of social conduct. The optimal boundary between individual liberty and social regulation does not run, therefore, between the self-regarding and social spheres. A full discussion of Mill’s utilitarian theory of social regulation cannot be attempted here. But he argues that any civilized society, after considering how to
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exercise its regulatory authority with respect to the social sphere, ought to establish rules that prohibit types of social acts that (credibly threaten to) directly harm others to such a severe degree that every individual should have an equal right not to suffer such a severe set-back to his personal circumstances without his consent. In short, to promote the general welfare as Mill conceives it (‘utility in the largest sense’), it is essential to have an optimal code of laws and customs which distributes individual rights and correlative duties. This code must also threaten suitable legal and social punishment for any rights-violations, except when ‘the special expediencies of the case’ dictate relying solely on individual conscience for enforcement (1859: 225). As he emphasizes in the fifth chapter of Utilitarianism, the rules of this code are society’s most important class of rules, namely, the rules of justice. Thus, in his view, there is in general nothing more important for promoting the general welfare than a suitable code of justice. Political institutions are needed by every civilized society to enact utilitarian laws, execute them, and try cases under them.2 Mill’s defence of individual liberty in On Liberty is consistent with his account of social justice in Utilitarianism, contrary to the charges of many commentators. For him, any coercive interference with the individual’s self-regarding liberty is a type of harm so serious that the individual ought to have a legal right not to suffer it. Utilitarian laws will distribute equal rights to absolute self-regarding liberty for all adults in every civilized society. To promote the general welfare, every adult must have a legal claim not to be impeded by others when choosing among his selfregarding actions and inactions as he pleases, and others must have correlative duties not to impede him. For Mill, the benefits of self-development through spontaneous self-regarding choice and experimentation always outweigh the mere dislike and emotional distress thereby occasioned for other people together with any ‘natural penalties’ that flow to the agent from others’ dislike and distress. Mere dislike is not harm in the sense of perceptible damage. Indeed, anyone who feels it retains his liberty to avoid what he dislikes, and thus can continue to enjoy the benefits of his own self-development. He can continue to pursue his own good in his own way without suppressing the individuality of anyone else. The natural penalties that flow to any agent are, however, harms to him which his own self-regarding choices have caused him to suffer. Again, the agent remains perfectly free to alter his self-regarding conduct if he pleases, in order to remove the cause of others’ aversion and avoid the natural penalties that flow from it.3 For the same reasons that different individuals may reasonably choose different self-regarding lifestyles as best, different societies may choose different collective lifestyles, including distinct legal codes and rights, as best for them in their distinctive circumstances. This pluralism of personal as well as collective lifestyles does not flow from any innate differences in individuals, classes or nations, in Mill’s opinion. Rather, it results from the distinctive ‘circumstances which surround different classes and individuals, and shape their characters’ (1859: 274). Recall that benefits and harms, upon which a reasonable person’s choice of his self-regarding lifestyle as well as a utilitarian society’s choice of its collective way of life will depend, cannot be reduced to mere likes and dislikes, that is, preferences floating
The Political Theory of John Gray 17 independently of circumstances. Rather, benefits and harms have an objective element that can be perceived by anybody capable of appreciating scientific evidence of perceptible changes in circumstances. Even though different individuals and nations may interpret and classify the perceptible effects in different ways, all reasonable people agree that the changes of circumstances can be perceived and that, unless some change is perceived, no benefit or harm exists. Of course, this does not preclude different individuals and nations from making similar choices to some extent, despite the distinctive circumstances shaping their respective personal and national characters. It is hardly contestable that a reasonable consensus exists about at least some of the perceptible changes in personal circumstances which should be classified as severe harms for any human being. Every civilized society (as opposed to ‘barbarians’ incapable of rational persuasion) establishes rules of justice which include rights to protection from such severe harms as arbitrary killing, slavery, broken promises, and so forth, even if these rights are not extended to outsiders who are viewed as ‘inhuman’, and even if the rules are laxly enforced for some recognized members of society. Such rights are the germs of ‘human rights’ or ‘natural rights’, that is, rights held to belong to any human being as such by virtue of his rational nature. Mill in effect treats the right to self-regarding liberty as a human right in this sense. He insists that every civil society should distribute such a right equally to every individual ‘capable of rational persuasion’. The self-regarding liberty maxim thereby sets an absolute limit on the scope of legitimate social regulation. Society may, for example, rightfully establish and enforce laws of justice which require business firms to publish accurate information about the products they sell. Such rules are designed to prevent fraudulent market conduct that directly causes severe harm to consumers. Similarly, society may legitimately prevent firms from polluting the environment, compel them to provide safe working conditions for their employees, and force them to collect personal information from the buyers of their products as a condition of sale to facilitate police investigations of any ensuing crimes in which the products are abused to seriously harm other people. But society can never rightfully implement rules that prohibit the sale of products which the individual can use in ways that pose no risk of direct harm to others without their consent. Social regulation of the producers and sellers cannot properly amount to a social ban on their sales activities because such a ban would interfere with the consumer’s selfregarding liberty. The consumer has a moral right to buy as he pleases any products that have purely self-regarding uses. Consistently with Mill’s doctrine of liberty, then, any civilized society has legitimate authority to regulate the drug trade. Marketers of drugs are properly required to obtain a licence to be in business, for instance. The number of sellers, their locations, and their hours of operation can also be limited by law. They can be rightfully required to adopt environmentally friendly production techniques and provide safe working conditions. They can be forced, if necessary, to label their drugs accurately for consumers. Even promotional public advertising can be prohibited, forcing the drug sellers to rely on ‘word of mouth’ among those interested in buying drugs.
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Moreover, different societies may choose to establish different schemes of regulation. Though all should choose some form of competitive market system for efficiently allocating the drugs, some could decide that a virtually unregulated market is best in light of the general character of their citizens and other social circumstances, whereas others could decide that a relatively heavy set of restrictions is most generally expedient for their drug marketers. Some societies may elect to establish capitalistic ownership in combination with their market systems, whereas others establish decentralized socialistic industries in which self-organized worker cooperatives produce and sell drugs in the open market, and still others permit mixtures of both.4 Nevertheless, although this institutional pluralism in their drug trades is reasonable, all civilized societies should display uniformity when it comes to recognizing the individual right to self-regarding liberty. No civil society can justifiably regulate the drug market to such an extent that adults are prohibited altogether from buying drugs for self-regarding uses. Unlike reasonable regulation, such a ban is incompatible with Mill’s doctrine. The Objection from Value-Pluralism Gray’s charge that value-pluralism renders unworkable any liberal utilitarian calculus calls into question Mill’s doctrine as it relates to the social sphere, even if we say that the principle of self-regarding liberty can be understood and applied without reference to its utilitarian foundations. If Gray is correct, a civilized society cannot calculate or estimate an optimal code of justice, and so cannot determine how to regulate social conduct, in its distinctive social circumstances. But is Gray’s charge persuasive? Mill clearly rejects value-pluralism as conceived by Gray, Berlin and others. In his view, general happiness is the sole ultimate value, to which all other values can be reduced. There is in principle a right way to resolve any conflict of values so as to maximize the general welfare or common good. Nevertheless, by admitting that we lack the rich utility information needed to apply a fully fledged utilitarian calculus, Mill can concede that we lack the information required to resolve at least some conflicts of values. To apply a liberal utilitarian procedure for selecting rules of social conduct, we do need a formidable amount of information, including information about the perceptible effects on his circumstances to be reasonably expected by any person from a given type of conduct, information about how intensely each person ‘capable of rational persuasion’ likes or dislikes the perceptible changes that he classifies as harms or benefits, and information about how to compare one such person’s preference intensities with another’s in cases of conflict. To the extent that we lack such information, the utilitarian is forced to concede that nobody can know how best to resolve the competing pulls of different values or even of different aspects of the same value like justice. In that case, even the most rational social decision makers must behave in practice as if they were value-pluralists, with the caveat that for them all conflicts of values might be reasonably resolved as more
The Political Theory of John Gray 19 utility information is acquired whereas the genuine value-pluralist asserts that at least some of these conflicts are forever irremediable. Suppose we do lack rich utility information so that the only information we have for classifying and evaluating any perceptible changes of circumstances as harms or benefits is the information contained in different persons’ preference orderings, with the caveat that any person capable of rational persuasion must be capable of appreciating Mill’s key distinction between mere feelings of like or dislike and perceptible changes of circumstances. In that case, where the only available utility information is purely ordinal, the utilitarian calculus effectively converts into majority voting (Riley 1990). Keeping in mind that rules of justice distributing equal rights are the most important class of social rules in Mill’s conception of the general welfare, and that voters must be suitably motivated to seek laws and rights that are most advantageous for their particular community, the majority is free to establish whatever legal code seems best to them for protecting every member of the community from suffering severe harms. In any large community, the majority should ratify whatever form of representative government seems most advantageous for enacting and enforcing an optimal code of justice. Taking for granted that every majority capable of rational persuasion will agree that the individual must have basic rights not to suffer certain specific harms because such harms would be devastating for any human being who suffered them, Mill (1861b) argues that constitutional representative democracy is the best form of government for any civilized society. The power of the elected government must be constitutionally limited to prevent official violations of the basic moral rights, including the right to selfregarding liberty, which ought to be recognized as legal rights in the code of every civilized community. Evidently, Mill joins figures like Locke, Rousseau and Madison in a venerable tradition of constitutionalism which assigns to the people – at least the popular majority – the ultimate authority to establish any form of limited government (not necessarily a democratic government) which in their estimation is most likely to preserve their basic rights and thereby promote the common good.5 He also joins them in holding that the popular majority can legitimately establish social customs to underlie and supplement the optimal laws of justice, as well as bolster their enforcement. His doctrine can hardly be singled out as unworkable for explaining how any civilized society should go about constructing an optimal code of justice for regulating social conduct in its particular circumstances. Value-pluralism itself might be more vulnerable than Mill’s utilitarian liberalism on this score. Gray at times appears to concede as much: ‘As a matter of logic, value-pluralism cannot entail any political project’ (2000: 135). Yet he also argues that value-pluralism is ‘the ethical theory underpinning modus vivendi’ (2000: 6), and that a genuine modus vivendi is constrained by certain basic moral rights: ‘there are limits on what can count as modus vivendi … human rights are constraints on the pursuit of coexistence’ (2000: 138). Indeed, he argues that all contemporary political regimes should respect certain ‘universal human rights’ among other ‘minimal standards of decency and legitimacy’ (2000: 106–115). The other minimal standards
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include having ‘a rule of law and the capacity to maintain peace, effective representative institutions, and a government that is removable by its citizens without recourse to violence’. When he is arguing in this spirit, Gray’s approach seems to fall squarely within the same constitutionalist tradition as Mill’s, with the caveat that Mill advocates liberal democracy whereas Gray is ethically content with nonliberal regimes that respect at least some basic rights as opposed to anything like a full array of liberal democratic rights. Nevertheless, a serious problem remains for Gray. In line with his concession that value-pluralism is logically unrelated to modus vivendi, he concedes that valuepluralism is compatible with political regimes that deny some basic moral rights: Basic human rights can be justified as giving protection against universal human evils; but even such rights clash with one another, and incompatible settlements of their conflicts can be equally legitimate … Rational inquiry does not yield a single answer as to which we are to choose when universal evils collide … Even minimal standards can be met in different ways. Minimally legitimate regimes need not, and often do not, protect the same basic rights. Like the universal evils they are framed to prevent, basic rights conflict with one another … Even the most minimal rights can be rivals … Such conflicts can rightly be settled in a variety of ways. (2000: 15, 67, 113) True, he implies that a minimally legitimate regime could not violate all basic moral rights, although it is unclear why he thinks value-pluralism entails even that much. The problem remains in any case that modus vivendi is no longer constrained to respect at least some genuine human rights. Indeed, the notion of modus vivendi must become sufficiently flexible to accommodate settlements between regimes which do not respect any basic rights in common. This seems to me to reveal a fatal contradiction in Gray’s approach. As he recognizes, ‘human rights … provide protection against [universal] evils that forestall anything recognizable as a worthwhile human life’ (2000:138; see also 2000: 66). By implication, every minimally decent and legitimate society must respect all genuine human rights, given that each such right protects some vital interest or need of the individual which must be protected to make any human life worthwhile. In short, to make the lives of its members worthwhile, any legitimate regime must enforce some harmonious set of genuine human rights, the same set which is also respected by all other legitimate regimes. If it does not prescribe respect for this common minimum of basic moral rights, value-pluralism is at odds with minimal standards of decency and legitimacy, and thus cannot serve as an ethical theory. But, on Gray’s reading, value-pluralism asserts that even these genuine human rights will clash, and there is no one rational way to resolve the conflicts. To avoid this fatal contradiction between value-pluralism and common decency, we must distinguish between, on the one hand, conflicts of incommensurable evils which can be reasonably resolved in a variety of ways, and, on the other, objective harms that are so devastating for any human being that everyone capable of rational
The Political Theory of John Gray 21 persuasion understands that they must be prevented by right for anything like a worthwhile human life to be possible. Value-pluralism properly acknowledges this distinction. Thus, it is one thing to say that enslavement and genocide are evils that every human being has a basic right not to suffer, but quite another thing to say that, when forced to make a choice between the two, some people might reasonably opt for slavery whereas others could reasonably choose annihilation. To meet the minimum threshold of common decency, a regime must protect its citizens (more generally, anyone residing on its territory) from both enslavement and genocide. It is irrelevant in terms of decency whether slavery or genocide is the better choice when those are the only two options available. Neither option is acceptable for any minimally decent society. That is the one right answer to the question of decency. If either slavery or genocide is practiced by individuals, classes or nations, then those people inhabit an illegitimate social enclave, below the threshold of decency. Properly interpreted, then, value-pluralism has the resources to recognize that some values are objective ‘bads’ rather than ‘goods’, and that some ‘bads’ are so devastating to any human that he ought to have legal claims on his society for protection against all of them.6 If this is correct, a value-pluralist will second Mill’s endorsement of constitutional representative government to enact and enforce at least a minimal code of justice and equal rights, on the grounds that such a code is essential to promote a worthwhile life for each member of society. Conclusion Mill’s doctrine of individual liberty, which prescribes complete liberty of selfregarding conduct as well as some liberty of social conduct contingent on social circumstances, is not ‘foredoomed to failure’ as Gray alleges. It is a powerful doctrine, applicable to every civilized society. It flows consistently from his liberal rule utilitarianism, in which rules of justice which distribute equal rights and correlative duties are viewed as the most valuable class of rules for promoting the common good. Every civil society’s legal code of justice should recognize and enforce certain basic human rights, including any mature individual’s right to complete self-regarding liberty. But an optimal code will do more than protect selfregarding liberty. It will also distribute conditional legal claims and permissions to freely perform some types of social conduct like trade and expression. Different societies can reasonably disagree over the generally expedient extent of liberty of social conduct, however, because of their different social circumstances. The objection from value-pluralism is not persuasive. Indeed, value-pluralism properly interpreted arguably seconds Mill’s liberal utilitarian justification of constitutional representative government as an essential component of any legitimate society’s political project of establishing at least a minimal code of justice to regulate harmful social conduct. In any case, Mill can reject value-pluralism without rejecting pluralism of self-regarding lifestyles or cultural pluralism. For him, even if everyone were motivated to promote the general welfare, differences in surrounding circumstances would tend to shape different characters across individuals, classes
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and nations. True, if people started from similar initial circumstances (including genetic endowments, finances, and so forth), experienced similar perceptible changes of circumstances, and, in general, grew up under the same conditions, then they would experience similar sensations, form similar beliefs and preferences, and develop more or less uniform characters. But Mill certainly does not endorse that sort of uniformity. He fears it and warns against it. People’s circumstances are already becoming too assimilated in the modern world, he insists, and the problem is likely to get worse. Rather, individuals, classes and nations should be grateful for their variety of circumstances, and should take steps to preserve and even expand this fortunate inheritance. Different surrounding circumstances shape different characters, and the freedom to develop in one’s own way within certain limits of justice is a principal ingredient of human welfare.7 Before closing, I should observe that nothing has been said about Mill’s own distinctive brand of value-pluralism, which holds that human happiness itself is a complex value comprised of plural kinds of pleasure. Indeed, higher kinds of pleasure are said by him to be incommensurable with lower kinds, not in the sense that the different kinds cannot be compared in value but rather in the sense that the higher kind is indefinitely or infinitely more valuable than the lower kind. This doctrine of higher pleasures gives rise to a pluralistic version of utilitarianism, in which the different aspects of human happiness cannot be reduced even in principle to a single utility scale of rational numbers. Rather, there are plural irreducible utility scales arranged in a hierarchy. Yet all other values, including justice, can be reduced to general welfare thus conceived. Given the requisite rich utility information, conflicts of values can always be reasonably resolved in terms of the hierarchy of utility scales. Of course, this Millian doctrine of value-pluralism is highly controversial, and, like the vast majority of other commentators, Gray rejects it (2000: 57– 62, 87). Still, the doctrine is probably the most fascinating and misunderstood part of Mill’s utilitarian philosophy. But that is a topic for another occasion.
Notes 1.
2.
3.
Mill defends an empiricist epistemology against any form of rationalism that finds reasonable norms in certain essential ideas and categories supplied by the mind prior to experience. He also agrees with Berkeley that empiricism involves no commitment to a materialist ontology. There are broad and intriguing similarities between Mill’s liberal rule utilitarian conception of the general welfare, and conceptions of the ‘common good’ defended by theorists of natural law and natural rights. Finnis (1980) provides an enlightening discussion of the natural law tradition as well as a modern natural law theory of his own. But he ignores similarities with rule utilitarianism in his haste to condemn as ‘senseless’ any form of utilitarian aggregation procedure. The priority given to rights in Mill’s conception of general good may also suggest some overlap with Rawls’ (1971, 1993) contractualist version of liberalism, which assigns absolute priority to a principle of equal basic liberties over any competing social considerations. Rawls himself interprets Mill as giving absolute priority to a principle of basic rights over competing considerations of general utility. Note that by enforcing any individual’s duty not to interfere with another’s self-regarding liberty, society may prevent social actions that directly benefit others without their consent. For instance, one person might want to force another to consume some medicine for his own good. But such social
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4. 5.
6. 7.
conduct constitutes coercive interference with the other’s self-regarding choices, assuming that he is a competent agent who is aware of the risk of self-injury associated with refusing to take his medicine. For Mill, the harms of this meddling with self-regarding liberty and self-development always outweigh any benefits of paternalism. So it remains true that society, in enforcing the relevant duties, is employing coercion solely for the purpose of preventing (net) harm to others without their consent. For further discussion of Mill’s approach to free markets, capitalism and socialism, see Riley (1996). Mill’s appeal to general utility should not distract attention from his agreement with the social contract theorists on the ultimate moral and legal power of the popular majority to select and alter its form of government for achieving the common good (including justice) in its social context. The key point is that utilitarian procedural norms convert into majoritarian procedural norms when utility information is poor, that is, purely ordinal (Riley 1990). For an interpretation of Berlin’s value-pluralism as incorporating a common moral horizon including some minimum set of genuine human rights, see Riley (2001, 2002). For further discussion of Mill’s doctrine of liberty as I understand it, see Riley (1998, 2005, 2006).
References Finnis, J. (1980) Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Gray, J. (1996) Mill on Liberty: A Defence 2nd ed. (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press). Hare, R.M. (1981) Moral Thinking: Its Method, Levels and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Harsanyi, J.C. (1992) Games and Decision Theoretic Models in Ethics, in: R.J. Aumann S. Hart (Eds), Handbook of Game Theory pp. 669–707 (Amsterdam: Elsevier). Kateb, G. (2003) A Reading of On Liberty, in: D. Bromwich & G. Kateb (Eds), On Liberty: John Stuart Mill pp. 28–66 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Mill, J.S. (1859) On Liberty, reprinted in: J. M. Robson (Ed.) (1977) Collected Works XVIII, pp. 213– 310 (London and Toronto: Routledge & University of Toronto Press). Mill, J.S. (1861a) Utilitarianism, reprinted in: J.M. Robson (Ed.) (1969) Collected Works X, pp. 203–259 (London and Toronto: Routledge & University of Toronto Press). Mill, J.S. (1861b) Considerations on Representative Government, reprinted in: J.M. Robson (Ed.) (1977) Collected Works XIX, pp. 371–577 (London and Toronto: Routledge & University of Toronto Press). Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press). Riley, J. (1990) Utilitarian Ethics and Democratic Government, Ethics, 100(2), pp. 335–348. Riley, J. (1996) J.S. Mill’s Liberal Utilitarian Assessment of Capitalism Versus Socialism, Utilitas, 8(1), pp. 39–71. Riley, J. (1998) Mill on Liberty (London: Routledge). Riley, J. (2000) Defending Rule Utilitarianism, in: B. Hooker, E. Mason and D. Miller (Eds), Morality, Rules and Consequences pp. 40–70 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press). Riley, J. (2001) Interpreting Berlin’s Liberalism, American Political Science Review, 95(2), pp. 283–296. Riley, J. (2002) Cultural Pluralism within Liberal Limits, Political Theory, 30(1), pp. 68–96. Riley, J. (2005) Mill: On Liberty, in: J. Shand (Ed.), Central Works of Philosophy, III pp. 127–157 (London: Acumen Publishing). Riley, J. (2006) Mill’s Radical Liberalism (London: Routledge).
The Social Theory of Anti-Liberalism PAUL KELLY Government Department, London School of Economics, UK PaulKelly 0 2
[email protected] 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600654985 FCRI_A_165472.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 9 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
Political liberals tend to dismiss John Gray as an intellectual gadfly who never holds a position long enough to become a target for serious and sustained critical examination. He has apparently, taken up and subsequently abandoned Millian, Hayekian Oakeshottian variants of political theory; he is now currently working through an ambiguous relationship with Isaiah Berlin, as he also flirts with Heideggerian antihumanism and an increasingly radical version of Green political thought. Such an interpretation, which I have myself endorsed in the past (Kelly 2000: 225–241), is both uncharitable and mistaken, for beneath Gray’s intellectual agility in moving from one theory or guru to the next, there is a surprising consistency of purpose.1 It would be a mistake to describe this consistency as an unfolding theory, for the underlying vision animating Gray’s work is an anti-theoretical one, but there is nevertheless such a vision. This vision has become increasingly clear in his most recent work and might be described as a combination of scepticism and pessimism, or to follow up a quasi-theological metaphor from one of his most recent books, it might be described as a secular Augustinianism (Gray 2004: 127). Basically this
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view recognises the ineradicability of conflict and violence as central to the human condition. Unlike the Augustianian doctrine of the fall, there is for Gray no corresponding doctrine of redemption, hence Gray’s pessimism. This is an agonistic vision of politics. Gray’s pessimism emerges through his critical rejection of theories that try to eradicate the contingency and conflict that underpins the human condition. The most striking examples of theories that have tried to eradicate the contingency of human affairs are Marxist and Nazi totalitarianisms and their offshoots on the political left. Yet, these are easy targets, and increasingly, Gray has sought to identify similar pathologies in the liberal theories of Popper, Hayek, Mill, Oakeshott, Berlin and most explicitly in what he considers the ‘academic’ irrelevancies of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. The problem with all such approaches is that to a greater (Rawls) or a lesser degree (Oakeshott), all are implicated in the rationalist project of normative theory, which aspires to purge politics of its contingency and conflict, and replace it with a Pelagian vision of perfectibility. Even the modest vision of Rawlsian liberalism is implicated in the same dangerous project that led to Marxism and totalitarianism, namely a rejection of the human condition as it is, and an attempt to make men ‘new’. Gray is certainly more favourably disposed to the antirationalism of Oakeshott and more recently to Berlin’s pluralist liberalism, but even these thinkers retain a hidden commitment to normative political theory. Gray’s pessimistic vision is coupled with a commitment to many core liberal values. He is a defender of the rule of law and a critic of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair’s apparent accommodation with the use of torture in pursuit of the ‘War on Terror’ (Gray 2004: 132–138). Yet such political commitments are contingent and not the result of some universalist theory or account of the ultimate good for man – and that is central to Gray’s vision. The impulse to theorise – the search for universal and non-contingent reasons for political principles and values – is precisely what is wrong with contemporary liberal versions of normative political thought. And it is precisely because liberal values are implicated in this redundant and dangerous theoretical enterprise that Gray becomes an anti-liberal and is ultimately critical of all variants of this normative project, whether Hayekian or Rawlsian. For those, like myself, who are committed to defending some variant of liberal political theory, Gray poses a difficult challenge (Kelly 2004). His complex, subtle and nuanced writings cannot simply be dismissed as relying on a number of dubious critiques of individual liberal thinkers, as one might reject, for example, some of Michael Sandel’s criticism of Rawls’ account of choice behind the veil of ignorance.2 This is not how Gray proceeds. Although he does often deploy careful readings of liberal thinkers, his overall critique of the liberal project is not simply the sum of a number of micro-criticisms of liberals such as Rawls, Dworkin or Brian Barry. This makes Gray’s assault on liberalism particularly difficult to challenge. Either one is forced onto the terrain of criticising Gray’s particular readings, which is inconclusive unless all Gray is concerned with is narrow liberal scholarship, or else one is forced to challenge the basic pessimistic vision. This would require adopting the kind of hubristic optimism that according to Gray, sits so uneasily with
The Political Theory of John Gray 27 what we know about the modern world and its recent history – hence his constant assault on the myth of progress. Yet in this essay I want to challenge Gray’s assault on egalitarian liberalism. In so doing I will try and avoid the pitfalls of irrelevance and naïve optimism. I will argue that the success of Gray’s vision depends upon its being more realistic and faithful to our moral experience.3 Yet I want to claim that the Gray’s anti-liberal stance is far from realistic and faithful to our moral experience and in fact depends upon a social theory that cannot withstand critical scrutiny. In contrast to the weakness of Gray’s anti-liberalism, I will argue that far from being abstract, naive and unrealistic, the social theory underlying egalitarian liberalism is a more plausible reading of moral and political experience. This will not of course provide a knock-down argument for egalitarian liberalism, but by showing that the social theory of anti-liberalism trades on a dubious and crudely positivist reading of moral experience, I will have provided indirect support for liberal political theory. An Overview of Gray’s Anti-liberalism Throughout his writings Gray has been engaged in a conversation and argument with the various forms of liberalism from Mill’s liberal utilitarianism, through Hayek and Oakeshott (who for our purposes is a liberal) to the work of Isaiah Berlin. The dominant liberal discourse of Rawls and Dworkin in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy has been given only a cursory discussion in Gray’s work. This is perhaps a useful corrective to the preoccupations of theorists who appear at least to endorse the view that if a problem is not derived from Rawls it is not a problem. However, as with so much else in Gray’s work, appearances are deceptive. For one can make a case that his main concern is to mount a liberal critique of the rationalist liberalism of Rawls and Dworkin. By focusing on Berlin in particular in his recent work, Gray argues that there is more to a liberal vision than is captured in the Rawlsian project. Consequently, much of his work on Berlin especially in Isaiah Berlin and Two Faces of Liberalism is really a sustained critique of the liberal rationalist project. Although this project is exemplified by Rawls and Dworkin, it is not narrowly identified with either thinker’s main texts: hence Gray’s reluctance to offer a straightforward critique of Dworkin or Rawls. Simply pointing out the internal weaknesses of Rawls or Dworkin will not suffice, as the overall project of normative political liberalism is the target.4 Yet it is quite clear that the main arguments of Two Faces of Liberalism are addressed to the viability of the Rawlsian and Dworkinian projects. For Gray these projects involve providing an uncontroversial set of principles that are universal in scope and in turn specify the ideal form of political community.5 One can see this view exemplified in Rawls’s vision of the contractual liberal state as a fair system of cooperation between individuals who disagree about ultimate ends. Although liberals such as Rawls claim that this contractualist model of the state can accommodate the fact of pluralism about ultimate ends, it precludes pluralism in at least one area, namely over the right, or those principles which regulate
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social cooperation. Thus whilst individuals might well be able to disagree about the correct path to salvation, there is no scope for reasonable disagreement about the right form of polity. Gray argues that liberals such as Rawls, Dworkin and their followers, who make this claim, are attempting to construct a Utopian vision that is freed from the vicissitudes of political disagreement and conflict.6 Rawls and Dworkin are Pelagians – to continue Gray’s theological metaphor – in that they want to allow that humans can achieve some kind of political redemption in history through the exercise of reason. It is this that parallels all other Utopian projects that Gray is so sceptical of. Normative political theory attempts to correct the lived experience of individuals in their social and political contexts by replacing that experience with an ideal conception of the state. If Rawls and Dworkin are correct in their account of the nature of justice and its primacy than the liberal project excludes other conceptions of political organisation as having any real claim on one’s allegiance. For Gray, liberals are engaged in an ‘anarchical fallacy’ in Jeremy Bentham’s sense, which undermines political allegiance and order anywhere that the Rawlsian vision of a state as a fair system of co-operation based around his two principles of justice does not hold. This characterization of the liberal project is based on four fundamental criticisms, two of which he shares with many antiliberals and two of which are specific to his critique of liberalism. The former two strands of criticism are false-neutrality and hubris, the latter two are value-pluralism and indeterminacy. I will consider each in turn but focus most of the discussion on the latter two strands of criticism. False Neutrality Gray’s argument is a familiar restatement of a position that one can find in many communitarian critiques of liberalism.7 Liberals argue that their conception of impartial reason can arbitrate between the conflicting conceptions of the good held by individuals in modern societies. However, this is to beg the question as the liberal idea of impartial reason is itself a partial conception of the good, because the liberal fails to recognise the way in which reason is always particular to some context, so that judgements of what is reasonable will depend on a prior account of the good. The method of abstraction employed by Rawls and contractualist political liberals, which aspires to provide us with a universal and impartial perspective, does not free one from a context of particular values; it merely disguises that context, so any claim to neutrality based on it is false. Unless one already has a reason to accept the primacy of the universal perspective over other particular normative values and obligations, the appeal to a liberal social contract theory as a means of accounting for one’s primary political obligations is merely question-begging. This is so because it either asserts the primacy of a particular perspective – liberalism – or denies that we have a way of deciding between values and principles. Reasoning must take place within richly textured contexts and not in some abstract realm beyond contexts. Yet whilst Gray accepts the critical force of the communitarian challenge to liberalism, he rejects the positive side of communitarian theories such
The Political Theory of John Gray 29 as Alasdair MacIntyre’s, which try to distinguish between moral communities in order to explain and defend the primacy of one over the other. For Gray there are merely rival moral contexts, societies and traditions, and each is in conflict with the other. There is no reason for preferring one above the other that is not already the reason of a particular group or perspective. As reasons apply within moral schemes and not between them, there is no rational ground for preferring one over the other. This fact brings us to the second generic feature of Gray’s critique of liberalism, namely its hubris. Hubris A persistent feature of Gray’s critique of all varieties of liberalism is its hubris. This is a problem shared by those liberal thinkers such as Oakeshott, Hayek and Berlin, with whom he has some sympathy and those such as Rawls and Dworkin with whom he does not. All of the former group fail to draw fully the implications of the situatedness of human reason, whilst Rawls and Dworkin miss the point altogether. The primary implication of the situatedness of human reason is the radical contingency of liberal or any other system of values. It is only one of a variety of forms that human society can take. What this means is that there is no external perspective from which liberalism is the right answer to the question of how to live in a world of conflicting groups. Thus all theories that assert or assume the inevitable triumph of liberalism as the best hope for mankind are dangerously deluded. But the myth of progress is not the only delusion of liberal hubris. What is equally dangerous is the way that liberalism constrains the realm of the political by reducing all political issues into those of rights and their adjudication. By so doing liberalism denies many issues that are best seen as clashes of interest, culture or identity that, are not easily reducible to the language of individual liberal rights. It also assumes the primacy of a narrowly state-centred conception of politics. This assumes, hubristically, that a simple liberal vision will capture all that is essential about the real world of politics and prescribe how we should deal with it. This is a dangerous naivety based on an ungrounded confidence in the capacity of liberal reason to replace the received wisdom of a multiplicity of different societies and polities. For Gray, the lessons of history are all negative. There is no sign of the imminent triumph of liberal reason or that history is progressing towards some ultimate goal or purpose. Indeed, in his more recent works, Gray has been insistent that if anything history is cyclical, echoing the ideas of classical and renaissance thinkers such as Polybius or Machiavelli. He writes: History is not an ascending spiral of human advance, or even an inch-by-inch crawl to a better world. It is an unending cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human needs. Freedom is recurrently won and lost in an alternation that includes long periods of anarchy and tyranny, and there is no reason to suppose this cycle will ever end, (Gray 2004: 3)
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It is merely the unfounded faith of liberals that things should be otherwise. They share this foundationless faith with all other utopians. And it is this utopian antirealism that is ultimately hubristic and dangerously so. The challenges of false neutrality and hubris are not particularly original to Gray’s argument: they are shared by many anti-liberals.8 But Gray develops a further more particular strand of criticism of contemporary political liberalism by drawing on a crucial insight of Isaiah Berlin and combining this with the charge of indeterminacy. Both of these charges are specifically geared towards the political liberalism typified by Rawls and Dworkin. Gray’s point is to claim that even if the general charge of false neutrality and hubris can be avoided there remain two specific challenges that undermine the claims of political liberalism. It is these to which I now turn, and to which I will devote most attention in the remainder of this essay. Value-pluralism The great insight of Isaiah Berlin that has shaped much of Gray’s recent thinking on politics is the truth of value-pluralism. This is a complex truth that has been the subject of much disagreement and debate, and it is found in a variety of forms in Gray’s work. There are three different forms of the value-pluralist thesis. The first claims that there are different moral schemes or practices. This is revealed in the fact of pluralism as a fact about the way the world is. Different people ascribe to different moral codes, and do things in different ways. These might be cultural and historical practices or religious moralities. This form is closest to traditional accounts of cultural relativism, where an account of moral obligation or value will always be internal to the standards of a particular culture, society and practice, and therefore there are no transcultural values. Gray is keen to avoid the paradox of endorsing the truth of relativism, so in order to avoid the charge he clearly distinguishes his position from traditional relativism, by asserting that this plurality of cultural practices shows different ways of realising the human good. There is not one single correct morality, and more importantly, neither is there such thing as a single moral good, but only a relativist social convention. Instead there is a plurality of such goods none of which can be reduced to any other. This variant of the valuepluralist thesis is important in undermining the cultural superiority of political liberalism as it allows that other conceptions of the polity that deny liberal values are equally valuable approaches to the problem of politics. Such a view is compatible with the assertion of East-Asian values or new-Confucianism in the face of liberal democracy.9 It is also implicit in Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative conceptions of liberty, where what is at stake is not really two concepts but two distinct visions of liberty which are ultimately incommensurable as they assume different accounts of causality and the nature of agency and responsibility. Yet Gray does not merely want to leave Rawls and Dworkin as viable options for liberals even if some transcendent justification of their liberalism cannot be provided for nonliberals. Consequently, Gray employs two other variants of the value-pluralist thesis.
The Political Theory of John Gray 31 The second variant of the thesis asserts that there are different and incommensurable valuable life options even within one particular social practice or moral view. Consequently one could accept the idea of a conception of the human good or flourishing and still acknowledge different paths within that conception. This does not allow for everything as a relativist view might, but it does acknowledge that even if we distinguish between worthless and valuable lives, we might still end up with a variety of valuable lives, all of which are good but all of which are in important respects in conflict with each other.10 The role of a good scholar and a good parent are potentially in conflict with each other, as both assert demands which cannot be reconciled and which cannot be commensurated in terms of some higher value, as both are valuable but in different ways. As these are different choices that cannot be ranked in order of some higher value there is no question of one being a more rational or reasonable option than the other. The third or final variant of the value-pluralist thesis asserts that even within a single version of the good life such as the choice of scholarship over parenting, there will still be conflicts of value that are incommensurable. Examples might include the conflict between the quest for truth and the quest for influence, both of which feature in the life of the scholar but both of which pull in opposite directions and often come into conflict. These tensions can be resolved by radical choice, but not by a balance of their respective claims in terms of some higher value such as utility. Friendship and scholarly integrity can often be a source of conflict (especially for those who have edited scholarly journals!). In ordinary life we have to juggle a number of roles and make hard decisions between these options in our lives. But unless we have some hyper-value such as utility to appeal to, whatever choices we make will always be perspectival and contingent. The only alternative would be to argue that some values are not values at all. One of the consequences of the liberal ideal of a rational ordering of our lives or the utilitarian appeal to hyper-goods such as pleasure or welfare is that they fail to capture the phenomenon of moral experience. The problems of moral life are not merely confined to the choice between good and evil, but are more often a result of having to make exclusive choices between different and overlapping goods. The thesis of value-pluralism and incommensurability is a fundamental insight that Gray derives from Berlin, though he argues that is an insight that even Berlin did not fully comprehend in his own theory (Gray 1995: 1–2). But it is his use of this in concert with the indeterminacy thesis that is supposed to be particularly damaging to Rawlsian and Dworkinian political liberalism. The Indeterminacy Thesis This thesis is developed in chapter 3 of Two Faces of Liberalism where Gray explores the issue of rival freedoms. The context of his argument is Rawls’s account of the first principle of justice. In the original version of A Theory of Justice, Rawls had claimed that the first principle of justice claims that ‘each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for
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others’ (Rawls 1972: 60). This first statement was famously criticized by H.L.A. Hart on the grounds that it was indeterminate. He gave a number of examples that showed how, in the absence of a set of identifiable human interests, one could not give any content to the equal liberty principle. Rawls conceded Hart’s criticism and recast the first principle into an account of a system of equal basic liberties underpinned by the idea of a liberal constitution (Rawls 1993: 289–371). Gray argues that this concession does not help as the same charge of indeterminacy can be made against the system of equal basic liberties. To illustrate this indeterminacy he uses the conflict between different implications of a basic liberty respecting freedom of speech and the potential liberty not to be subject to hate speech or racist and homophobic abuse. Most constitutional democracies now have curbs on the unrestricted freedom of speech not merely restraints on the scope of the principle following from the compossibility of all basic liberties. In defending curbs on freedom of speech Gray suggests that we come up against the problem of pluralism again. Here we have two conflicting values that are in conflict and between which legislators have to make choices. We are not faced with a simple specification of the scope of the system of basic liberties, as how we specify this issue of scope will draw us into the issue of making choices between plural values and incommensurable conceptions of liberty and its value. Different liberal democracies make those choices in different ways, as we can see from the different experience of US and European Courts. The issue of value conflict and the need to make incommensurable choices between liberties and other values shows that the liberal project of a single rationally ordered conception of political values underpinning a neutral principle of right is incoherent. The choice of principles behind a veil of ignorance will not be able to resolve these issues of conceptual indeterminacy. This leaves us with hard political choices between incommensurable goods. The political liberalism of Rawls and Dworkin is faced with two choices; either it concedes the field and has nothing to say, or it falls back upon a partial substantive liberalism which ranks these conflict claims in a coherent way but only at the cost of failing to address the claims of rival liberal and non-liberal solutions to these problems. Consequently, Gray can conclude that the political liberalism of Rawls and Dworkin is at best redundant and at worst dishonest. Neither position is particularly attractive. Anti-anti-liberalism Gray’s indictment of normative political liberalism is certainly challenging but is it as persuasive as it looks, and is it as damaging as he claims? Up until now the argument has been exegetical. In this section I want to explore how plausible Gray’s account of liberalism is. In so doing I do not want to focus narrowly on where he may have misunderstood Rawls or Dworkin. Instead I want to draw the sting from the charge of indeterminacy and value-pluralism by exploring the social theory on which both depend. In order to assess the plausibility of Gray’s position we need to unpack what is involved in his argument for value-pluralism and what does it tell us about his
The Political Theory of John Gray 33 approach to normative theory. If we start by asking are there any incommensurable values we can begin to see how Gray’s answer depends upon a particular conception of the method and point of moral and political theory. Gray asserts that the claim that there are plural and conflicting values is more truthful to ethical experience (Gray 2000: 35). Like Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams, Gray suggests that an honest account of ethical life must acknowledge the fact of pluralism. So the argument for value-pluralism is an empirical claim: a point Gray concedes when he argues that ‘ethics cannot be other than an empirical inquiry’ (Gray 2000: 35). What does experience show? It shows the ineradicability of moral disagreement. In reducing ethical theory to a kind of sociology of morality, Gray follows an important tradition that goes back at least to Durkheim (1993). But he also opens himself to a number of challenges that have been levelled against this approach to moral enquiry.11 The first and most obvious point concerns the significance of the fact of reasonable disagreement. The fact of pluralism – that people do actually disagree about values – is taken as a truism by most liberal political theorists, indeed it is the starting point of Rawls’s theory. That said, what follows from this is less clear. If one is merely giving a descriptive account of moral and ethical life then this might be relevant. Yet this is not what Gray is trying to do, indeed he could not, as this leaves open the normative force of disagreement and pluralism. After all, we might disagree about ultimate values, because of confusion, ignorance or false consciousness. The Pope, for example, could acknowledge the fact of a plurality of moral views, but he would (presumably) draw very different conclusions from Gray about what follows from that fact. An appeal to the fact of pluralism will not deliver what Gray wants, as he concedes, but in claiming that moral and political theories must show fidelity to the fact of moral experience he seems to be relying on just that fact. This matters if we take one of Gray’s examples, namely the conflict between Christian agape and Homeric arête (2000: 51). From the point of view of a St Paul or Homer one might argue that there is no disagreement as each denies that the other’s value is indeed a value. From a contemporary perspective we might find both to be false beliefs about how we should live. But rather than this supporting the claim that there are plural and incommensurable values, Gray’s example begs the question about what sorts of things values are. And it is in answering this question that turning to the facts of ethical life will not do, for it begs the question about the identity of ethical life and of the nature of values. If we look at the nature of value claims themselves, we have a number of complex issues concerning what makes something valuable. If one takes a sociological view we could argue that a value is simply whatever a person or group values. Thus if I value a dish of mud, then it follows that that dish of mud is valuable (at least to me). But this curious conclusion is far from obvious, as it suggests that a value is equivalent to a want or brute preference. Some moral philosophers and welfare economists do take this view. But in so doing they reject the idea that a value claim has a content beyond a mere want claim, so that if something is valuable then others should acknowledge or respect that thing. Even those who do take this reductionist
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view cannot rule out the possibility of substitutability between goods. This reductionist view denies that values have any cognitive content and leaves it as a contingent matter whether one value can be replaced by an amount of another value. This is precisely the starting point of some welfarist utilitarian theories. Such views make the question of value-pluralism highly contingent. It might well be the case that there are no such incommensurable values. The reductionist view might deny the possibility of genuine value-pluralism, so that cannot be Gray’s position. That leaves open the question of the nature of values. At the very least Gray wants a theory in which values cannot be traded. In order to avoid this possibility, he must claim that values are more than merely wants and preferences, or else he must assert the strong naturalistic claim that as a matter of fact preferences are brute and cannot change. This naturalistic claim is ultimately not a logical claim and is subject to the possibility of falsification in light of the growing experimental literature in the social sciences on preference formation and change. Although R.M. Hare may have been unduly restrictive in his account of moral language, he is surely right in claiming that moral concepts have prescriptive force. Value claims form part of complex practice of reason giving where to assert the value of something as good, wholesome, beautiful, just etc., is to provide a form of reason for respecting the object of that claim, whether it is a thing, action or character trait. If values are merely what people like then we are back with a form of emotivism where the expression of a value claim is merely a non-rational expression of emotion. As thinkers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre, R.M. Hare and Brian Barry all argue, emotivist theories do not adequately capture the way moral concepts work (Hare 1981; MacIntyre 1981; Barry 1995). One might argue that I am begging the question here because I am referring to ethical theories which prescribe rather than describe moral practice. But even if I concede the point, it is not obvious that moral experience does collapse into the extreme subjectivism that allows all claims about value to refer to genuine values. To make this claim would potentially undermine Gray’s argument as it would transform the nature of moral disagreement from disagreement within a set of shared understandings to merely the assertion of different perspectives. For example if you assert that you like trains and I claim that I like bicycles, we are not actually disagreeing. If we are to have genuine claims about incommensurable value conflicts then we need an account of values that allows for conflict. In order to do this we need to discriminate amongst the value claims that are made in order to distinguish between those that are genuine and those that are spurious. This cannot be done merely by appealing to experience, as some people might well claim to find value in things that are completely worthless (such as dishes of mud). Presumably this is how a partisan to Christian agape and Homeric arête would regard each other’s values. Genuine moral disagreement can only occur within a set of shared understandings of moral practice. In order to pursue the claim that there are genuinely incommensurable conflicts of value we need a theory of value and we need to do ethical theory. What we actually get in Gray’s writings is a conception of values as fixed entities that are not subject to interpretation and revision in moral arguments. In this way
The Political Theory of John Gray 35 values are not like beliefs that are revisable in argument. It is this static and rather positivist conception of moral argument that sustains the idea of non-negotiability underlying Gray’s account of ethical life. Individuals are confronted by fixed positions that they must endorse or deny. When such positions clash we must go beyond reason and make radical choices. Yet how truthful is this idea to the facts of ethical life and experience. It is easy to see ethical life as a site of ineradicable conflict, but conflict need not be the norm. Gray offers a peculiarly realist (in the sense used by international relations theorists rather than moral philosophers) conception of moral enquiry which makes conflict the norm. Whilst Gray is obviously right in arguing that we cannot merely wish conflict away, one can also follow the example of international relations theorists who query the inevitability and intractability of conflict as an incontestable truth about the world. A more sensitive account of ethical life that does not follow from the simplistic dichotomy of Augustianians and Pelagians might well leave us with some conflicts of value but not the level of incommensurability that will undermine the possibility of political liberalism. Once again the ineradicability of conflict cannot serve as a premise of moral enquiry but must serve as a conclusion if it is to support a thesis about value-pluralism. Gray’s critique of liberalism also entails the familiar charge that much moral and political theory is too remote from the facts of moral experience. This position is one he shares with Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams, two eminent moral philosophers who endorse a Berlinian commitment to value-pluralism (Hampshire 1983; Williams 1986). All claim that ethical inquiry needs to be more sociological and to show more fidelity to the facts of moral experience. As we have seen this leaves open the question about the nature of values that must be addressed in order to identify value incommensurability. In so doing they echo the views of thinkers like Westermarck at the turn of the twentieth century who tried to combine ethics and anthropology. Yet in encouraging a return to a more anthropological conception of moral enquiry they ignore the developments in anthropological and sociological theory. They do this in two ways, both of which are echoed in Gray’s approach. The pluralists either fail to recognise that the facts of ethical experience cannot be identified prior to some theoretical identification of the objects of enquiry, or else fail to draw the full implications of that view. The issue is similar to that confronting social anthropologists trying to identify primitive social forms in the ethnographic data derived from participant observation. This involves a simple point about the boundaries of the object of ethical enquiry: are these self-identifying closed systems of belief like Catholicism and Marxism or are they more complex systems of beliefs without hard boundaries – what one might describe as a ‘billiard ball’ view of values and moral practices? I will return to this point later. But even if we can identify an object of ethical experience we need to do that in a way that does not simply beg the question. We can see this problem if we turn to Berlin’s attempted defence of valuepluralism through a criticism of the person who does not see deep conflict in moral life. Berlin’s point – shared by Gray and Hampshire – is that the person who does not acknowledge the contingency of one’s values and the interminability of choice between options fails, in some sense to be fully human. He says:
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P. Kelly we are doomed to choose, and every choice must entail an irreparable loss. Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and brook no possible doubt … those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for a contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human.12
The idea that only those with a closed mind do not feel the loss engendered by having to choose between plural and incommensurable values is central to Gray’s claim that value-pluralism is an ineradicable feature of our moral experience. If we attend sensitively to moral experience we will recognise that incommensurable choice is all around us. If we do not recognise this experience we are in some sense blind to moral experience: we lack the sensitivity of philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams. But surely this is to fall into precisely the sort of rationalist reconstruction of moral and ethical experience that Gray claims characterises the liberal mind-set and to mischaracterize the reality of many actual moral disagreements and conflicts. This sense of psychological loss is clearly not felt by many, and in some cases as Michele Moody-Adams points out, we ought not to feel the pull of conflict between some principles and values which are essential to the idea of a coherent moral identity and roles which contradict them. If for example a tamed housewife feels a certain sense of loss at her emancipation – such as the bewilderment of freedom – we might be inclined to say ‘so what?’ This is not evidence of a clash of valuable life options but rather the replacement of a life that is merely the result of coercion and oppression with a valuable one (Moody-Adams 1997: 121–123). Obviously psychological discomfort matters, but that is not necessarily a morally relevant consideration, nor does it signify without further argument a genuine moral conflict. Berlin’s account of the phenomenology of moral experience does not necessarily tell us anything about the true nature of ethical life, as his argument is not an interpretive one; rather it is a moral one. It tells a lot about Berlin but establishes no fact of the matter. As such it simply begs the question, against those who deny that psychological feelings of loss have any bearing on issues of moral character, responsibility and choice. Surely the same point must hold for Gray. He needs to show that his examples of conflicts of value are just that, but appeals to the phenomena of ethical life will not settle the issue. For he can only claim that the fact of ethical experience supports the pluralist view if he can dismiss those positions that deny that all the alternatives bar one, are not really values at all. He can only do this if he argues that the moral vision of those who hold such antipluralist views is narrow and blinkered, but this as we see with Berlin is a moral argument that cannot be based simply on the anthropological or sociological facts of the matter. Whether it shows greater or lesser fidelity to moral experience will ultimately depend upon how we define ethical experience and that in itself involves a prior normative view.
The Political Theory of John Gray 37 In the end whether value-pluralism is more faithful to ethical experience is a normative and not a sociological question, although it does undoubtedly have a sociological dimension. But as such, it is a question that cannot be settled by appeal to examples, as how one interprets those examples, will itself depend upon normative commitments. It would not be illogical to deny that any of the examples identified by Gray or Berlin are genuine cases of incommensurable values in conflict. However, even if one were to concede the possibility of incommensurable values this of itself does not undermine the Rawlsian liberal project, unless the fact of incommensurablity is pervasive and in particular that it applies to things like Rawlsian basic liberties. Unless value-pluralism is pervasive we do not have the indeterminacy thesis and unless that holds we do not have a knockdown argument against Rawlsian liberalism. The fact that some values might be incommensurable is perfectly consistent with the kind of liberal project Rawls pursues.13 If for example the genuine cases of value-pluralism fall within a fixed set of conceptions of the good life, all of which can be accommodated within Rawls conception of primary goods, then this view of value-pluralism will not support the anti-liberal argument. The strategy of reflective equilibrium is supposed to help us with deciding the scope and priority of some values not all values otherwise it could result in a single rational conception of the good life. It is not obvious that this strategy must fall foul of the charge of value-pluralism even as it is deployed in Gray’s argument. However, as I pointed out earlier Gray does not have a single conception of valuepluralism but also deploys a version that depends on cultural pluralism. If I am right in claiming that some conceptions of value-pluralism do not refute the Rawlsian liberal position, then Gray must reinforce his argument by appealing to a mixture of pluralist positions and must primarily rely on the form of cultural pluralism which tends to support arguments from cultural relativism. Gray denies that his argument is a form of cultural relativism (Gray 2000: 54). Yet if we look at how the argument works, then his denial can only be true if he is working with a normative conception of value and one that is arguably no more plausible than that employed by liberals. In order to rebut the charge of relativism Gray denies the holistic view of cultural traditions and practices that is often suggested by either multiculturalists or moral conservatives. Yet when he accounts for the origins of value-pluralism he explains it in terms of the way different cultures either value the same good or different goods, and the way different goods emerge from the conventions that govern moral life in different cultures (Gray 2000: 35). Although Gray avoids any of the familiar debates surrounding multiculturalism, the context of his account of value-pluralism echoes the circumstances of multiculturalism. The idea of bounded cultures is clearly important for Gray as this gives rise to the relevant kind of differences that underpin value incommensurability. He is right to reject the simplistic holistic view of cultures as closed conceptual schemes as this is both philosophically incoherent and anthropologically and sociologically false (Davidson 1984). But in so doing, can he retain the view that value incommensurability is a fact of moral experience, without reverting to claims about the limitations of translatability and overlap that depend on cultures and moral practices having a relatively stable and authoritative
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content – precisely the point he denies in order to preclude the charge of relativism? (Gray 2000: 54). The issue of intercultural dialogue that is central to multiculturalism is a political question rather than an epistemological question and covers issues of power, fairness and the demands of compromise. Cultures as social and political entities can impose terms of dialogue and integration on other cultures or they can refuse to engage in dialogue. But in the case of value-pluralism as presented by Gray the issue cannot be simply an act of personal or political will. A mere refusal to negotiate my value claims with those of others does not support a thesis about value incommensurability. Again we must face an epistemological claim about the integrity of values and the limits of compromise and negotiation of those values. This distinction is often ignored in debates about multiculturalism. But if Gray does allow for the prospect of negotiation, interpretation and revision, as he must if he is going to rebut the challenge of conceptual relativism, then we need an additional reason why this process must run out in particular cases. That it may well run out is not the point: what Gray needs is an argument for the claim that it runs out much more frequently, enabling him to challenge the liberals with his indeterminacy thesis. That argument cannot be an appeal to fidelity to moral experience. If he cannot provide such an argument then the whole indeterminacy thesis collapses into a series of arbitrary snapshots of processes of argument that cannot rule out the possibility of potential resolution. If on the other hand Gray’s argument is that the idea of negotiation, revision and interpretation must stop somewhere, we end up with a ‘billiard ball’ conception of moral values and principles that have final and authoritative statements. This of course raises the complex question: who decides what these are? Even many who hold to the idea of divinely sanctioned eternal and universal values actually offer a basis for argument rather than a incontrovertible definitive statement. The whole idea of hermeneutics itself grew up in the context of trying to give human statements of divine eternal truths that cannot ultimately be bound in human language. All this reinforces the point that how we interpret and determine the conceptions of value that underpin our claims about value-pluralism and cultural and contextual integrity must reflect a philosophical account of the nature of ethical enquiry. The ‘billiard ball’ conception of values, which claims that they have single and determinate meanings, must depend upon either a political claim of authority, or a similar conception of cultural fixity. Yet this idea of cultural fixity cannot withstand philosophical scrutiny or sociological adequacy. If it could, that would not help Gray either for it would merely raise again the problem of cultural relativism. In conclusion, Gray needs a strong thesis of value-pluralism in order to challenge the claims of liberalism, but in order to provide that he must draw on a conception of culture and value conflict that is arbitrary and threatens the charge of conceptual relativism. Liberal Political Theory and Moral Practice My argument thus far has claimed that Gray’s anti-liberal thesis about value-pluralism depends upon a social theory that cannot withstand critical scrutiny and threatens
The Political Theory of John Gray 39 relativism. That said, nothing I have claimed against Gray entails that liberalism fares any better than his theory of value-pluralism. I want to conclude with an account of ethical life that is more socially nuanced but which can still accommodate the abstract methods of liberal political theory. The first feature of this account is its interpretive character. The objects of moral inquiry just as ethical life itself are not pre-interpretive social objects that have fixed authoritative meanings. The meanings that underpin value claims emerge from the interpretation of ethical practices and their criticism and challenge. It remains an important feature of any conception of moral enquiry and practice that it contains ideals and critical standards and not merely statements of how a group acts. The process of reason giving in moral enquiry is not simply the ability to repeat some authoritative norms. This interpretive process may well run out, but where it runs out is not settled in advance. There may well be a point at which the interpretation of a value starts to transform into the account of a new or different value. In such cases genuine incommensurability might arise, but if and when such ruptures in interpretive debates arises is itself a matter of moral inquiry, conceived of as a debate. It is not merely something that is self identifying or that can be decided by fiat. This model of moral inquiry is close to, but not identical with the idea of social criticism advanced by Michael Walzer (1987). Where it differs from Walzer’s approach is that it does not recognise the boundaries and authority of ethical life as being settled by some particular society, as the issue of boundaries is precisely what is at issue in the process of critical reflection and reason giving. In other words we have a Walzerian position that abandons his implicit communitarianism on the grounds that he gives an arbitrarily political reading to the idea of ethical inquiry as a hermeneutic practice. The scope of this idea is potentially universal, although the conditions for moral inquiry being actually universal will depend on the requirements of interpretation and dialogue. The process of understanding and justification builds out of this potentially boundless interpretative practice, not by a simplistic process of translating group claims into a higher meta-language of universal reason, but through a process of constructing reasons between people that are potentially universal in scope. Of course one cannot have any guarantee that such a hermeneutic account of ethical life and moral inquiry will tend towards the claims of political liberalism. Indeed the Walzerian character of the approach might suggest something that is far more communitarian and particularist and essentially hostile to the method of abstraction that is such a fundamental feature of contemporary liberalism. Many contemporary moral and political theorists would see the hermeneutic approach sketched above as precluding the abstract moral theorising so characteristic of liberal political theory. Yet this would be a mistake. Abstraction can provide an important contribution to the articulation and critical reflection on the requirements of ethical life. Abstraction, which in this case simply means the bracketing of predicates, is merely one important device of representing moral demands and values. It does not have to be seen as an attempt at translating moral concepts and values into the terminology of a neutral meta-language so it does not necessarily beg the question against possible incommensurability. Abstraction and abstract moral
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theory retains a connection with interpretive ethical inquiry. It would only be problematic if that enquiry must remain descriptive, but we have no good reason why it must only be descriptive and every reason to think an interpretive view of ethical inquiry cannot be solely descriptive because it is irreducibly normative in taking a view about what are and what are not genuine objects of enquiry and value. If we bring the interpretive account of moral inquiry together with the strategy of abstraction as a device of representation we get a method of ethical argument that is similar to reflective equilibrium. This method as we find it in Rawls is not simply a method of invention or discovery (to adopt two alternative views of moral inquiry described by Walzer), but neither is it merely a descriptive conception of interpretation that is bound by clearly distinguishable value claims and beliefs. Of course, reflective equilibrium and philosophical criticism of moral and political values and practices will be far removed from everyday ethical experience. But that does not make it redundant or unimportant. No level of ethical practice and inquiry can be free from potential scrutiny and reflection. This still leaves open the authority of moral and political philosophers, but the issue of authority is not peculiar to them; it can be raised against any claim to define the nature of ethical experience. One can raise the same question against the authority of everyday moral practice, whatever that should happen to be. A social history of ethical practice would show that this issue of authority is never finally settled in any particular place. Even when groups try to establish institutional structures of authority they are still open to challenges of scope – one only has to think of the practice of adjudication in legal codes and the peculiar history of the Catholic doctrine of Papal infallibility. As reflective equilibrium is primarily a constructive procedure rather than a method of discovering pre-existing moral truths, liberals are not committed to a correspondence theory of moral judgement of the sort that underpins Gray’s account of value-pluralism. Furthermore, reflective equilibrium can potentially satisfy the liberals claim to provide arguments that are universal in scope. Whether liberals do actually provide such reasons depends upon whether they can withstand further critical scrutiny. Rawls suggests that this is precisely the status of his conception of justice as fairness within the context of the method of reflective equilibrium. All liberals need to be able to defend against is some anti-ethnocentric objection which would necessarily curtail the scope of liberal claims. It is however, hard to conceive how an ethnocentric argument can be defended without raising the paradox of relativism. Once one overturns the necessity of enthocentricity the argument about universality of scope is back on the agenda. This approach to ethical inquiry can accommodate the claims of liberal political arguments. It is superior to the social theory of morality that underpins Gray’s (and Berlin’s) conception of value-pluralism because it does not impose a static or positivistic view of moral concepts and practices. In so doing it renders the intuitive appeal of Gray’s argument for value-pluralism suspect. At its strongest it might undermine the claim that any of the examples that Gray describes really are issues of value-pluralism, but even at its worst it weakens the incommensurability thesis to a version that can be accommodated within liberal arguments. Unless the issue of
The Political Theory of John Gray 41 value incommensurability is pervasive the indeterminacy thesis does not hold. And if that thesis does not hold, Gray’s claims have no purchase against Rawlsian political liberalism. If we ignore the apparent rhetorical plausibility of Gray and Berlin on value-pluralism and look at the social theory that underpins their view, we can see that despite its surface appeal, it is no more credible than any other anti-liberal argument currently on the agenda and as such liberals can safely ignore it. Notes 1.
2.
3.
4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
13.
The characterization of certain political theorists as gurus is derived from Barry (1996). Gurus provide a political vision that one can follow (eg Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Hayek) rather than a series of arguments that one can contradict or refute (e.g. Rawls, Nozick or Dworkin). This is precisely how John Rawls dismisses Sandel’s critique of choice behind the veil of ignorance in the opening section of Rawls (1993). Rawls rejects the idea that his revision of his theory is based on Sandel’s communitarian critique, because that critique is premised on a mistake. Gray claims that the superiority of Berlin’s pluralism is that it is more ‘realistic’ and more ‘faithful’ to our moral experience, but it is clear that he thinks that it is a lack of realism and faithfulness to experience which mars liberalism (Gray 1995: 57). Though to be fair, Gray is prepared to mount individual critiques, see for example ‘Rawls’s AntiPolitical Liberalism’, in Gray (1997: 51–54). See Kelly (2004: 1–50). Rawls (1999) does of course try to avoid this imperialist implication of his theory. See MacIntyre (1988), for a non communitarian variant of this critique see Newey (2001). For a subtle discussion of the sources of anti-liberalism see Holmes (1993). See Bell (2000) and Bell and Chaibong (2003). Such a view can be found on Joseph Raz’s perfectionist pluralism in Raz (1986). See most recently Moody-Adams (1997). Berlin (1990: 13–14). The significance of this passage was drawn to my attention by M. Moody-Adams’ discussion of Berlin (1997: 121). I am very happy to acknowledge the impact of Moody-Adams’s work on my critique of Gray’s sociology of moral and political theory. The issue is potentially more complex with Dworkin as his account of resource egalitarianism does seem to translate all conceptions of the good into some fungible currency.
References Barry, B. (1995) Justice as Impartiality (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Barry, B. (1996) Political Theory Old and New in: R.E. Goodin and H.-D. Klingemann (Eds), A New Handbook of Political Science, pp. 531–550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Bell, D. (2000) East Meets West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Bell, D. and Chaibong, H. (Eds) (2003) Confucianism and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Berlin, I. (1990) The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: John Murray). Davidson, D. (1984) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Durkheim, E. (1993) Ethics and the Sociology of Morals, Ed. R.T. Hall (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books). Gray, J. (1995) Isaiah Berlin (London: Harper Collins). Gray, J. (1997) Endgames (Cambridge: Polity Press). Gray, J. (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press). Gray, J. (2004) Heresies: Against Progress and other Illusions (London: Granta). Hampshire, S. (1983) Morality and Conflict (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press).
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Hare, R.M. (1981) Moral Thinking: Its Method, Levels and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Holmes, S. (1993) The Anatomy of Antiliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Kelly, P. (2000) Political Theory in Retreat? Contemporary Political Theory and the Historical Order, in: N. O’Sullivan (Ed.), Political Theory in Transition, pp. 225–241 (London: Routledge). Kelly, P. (2004) Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press). MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue (London: Duckworth). MacIntyre, A. (1988) Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth). Moody-Adams, M. (1997) Fieldwork in Familiar Places (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Newey, G. (2001) After Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Rawls, J. (1972) A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press). Rawls, J. (1999) The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Raz, J. (1986) The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Walzer, M. (1987) Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Williams, B. (1986) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana).
John Gray and the Political Theory of Modus Vivendi JOHN HORTON School of Politics International Relations and the Environment, Keele University, UK JohnHorton 0 2 9
[email protected] 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600654993 FCRI_A_165473.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
It is a truism that conflict, of one kind or another, is one of the conditions that makes politics unavoidable and some form of government a necessity. However, the nature of such conflicts, how they are best understood and explained, and how they should be dealt with politically, are much more controversial questions. Within recent liberal political theory, one kind of conflict in particular, conflicts of value, have typically been regarded as presenting the central problem for political theory; and a theory of justice that can provide legitimate grounds for the process of mediating between such conflicts has seemed to some to be the holy grail of political theory. Liberal theory, especially, has been preoccupied by the task of elaborating a normative theory setting out morally authoritative principles for regulating conflicts between individuals and groups with differing values. Although by no means an isolated voice, John Gray is one political theorist who has argued powerfully against this version of the liberal project. He sees himself as working both within and against the liberal tradition, broadly conceived, arguing that there is a fissure at the heart of modern liberalism. This can be found in two distinct and incompatible ideals of toleration:
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J. Horton Liberalism has always had two faces. From one side, toleration is the pursuit of an ideal form of life. From the other, it is the search for terms of peace among different ways of life. In the former view, liberal institutions are seen as applications of universal principles. In the latter, they are a means to peaceful coexistence. In the first, liberalism is a prescription for a universal regime. In the second, it is a project for coexistence that can be pursued in many regimes. (Gray 2000a: 2)
Gray regards Locke and Kant, along with Rawls and Hayek, as exemplars of the former view, and Hobbes and Hume, together with Berlin and Oakeshott, as examples of the latter. His central claim is that, at least under the conditions of modern pluralism, we should abandon the first view and embrace the second. That is, we should adopt the more modest and normatively limited political ideal that he terms modus vivendi, and reject the aspiration of achieving a rational consensus on core liberal values.1 It is this idea of modus vivendi that I intend to explore in what follows.2 Gray, Modus Vivendi and Value-pluralism While I shall have more to say on this later, it is helpful to begin by noting what Gray understands by modus vivendi. He writes that: Modus vivendi expresses the belief that there are many forms of life in which humans can thrive. Among these are some whose worth cannot be compared. Where such ways of life are rivals, there is no one of them that is best. People who belong to different ways of life need have no disagreement. They may simply be different. (Gray 2000a: 5) Crucially, for Gray, modus vivendi is not a form of political accommodation that seeks to eliminate conflicts of value. Rather, it seeks only ‘common institutions in which many forms of life can exist’ (Gray 2000a: 6). Where it differs from Rawls’s position, and the alternative view of liberalism more generally, is that ‘a theory of modus vivendi is not the search for an ideal regime, liberal or otherwise. It has no truck with the notion of an ideal regime. It aims to find terms on which different ways of life can live well together’ (Gray 2000a: 6). While Rawls, like Gray, can be seen as seeking to institutionalise the value of toleration, for him this takes the form of a set of ideal principles of justice that have fairly specific and restrictive normative implications for legitimate political institutions. For Gray, by contrast, a modus vivendi is compatible with a broad range of normative principles of political organisation, which may take very different institutional forms, although both principles and institutions must acknowledge certain ‘universal goods’ that are ‘needed for any kind of human flourishing’ (Gray 2000a: 8). This last point is sometimes thought to be an admission through the back door of the view that Gray has been busy ejecting through the front door. However, even if
The Political Theory of John Gray 45 there is something to this criticism, it seems to have little bearing on Gray’s critique of the liberalism he rejects. For it is no part of Gray’s account of modus vivendi, or I would suggest of any plausible account, that it can be altogether de-moralized, and therefore avoid appeal to any goods or values. Not all stable political arrangement will count as a modus vivendi. As Gray makes clear, it is one interpretation of the idea of toleration; so, for example, a political structure that persistently and ruthlessly oppresses a minority is not an example of modus vivendi. Although it cannot be identified with any specific set of substantive values, ‘there are limits on what can count as modus vivendi’; and it must recognise that there are ‘evils that can make any kind of good life difficult or impossible’ (Gray 2000a: 66, 138). These evils rest not on a consensus of belief, according to Gray, but ‘on the fact that the experiences to which these evils give rise are much the same for all human beings, whatever their ethical beliefs may be. The constancy with which these experiences are found, across remote cultures and different epochs, reflects a constancy in human nature, not an agreement in opinions’ (Gray 2000a: 66). This is a point I shall return to later. Granting that there are universal evils, however, does ‘not ground a universal morality. When faced with conflicts among them, different individuals and ways of life can reasonably make incompatible choices’ (Gray 2000a: 66). And nor do universal evils necessarily always take priority over local loyalties. There need be nothing unreasonable in defending one’s way of life, even though the decision to do so may also result in some universal evil. The general point is that: To affirm the reality of universal human goods is not to endorse a universal morality, such as many liberal thinkers have attempted to defend. Universal values are compatible with many moralities, including liberalism, as it has been understood by recent philosophers who take their cue from Locke or Kant; but they underdetermine them all. There is no one regime that can reasonably be imposed on all. Even minimal standards can be met in different ways. (Gray 2000a: 67). So, Gray claims, accepting that there are universal goods and evils does not commit him to a universal morality; only that there are things that any morality will recognise as evils. But this does explain why the idea of a modus vivendi is not tantamount to a political theory of ‘anything goes’. The notion of a modus vivendi is consistent with many different moralities, but it is not infinitely expansive. While it may be questioned whether he is right to draw the contrast in quite the way he does – arguably, there remains a residual sense in which he is committed to something that could be intelligibly called ‘a minimal universal morality’ – the gulf between Gray and the liberals he criticises is in no way bridged. Underpinning this account of modus vivendi is Gray’s commitment to the theory of value-pluralism. Value-pluralism is a complex view that comes in different forms, but at its heart Gray contends is ‘the proposition that there are many kinds of good life, some of which cannot be compared in worth. Some varieties of the good
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life are neither better nor worse than each other, nor the same in value, but incommensurable; they are differently valuable’ (Gray 2000a: 34). It is the claim of incommensurability that is crucial. For value-pluralism is not merely the mundane and widely accepted view that there is a diversity of goods that cannot all be realised simultaneously, but the additional claim that some of these goods cannot be compared or definitively ranked. It follows from this that when they can be combined, they can be combined in a variety of ways, none of which is rationally superior to another. Furthermore, sometimes it will not be possible to combine two values, and choosing a way of life that instantiates one value will be either logically or empirically incompatible with living a life that incorporates the other. But because both are valuable, and neither can be shown to superior to the other, there is no compelling general reason why people should choose one rather than another; and in so far as one is chosen to the exclusion of another, something that is recognisably valuable is inevitably foregone. Gray insists that value-pluralism must not be mistaken for a form of scepticism, subjectivism or relativism. Rather, it is what he now calls a version of irrealism.3 ‘In ethics, irrealism is the claim that we can identify errors without there being any single reality that our ethical beliefs track. Each may be in error as to the good life, without it being true that there is one life that is best for him’ (Gray 2000a: 63). This view is closer to the realist assertion of the objectivity of value-judgement than it is to any of the standard varieties of scepticism, relativism and subjectivism. For it affirms that the content of the good life depends not on our beliefs and opinions, our preferences or decisions, but on experience. From another point of view, irrealism means giving up a traditional ideal of truth in ethics. Though we can be in error about how we want to live, there need be no one truth about the best life. There are many things the good life is not, but no one thing it is bound to be. (Gray 2000a: 63) What we have, therefore, is a plurality of sometimes conflicting and incommensurable, objective, experientially determined, values; objectivity without monism; and the possibility of error, revealed through experience, although there are many truths. Having very briefly sketched Gray’s conception of modus vivendi and its grounding in his theory of value-pluralism, I want now to undertake two tasks. First, I briefly offer a few reasons to explain why, in my view, it is desirable to make the idea of modus vivendi less dependent on the theory of value-pluralism than Gray does. This is not because I entirely reject value-pluralism, but it is a highly controversial theory, and it would be better, at least so far as is possible, to ground modus vivendi in a broader and less contentious range of considerations. Moreover, as I shall seek to show, there are some features of Gray’s own version of value-pluralism that are problematic. Finally, focusing too much on value-pluralism, it is suggested, circumscribes the scope of modus vivendi in unnecessary and unfortunate ways. But the significance of these criticisms and qualifications should not be exaggerated: my
The Political Theory of John Gray 47 principal aim is not to bury modus vivendi, but to praise it. So, and this is my second task, I try in the final section to respond to a number of criticisms that have been made of modus vivendi. While not pretending to dispose entirely of all these criticisms, I do claim that modus vivendi is a much more robust and defensible idea than its critics have typically allowed. Some Reservations about Value-pluralism Value-pluralism is, as Gray admits, a controversial theory. But rather than ground it exclusively in a disputable philosophical claim about the nature of value, he seeks to circumvent some potential difficulties by appealing to experience. The diversity of value, he contends, ‘is no longer only a claim in moral philosophy. It is a fact of ethical life. Today we know that human beings flourish in conflicting ways, not from the standpoint of an ideal observer, but as a matter of common experience’4 (Gray 2000a: 34). While it is not difficult to see why this resort to common experience should be attractive to Gray, it will not, I think, do the work he requires of it. Not that experience is irrelevant; far from it. However, human beings frequently differ in how they interpret ‘experience’; and what lessons, if any, they draw from it. One can no more unproblematically appeal to common experience in many cases than one can appeal to common values. One important reason for this is that experience is not something that is entirely independent of and prior to our values: what we experience is in part formed and shaped by our values. Simple, apparently direct, appeal to experience, therefore, risks a damaging circularity. In fact, the appeal to common experience is really little more than an attempt by Gray to cajole us into agreeing with him, and short-circuit the need for complex argument, which will often prove inconclusive.5 A connected reason for not tying modus vivendi too closely to value-pluralism is the difficulty that the latter view has in dealing with disputes about what is valuable. For, while value-pluralism is good at accounting for the character of the diversity of values, and the resulting conflicts between them, it is less good at explaining conflicts over values. Indeed, in so far as some valuable ways of life are not merely different from, but actually deny value to other putatively valuable ways of life, value-pluralism faces a problem. For instance, for some religious ways of life any way of life that does not find a place for the one true God is not an alternatively valuable way of life, but sinful, or at least in a fundamental respect deficient. Gray responds to this point by contending that this problem arises from the universalist claims of religion, and ‘from the standpoint of value pluralism, all conflicts about rival claims about the best life for humankind are collisions of illusions’ (Gray 2000a: 21). His point is directed specifically at the claim that there is ‘a single way of life, or a small family of ways of life [that are] right or best for all humankind’ (Gray 2000a: 21), which as he acknowledges commits value pluralism to the view that all universal religions are, at least in this fundamental respect, false. It is perhaps worth noting, as an aside, that this is not an obviously promising basis for a politics of modus vivendi. But this is not my main point. For Gray’s position seems
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to deny not some incidental feature of universal religion, but something so central that it must surely call into question the supposed value of such a way of life. What Gray is saying is that to live such a life is to base one’s life on an illusion; although perhaps he does not want to go on to claim that a life founded on an illusion in this way lacks value. But would such a position be sustainable? It would certainly seem to have a distinctly paradoxical conclusion. For adherents of a universal religion very likely would think that their way of life at least lacked the value that they thought it had if their belief in a universal religion was mere illusion. And surely they would be right to do so. What Gray seems committed to, if his value pluralism is to find a space for many of the world’s religions, is the idea that their ways of life do have value, but not the value that those living them believe them to have. And if this is his view then it seems to conflict not only with the beliefs of adherents to a universal religion, but also with those of militant atheists who deny that the religious way of life has value precisely because of its being based on falsity and illusion. To say the least, this is all very puzzling, In any case, the doctrine of value pluralism still leaves open, as it must, the question of what ways of life are in fact valuable. Gray’s irrealism (and his resort to human experience as the test) implies that there are some ways of life that have value and others that do not, as presumably the latter category is not exhausted by universal evils. And this is not a problem that arises only with respect to religions or moral projects that are universalist in their claims. It can present itself in the most prosaic of terms. For instance, is the life of a couch potato (a life devoted to nothing beyond watching sports on TV with a beer in hand) one valuable way of life among others, or a sterile and empty life, without real value? Gray’s value pluralism is at least committed to the view that there must be, in principle, a ‘right answer’ to this question. On his own account of the metaphysical status of values people may make claims about what is valuable that others may rightly deny. Simply to claim that a way of life is valuable is not sufficient to make it so. But unless we think that the distinction between what is valuable and what is not is just blindingly obvious to everyone, then there may be no way of effectively establishing whether in fact a particular way of life is valuable or not. This is the dog that fails to bark in most versions of value pluralism; and Gray’s is no exception. The problem is that Gray’s irrealism obscures something rather important. For, whether or not values are objective in the way Gray claims that they are, there is certainly much ‘disagreement’ about what they are. Even assuming the truth of the claim that there is always, in principle, even if we do not know it, an objectively right answer to the question of whether any putative value really is valuable, this still leaves us with the fact of plausibly grounded and rationally unresolved disagreement about what does have value. And in political life it is surely the persistence of disagreement that matters (Waldron 1998: ch. 8). The doctrine of value pluralism is a metaethical theory, which crucially leaves open what plural values there actually are. As we have seen, Gray’s reliance on experience to settle such questions is at best of only limited help. Moreover, to suggest that this is a question that the theorist of value pluralism is in a privileged position to answer would be to
The Political Theory of John Gray 49 introduce a theoretical hubris on a par with that of the liberal philosophers Gray opposes; and he does not do so. However, this means that, in the absence of compelling arguments or incontrovertible evidence to resolve disagreements about whether something really is valuable, value pluralism cannot tell us in such cases whether we are dealing with something worthless masquerading as a good, or a genuine good. The overwhelming focus on value pluralism in Gray’s defence of modus vivendi also has other disadvantages. In particular, it may lead us to think that it is only conflicts of value that explain or justify the politics of modus vivendi. In fact, Gray does not altogether ignore interests (e.g. Gray 2000a: 101), and anyway he is far too worldly wise to really believe that they are unimportant. However, for a position that Gray himself describes as ‘neo-Hobbesian’ there is surprisingly little attention given to conflicts of interest. While conflicts of value and conflicts of interest are often intertwined in various and complex ways, it is surely implausible to think that either can be entirely reduced to the other. One common kind of conflict, for instance, arises precisely where a value is shared, but there is not enough of it to satisfy everyone who wants it. Modus vivendi is also very much to the point in this sort of situation. For all these reasons, and others,6 therefore, I think it would be better not to place such heavy reliance, as Gray does, on value pluralism in the defence of modus vivendi. It can play a role in making the case because, arguably, value pluralism does capture something important about the way in which some values can come into conflict, although as we have seen it is not without its own theoretical problems. But, at best, it only tells part of the story. For we also, have to deal with other types of conflict and with conflicts about what is valuable. However, in my view, these clearly strengthen, rather than weaken or undermine, the case for modus vivendi. For this reason, even if my reservations about value pluralism are soundly based, they do not impact negatively on the defence of modus vivendi, and on which I now embark. This defence takes the form of responding to a number of criticisms that have been advanced against it In Defence of Modus Vivendi There seem to be four principal objections to the idea of modus vivendi as an appropriate way of thinking about a legitimate political settlement. These are that it is unstable; that it is indeterminate; that it can be unjust or immoral; and that it privileges a narrow and contestable conception of value, quite as much as the liberalism it criticises. The most important and troubling of these, in my view, is the objection that modus vivendi can be unjust. I begin, however, by considering the first objection, which has figured more prominently in discussions of modus vivendi than it perhaps merits. The claim that the idea of a modus vivendi is unsatisfactory because it is inherently unstable is one that has been advanced by, among others, John Rawls and Charles Larmore. In its most straightforward version this charge is that settlements that are ‘merely’ a modus vivendi are always ‘hostage to the shifting distribution of
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power: Individuals will lose their reason to uphold the agreement if their relative power or bargaining strength increases significantly’ (Larmore 1990: 346). Or, as Rawls puts it, ‘social unity is only apparent, as its stability is contingent on circumstances remaining such as not to upset the fortunate convergence of interests’ (Rawls 1993: 147). When formulated in this way, the alleged instability of modus vivendi is essentially an empirical claim. Little evidence is in fact adduced to support this objection, and on the basis of a casual survey of experience there is some reason to believe that a modus vivendi may be quite robust and persist for a considerable length of time. How robust it is will indeed partly depend on circumstances, and be influenced by many factors, not least what Machiavelli called Fortuna. There can never be any guarantee; and it is right to suggest that there are always circumstances that can undermine a modus vivendi. To which the appropriate response is c’est la vie. No political accommodation is immune from the vicissitudes of human circumstances (even Rawls’s), and none can be expected to last indefinitely. It is, however, simplistic to suggest that as soon as one side gets the upper hand then any modus vivendi is doomed. Just as Rawls allows himself, rightly, to assert that living in a society governed by his principles of justice would have some motivational impact on those within it, so it can be argued that experiencing the value of modus vivendi may have a similarly beneficial impact on political motivations (Neal 1997: 194–195). It may encourage a political culture of negotiation, compromise and flexibility, of accepting limits to what can be changed and of seeking only the practically feasible. Moreover, its utility may mean that groups are wary, on ethical and prudential grounds, about seeking to exploit shortterm shifts of power in their favour. It is also likely to generate support for institutions that are seen to be generally effective in brokering settlements. It should be noted, however, that the argument from stability in Rawls also has another dimension. For his claim is not only that a political settlement based on a modus vivendi will in fact be more prone to political breakdown, but also that it aims at the wrong sort of stability. To be legitimate, stability must be based on reasons that are acceptable to those over whom political power is being exercised. That is: The problem of stability is not that of bringing others who reject a conception to share it, or to act in accordance with it, by workable sanctions, if necessary, as if the task were to find ways to impose that conception once we are convinced that it is sound. Rather, as a liberal political conception, justice as fairness is not reasonable in the first place unless it generates its own support in a suitable way by addressing each citizen’s reason, as explained within its own framework’ (Rawls 2001: 186). In brief, stability must be based on reasons to which all those party to it can be reasonably expected to accept as legitimate, and this is of course what Rawls’s own theory is supposed to furnish. Three comments are in order here. First, it is far from clear whether there is any such set of reasons to be had. In so far as Rawls’s theory succeeds at all, as I have argued elsewhere, it is only through a contentious conception of the
The Political Theory of John Gray 51 ‘reasonable’, which significantly circumscribes the range of groups to which his principles will be acceptable (Horton 2003). Consequently, and this is the second point, there is still the political problem of how to do deal with those who do not accept Rawls’s preferred principles of justice. Rawls may be content to consign this question to a realm of non-ideal theory, but the non-ideal world is the one in which problems of stability arise, and we need some indication of how such problems are to be addressed. Finally, the values appealed to through modus vivendi are actually likely to fare rather better on this criterion, precisely because they are more minimal and less exclusive. So, the case against modus vivendi in terms of its supposed propensity to political instability is, I contend, less than compelling. The second objection can be dealt with fairly briefly. This is the claim that the idea of a modus vivendi is too vague and indeterminate to serve as a guide to action. That is, a political settlement based on a modus vivendi will always be circumstantial and contingent, and although not entirely bereft of content, it does not prescribe a definite set of principles or institutions towards which political action should aim. Moreover, and this is often what is at the heart of the objection, it severely circumscribes the role of any general normative or philosophical theory in determining what is the best, or a better, settlement. It leaves it to political agents themselves to determine not only how an acceptable accommodation is to be accomplished, but also what is acceptable. At the centre of the idea of a modus vivendi are notions such as prudence, judgement, negotiation, compromise, bargaining and such like. These are notions that can certainly be explicated in general terms but by their very nature are resistant to any attempt to set out precise criteria for their proper application. They can be instantiated in many different ways; and, although weakly normative, how they are to be interpreted will largely depend upon circumstances and context. While this characterisation of modus vivendi is accurate enough, what is less obvious is why this should be thought to be an objection. Theorists like Rawls do not deny a place for modus vivendi in practical deliberation, but insist that it be tightly circumscribed by liberal principles of justice. However, it essentially belongs to the realm of non-ideal theory; and this realm is necessarily incomplete. For, according to Rawls, ‘ideal theory, which defines a perfectly just basic structure, is a necessary complement to non-ideal theory without which the desire for change lacks an aim’ (Rawls 1993: 285). The principal problem with this claim is that it is certainly false. While it is trivially true that political action will normally be motivated by some aim or purpose, it is quite another to say that such an aim or purpose must take the form of, or even imply, a theory of ‘a perfectly just basic structure’ of society. In fact, a handful of philosophers and political visionaries apart, I suspect almost nobody has much idea of what they think a perfectly just basic structure would be. Nor are they any the worse for lacking it. It is not only entirely possible, it is almost always the case, that while we have a rough idea of what we want to achieve from a particular course of political action, we have no idea of what a perfectly just basic social structure would look like. It is a rationalist illusion to think that we must be motivated by a notion of perfect justice, and philosophical hubris to suggest that it is for philosophers to set out the principles of a perfectly just
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political order. In so far as the idea of a modus vivendi lacks the guidance of an ideal theory, therefore, it lacks for nothing without which it will be disabled. On the contrary, its flexibility and indeterminacy can be seen as reflecting the character of political activity when it is not construed as being directed towards building an ideal society, but as engaged in the immediate and everyday business of coping with conflict and managing the collective arrangements of a society. The third objection is more troubling. At its most robust, it is the claim that modus vivendi is no more than a nice Latin label for what is a far from nice proposal to grant legitimacy to more or less whatever is the outcome of the free play of brute political power. In short, this is the charge that the politics of modus vivendi, at least unless severely constrained by liberal political principles, is a form of immoralism or a licence for injustice. It is to abnegate responsibility for insisting that political conflict be regulated by principles of justice or morality, if not altogether, then to a far greater extent than is acceptable. It is a counsel of despair in so far as it legitimates any set of political arrangements, as long as they are conducive to peace and security. From the perspective of these critics, what is wrong with the politics of modus vivendi is that, if not denuding politics of morality entirely, it leaves too much room for the powerful and the unscrupulous to exercise their will at the expense of the weak and the virtuous. This is a serious charge, and one that I do not pretend fully to meet. However, there are a number of points to be made in response. These are broadly compatible with Gray’s more general reflections on politics and political theory, but they are not all clearly derived from his writings. The first is that it is simply a mistake to suggest, as the stronger versions of this objection do, that a modus vivendi has virtually no ethical content. There are two observations that are relevant here. The first, which Gray insists on, is that there is a range of universal human goods with which any modus vivendi must be consistent. As he also makes clear, while these do not dictate any particular set of political arrangements, not just any political institutions or practices are consistent with them. Secondly, and more importantly, modus vivendi contains within it the idea that the resulting political accommodation or settlement is in some sense ‘acceptable’ to the parties to it: it is not the ruthlessly, coercive imposition of a particular set of arrangements by one party on another. Although this not a point Gray makes explicitly, I think, it is broadly consistent with his position.7 This latter point, however, is liable to be misunderstood. In particular, the idea of a political arrangement being ‘acceptable’ to the parties to it should be interpreted only in a weak sense that allows, for example, that one appropriate type of reason why a particular political compromise may be acceptable to a group is pragmatic. They settle, not because the outcome is one that they accept as ‘just’, but because, for instance, what they take to be their vital interests are sufficiently protected and they are not prepared to devote further resources to political struggle. Adjectives like ‘grudging’, ‘wary’ and ‘reluctant’ will often be appropriate in these kinds of case to characterise the acceptance that modus vivendi attracts; and this reflects the fact that it will not be any party’s ideal. In this respect, therefore, the idea of modus
The Political Theory of John Gray 53 vivendi is very different from notions of free and equal consent, or agreement based on deliberation in an ideal speech situation or behind the veil of ignorance, or the perspective of an ideal observer. It would be wrong, though, as we saw earlier, to infer from this that a modus vivendi must lack any ethical hold over the parties to it. The temptation to believe that this is so arises from thinking that our acceptance of an arrangement will only give rise to any moral commitments if it is based on our free and undeceived consent under conditions of fairness, or on principles of justice that we freely endorse. But our moral ideas often do not work in this way. We reasonably regard ourselves and others as under obligations in a great many circumstances when these conditions are not met. Even when we are pressurised, and agree only reluctantly to do something, we may still think ourselves bound so to act. Likewise, with political compromises. One party may believe that abortion should be freely available to women ‘on demand’, while another party believes it should only be legally permitted, if at all, when necessary to save the mother’s life. Yet both may be willing to respect a compromise that allows abortion up to a certain time; and they may quite properly and consistently hold that this compromise has ethical claims on them, even though both parties continue to have passionate objections to it. There are of course a great many ‘mays’ in this example, but this reflects the fact that whether a compromise along these lines is acceptable to the parties is itself a matter of political negotiation. All I am trying to do is to sketch one possible scenario. But, in this case at least, since what has been described is roughly what has been the legal situation in Britain for the last 30 years, a situation that has been notably more stable than that in the United States, where abortion has typically been treated as a matter of constitutional rights, it can hardly be dismissed as merely fanciful. The response to the charge of immoralism so far has been largely concessive. That is, I have tried to suggest that the idea of a modus vivendi is not as ethically empty as this criticism suggests, but conceded that this is a legitimate cause for concern. However, even in the course of this concessive response, a less conciliatory, more robust, kind of reply is hinted at, and it is to this that I now want to turn. For there is a real difference between the way politics is conceived within mainstream contemporary liberal theorising and by Gray (and myself). For an important feature of the latter conception of politics is a rejection of the excessive moralisation typical of liberal theory. In this respect, as Glen Newey has persuasively argued, contemporary liberal political theory has been characterised by a form of reductionism in which the ostensible subject is reduced ‘to something else – usually ethics’ (Newey 2001: 17). But politics cannot be adequately understood simply as a branch of ethics. For instance, to assume that the right way of formulating the problem of social justice is as what would be agreed under suitably idealised conditions by free and equal people is to abstract from what is a political problem many of its distinctively political features. Politics has to confront the existence of differing conceptions of social justice, the intertwining of ethics and interests, the responsibilities of politicians to something other than disputed ideals of justice, the limits of what in any given situation is practically possible, the complex relations between means and
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ends, the existence of groups, inside and outside of the society, who may be ‘unreasonable’ (or even unreasonable) and so on. The politics of modus vivendi, especially if it is not exclusively focused on value pluralism, attempts to acknowledge and take account of the centrality of these less attractive but apparently ubiquitous features of politics. Having said all this, however, I would not want to convey the impression that this response entirely disposes of the objection. There remains a concern about the capacity of a politics of modus vivendi to allow, or even institutionalise, the oppression of the weak. It is not a matter of tyranny, as that is ruled out by the nature of a modus vivendi; and nor, on the other hand, should we be too bothered by something less than the idealised, but unrealisable, egalitarianism of liberal theory. Arguably, however, at least in some circumstances, the politics of modus vivendi may leave minorities and the vulnerable too exposed. The final objection that I shall consider, is advanced by George Crowder, and is something like the reverse of the preceding criticism. It is that Gray’s defence of modus vivendi ‘amounts precisely to the kind of universal privileging of a particular notion of the good that he attributes to liberal universalists’ (Crowder 2002: 121). While it is not too difficult to see how this charge arises, it is not I think one that need detain us long. This is not so much because, as Crowder acknowledges, Gray explicitly counters this objection, when he writes: The pursuit of modus vivendi is not a quest for some kind of super-value. It is a commitment to common institutions in which the claims of rival values can be reconciled. The end of modus vivendi is not any supreme good – even peace. It is reconciling conflicting goods. That is why modus vivendi can be pursued by ways of life having opposed views of the good. (Gray 2000a: 25) Crowder’s response is that this ‘clearly will not do’, because peace and stability is just one good among others, and although a universal good it can still be weighed differently by different people against other goods. But Gray does not deny either of these points. However, it is not so much that Gray elevates peace and stability into a supreme good that is the real problem for Crowder; rather, it is, he claims, that it is ‘ironically narrow to the point of monism. That is because his modus vivendi is informed by no guiding principle except either self-interest or peace: one or the other consequently becomes the sole overriding consideration – an instance of monism’ (Crowder 2002:122). The first point to note is that there might, indeed, be thought to be some evasiveness in Gray’s response, as quoted above, to the charge that peace and security functions as super-good. For the notion of ‘reconciling’ is more than a little obscure if it has no substantive content. What would count as reconciling conflicting values? Surely not, for instance, civil war? But Gray does not need to be drawn into denying that peace (not of course an entirely straightforward notion) would be a feature of any modus vivendi. For he need not claim that modus vivendi is the supreme good; only that if people want to live together in a civil manner, without
The Political Theory of John Gray 55 resort to tyranny or persistent violent struggle, and in a way that at least extends a measure of toleration to diverse ways of life, then modus vivendi is the best way forward. What does seem unjustified is Crowder’s view that this is ‘narrow to the point of monism’. Peace and stability are consistent with a wide range of goods, and can be embraced by very diverse ways of life. Not, perhaps all: militaristic ideals, for instance, may not be easy to accommodate, but this hardly seems sufficient to make ‘narrow to the point of monism’ an appropriate characterisation. Furthermore, as peace and stability are part of any liberal theory, it is no more than chutzpah to go on to suggest, as Crowder does, that the liberal good is somehow less narrow (Crowder 2002: 122). Modus vivendi is not an inspiring ideal. It lacks the theoretical glamour (and moral self-righteousness) of more ambitious forms of liberal theory. But in a world where civil disorder and violence are much more likely a prospect than the realisation of our highest ideals, even when we know what they are, there is much to be said for it. Gray’s value pluralism makes a more elevated case for it. On his view, it is not merely the best we can hope for in a radically imperfect world, it is the best we could hope for in any possible world, given the truth of value pluralism. He is almost certainly right about this; and I share his rejection of utopian blueprints, even of the liberal kind. But, at the end of the day, I would not want to put all my eggs in the basket of value pluralism, and lose sight of a more powerful and less controversial, if also more prosaic and less theoretically exciting, case in terms of human weakness and fallibility (Shklar 1989). Philosophical theories of value come and go: the reality of political conflict persists. This is not to deny, in the language of philosophical logic, that there could be some possible world in which it would not. Here, though, I think we can safely resort to common experience: the whole weight of human history supports the view that such a world is not our world, nor is it ever likely to be. That, ultimately, is the strongest case for the politics of modus vivendi.8
Notes 1.
Gray’s formulations can sometimes verge on the sloppy. For instance, he occasionally uses the term modus vivendi to cover the aspirations of both faces of liberalism (e.g. Gray 2000a: 1), whereas his more common usage is to contrast his preferred form of liberalism with the search for a rational consensus on values associated with the form of liberalism he rejects. Similarly, he generally presents his own view as the defensible face of liberalism, but occasionally confuses matters by using ‘liberal’ more narrowly to characterise the position he rejects, particularly when he writes of ‘liberal institutions’ (e. g. Gray 2000b: 332). Although this terminological looseness is regrettable and can mislead less attentive readers, I do not believe it betrays any major confusion on Gray’s part. Some critics, however, have sought to make rather more of it (e. g. Crowder 2002: 119). 2. The following discussion does not offer anything like a full account of a political theory of modus vivendi. An adequate explanation would certainly need to fill out the content in more detail than I attempt here. See Neal (1997: ch. 9) for some additional, congenial observations in favour of what he calls ‘vulgar liberalism’, which is quite close to what I mean by modus vivendi. 3. Gray has clearly had some difficulty in arriving at a satisfactory account of the metaphysical status of values within his account of value pluralism. Earlier (Gray 1995) he had endorsed a form of internal
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realism. He now rejects that because ‘internal realism is a species of conventionalism. It makes truth in ethics depend – in the last analysis – on convention. By contrast, irrealism holds that questions of value are answered at the bar of experience’ (Gray 2000a: 64). My own view is that Gray’s most recent account of the metaphysical status of value moves in a mistaken direction. I hint at some of the difficulties to which it gives rise later. 4. Gray’s confidence that we now know more about the good hints at some surprising progressivist tendencies in his moral thought, which he is more characteristically inclined to deflate (see e.g. Gray 2004). 5. The appeal to experience is certainly sufficient to justify the contention that there is a wide diversity of practices and ways of life that various people hold to be good. But it cannot show that this diversity of belief about what is good is itself justified, or that some ways of flourishing may not be better than others. 6. Not least among these other reasons are arguments that value pluralism provides more support for the liberalism that Gray rejects than either he or I believe (see e.g. Crowder 2002, Galston 2002). 7. Gray, himself, sometimes takes a rather different direction. For instance, he writes: ‘Modus vivendi is impossible in a regime in which the varieties of the good are seen as symptoms of error and heresy. Without institutions in which different ways of life are accorded respect there cannot be peaceful coexistence between them’ (Gray 2000a: 20). However, I would want to make a distinction between error and heresy. The latter, at least in any strong form, probably does make modus vivendi extremely difficult. But the conviction that others are in error is, I think, far from fatal to its prospects. Moreover, much depends upon how demanding the requirement of ‘respect’ is taken to be. 8. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the APSA Annual Conference in Chicago and at the Political Theory Workshops in Manchester, both in September 2004. I am very grateful for the helpful and constructive discussion on both occasions. I am particularly indebted for their comments to the following: Bill Galston, Peter Jones, Glyn Morgan, Noel O’Sullivan, Enzo Rossi and especially Glen Newey. Above all, I am most grateful to John Gray, who has spent many hours discussing these issues with me, and who saved me from at least some (but maybe not all) misrepresentations of his ideas. I should also like to thank the British Academy and the American Political Science Association for their financial support, which enabled me to participate in the panel on Gray’s work at the APSA Conference.
References Crowder, G. (2002) Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London: Continuum). Galston, W. (2002) Liberal Pluralism. The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gray, J. (1993) Post-Liberalism. Studies in Political Thought (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1995a) Berlin (London: Fontana Press). Gray, J. (1995b) Enlightenment’s Wake. Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1997) Endgames. Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity Press). Gray, J. (2000a) Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press). Gray, J. (2000b) Pluralism and Toleration in Contemporary Political Philosophy, Political Studies, 48, pp. 323–333. Gray, J. (2000c) Where Pluralists and Liberals Part Company, in: M. Baghramian & A. Ingram (Eds), Pluralism: the Philosophy and Politics of Diversity, pp. 85–102 (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (2002) Straw Dogs. Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books). Gray, J. (2004) Heresies. Against Progress and Other Illusions (London: Granta Books). Horton, J. (2003) Rawls, Public Reason and the Limits of Liberal Justification, Contemporary Political Theory, 2(1), pp. 5–24. Larmore, C. (1990) Political Liberalism, Political Theory, 18(3), pp. 339–360. Neal, P. (1997) Liberalism and its Discontents (Basingstoke: MacMillan).
The Political Theory of John Gray 57 Newey, G. (2001) After Politics. The Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press). Rawls, J. (2001) Justice as Fairness. A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Shklar, J. (1989) The Liberalism of Fear, in: N. Rosenblum (Ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life, pp. 21–38 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Waldron, J. (1999) Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Gray and the Politics of Pluralism GEORGE CROWDER School of Political and International Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia GeorgeCrowder 0 2
[email protected] 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600655008 FCRI_A_165474.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 9 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
On the subject of value pluralism and its political implications, the influence of John Gray is second only to that of Isaiah Berlin. It was Berlin, in his famous ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958) and other writings, who first brought the idea of plural and incommensurable values to the attention of a wide audience, and who first made that idea the centre of a sustained political theory. For Berlin, the salient ethical message of pluralism was that human beings are inevitably faced with hard choices when fundamental goods come into conflict, and that in many such cases no single response will be uniquely correct or superior to others. The political message was that individuals should be free, within limits, to make such choices for themselves, rather than having solutions imposed on them. On Berlin’s account, pluralism points
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towards a liberal politics in which individual liberty, although not invariably overriding, has a special place. Gray issues a dramatic challenge to Berlin’s reading of the politics of pluralism. Pluralism, Gray argues, far from supporting liberal universalism, actually undermines it. If pluralism means that fundamental human values can reasonably be ranked in many different ways, then the ranking characteristic of the liberal outlook will be only one such ranking among others, with no valid claim to superiority. From a pluralist point of view, liberalism can at best be seen as ‘agonistic’, competing with alternative political forms on an equal moral footing. In some situations non-liberal solutions will make more sense than liberal ones. I shall argue that Gray’s anti-liberal reading of pluralism is mistaken.1 The essay is divided into three main sections. First, I review the basic terms of Berlinian pluralism as the background to Gray’s own position. Second, I trace the development of Gray’s thinking about pluralism through three more or less successive phases: an early ‘subjectivist’ phase, in which political choice among plural values is seen as fundamentally non-rational; a middle ‘contextualist’ period, where reasoned choice among plural values is possible within specific cultural traditions, implying a broadly conservative politics; and a recent ‘pragmatic’ turn towards the notion of ‘modus vivendi’ as a means of adjudicating conflicts among competing traditions. I show that none of these interpretations of pluralist ethics and politics should be accepted. In particular – although this is not the only problem – Gray tends to confuse the distinctive pluralist outlook with cultural relativism. Third, I claim that pluralism, properly understood, does support liberal universalism. I consider several possible arguments to this effect, and show how some of these amount to a pluralist case for liberalism that is stronger than that offered by Berlin – a case strengthened by the encounter with Gray. Berlin’s Liberal Pluralism Berlin’s concept of value pluralism confronts the ‘moral monism’ he sees as the ‘perennial philosophy’ of Western thought (Berlin 1997: 6–16; 2000a: 11–14; 2002: 212–217). The monist view of ethics holds that all moral questions have a single correct answer deducible from a single formula applicable in all cases. Monist formulas are dominated by a single value, or by a small set of values, which either overrides or serves as a common currency for all others. Plato’s Form of the Good, Aristotle’s ideal life of contemplation, and Marx’s liberation of the proletariat are all instances of overriding super-values. The notion of a single value as common currency for all others is exemplified by Bentham’s concept of utility. There are two major problems with moral monism, according to Berlin. First, the idea of a single right answer to all moral conflicts is an invitation to utopian thinking, and consequently to authoritarian, or even totalitarian visions in which utopia is realised by force. Second, moral monism is false, because no single formula can resolve all ethical conflicts. Rather, ‘the world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and
The Political Theory of John Gray 61 claims equally absolute, the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others’ (Berlin 2002: 213–214). This is the idea of value pluralism. Basic human goods cannot be easily ranked or commensurated, but are irreducibly multiple, frequently incompatible and sometimes incommensurable with one another. The value-pluralist world is one of moral conflict, disagreement and dilemma. If goods are irreducibly plural, then they may clash. If goods are incommensurable, then when they clash there is no single way of ranking them or trading them off that is correct in all cases. Each is its own measure and, depending on the circumstances, there may be many reasonable ways of responding to conflicts among them. Consequently there is no possibility in a pluralist world of a ‘final solution’ to all moral and political problems, no possibility of moral or political perfection, and therefore no justification of authoritarian politics in the name of utopia (Berlin 2002: 212). However, there is a problem here. If pluralism means that there are many legitimate ways of ranking goods, one might suppose that this implies a form of cultural relativism, in which all cultures are equally authoritative. What then could be said for Berlin’s liberalism – his general defence of minimal ‘frontiers’ of negative liberty as requisite to any humane politics (Berlin 2002: 52–53, 171–174, 211)? If pluralism is really a species of relativism, then Berlin’s liberal commitments could be dismissed as no more than the local preferences of some cultures among others. Berlin does sometimes come close to equating pluralism with relativism. In his studies of Vico and Herder in particular, he appears to endorse what he sees as their shared picture of cultures as distinct and incommensurable, each with its own ‘centre of gravity’ (e.g. Berlin 2000: 61, 75, 211, 233–235). In his later work, however, Berlin sets out to distinguish pluralism from relativism. If, as strong relativists suppose, cultures were wholly incommensurable, each ‘would be enclosed in its own impenetrable bubble’, and would have no understanding at all of other cultures or historical periods (Berlin 1990: 11). Clearly, this is not the case, Berlin argues. We are capable of gaining some understanding of other peoples by putting ourselves in their place through the exercise of our imaginations. What makes this ‘inside view’ possible is the ‘human horizon’ we all share: the basic goods and interests that identify us as human beings (Berlin 1990: 10–11, 79–80). In other words, some (highly generic) values are, and must be, universal – for example, liberty, equality, justice and courage. That claim separates Berlin from strong cultural relativists. Compared with relativism, he argues, pluralism is truer to our experience of universal goods that transcend cultural boundaries. Further, pluralism recognizes that moral conflicts occur within cultures as much as among them. Cultural relativists tend to explain moral conflict in terms of the divergence of different cultural perspectives, each conceived as internally coherent and univocal. But under pluralism, moral conflict is not merely inter-cultural but intra-cultural; the same basic patterns of conflict tend to be repeated, in different local forms, across cultural lines. For pluralists, unlike cultural relativists, the moral voice of a culture is never univocal, because human moral experience is always deeply fragmented by conflicts among incommensurable goods. The emphasis in value pluralism is on the
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plurality of those goods, not (to the same extent) of cultures. This is a crucial point, to which I shall return later. Still, even if pluralism is not identical with relativism, it might seem to leave liberals like Berlin with a similar problem. The pluralist emphasis on hard moral choices might seem, like relativism, to undermine universalist positions, such as liberalism. Any such position will involve judgements that privilege certain values or packages of values over others. If those values are incommensurable, what reason do we have to choose one value or package rather than another? Berlin never really confronted this problem squarely, and it remains one of the most controversial aspects of his work. Implicit in what he does say, however, are at least three different responses. First, he sometimes seems to believe that incommensurable values are wholly incomparable with one another, and that consequently choices among them must be ultimately non-rational, or not guided by any reason that is decisive over others (Berlin 1997: 320). If this is his view then his commitment to liberal solutions in preference to the alternatives looks arbitrary. Indeed, on this strong reading of incommensurability, no political position is rationally justifiable since any such position rests ultimately on a non-rational plumping for one set of values rather than another. However, Berlin repudiates the strong interpretation of incommensurability in a later article (Berlin & Williams 1994). There, he insists that reasoned choice among incommensurable goods is possible, if not in the abstract then at least in (some) particular cases. For example, it is not possible to rank liberty above equality in the abstract, or vice versa; there is no reason to place one before the other in every case. However, there may be good reason to do so in a particular case, as for example where welfare redistribution is justified by the goal of greater equality, even though it means placing some restrictions on the liberty of taxpayers (Berlin 2002: 172– 173). Consequently, Berlin’s second view of choice under pluralism allows at least some room for rational choice. Although incommensurability may place difficulties in the way of reasoned decision making, it does not rule out the possibility of reasoned choice within a particular context. But although this view is an improvement on the crude subjectivism of Berlin’s first position, it still comes close to the cultural relativism he is supposed to reject. What sort of context should we look to for guidance? One obvious candidate is cultural context, and indeed Berlin sometimes speaks in just those terms, referring to the possibility of resolving hard choices by appeal to ‘the general pattern of life in which we believe’ (Berlin 2002: 47), or ‘the forms of life of the society to which one belongs’ (Berlin 1990: 18; 1997: 15). In these passages cultural convention seems to be authoritative. Berlin’s third response to the problem of pluralist choice is his most inventive. It breaks free from appeals to particular contexts and strives towards principles of universal scope, finding these principles implicit in the concept of pluralism itself. His main argument along these lines turns on the idea and value of choice. If pluralism is true, then ‘the necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom’
The Political Theory of John Gray 63 (Berlin 2002: 214). The value-pluralist outlook emphasizes moral plurality and conflict. On this view choice moves to centre-stage in moral experience as unavoidable. If we must choose, Berlin argues, we must value freedom of choice, hence by implication a liberal order based on negative liberty. Pluralism implies liberalism. Gray’s Thesis: Three Phases Gray accepts Berlin’s basic concept of value pluralism, but not Berlin’s account of its political implications. First, pluralism does not, contrary to Berlin’s view, provide a foundation for liberalism. Berlin’s argument from pluralism to liberalism by way of choice is invalid, passing too rapidly from the fact that pluralism imposes choices on us, to the valuing of choice, hence of freedom of choice (Gray 1995a: 160–161). To say simply that pluralist choices are unavoidable is not to say that they are desirable, or that our freedom to make them should be maximised. On the face of it, an equally valid response to the necessity of difficult moral choices is to keep such choices to a minimum – a recipe for authoritarian rather than liberal politics. Second, pluralism not only fails to support liberalism, Gray argues, it positively undermines most forms of liberal political thought. Most forms of liberal justification – Locke’s natural rights, Bentham’s utilitarianism, Mill’s self-development, Rawls’s neutrality – are universalist, and pluralism rules out universalism. The core message of pluralism is precisely that no single value or narrow set of values, even liberal values like individual liberty or toleration, can be overriding in all or most situations. On the pluralist view, liberalism can be no more than an ‘agonistic’ form of politics, in which liberal values are always in competition with other goods of equal (or incommensurable) moral weight. They are valid only locally, not universally. Gray insists that the logic of Berlin’s pluralism leads to the rejection of liberal universalism. Despite some ambiguities, Gray’s position may fairly be described as anti-liberal. This is clearest in those many passages where he announces that ‘the liberal project’ – or indeed the entire ‘Enlightenment project’ – has received its ‘death-blow’, and that the coming of ‘post-liberalism’ is at hand (e.g. 1993: 65; 1995b: 145, 169, 175). Elsewhere, it is true, he claims to be rejecting only one of the ‘two faces of liberalism’ (2000b), namely its traditional universalist form, leaving the chastened, agonistic version as a legitimate survivor. But agonistic liberalism is scarcely recognisable as ‘liberalism’ at all. What kind of liberalism is it that sees central liberal criteria such as human rights as appropriate for some human beings but not for others? Can liberals really understand their own position as ultimately possessing no more moral force than alternatives such as socialism or conservatism or political absolutism? Indeed, one might ask whether, on Gray’s view, there is ultimately anything more to be said for liberalism than, for example, fascism or Nazism. There is also the question of how agonistic liberalism fits with Gray’s recent turn towards ‘modus vivendi’. I shall return to some of these questions in due course. The ambiguities in Gray’s political conclusions correspond, at least in part, to the shifting accounts he has offered of pluralism’s ethical implications. At different
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times he has drawn different ethical and political conclusions from pluralism. I shall distinguish three of these, corresponding to three roughly successive phases (overlapping chronological to some extent) in the development of Gray’s pluralism. My purpose in separating these out is not to criticise Gray for changing his mind, but to clarify his position the better to evaluate it. The first two phases, respectively ‘subjectivist’ and ‘contextualist’, mirror the subjectivist and contextualist moods in Berlin. But while Berlin also floats a universalist argument, Gray does not allow this possibility. Instead, his third and most recent phase introduces the notion of ‘modus vivendi’. I take these in turn. Subjectivism This phase is especially prominent in Gray’s earlier pluralist writings, from the late1980s to the mid-1990s. There he seems to be influenced by those passages in which Berlin describes choice among incommensurables as non-rational. As Gray puts it in this phase, pluralism imposes on us ‘radical’ rather than rational choices among incommensurables: ‘choice without criteria, grounds, or principles’ (1995a: 61; see also 1993: 291, 295; 1995a: 8, 9; 1995b: 69–70). If this were so, then the choice of liberal values in preference to the alternatives would also be fundamentally non-rational. But the shortcomings of this position have already been outlined. It rests on an irrationalist interpretation of choice under pluralism that does not do justice to our actual moral experience. Decisive rational choice among incommensurables does seem possible in at least some concrete cases. Berlin rightly repudiates the subjectivist interpretation, and so too does Gray in the second phase of his pluralist thought. Contextualism By the mid-1990s Gray had abandoned the subjectivist reading in favour of an approach that accepts the possibility of rational choice under pluralism within particular concrete contexts: ‘our histories and circumstances, our needs and goals, may give good reasons for different choices’ (Gray 1995a: 154–155; 2000b: 36). This echoes Berlin’s appeal to ‘the general pattern of life in which we believe’. But unlike Berlin, Gray sees contextualism as providing another line of pluralist argument against liberalism. He argues in effect that under pluralism a reasoned ranking of values is possible only in context. Since the traditional project of liberalism is not contextual but universal, orthodox liberalism is at odds with pluralism and must be rejected. Indeed, pluralism points away from universalism of any kind and towards the authority of local tradition: the kind of politics that emerges from Gray’s contextualist reading of pluralism is deeply conservative. Only cultural tradition can provide us with the context we need for the reasoned resolution of conflicts among incommensurable goods. ‘Judgements of the relative importance of such goods appeal to their role in a specific way of life’ (Gray 2000c: 98). Gray’s traditionalist interpretation of pluralism raises several critical questions. First, is it true that reasons generated by context are the only reasons for choosing
The Political Theory of John Gray 65 among conflicting incommensurables? What about Berlin’s suggestion that we might find principles for reasoned choice within the concept of pluralism itself? I shall return to this possibility later, indeed making it the starting point for my restatement of the liberal-pluralist case. Second, supposing that pluralism does commit us to contextualism, must context be identified with tradition? A broader view would understand context as including not only pre-existing culture but also wider social, economic or civilizational circumstances. Such a broader reading of context might suggest a broader defence of liberalism. For example, Joseph Raz argues that the central liberal ideal of personal autonomy is appropriate, even unavoidable, not only for currently liberal societies but for all societies under ‘the conditions of the industrial age and its aftermath with their fast changing technologies and free movement of labour’ (Raz 1986: 369). Gray counters that this particular claim is falsified by the apparent success under modern economic conditions of Asian cultural groups that do not value individual autonomy highly (1993: 308; 1995b: 83). But the broader point of principle remains, that context does not equal tradition. Gray himself sometimes appeals to the context of ‘contemporary circumstances’ (2000b: 106–107), as I shall discuss later. A third problem is that Gray’s traditionalism neglects the possibility, indeed likelihood, of conflicts within traditions and among them. What happens when the tradition that is supposed to resolve value conflicts is itself divided? Indeed, pluralism makes such divisions and disagreements almost inevitable: the incommensurability of values tends naturally to generate reasonable disagreement over moral questions, in particular over questions of how one ought to live in general. Further, even if a given tradition is univocal on how to resolve a particular conflict of incommensurables, what should pluralists do when they are confronted by multiple traditions sanctioning conflicting resolutions? Once again, Gray has now conceded these difficulties with his view, concluding that ‘conservatism has ceased to be a coherent social philosophy. It is a conceit of conservative thought that we can resolve moral dilemmas by pursuing the intimations of tradition. Which tradition? It is often the rival intimations of the different traditions to which we belong that engender our ethical dilemmas’ (Gray 2000b: 53). Modus vivendi Where traditions collide, Gray now asserts, such conflicts should be ‘settled by achieving a modus vivendi’ among the parties, in which they ‘find interests and values they have in common and reach compromises regarding those in which they diverge’ (Gray 2000c: 99; also 2000b: 5–6). This yields an approach to politics that is quite different from the culture-based conservatism of Gray’s ‘middle’ period. Loyalty to tradition is now replaced by a loose pragmatism, a case-by-case response unconstrained by any principles other than a general concern for accommodation rather than conflict. But Gray’s hostility to liberalism remains constant: ‘liberal institutions are merely one variety of modus vivendi, not always the most legitimate’ (Gray 2000c: 101; also 2000a: 332). According to Gray, the only limits to legitimate
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modus vivendi are set by an ultra-thin notion of ‘minimal standards of decency and legitimacy’, explicitly consistent with non-liberal solutions (2000b: 109). Gray’s account of pluralist modus vivendi is unclear in some important respects. One question concerns the relation of modus vivendi to traditionalism. Does Gray intend modus vivendi to displace tradition altogether, or merely to complement it in cases where traditions are divided or multiple? At first sight it might seem that the two ideas are intended to be complementary, that the role of modus vivendi is only to fill in the gaps when traditions fail or collide. But on reflection it appears that tradition must always fail as a guide for pluralist choice, since, as Gray observes, traditions are always contested. This reflection fits with the emphatic tone in which Gray declares the end of conservatism as a coherent social philosophy. Yet in some of his most recent writing about pluralism he continues to say that a single ‘way of life’ can serve as a criterion for resolving conflicts among incommensurable goods within that way of life, and that modus vivendi comes in only when ways of life conflict (2000c: 87). There is another ambiguity here: what does ‘modus vivendi’ mean exactly? Rawls, for example, distinguishes two kinds of political settlement: a balance of power based on self-interest, and a moral settlement based on a principled commitment to peaceful coexistence (Rawls 1993: 146–149). Rawls associates only the first kind of settlement with the term ‘modus vivendi’. Gray makes no such distinction, and his use of the term seems to straddle both meanings. Either way, he is faced with a problem. If by modus vivendi he means a balance of power, then he is exposed to Rawls’s objection that that kind of settlement is inherently unstable because it depends wholly on the shifting interests of the parties. On the other hand, if Gray’s modus vivendi is a principled commitment to peaceful coexistence, what prevents it from amounting to a form of monism? Indeed, the accusation of monism is a problem for Gray on either interpretation of his notion of modus vivendi. In each case there appears to be an overriding value: either self-interest or peace. How is Gray’s position any different from the liberal universalism he condemns, other than in the content he gives to his privileged values? While Gray accuses the liberals of promoting their values of individual liberty, toleration and so forth over others, liberals could retort that Gray merely substitutes for liberal concerns a doctrine of self-interest or of peace at any price. Presumably, the Munich Agreement of 1938 would count as a legitimate modus vivendi according to Gray’s definition. But a settlement that won a temporary peace by delivering the Czechs into the hands of the Nazis is a dubious expression of the general spirit of value pluralism. Gray might respond that he does not intend to present modus vivendi as a universal principle. In one place, for example, he describes modus vivendi as only ‘a contingent good’ – contingent on ‘human interests’, which may change (Gray 2000b: 135). But then, what are the interests in question, when do they call for modus vivendi and when do they not? What happens when modus vivendi does not apply? Do we then return to traditionalism? If so, we would seem to be back with the problem of divided and competing traditions. Gray simply gives no answers to these questions. Indeed, the general tendency of what he does say suggests that he does
The Political Theory of John Gray 67 regard modus vivendi as a universal principle. ‘Because they are practised by human beings’, he writes, ‘all ways of life have some interests in common’, and these ‘give us reason to pursue coexistence’ (Gray 2000b: 136). But again, Gray does not tell us what the common interests are apart from observing that they are ‘many and varied’. Nor does he explain how the common interests give us reason to pursue coexistence. In fact, he admits, ‘it is frequently those interests that divide us’ (Gray 2000b: 136). So the question remains: why should the pluralist outlook be identified more especially with the good of peace (or self-interest) rather than with other goods, such as those of liberalism? I agree with Gray that there is a distinctively pluralist case to be made for peace as an especially important value in politics. However, this does not amount to a case for peace as universally overriding, since under pluralism nothing is overriding. The basic point is one that is well made by Berlin: the use of force on a large scale carries huge costs and leads to consequences that cannot be foreseen (Berlin 1990: 17). Such policies are more easily justified on monist grounds, since a super-value by definition authorises the sacrifice of all other values. By contrast, a pluralist point of view, which insists that all human goods must be taken seriously, will make it harder to show that the gains from large-scale violence will outweigh the losses. But this does not mean that pluralists must be pacificists (Berlin certainly was not), since there will be cases where peace must be traded off against other goods. The Munich Agreement is a case in point. Pluralists will favour something like a presumption in favour of peace, but a presumption that can be rebutted in appropriate circumstances (Galston 2002: 69–78). Consequently, pluralists will not always seek a modus vivendi. Moreover, when they do, it will be a modus vivendi or settlement informed by a concern not only for peace but for other values of especial political importance from a pluralist point of view. These are essentially the central values of liberalism as I shall argue in the next section. These observations suggest a final problem with Gray’s idea of modus vivendi – indeed with his pluralism as a whole – namely its lack of limits. Gray might argue that the Munich Agreement was not a legitimate modus vivendi because it was imposed by the Nazis. The norms of the Nazis fall short of ‘minimal standards of decency and legitimacy that apply to all contemporary regimes’ (2000b: 109). These minimal standards are demanding enough to exclude regimes like those of the Nazis, but also relaxed enough to admit many non-liberal outlooks. ‘In contemporary circumstances’ they include the rule of law, a capacity to maintain peace, effective representative institutions, popular accountability, satisfaction of basic needs, protection of minorities from disadvantage, and institutions that reflect a common way of life (2000b: 106–107). One might wonder what regimes meet these standards other than liberal regimes. Further, one might wonder why, under pluralism, these values should be privileged rather than others – the same question that Gray asks the liberals. Again, he provides no answers apart from his references to ‘contemporary circumstances’ and ‘human interests’, neither defined. Why should we believe that Gray’s minimal standards are anything more than his own personal preferences, or indeed the assumptions of a liberal order that he claims is valid only locally? Gray does not tell us.
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To summarise: Gray’s various non-liberal readings of Berlinian pluralism are all seriously flawed. His early subjectivism ignores the possibility of reasoned choice among incommensurable values in context. His later conservative contextualism is narrow and complacent, neglecting conflicts among and within traditions. His recent concept of modus vivendi is ambiguous and undeveloped, its general preference for either peace or self-interest looks monistic, and its limits are arbitrary. Liberal Pluralism Restated Even if Gray’s non-liberal readings of pluralism are unconvincing, he might reply that liberal interpretations are no more convincing. Perhaps pluralism simply generates no positive political implications in favour of either non-liberal views or liberal views. Here Gray could return to his central point against liberalism: if pluralism is true, then liberal universalism is false, because it purports to universalise political values, such as individual liberty and toleration, which there is no reason to privilege universally. Can liberals restate their position in the face of Gray’s pluralist challenge? I believe they can. They might start by pointing out that Gray’s dismissal of liberal universalism depends in particular on the contextualist phase of his thought. Since his initial subjectivism was soon abandoned, and his modus vivendi is probably itself a universalist view, contextualism remains his strongest ground for rejecting liberal universalism. According to Gray’s contextualist account, liberal universals, indeed all or most political universals, must be rejected because plural values can be ranked for good reason only in particular concrete contexts, and different contexts justify different rankings. I have already discussed some of the problems with Gray’s contextualism: for example, that he identifies context too narrowly with tradition, and that he (initially) overestimates the unity of traditions. Another problem was mentioned briefly and flagged for further attention: Gray assumes that because reasoned choice under pluralism can be guided by attention to context, it can only be guided by context. This assumption ignores the possibility, broached by Berlin, that pluralist choice might also be guided or shaped by attention to the concept of value pluralism itself. Reflection on the conceptual elements of pluralism might yield principles of more than merely contextual application. Berlin, for example, by emphasising the pluralist notions of value plurality, conflict and incommensurability, arrives at a case for valuing freedom of choice as a moral and political universal. I have agreed with Gray that there are serious problems with this argument in the form in which Berlin presents it. But might the same general strategy not be pursued with better arguments? The following are five possibilities, sketches of arguments I have pursued in detail elsewhere (Crowder 2002, 2004). Universal Values The first possibility is that the universality of at least some values, presupposed by Gray along with all pluralists, suggests a principle of respect for a minimal universal
The Political Theory of John Gray 69 morality that is best satisfied by liberalism. Jonathan Riley, for example, refers in this connection to starvation, arbitrary killing, and slavery as experiences that are universally disvalued, and argues that such judgements imply an embryonic notion of human rights, hence the beginnings of a case for liberalism (Riley 2000, 2001). Gray would deny that this kind of argument gets us very far in bridging the gap between pluralism and liberalism, and on this point I agree with him. Generic universals of the kind listed by Riley are too thin to single out liberalism as their best political expression (Gray 2000b: 109). The most one could say on this basis is that liberalism is compatible with the moral implications of pluralism, since liberals do accept these universals. But liberals are clearly not the only ones who accept these values: socialists, conservatives and republicans, for example, could say the same. Of course, liberals might respond by ‘thickening’ their account of the universal values, so that these become harder to realise in societies other than liberal societies. Berlin seems to do this when he suggests that ‘what it is to be a normal human being’ includes enjoyment of the minimal frontiers of freedom (Berlin 2002: 211). But the obvious problem with such a move is that it brings us closer to liberalism at the cost of making it harder to claim that our ethical starting point is genuinely universal. Berlin himself concedes that relatively few societies have insisted on maintaining the frontiers of individual liberty celebrated by liberals like Locke, J.S. Mill, Constant and Tocqueville (Berlin 2002: 207). In general, then, attempts to argue from pluralism to liberalism by way of universals that are presupposed by pluralism are caught between a conception of universality that is too thin to ground liberalism, and a conception of universality that is too thick to be genuinely universal. Liberal pluralists would be unwise to depend on arguments of this kind.2 Incommensurability Might a case for liberalism be based on the central pluralist notion of value incommensurability? Such a case is hinted at by Berlin when he stresses that the incommensurability of values implies the imperfectibility of human lives in general and of political life in particular. His critical targets here are views like classical Marxism and anarchism, which anticipate the possibility of human societies in which all genuine goods are realised simultaneously and harmoniously, and in which significant disagreement and conflict concerning the nature of the good life is a thing of the past. If pluralism is true, Berlin argues, such positions must be dismissed as dangerous utopian fantasies. Value incommensurability implies the permanence of conflict among goods, and reasonable disagreement about how to rank them. Pluralism rules out as conceptually incoherent some of the main ideological rivals of liberalism. Moreover, it provides liberalism with positive support, since it implies that a realistic and humane for of politics must be one that accepts and accommodates serious moral conflict and disagreement. Liberalism, with its values of toleration and personal liberty, arguably falls within this latter class of realistic positions. Gray, however, sees incommensurability as undermining rather than supporting liberalism. If some values are incommensurable, he argues, then so too are the
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‘forms of life’ in which they are expressed (Gray 1993: 293; 1995a: 142–143). If incommensurability prevents reasoned universal ranking, then that applies as much among ways of life as among values. And since liberalism is the political expression of a particular form of life (emphasizing negative liberty, personal autonomy etc.) it follows that there can be no good reason to uphold liberalism as universally superior to alternative political views based on alternative conceptions of the good. The problem with Gray’s position here is that it blurs the distinction between pluralism and cultural relativism. Gray accepts that distinction in principle (e.g. 1993: 293; 1995a: 149–150; 2000b: 53–54), but then effectively abandons it in his emphasis on the distinctness of cultures. If pluralism means that forms of life are wholly incommensurable with one another to the extent that critical comparison is impossible, then each is morally sovereign and it is hard to see how such a view is different from cultural relativism. But as Berlin insists, pluralists are separated from relativists in part by their acceptance of at least some generic universal values – in Berlin’s terms, the contents of the ‘human horizon’. If there is such a common horizon, then it cannot be true that whole forms of life are completely incommensurable. And if that is so, then liberalism cannot be relativised as simply the political arm of one incommensurable form of life among others.3 This brings me back to a more general point worth re-emphasising. Value pluralism is a theory that stresses the multiplicity and incommensurability of values or goods, not necessarily or to the same extent the incommensurability of cultures or forms of life. Of course, if values can legitimately be combined or ranked in many different ways, then there will be many legitimate ways of life too. But that is not to say that these are incommensurable. Rather, they will overlap on the universals contained in the common human horizon. Gray might reply that even if different cultures appear to share some value, their understandings of that value may be so divergent that, in effect, they are really pursuing different goods altogether. The courage commended by Christians, for example, is very different from the courage commended by pagans. Nevertheless, there must be an underlying commonality among these different interpretations or else we would not have the generic concept of courage in the first place. Gray sometimes seems to concede this (e.g. 1993: 292). If there were no such generic values, then much of what is distinctive about the pluralist position – and therefore the position Gray claims to espouse – would disintegrate. If there are such values, then forms of life cannot be as distinct, and their distinctness cannot be as central to the pluralist outlook, as Gray supposes. This is not to say that the notion of value incommensurability is sufficient on its own, or in combination with generic universality, to ground a pluralist case for liberalism. Value incommensurability rules out certain anti-liberal positions, and commends a politics of realism with which liberalism is consistent. However, liberalism is not the only political form that is consistent with pluralist anti-utopianism. Conservatism is another obvious candidate. Liberals need a stronger principle if liberalism is to be picked out as uniquely fitted to the pluralist outlook. Still, the notion of value incommensurability gives a hint as to what this stronger principle might be. If the primary emphasis in pluralism is on the incommensurability of
The Political Theory of John Gray 71 goods rather than ways of life, then that suggests that respect for the distinctiveness of different goods is a criterion that cuts across, and provides a critical standard for, different ways of life. This brings me to the next possibility. Diversity of Goods Might pluralism provide more determinate support for liberalism by way of a principle of ‘diversity’? ‘If there are many and competing genuine values’, Bernard Williams writes, ‘then the greater the extent to which a society tends to be singlevalued, the more genuine values it neglects or suppresses. More, to this extent, must mean better’ (Williams 1978: xvii). Liberal pluralists could argue that, roughly speaking, it is better that a society embrace more values rather than fewer.4 When it comes to determining the best political vehicle for this diversity of goods, liberalism surely has a strong claim. Its traditional emphasis on individual liberty, toleration and personal autonomy clears social spaces within which individuals and groups can pursue a wide range of different purposes. Gray accepts that pluralism implies an ethic of diversity, but denies that diversity is best served by liberalism. The reason is that he understands the diversity in question as a diversity of cultures or forms of life. Because different forms of life generate different political systems, pluralist diversity therefore endorses a diversity of political regimes. Liberalism will be one of these, but only one among others – it will possess no privileged status. The optimal pluralist world will contain both liberal and non-liberal regimes (1995a: 152). Once more Gray’s position blurs the boundary between pluralism and cultural relativism. On a distinctively pluralist view it is particular goods, such as liberty and equality, that are incommensurable, not whole cultures. Consequently, the ideal of diversity implicit in pluralism refers, primarily, not to political regimes or forms of life, as assumed by Gray, but to goods or values. Rather than valuing and promoting a diversity of regimes or cultures without regard to their content, value pluralists should value and promote a diversity of regimes and cultures that are themselves internally diverse – that is, that exhibit internally a diversity of goods and (secondarily) ways of life. Once more, liberalism has a strong claim to being acknowledged as the political form most accommodating of this kind of diversity, for the reason given above: its distinctive freedoms enable individuals and groups to pursue disparate goods within the same polity. This is not to claim that liberalism is limitlessly accommodating or wholly neutral among conceptions of the good life. In this connection Gray objects ‘that liberal societies tend to drive out non-liberal forms of life, to ghettoize or marginalize them, or to trivialize them’ (Gray 1995a: 154). It is true that even the most liberal of orders is based implicitly on a general value ranking that privileges goods such as individual liberty and toleration, and in so doing constrains other goods. But some such ranking is unavoidable in any political system. What liberals can fairly claim is that their ranking leaves more room for a variety of goods and conceptions of the good to be pursued than does any known alternative. Certainly liberalism is superior on this
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score to the alternatives presented by Gray: his narrow traditionalism and his peaceloving modus vivendi (unless this takes a liberal form). Sometimes peace can be bought only at the price of reduced liberties, and consequently a diminished range of human goods. Reasonable Disagreement Let us suppose, though, that Gray is right to link pluralism with a primary commitment not to a diversity of goods but to a diversity of cultures or forms of life. Here too, liberal pluralists can reasonably argue that such diversity is more adequately accommodated and encouraged by liberal forms of politics than by any alternatives. Plainly, some political regimes are more hospitable than others to diverse ways of life. This is true both externally, in their treatment of other states, and internally, in their treatment of different ways of life within their own territory. On the whole it is liberal polities, or polities with substantial liberal components, that have the best records when it comes to tolerating and promoting multiple ways of life both at home and abroad.5 Again, this is not to say that liberal polities have been limitlessly tolerant in these respects, merely that they have done better, on balance, than non-liberal regimes. Therefore it is unlikely that pluralist diversity would be advanced by replacing liberal regimes with non-liberal. Non-liberal regimes would, it is true, add something to human diversity, but they would take away a good deal more. This line of argument is confirmed by reflection, from a pluralist point of view, on the familiar liberal idea of ‘reasonable disagreement’ concerning the good life (Rawls 1993; Larmore 1996). Conceptions of the good life are essentially schemes for ranking basic human goods across a generality of cases. Christians, for example, emphasize humility and love for one’s neighbour as especially important values for all human beings in all or most circumstances; imperial Rome celebrated manly strength and self-assertion in the same general terms (Berlin 1997: 6–7). If at least some basic values are incommensurable, then many such general rankings will be prima facie reasonable. Pluralism does not endorse all conceptions of the good without exception, since some do better than others when judged by pluralist standards such as respect for universals, moral and political realism, and diversity of goods. But within those limits there will be much legitimate variation. Consequently, many disagreements concerning the merits of rival conceptions of the good will also be reasonable. Where disagreements are reasonable in this sense they are likely to be permanent. A realistic and prudent form of politics will therefore accept and accommodate reasonable disagreement rather than trying to overcome it. Liberalism, its defenders may fairly claim, is just such a realistic and prudent political form. Conservatives, as I conceded earlier, also value realism and prudence. But they are not as well equipped as liberals to cope with reasonable disagreement. The problem with conservatism here is its reliance on tradition – that is, the uncritical acceptance of an inherited conception of the good. The disjunction between pluralism and
The Political Theory of John Gray 73 traditionalism was touched on earlier, when I argued that even so far as pluralism implies the importance of context in decision making, context need not be narrowly identified with tradition. The idea of reasonable disagreement drives a further wedge between pluralism and tradition. On the pluralist view, traditions themselves embody rankings of incommensurables that are subject to reasonable disagreement. Of course, one could say the same thing about liberal traditions or conceptions of the good. But liberals are typically prepared to see their own deepest convictions questioned, and even regard this as essential – one thinks here of Mill’s arguments for freedom of expression. Certainly, liberals are more accommodating than conservatives of reasonable disagreement concerning the good. Individual Autonomy Pluralist rejection of tradition as a conclusive guide to conduct suggests a final link between pluralism and liberalism. We cannot resolve conflicts among incommensurables simply by appealing to tradition. Similarly, we cannot rely on simple monist rules like utilitarianism to resolve our difficulties, since these, too, represent rankings of incommensurables that reasonable people may contest. How, then, can we decide such questions? Pluralists, I believe, are obliged to think for themselves in a strong sense. Rather than simply accepting without question the authority of monist rules or local traditions, they must be prepared to deal with each choice situation on its own terms, weighing all relevant competing considerations, including those that conflict with rules and customs. They must be willing and able to stand back from received rules and customs, recognise the value rankings these embody, and critically assess their application in the circumstances. This may involve appeal to background values such as personal and collective conceptions of the good, but these too must be subject to revision. Pluralists must, that is, be autonomous. And since individual autonomy is one of the most distinctive ideals of liberalism, it is in a liberal political order that individual autonomy is most likely to flourish. In short, to cope well with the hard choices that pluralism imposes on us is to be able to choose autonomously, or critically. This argument is essentially a reworking of Berlin’s argument from choice, but it improves on Berlin’s argument by giving a fuller account of the link between the necessity of hard choices and the value of free choice. The problem with Berlin’s version of the argument was that he passed too rapidly from necessity to value. The suggested reworking bridges that gap. What grounds the case for autonomy here is not merely the necessity of choosing among incommensurables, but the goal of choosing well – by which I understand choosing for good reason. The argument thus contains a significant assumption: to choose rationally among incommensurables is a goal implicit in the pluralist outlook itself. Why is that? Why not say that from a pluralist point of view rational choice is itself merely one value among others, no more inherently worthy than arbitrary choice? My answer is that reasoning about such choices is necessary if we are to honour one of the most basic principles of the pluralist outlook: that we should take all genuine values seriously. This does not, of course, mean that every human good
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must be pursued in every situation, since obviously goods often conflict and we have to choose among them. But it does require that we should, in making such choices, ‘honour’ all genuine goods so far as circumstances allow. To determine how far circumstances allow the pursuit of a particular good or combination of goods is the province of practical reasoning. In the absence of practical reasoning our choices would be arbitrary and incoherent, resulting in lives in which goods are pursued or neglected at random, without attention to their real value. Pluralism does not imply indifference; on the contrary, it stresses the intrinsic value of many goods. Practical reasoning is essential to the honouring of these goods, hence their organization (Kekes 1993: 97–98; Nussbaum 2000: 82). If my argument from pluralism to individual autonomy is correct, then it will have very significant ethical and political implications. First, it means that the capacity for autonomy will be a characteristic of the best lives under pluralism. People who are not equipped to think critically will be to that extent ill-equipped to cope well with the hard choices that will inevitably confront them. This does not mean that heteronomous lives are valueless. Such lives may exhibit many genuine goods. But heteronomous lives cannot be among the best possible overall, judged from a pluralist perspective, since they lack a capacity for good decision making in the face of inevitable and profound value conflict. Second, my pluralist argument for autonomy implies a case not only for liberalism but for a form of liberalism under which the facilitation of personal autonomy is a legitimate goal of public policy. If the conditions for personal autonomy are among the primary components of human well-being, as pluralism suggests, then the securing of those conditions must be a concern of the liberal state. This conclusion is reinforced by the plausible claim that, in the absence of state intervention, the conditions for personal autonomy, both economic and cultural, are unlikely to be sustained for many people (Crowder 2002: ch. 9). Gray would perhaps object that my conclusion here is un-pluralist, because I have in effect accorded a universal privilege to a single good, namely individual autonomy. But my argument does not require that autonomy be privileged in every case. I do not deny the possibility of situations where personal autonomy appropriately yields to rival considerations such as urgency or security or the demands of personal relationships. The point is that these and other moral decisions are unavoidably made within a political framework informed by some general ranking of values. The only question is whether, and to what extent, this ranking answers to fundamental pluralist concerns. Among these are concerns for value diversity and reasonable disagreement, which suggest a politics capable of accommodating many goods and ways of life. Further, the exigency of choices among incommensurables points to an emphasis on personal autonomy. These considerations amount to a case for an identifiably liberal political order, and for a liberal order in which individual autonomy is a public ideal. But the principles that ground and regulate such an order need not be conceived as absolutes. William Galston captures the appropriate liberal-pluralist view here when he refers to the possibility under pluralism of strong but rebuttable presumptions – in favour, for example, of human rights (2002: 69–78). The same
The Political Theory of John Gray 75 point may be made in favour of the main principles for which I have argued: diversity, reasonable, disagreement, and individual autonomy. Conclusion Gray has undeniably performed a great service to the discussion of pluralism by opening up the question of its political implications to more thorough scrutiny. But his own answers to that question should be rejected. His highly influential equation of value pluralism with cultural pluralism is especially misleading. Further, his answers have been notably unfruitful. Gray’s successive conclusions in favour of subjectivism, traditionalism and modus vivendi pragmatism amount to a series of theoretical culs de sac from which little has been, or can be, extracted in the way of a progressive political programme. Significantly, the idea of pluralism makes no appearance in Gray’s most recent work (Gray 2002, 2003, 2004). Moreover, in arriving at his fashionably relativist and pessimistic views, Gray has missed the many opportunities for constructive and creative argument that are latent in the idea of value pluralism. In particular, he has greatly exaggerated the death of liberal pluralism. In this essay I have tried to sketch some of the liberal principles implicit in the pluralist outlook. Elsewhere I have argued that those principles can be deployed to support progressive policies concerning economic redistribution and multiculturalism (Crowder 2002: ch. 9; 2004: ch. 8). My overall sense is that the spirit of the pluralist outlook has more in common with the liberal Enlightenment world-view that Gray so despises than with the anti-liberalism and anti-humanism that he favours. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Glen Newey for his helpful comments. Notes 1.
For other critical discussions of Gray on pluralism and liberalism, see: Lomasky 1991; Katznelson 1994; Legutko 1994; Colls 1998; Crowder 1998, 2002, 2004; Weinstock 1998; Galston 2002; Talisse 2002. 2. I distinguish here between universals that are ‘presupposed by’ pluralism, and those that are ‘implicit in’ pluralism or can be deduced from it. Only the most generic goods – food, shelter, belonging, courage and so on – can be assumed by pluralists to be universally valid; but reflection on the nature of pluralism can yield more specific principles, as I try to show. These latter principles are universally valid because pluralism is a universal feature of morality. 3. Even if whole cultures were incommensurable, that would not necessarily rule out the possibility of ranking them, on the model of the reasoned ranking of incommensurable values, either in context or according to the principles implicit in pluralism itself. Consequently, even if Gray were right about the incommensurability of cultures, that would not be enough to eliminate arguments for the superiority of liberal cultures. 4. Clearly, this formulation of pluralist diversity needs refinement and qualification. Pluralists cannot simply advocate maximising units of value, since there are no such measurable units on the pluralist view. Nor can pluralists forget that certain values, and packages of values, necessarily conflict with
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G. Crowder others. Consequently, pluralist diversity requires not multiplicity alone but also coherence among values (Crowder 2002: 138–145). But there can be little doubt that some societies accommodate a greater range of values than others – compare, for example, liberal democracies and Soviet-style regimes. A major objection to this claim might seem to be that it ignores colonialism. But we should distinguish between, on the one hand, the past policies of particular ostensibly liberal states, and on the other, the principles of liberalism itself. In the case of colonialism, the policies stand condemned by the principles.
References Berlin, I (1990) The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. H. Hardy (London: John Murray). Berlin, I (1997) The Proper Study of Mankind, ed. H. Hardy and R. Hausheer (London: Chatto & Windus). Berlin, I (2000) Three Critics of the Enlightenment, ed. H. Hardy (London: Pimlico). Berlin, I (2002) Liberty, ed. H. Hardy (Oxford: (Oxford University Press). Berlin I. & Williams, B. (1994) Pluralism and liberalism: a reply, Political Studies, 42, pp. 306–309. Colls, R. (1998) Ethics man: John Gray’s new moral world, Political Quarterly, 69, pp. 59–71. Crowder, G. (1998) John Gray’s pluralist critique of liberalism, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 15, pp. 287–298. Crowder, G. (2002) Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London: Continuum). Crowder, G. (2004) Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism (Cambridge: Polity). Galston, W. (2002) Liberal Pluralism: the Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gray, J. (1989) Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1993) Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1995a) Isaiah Berlin (London: HarperCollins). Gray, J. (1995b) Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London and New York: Routledge). Gray, J. (1997) Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity). Gray, J. (2000a) Pluralism and toleration in contemporary political philosophy, Political Studies, 48, pp. 323–333. Gray, J. (2000b) Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity). Gray, J. (2000c) Where pluralists and liberals part company, in: M. Baghramian & A. Ingram (Eds), Pluralism: the Philosophy and Politics of Diversity (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (2002) Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta). Gray, J. (2003) Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern (New York: New Press). Gray, J. (2004) Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (London: Granta). Katznelson, I. (1994) A properly defended liberalism: John Gray on the filling of political life, Social Research, 61, pp. 611–630. Kekes, J. (1993) The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Larmore, C. (1996) The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Legutko, R. (1994) On postmodern liberal conservatism, Critical Review, 8, pp. 1–22. Lomasky, L. (1991) Liberal obituary?, Ethics, 102, pp. 140–154. Nussbaum, M. (2000) Women and Moral Development: the Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rawls, J., (1993) Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press). Raz, J. (1986) The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Riley, J. (2000) Crooked timber and liberal culture, in: M. Baghramian & A. Ingram (Eds), Pluralism: the Philosophy and Politics of Diversity, pp. 120–155 (London: Routledge). Riley, J. (2001) Interpreting Berlin’s Liberalism, American Political Science Review, 95, pp. 283–295. Talisse, R. (2002) Two-faced liberalism: John Gray’s pluralist politics and the reinstatement of Enlightenment liberalism, Critical Review, 14, pp. 441–458. Weinstock, D. (1998) The Graying of Berlin, Critical Review, 11, pp. 481–501.
Toleration, Value-pluralism, and the Fact of Pluralism PETER JONES School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, University of Newcastle, UK
[email protected] 0 2 9 PeterJones 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600655016 FCRI_A_165475.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
Introduction In his Two Faces of Liberalism, John Gray distinguishes two traditions of liberal thinking about toleration. One conceives toleration as a route to rational consensus on the best way of life; the other holds that there is no single best way of life but rather many ways of life in which human beings can flourish. Gray argues that the first tradition has come to dominate liberal thinking and that it encompasses the work of contemporary liberals as diverse as Rawls, Dworkin, Hayek and Nozick. It has become so dominant that Gray sometimes describes it simply as ‘liberal toleration’. He believes that this tradition, with its aspiration to secure rational consensus on how we should live, is fundamentally misconceived. It has always been mistaken, but its error has been made more conspicuous by the sheer range of the different ways of life that toleration has to encompass in the late modern world. Gray argues that liberal thinking needs to relocate itself in the second tradition which recognises the goodness of many different ways of life, none of which is better than the rest.
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This second tradition constitutes Gray’s second ‘face’ of liberalism, but it actually belongs to a broader way of thinking that he calls ‘pluralism’. Pluralism can endorse liberalism as a form of life that is good for some societies, but it does not accept that a liberal order is the best or the uniquely legitimate form of life for all humanity. Rather, for the pluralist, liberalism describes merely one of many good forms of life and one that can make no claim to be intrinsically better than those other forms. That is why Gray gives only limited applause to liberals whom he locates in this second tradition, such as Berlin and Raz. Although they have broken free of the dominant liberal tradition, they still give liberalism a special status to which it has no claim. To be a pluralist liberal is to accept that, while a liberal way of life may be contingently good for some societies given their histories and circumstances, it is not the only good way of life or the best for all societies in all circumstances.1 Gray’s characterisation of the dominant liberal tradition of toleration is extremely broad-brush. Even those whom he identifies as its leading spokesmen, such as Locke and Rawls, cannot be easily represented as pursuing ‘the ideal of a rational consensus on the best way of life’ (2000a: 1). However, I shall not stop to examine the accuracy of Gray’s representation of liberal thinking on toleration. Rather I shall focus on the sort of thinking on toleration that he does endorse. I want to examine what the role of toleration might be in the world as Gray sees it and whether his value-pluralism can justify that role. More specifically, I want to ask: given the fact of pluralism, can Gray’s value-pluralism provide a case for the toleration needed to secure a modus vivendi? I begin by saying something about each of the four constituents of that question.
Terms of Reference Value-pluralism Gray understands value-pluralism to hold ‘that ultimate human values are objective but irreducibly diverse, that they are conflicting and often uncombinable, and that sometimes when they come into conflict with one another they are incommensurable; that is, they are not comparable by any rational measure’ (1995b: 1). I follow Gray in taking the essential claims of value-pluralism to be that values are irreducibly plural and, in significant measure, uncombinable and incommensurable. Value-pluralism therefore stands opposed to the claim that there is a single master value, such as utility, or a set hierarchy of values. Applied to forms of life, valuepluralism holds that there are many good forms of life, none of which can claim to be the single best form. Because goods are frequently uncombinable, it also holds that not all goods can be realised fully in the life of one individual or one community. Although it emphasises the diverse and conflictual nature of values, valuepluralism entails neither relativism nor subjectivism. Value-pluralists, including Gray, understand human values to be objective in that they are rooted in objective human needs and interests.
The Political Theory of John Gray 79 As a general position, value-pluralism admits of degree. We may recognise that values can be uncombinable and incommensurable but hold that they exhibit these properties only rarely. Alternatively, we might hold that conflict, uncombinability and incommensurablity are ubiquitous features of value, features that must shape our understanding of the entire nature of ethical and political life. Although Gray claims only that values are ‘often’ uncombinable and ‘sometimes’ incommensurable (1995a: 68), his value-pluralism stands at the more comprehensive end of the spectrum.2 It may be less than fully comprehensive, but it is sufficiently comprehensive to be a major factor, perhaps the major factor, that should guide our ethical and political thinking. The Fact of Pluralism Value-pluralism is both a meta-ethical and an ethical theory. The ‘fact of pluralism’ is neither; its claim is empirical. It describes the fact that people live different sorts of life whether as individuals or groups or communities. However, in conformity with the meaning given to this phrase by writers such as Rawls (1993) and Larmore (1996), I use ‘the fact of pluralism’ to describe more than the mere existence of diverse modes of life. It also describes the fact that people hold different and conflicting beliefs and values so that they possess different views about how we should live and make different assessments of how people actually live. Thus people disagree as well as differ. This makes for an asymmetry between value-pluralism and the fact of pluralism. Whereas the plurality noticed by value-pluralism is a plurality of different and conflicting goods, the plurality noticed in the fact of pluralism is a plurality of different and conflicting conceptions of the good. That is not to say that value-pluralism and the fact of pluralism are wholly independent. Gray suggests two ways in which they are related. First, the truth of value-pluralism can help to explain the fact of pluralism. One reason why people are committed to different sorts of life is that conflicts of value can be settled in different and incompatible ways no one of which is uniquely good or right (2000a: 8; see also Crowder 2002: 65). Value-pluralism therefore helps us to make sense of the fact of pluralism. Secondly, the fact of pluralism provides evidence of the truth of value-pluralism. For Gray, it is experience that provides the test of the ‘truth’ of our ethical beliefs (2000a: 41, 46–47, 64; cf. 1995b: 63; 1997: 95–96; see also Galston 2002: 33–34). The fact that people live diverse modes of life and evidently flourish in those many different modes provides evidence for the truth of value-pluralism. Indeed, he claims the experience of late modern societies has made value-pluralism a matter of ‘common knowledge’ (2000b: 325). Despite these possible links, value-pluralism and the fact of pluralism make importantly different claims. Gray recognises the fact of pluralism as I have described it. Indeed, he complains that others have recognised it insufficiently (2000b: 332). One of the failings of current liberal theories of toleration is, he argues, that they draw on a tradition of thinking that was evolved for a monocultural society whose disagreements were contained within a shared religious and moral
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outlook. These liberal theories have not adjusted to the breadth and depth of differences of belief and value to be found in our world (2000a: ch.1; 2000b: 323–325). Modus vivendi For Gray ‘modus vivendi’ describes a condition of peaceful coexistence. Modus vivendi is a goal that we should pursue both within societies and between them. It describes a settlement secured amongst people who subscribe to different and possibly conflicting values and ways of life. However, it is an altogether more contingently based arrangement than the just societies sought by deontological liberals. Because conflicts of value afflict considerations of justice as much as other values, the aspiration to ground a plural society on a consensus concerning principles of right is, for Gray, misguided. A modus vivendi is something that must be achieved without the benefit of consensus upon values. In any particular case, it must also be geared to the particular circumstances and ways of life that characterise the parties to the modus vivendi and to the compromises they are able and willing to make. We cannot therefore set out a universal pattern to which each modus vivendi must conform. At the same time, a modus vivendi is not, for Gray, just any condition that falls short of open conflict. It is more than a cold war and more than the mere absence of war (2000a: 133). It is also more than a mere balance of power. It connotes an established arrangement, even though it may be one that is fragile and shifting, that enables people to live together in spite of their differences. As I have said, it does not presuppose a consensus upon values, but it does entail a population’s possessing and recognising common institutions through which they can negotiate compromises between their different values and interests. The more successfully these institutions provide for negotiation and compromise, the better the modus vivendi. Gray sometimes draws the link between value-pluralism and modus vivendi very close. He remarks, for example, that ‘modus vivendi expresses the belief that there are many forms of life in which humans can thrive’, and that ‘the ethical theory underpinning modus vivendi is value-pluralism’ (2000a: 5, 6, 25). However, I understand these statements to describe the value-pluralist’s commitment to modus vivendi rather than beliefs and commitments that are essential for a modus vivendi. As I have already remarked, modus vivendi is peaceful coexistence secured without the benefit of a consensus on value and we need not suppose that all or any of the parties to a modus vivendi are value-pluralists (2000a: 25). Toleration I shall use the term ‘toleration’ in its orthodox sense, according to which we tolerate when we object to something yet do not seek to prevent it. Thus reasons for toleration are reasons for not seeking to suppress or otherwise prevent beliefs and practices even though we believe them to be wrong or objectionable in some other way. As Gray himself has observed, ‘the objects of toleration are what we judge to
The Political Theory of John Gray 81 be evils. When we tolerate a practice, a belief or a character trait, we let something be that we judge to be undesirable, false or at least inferior; our toleration expresses the conviction that, despite its badness, the object of toleration should be left alone’ (1995a: 18). The terms ‘tolerate’, ‘tolerance’, and ‘toleration’ are sometimes used nowadays in more relaxed senses which make the presence of disapproval or dislike inessential. I shall refer to some of these alternative senses, but in general I shall keep faith with the orthodox meaning of toleration. Toleration is not co-extensive with liberalism. There are reasons for being tolerant that are not distinctively liberal, and we may tolerate practices and ways of life that the liberal would have us not tolerate. More to the point here, liberalism need not entail toleration. Most obviously, it does not when liberalism takes the form of a theory that applauds the pursuit of a wide range of forms of life because it endorses the goodness of each of those many forms. Prima facie, a liberal theory grounded in value-pluralism looks likely to take that generously approving, and therefore nontolerant, form. Argument over whether value-pluralism does or does not entail liberalism is not then co-extensive with the issues I shall examine. The link between the fact of pluralism, modus vivendi and toleration is fairly obvious. If the members of a population, either societal or global, possess different and conflicting conceptions of the good, they will be able to coexist peacefully only if they are ready to tolerate one another’s different and conflicting conceptions and the ways of life, individual or collective, that derive from these. I turn then to the question of whether value-pluralism can deliver the toleration necessary for a modus vivendi. I examine that question in two parts. I begin by looking at the world as the valuepluralist sees it and consider whether value-pluralism itself generates a need for and a case for toleration. However, the value-pluralist has to recognise – and Gray does recognise – that the world in which he has to operate (a world characterised by the fact of pluralism) is one in which many people hold beliefs and values that are incompatible with his own. Thus, in the second part of this article, I consider what Gray might say to induce those who reject value-pluralism to participate in a modus vivendi. Toleration and the Demands of Value-pluralism Value-pluralism insists that values conflict and, when they do, we have to sacrifice the achievement of some for the sake of others. In some cases, goods may be absolutely uncombinable so that we have to sacrifice one wholly for the sake of another. In other cases, they may conflict in ways that permit trade-offs, but more of one will still entail less of the other. No individual or community can therefore expect to realise the good fully and uncompromisingly; there are goods that they will simply have to forego. Moreover, just as we are obliged to make choices or compromises between goods, so we shall often have to choose amongst or trade-off evils; evils will not be entirely avoidable or removable. In addition, in Gray’s version of
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value-pluralism, as in Berlin’s, it is not merely that good competes with good and bad with bad. Some goods may be achievable only if accompanied by evils and some right actions may unavoidably involve an element of wrong (1995a: 162; 1995b: 35–36, 53–57; 2000a: 10, 46, 138). A world in which we are obliged to forego goods and to put up with evils looks like just the sort of world in which toleration will be at a premium. But what sort of toleration does it call for? It is not toleration in its orthodox sense – toleration of other people and of the values they pursue. It is toleration of the way things are – a readiness to recognise the impossibility of perfection and to accept the limitations upon the achievement of goodness that value-pluralism explains are inescapable. This ‘toleration’ is little more than resignation to an unalterable fact about the world. It resembles stoic toleration: ‘a cultivated indifference toward uncontrollable externalities’ (Fiala 2003: 154). If we move from the conflicting nature of values to the diverse forms of life they generate, how should the value-pluralist view these? Let’s put aside evil for the moment. People either find themselves living, or commit themselves to living, various forms of life each of which embodies some goods and each of which, of necessity, excludes or diminishes others. Because the goods at issue are in conflict and cannot be realised fully together, Gray describes them as ‘rivalrous’ and then goes on to describe the ways of life based upon them as ‘rivals’ (e.g. 2000a: 5, 20, 34). But are these different forms of life rivalrous in ways that could require toleration amongst those who live them? Must agonism amongst values yield agonism amongst ways of life (cf. Gray 1995a: 84)? From the vantage-point of the value-pluralist, it would seem not. Each form of life is on balance good, each of necessity does not encompass every good, and in so far as the goods manifested or pursued in different forms of life are incommensurable, no form can be held inferior or superior to another. Thus, although a world in which everyone was fully apprised of value-pluralism might be highly diverse, the value-pluralists who inhabited that world would not, if they remained true to their value-pluralism, find themselves objecting to and having to tolerate one another’s ways of life. Although this is how the value-pluralist would have us see the world, it might be less easy for those who find themselves in the world to view its diversity with quite such indifference and equanimity. Can someone who is genuinely committed to a particular form of life readily accept that other forms, to which he feels no similar allegiance, are no less good? If those other forms of life are incommensurable with his own, that is indeed what he should accept. To hold that goods or forms of life are incommensurable is to hold that they are not rationally comparable. Thus, when we face a choice between such goods or ways of life, all we can do is to make a ‘radical choice’. Radical choice is choice that is groundless rather than reason based (1995a: 70; 1995b: 23). ‘Such groundless and criterionless choice is’, Gray observes, ‘the stuff of moral and political life, in so far as it is pervaded by incommensurabilities’ (1995b: 71). Radical choices that are forced by incommensurability must be themselves incommensurable; hence the radical chooser who condemns another’s radical choice mistakes the nature of his own choice and of the choice he condemns. The
The Political Theory of John Gray 83 only sort of tolerance appropriate to radical choice is what Gray describes as ‘the radical tolerance of indifference’ (1995a: 28–29; 2000a: 25).3 Gray does say that, even when conflicts are between incommensurables, some resolutions can be better than others. However, I take that to encompass two possibilities, neither of which frees incommensurability from the need for radical choice. First, it may be that, when we confront issues beset by incommensurability, the scope of that incommensurability is limited such that answers that are incommensurably right, or solutions that are incommensurably good, form a limited set. We can then say that any answer drawn from that set of right or good answers is better than any that falls outside it. Thus, the absence of a single right answer does not mean that no answer is better than any other, but the right or best answers will still be incommensurable with respect to one another (2000a: 6–7, 42, 62–68). The second possibility that Gray points to is that a conflict between values may, at a general level, admit of no rational resolution, yet may do so when conflict arises in a specific context (2000a: 36, 42–43, 55–56; 1995b: 154–155). But if that is so, the specifics of the context must in some way remove or diminish the incommensurability and that is why we can make a choice that is more than merely radical.4 It is difficult then to see how the value-pluralist could object to, and could experience a need to tolerate, differences that arise from the uncombinability and incommensurability of values. Equally, there need be little about the make-up of a modus vivendi that he need regret or tolerate. He may take a positive view of the great majority of forms of life that are accommodated in a modus vivendi. Establishing a modus vivendi will require the bearers of different forms of life to enter into compromises with one another and that may well tax their tolerance. But it will not tax the tolerance of value-pluralists, whether they are participants in or merely observers of the modus vivendi since, from their synoptic perspective, such compromises will appear inevitable and necessary and wholly positive in consequence. It may be, however, that the world can appear so unchallenging for value-pluralism only so long as we view it in a simple abstract fashion. Even if we are valuepluralists, we cannot be only value-pluralists. Each of us must also live a way of life that is particular. Perhaps the world viewed from inside a way of life will appear differently from the way it appears from outside. Affirming a way of life entails committing ourselves to, or discovering that we are committed to, a specific set of values and perhaps also a set of beliefs. The beliefs and values that are fundamental to our way of life may require us not merely to set aside other ways of life as uncombinable with our own. They may be such that we must view some, if not all, other ways of life as bad or inferior or falsely grounded. Thus differences, that may be matters of indifference when viewed from the Olympian heights of value-pluralism, may assume a quite different character when observed from the vantage-point of a particular way of life. The toleration that is otiose as long as we remain outside our caves may be essential when we return to them. One feature of Gray’s pluralism that makes this a significant consideration is his recognition that lives can be good even if they are based upon beliefs that are at odds with value-pluralism. What matters for Gray is the objective goodness (or badness)
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of lives, rather than people’s own conception of their lives or their reasons for living as they do. Thus, his value-pluralism is not a doctrine that can recognise as good only lives that are predicated upon its own truth. He is willing to accept that there are good forms of life that are based upon illusion and that can be lived only so long as the illusion is maintained.5 That is why he believes that a world in which everyone was persuaded of value-pluralism might not be a better world (2000a: 136–137). How then should the value-pluralist respond to the possibility that ways of life that he identifies as good may be ways of life that find one another unacceptable? His most obvious option, qua value-pluralist, is to disabuse the bearers of those ways of life of their objections to one another. In other words, his most obvious recourse is to lead them out of their caves and inform or remind them of what the world is really like. Once they are dragged into the external world of valuepluralism, they will see that their condemnation of others’ forms of life is misplaced. That will solve by dissolving the problem of toleration, or it will if people can be induced to take their corrected conceptions of the world with them when they return to their particular ways of life. The trouble is, of course, that this may mean that the form of life to which they return is not the form of life that they previously led. Some ways of life may be able to survive an encounter with the truth of value-pluralism but others may be transformed or destroyed by it. Their adherents, having seen the world from outside their cave, must find their conception of life within their cave forever altered. That will be most obviously so for those whose form of life rested upon a belief in its unique rightness. How, for example, can those whose way of life was predicated upon the belief that it was uniquely ordained by God continue living as if the falsity of their foundational belief made no difference to their way of life? Value-pluralism might seek to avoid this transformative effect by inviting us to adopt a split-level view of the world, analogous to the two-level view proposed by the indirect utilitarian, R.M. Hare (1981). Hare distinguishes between a critical and an intuitive level of moral thinking. At the critical level our moral thinking should be utilitarian while, at the intuitive level, it will consist of everyday ‘common-sense’ morality according to which it is simply right that we should keep our promises, treat people justly, and so on. The truth of morality really lies at the critical level and our thinking at that level should recognise utility as the single value that subsumes all others. Nevertheless, Hare argues, we are right to conduct our ordinary lives according to the rules of intuitive morality because, in so doing, we shall more successfully promote utility than if we attempted its direct pursuit, given our limited knowledge, foresight, impartiality, and the like. In a similar fashion, the value-pluralist might enjoin us to live forms of life on their own terms rather than only under the aegis of value-pluralism. That may enable us to live forms of life that value-pluralism recognises as good but that it would render unliveable if people were to take it fully to heart. By keeping valuepluralism at arm’s length, people may be able to live a greater range of good forms of life, including lives based on illusions, than they would if they were overly conscious of the truth of value-pluralism.
The Political Theory of John Gray 85 Whether people could really perform this trick of double consciousness is highly doubtful. One criticism that has been levelled at Hare’s split-level theory is that it may not be feasible for people to keep the two levels of moral thinking as separate as his indirect utilitarianism requires. That sort of criticism would seem to apply even more forcefully to the split-level value-pluralism that I contemplate here. It would require people to conduct their lives as though value-pluralism were false, even though they know it to be true. One way of dealing with that conundrum would be to keep the truth of value-pluralism under wraps. The analogue would then be not merely indirect utilitarianism but a form of ‘government house’ utilitarianism in which a governing elite keep people, for their own good and perhaps for the good of others, ignorant of the full moral truth.6 That subterfuge would be morally unappealing and difficult to execute but, even if it could be carried off, it would leave the value-pluralist having to provide those who live good but benighted lives with something other than value-pluralism as their reason for toleration. Before turning to the general question of how value-pluralists might cope with those who do not share their beliefs, I want to suggest that value-pluralists are likely to encounter a phenomenon that will create the circumstances for toleration even within their own ranks: the phenomenon of reasonable disagreement. Value-pluralism and Reasonable Disagreement Generally Gray views the idea of reasonable disagreement unsympathetically. That is because the notion that people disagree implies that they are in dispute about one right answer and also that there is one right answer to be had. But value-pluralism shows that, when we encounter value conflict, frequently no single right answer is available but rather many right answers, no one of which can properly claim to be better than the others. Thus, when people come up with different answers to value conflict, we should conceive their answers as merely different rather than as authentic expressions of disagreement. People may, of course, conceive themselves as engaged in disagreement but they mistake the nature of their differences. (2000a: 5, 8, 9, 21, 35) George Crowder, by contrast, ties the idea of reasonable disagreement into valuepluralism and uses it to link pluralism with liberalism. He argues that the idea of reasonable disagreement presupposes the truth of value-pluralism since it is that pluralism that explains how there can be reasonable disagreement on moral and practical questions (2002: ch.7, especially pp. 165–172). Despite Crowder’s efforts to embed reasonable disagreement within valuepluralism, it seems to me that Gray is right to distinguish between the differences generated by value-pluralism and disagreement properly so-called.7 In one case, differences amongst people are grounded in the plurality, uncombinability and incommensurability of values. Differences have their origins in objects rather than in subjects, in goods rather than in conceptions of the good, and, if those differences generate disagreement, that disagreement is apparent rather than real. In the other case, differences are grounded in subjects rather than objects, in the different
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judgements people make about the good rather than in the nature of the good itself, and the disagreement to which these differences give rise is real rather than apparent. In the first case, value-pluralism generates many possible ‘right answers’ no one of which is uniquely right. In the second case, a right answer is, in principle, available even though people can reasonably disagree about what it is.8 If we accept that distinction, we then have to ask how comprehensively valuepluralism can account for the value differences that we find amongst people. Can value conflict, uncombinability and incommensurability together swallow up the entire domain of value-disagreement? That seems wholly implausible. It may be that many apparently conflicting conceptions of value each recognise something of real value and that, where others see only disagreement, the value-pluralist can expose the reality of value conflict. But we cannot plausibly dismiss every value disagreement as merely value conflict misrecognised. Nor should we expect differences that arise amongst value-pluralists themselves to be explicable wholly in terms of value-pluralism. For one thing, agreement on value-pluralism need not entail agreement on the values that should figure in that pluralism. Consider, for example, the many different conceptions of distributive justice that people have proposed. There may be merit in more than one of these but a value-pluralism that tried to honour all of them would collapse into incoherence. Nor, if we think that justice encompasses a plurality of different and conflicting considerations, need we suppose that each value-pluralist will find value in the same range of considerations. Incommensurability itself may be a focus of dispute: will we always agree on when goods are incommensurable and when they are not? Moreover, even in the world of the valuepluralist, not all values (or not all values all of the time) are uncombinable and incommensurable. Sometimes there will be, in principle, a combination of values that is right, or best judged, but opinion can be reasonably divided on what that is. Another matter that figures prominently in Gray’s thinking is the ethical significance of circumstance and context. His hostility to universalism stems not only from his belief in the incommensurability of different cultural forms but also from his acute sense that the good must always be attuned to contingencies of time and place. But that too calls for judgement and what calls for judgement will, experience shows, frequently elicit conflicting judgements. Even a value-pluralist like Gray, therefore, has reason to take disagreement seriously. Indeed, the complex circumstances and hard cases that abound in Gray’s world make not merely for disagreement but also for reasonable disagreement. In fact, Gray himself frequently moves from the language of difference to that of disagreement, from conflicts of value to conflicting conceptions or judgements or views of value.9 The ease with which he moves between these languages suggests that he sees their distinction as of little consequence, perhaps because he believes that diverse conceptions of the good are little more than the epiphenomena of diverse goods. In fact, goods and conceptions of the good are really two quite distinct phenomena. That goods or values are irreducibly plural and conflicting is a central claim of
The Political Theory of John Gray 87 value-pluralism. That people arrive at different conceptions of the good, which they reasonably regard as conflicting and mutually exclusive conceptions of what is good, is no part of it. Yet we have good reason to suppose that a world of valuepluralists would be a world characterised by reasonable disagreement. That, in turn, means that it would be characterised by the circumstances of toleration. How then should value-pluralism respond to that disagreement? Does it yield a case for toleration? I consider how value-pluralism might respond to the broad fact of pluralism in the next section. Here the question is more limited in scope: how should valuepluralists respond to disagreement within their own ranks? The short answer is that value-pluralism, in and of itself, has no answer. Valuepluralism is a theory about the nature of the good that we should pursue and about the way in which we should pursue the good given its nature. It is not a theory that tells us how we should respond to conceptions of the good that we reckon to be erroneous or to genuine disagreement, whether reasonable or unreasonable. There are features of value-pluralism that might intimate an answer. One is its acceptance of imperfection. But the imperfection it accepts is not the imperfection we are considering here, which has its origins in limited human capacities, but an imperfection that is forced by the conflicting nature of values (2000a: 10, 39). A more obvious tactic for Gray is to resort to his argument for a modus vivendi. For Gray, the principal virtue of a modus vivendi consists in its creating circumstances in which many good forms of life can flourish. If the reality is that we have to achieve a modus vivendi in a context of (genuine) disagreement as well as difference, extending toleration to conceptions of the good that we believe to be erroneous may be a price we have to pay to secure a modus vivendi. In that case, toleration can be justified as a means to the end of peaceful coexistence – or it can if, in this instance, means and end are commensurable. I shall consider the limits of this case for toleration in a moment. There are other more immediate ways in which the reasonableness of disagreement might be used to argue for toleration but these have no evident connection with value-pluralism. One points to the epistemic modesty that reasonable disagreement should induce. If we recognise that we are parties to a disagreement that is reasonable, that is not usually understood to require us to forsake our own beliefs and to accept that all views that figure in the disagreement are of equal merit. We can continue to hold our own beliefs whilst recognising that they are subject to reasonable disagreement. Even so, the reasonableness of the disagreement can give us reason to allow that our beliefs could be wrong and those of others right, even though, as things stand, we reckon otherwise. The risk that we ourselves could be mistaken becomes a reason why we should tolerate the apparent error of others. The other way in which reasonable disagreement can be deployed to argue for toleration is associated with liberals like Rawls. We are justified in coercing others and suppressing their ways of life only if we can justify our coercion and suppression to them. If the value of the ways of life at issue is subject to reasonable disagreement, we cannot justify our intolerance in that way. To that extent, we must tolerate conceptions of the good to which we object.
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Both of these are, by my reckoning, imposing arguments for taking reasonable disagreement seriously and both provide a significant case for toleration. But neither can be generated by value-pluralism itself. Value-pluralism may therefore need more that itself to cope with a diverse world, even if that world were one in which everyone embraced value-pluralism. Value-pluralism and the Fact of Pluralism Up to now, I have considered value-pluralism mainly in relation to forms of life that it identifies as good or whose goodness is controversial amongst value-pluralists themselves. But value-pluralism is a discriminating moral position and there are forms of life that it will identify simply as bad – most obviously forms of life that are impoverished or marked by evils that unnecessarily impede human flourishing. There is a further sort of ‘bad’ that preoccupies Gray: the error of moral theories, political ideologies, religions and other systems of belief that are at odds with the central claims of value-pluralism itself. He does not seek to diminish the presence or significance of these beliefs in the fact of pluralism. He repeatedly berates the sponsors and heirs of the so-called Enlightenment project for their folly and naivety in supposing that, with the passage of time, human thought would converge on a rational consensus and he points insistently to the recrudescence and persistence of a multiplicity of dissonant beliefs and allegiances that confound the Enlightenment’s optimism (e.g. 1995a: 13, 65, 145–146). The downside of that for Gray himself is that he too has to cope with a world of diverse beliefs, many of which are at odds with value-pluralism. He is unambiguous in affirming that universalist religions, in so far as they hold that one way of life or a small family of ways of life is best or right for all humanity, are incompatible with the truth of value-pluralism (2000a: 21; 2000c: 90–91; 1995b 42–43).10 Clearly, Christianity and Islam, especially in their more fundamentalist forms, cannot live comfortably with value-pluralism, particularly not with Gray’s version of it. Nor can Judaism, although Gray finds that faith less problematic since its claims are mostly directed at one people rather than at humanity at large. He is better disposed towards polytheistic religions, for the simple untheistic reason that they are more compatible with a diversity of good forms of life (1995b: 151; 2000a: 4; 2002: 125–127). But, polytheism is still very different from value-pluralism and Hinduism, as Gray notices (2002: 174), has its fundamentalists. Liberalism is also very much a problem for Gray in so far as it sees itself as the foundation for the uniquely legitimate social order rather than merely one way of life amongst many. So too are other doctrines and ideologies that have universalist aspirations. For Gray, all of these are ‘illusions’ (2000a: 20–21, 135; 1995a: 155). Despite his intellectual dismissal of these systems of belief and their associated conceptions of the good, Gray wishes them to be part of a mutually tolerant modus vivendi, so that people are able to live the many different forms of life in which they can flourish. Can he offer his own conception of value as a reason why they should tolerate diverse forms of life? Of course, for the value-pluralist himself that is
The Political Theory of John Gray 89 precisely why others should tolerate a plurality of lives. But that cannot function as a reason for those whose beliefs are at odds with value-pluralism. That I am right and you are wrong is, for me, a good reason why you should tolerate what I applaud and you condemn; but it cannot be a good reason for you. Reasons for toleration need to be reasons that people can embrace along with, not in place of, their other beliefs and values.11 Value-pluralism remains a conception of the good and, for those who conceive the good differently, it cannot provide reason to be tolerant. Gray himself describes value-pluralism as a ‘subversive doctrine’ that ‘does not leave everything as it is’, but which ‘undermines all claims about the best life for the species’ (2000a: 22; see also 1993: 292; 2000c: 101). It does not therefore provide a way of seeing the world that adherents of other systems of belief can easily graft on to, or hold alongside, their own ‘comprehensive doctrines’. That verdict may seem too quick and too harsh. Value-pluralism might be conceived as a purely formal theory of value. It might be conceived, that is, as a theory that tells us certain things about the nature of values, such as their frequent uncombinability and incommensurability, but that does not, or need not, tell us what actually is valuable (cf. Crowder 2002: 177–178). In fact, Gray and other proponents of the theory give value-pluralism substance as well as form. Yet that substance is of a limited sort, partly because the core tenets of value-pluralism dictate that it must be. Gray therefore does not see the practical application of his value-pluralism as the imposition of a comprehensive doctrine (1995a: 78; 2000a: 134). Keeping the content of value-pluralism largely formal may seem one way of making it more congruent with the fact of pluralism. In so far as it remains merely formal, it will be compatible with, and will be able to accommodate, a variety of substantive conceptions of the good. But actually that will not help at all. If valuepluralism is merely a formal type of which there can be different substantive tokens, value-pluralists will then present different and conflicting conceptions of what is valuable (as they do). The mere fact that these different conceptions are all versions of value-pluralism will not legitimate them for all value-pluralists, nor will it do anything to resolve or ameliorate the conflicts amongst them. Value-pluralism will be even more evidently part of the problem posed by the fact of pluralism, rather than its solution. Gray invests his hope for the toleration needed for a modus vivendi mainly in people’s ability and willingness to recognise peace as a shared good. He does not present peaceful coexistence as an a priori value or transcendent good that can escape the conflicts and incommensurability that characterise other values and that must be overridingly valuable for all. His more modest claim is that most ways of life have an interest in peace: ‘all or nearly all ways of life have interests that make peaceful coexistence worth pursuing’ (2000a: 135). Thus it is to people’s overlapping interests in peace, rather than to any more ambitious consensus on value, that we should look for the foundation of a modus vivendi. This appeal to peace as a shared good has very considerable force. It once figured prominently in arguments for toleration but has been unjustifiably sidelined in more recent defences of toleration which have preferred philosophy to pragmatism. We
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should remember that, as Gray points out, people’s interest in peace consists not only in their being spared suffering and bloodshed, but also in their enjoying the many positive goods for which peace is a practical precondition. Nevertheless, while the appeal to peace can contribute powerfully to a general case for toleration, as an isolated justification it has its limits. One reason why many advocates of toleration fight shy of resting their case on that appeal is that, as Gray concedes, peace may not figure as an overriding value for everyone. Clearly, in our world that remains much more than a theoretical possibility. Another limitation of the appeal to peace, and one that may be more significant, is that peace may be attainable without toleration. If power is distributed sufficiently unequally, ways of life can be suppressed with little hint of open conflict.12 The last 20 years have provided ample evidence that repressive regimes can be instruments of peace, while more tolerant regimes can be catalysts for conflict and bloodshed. That is merely a dark instance of two of Gray’s core claims: that good cannot always be freed from evil and that there is no necessary harmony amongst goods. Moreover, the sort of intolerance that should and does worry Gray need be neither bloody nor repressive. It may consist in the active promotion of one way of life by proponents who (wrongly) believe it to be morally superior or uniquely legitimate, and their active erosion of rival ways of life that they deem illegitimate or inferior. Ironically, it is regimes and cultures committed to liberalism that Gray sees as presenting the greatest contemporary threat of that sort. The creeping dominance of one culture over others may provoke a violent reaction, but it may also confront nothing more than resignation and a sense of helplessness. Might there be other values to which the pluralist might look for an overlapping consensus? One whose acceptance would facilitate a modus vivendi is the value of diversity itself. That is a good that is closely associated with value-pluralism and one whose recognition is not confined to value-pluralism. But that good is also problematic as the foundation for a modus vivendi. The problem is not merely that too few doctrines would acknowledge the good of diversity or that those which do might dispute what sort of diversity is good. It is also that value-pluralism itself is not unambiguously committed to diversity as a good. Because value-pluralism recognises goods as irreducibly plural, it is often supposed that it must favour a world in which many different values are realised over one which realises fewer. Or, to apply the same point to ways of life, because value-pluralism holds that good ways of life can take many different forms, it is commonly thought that the value-pluralist will regard a world in which people live many diverse good ways of life as better than one in which everyone lives pretty much the same sort of life. But, in so far as different values or different ways of life are incommensurable, that cannot be so. If values X, Y and Z are incommensurable, we cannot say that a world in which X is realised fully and Y and Z not at all is inferior to one in which X, Y and Z are all realised in some measure. We cannot say, for example, that a world in which justice is realised fully without concession to mercy or social utility is inferior to one in which justice is sacrificed in some measure for the sake of mercy and social utility. The same holds true if X, Y and Z represent
The Political Theory of John Gray 91 ways of life. If lives X, Y and Z are incommensurable, we cannot say that a world in which everyone lives life X is less good than one in which some live life X, some life Y and some life Z. Thus, in so far as he insists that different ways of life are incommensurable, Gray has no reason to lament – even though he clearly would lament – a world in which the range of different ways of life diminishes or one in which a single way of life supplants all others.13 In a similar fashion, it might be supposed that, in so far as diverse lives are incommensurably good, a government would be acting wrongly if it sought to diminish their diversity. But, as an inference from incommensurability alone, that is too strong. In so far as diverse lives are incommensurable and we take account of nothing but their incommensurability, a government does indeed have no reason to diminish their diversity, but it also has no reason not to diminish their diversity. Even if goods are incommensurable, we may be able to apply a Pareto test to compare the relative value of different combinations of good. If X, Y and Z are each positive values, we can say that a world in which X alone is realised, and realised to a specific degree, is less good than a world in which X is realised to the same degree and some of Y is realised as well. Similarly, we can say that a world in which X and Y are each realised to a specific degree is inferior to one in which X and Y are realised to the same degree and some of Z is realised as well. In these cases, we can say that more diversity is better than less. But those comparisons will be possible only so long as the worlds we compare are identical except that one has something that the other does not. If worlds differ in other ways, as they usually do, they are not open to Pareto comparison. Notice that the Pareto test does not imply that a world in which different people live different good lives is better than one in which everyone lives one of those lives. If, as before, X, Y and Z are incommensurable, a world in which everyone lives life X is not necessarily inferior to one in which some live life X, some life Y and some life Z; three Xs are not obviously inferior to one each of X, Y and Z. At least, that is so if we evaluate the goodness of a world by assessing the goodness of the life of each individual or each community in that world. It would not be so if what mattered to us was the mere presence of X, Y and Z in the world.14 There are reasons other than incommensurability that lead Gray to favour more diversity over less, the most prominent of which is his particularism. But even particularism does not claim that a world in which there are many different good ways of life must be better than one in which there are fewer. It claims only that what is good for particular communities or individuals must take account of their particular histories and circumstances. For particularism, diversity as such is not a good; it is merely a by-product of the way in which the good needs to be realised in a world in which people’s lives are embedded in different contexts. The attempt to find a reason that can be a reason for tolerating conceptions of the good or forms of life that we believe to be mistaken is most associated nowadays with deontological liberals who distinguish between the right and the good. If we accept that distinction, we can be duty-bound not to prevent ways of life, even though we judge them bad. Gray has absolutely no sympathy with those who seek to
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distinguish the right from the good and he reserves some of his most withering and dismissive criticism for liberal theories built upon that distinction (e.g. 1995a: 1–10, 75–80; 1997: 51–54; 2002a: 69–104). Even so, I want to suggest that Gray, qua value-pluralist, has reason to rethink his wholesale subordination of the right to the good. The relation of the right and the good is obviously a complex and highly controversial matter and my comments here can be only brief and suggestive. Gray is adamant that the right must always be subordinate to the good and so gives no independent role to the right.15 More generally, he seems to subsume all values relating to human beings within an idea of well-being or human flourishing. For a valuepluralist, well-being cannot be the super-value that gives value to all other values. Presumably Gray conceives it as an inclusive general notion that encompasses all that is of value in human lives, including all values that others assign to the right rather than to the good.16 Gray’s claims about which values are, and which are not, subordinate or reducible to others are independent of value-pluralism as such. What is incompatible with value-pluralism, assuming that its reach extends to all values, is the claim that the right will escape the uncombinability and incommensurability that afflicts the good. Conflicts do arise in what we think of as the sphere of the right and, if we accept that goods conflict in ways that make them uncombinable and incommensurable, it seems reasonable to suppose that the same properties will occur in relation to the right. In addition, if we extend the idea of incommensurability to conflicts between the good and the right, we cannot say that the right must always be prior to the good. All of that is, however, entirely consistent with the claim that the ‘right’ describes a different type of value from the ‘good’. So, for example, the wrong of subjecting someone to an unfair trial is categorically different from the bad of failing to maximise their well-being. Similarly, the issue of how much responsibility we should take for one another’s well-being is a different kind of issue from the question of what constitutes our well-being. A theory of value-pluralism might be expected to be sensitive to, rather than dismissive of, these different types of value.17 Of course, with various twists and turns, we might try to recast every aspect of the right into a form of good, but I respond to that as Gray does to the reductivism of the utilitarian: it misrepresents the reality of our moral lives (1995b: 63–64; 2000a: 45; 2000c: 93). I do not want to deny that the right is often geared to the good. If the right takes the form of rights, it will often be the significance of a good that explains why we think of it as a matter of right. Indeed, while rights-thinking and consequentialism are frequently counterposed as rival forms of morality, the best arguments for some rights, such as freedom of expression, are the goods that they deliver. But that is not to concede that the right can always be cashed out as the good. Consider the following case. We reach an all-things-considered judgement that the form of life someone is living is bad and that it is possible for us through our intervention to make the way that person lives good or, at least, less bad – again, all things considered. Could it be wrong for us to intervene even so, assuming that our
The Political Theory of John Gray 93 intervention would be uninvited and unwanted? If it could, would the wrong be a wrong to the person in whose life we intervene? If we answer ‘yes’ to these questions, we seem bound to accept that the right cannot always be reduced to the good. (My use of the phrase ‘all things considered’ in relation to the good is designed to exclude all possibility that it might be some good not already taken into consideration, such as the alleged ‘good’ of autonomy, that tips the scales against intervention.) Our affirmative answer might be only a logical affirmation, or it might be both a logical and an ethical affirmation. We might concede only that, if it were wrong to intervene in the circumstances I describe, logically the right could not be wholly reducible to the good; but we might still insist that, morally, it would never be wrong to intervene in those circumstances. Alternatively, we might accept (as I do) both that, logically, the right can sometimes be conceived independently of the good and that, morally, there is indeed a right of self-determination that makes uninvited intervention wrong, at least prima facie, even though, all things considered, intervention would make someone’s life go better.18 I insert the qualification ‘prima facie’ because we may believe that what we should do in the case I describe will depend upon how bad a person’s life is and on how much better our intervention can make it. If someone’s life is very bad and our intervention could make it go very much better, we may think that the good of a better life should trump deontic objections to uninvited intervention. Alternatively, if someone’s life is bad but not too bad and if our intervention would improve it only marginally, we may think it wrong to intervene. In so far as the right and the good are incommensurable, these trade-offs will not be easily made. But even though the right may conflict with and compete with the good in this way, rather than be simply ‘prior’ to the good, it must, in so far as it can conflict with and compete with the good, be independent of the good. I see no reason then why value-pluralism should not recognise a distinction between the good and the right. If it does not, it betrays its mission to respond to the plurality of values by embracing the reality of value conflict rather than by engaging in value reductivism. Without acknowledging self-determination, individual or collective, as a matter of right independent of the good, value-pluralism will be hard put to cope with the fact of pluralism. Merely invoking ‘well-being’ as a catch-all good will not do the job. According to value-pluralism, the potential constituents of well-being must be diverse and in significant measure uncombinable and incommensurable, but that of itself is not a problem – or at least, for the value-pluralist, not a problem that should raise questions of toleration. What will present problems is disagreement amongst value-pluralists about which of the many ways of life that people do live and might live satisfy the internally diverse criterion of well-being. What presents a further problem is the different and conflicting conceptions of wellbeing possessed by those who are not value-pluralists, and perhaps also their rejection of well-being as the standard by which the goodness of human lives should be judged. If, in the face of doubts over the content and status of well-being, we still believe there is reason to allow people to live the way of life to which they are committed, we seem driven to a conception of right that is not reducible to a
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conception of the good. The status of those who are committed to a way of life should be factored into our response to it, as well as our estimate of its goodness.19 I remain deeply suspicious of claims that we should allow people to pursue their ways of life only because and in so far as we reckon them to be (commensurably or incommensurably) good. There is especial reason for suspicion if the range of lives we are enjoined to recognise or tolerate is as diverse and inclusive as Gray evidently intends. Frequently, we will not know enough about particular forms of life to make any worthwhile assessment of their goodness. We may also be unable fully to appreciate the nature of lives that we ourselves have not experienced from the inside, particularly when we address human diversity on a global scale. Yet, our limited understanding of others’ ways of life does not prevent our accepting that we would be wrong, at least prima facie, to prevent people living ways of life that are distinctively their own. The driving thought behind that acceptance is not a judgement that their way of life is good or the best open to them – how could we know that in these circumstances? Rather, it is the deontological thought that people should be able to pursue their way of life because it is theirs. The moral standing of those who are committed to a way of life should matter independently of our conception of the goodness of that way of life. In so far as Gray rejects any such conception of the right, he deprives himself of a moral resource that could contribute (and, I would argue, already does contribute) significantly to securing a modus vivendi in a world characterised by the fact of pluralism. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the participants in the Workshop on the Political Thought of John Gray held at Manchester Metropolitan University and to my colleagues in the Newcastle Political Philosophy Research Group for helpful comment on an earlier version of this article. Special thanks to John Horton. Much of the work for this paper was conducted during my tenure of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship; I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their support. Notes 1.
2.
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Gray suggests that liberalism’s giving up its self-conception as a universalist philosophy and reconceptualising itself as merely one tradition amongst others must entail its undergoing a ‘profound cultural metamorphosis’ and one that threatens its continuance (1995a: 155–157, 177–178). Commenting on Berlin, but in a way that indicates his own thinking, Gray writes, ‘Berlin’s pluralism is not the claim that there are occasional pockets of incommensurability, such that utilitarian maximization is not always a possibility: it is the more radical claim – but also the more defensible claim, if human experience is to be our guide – that incommensurability is pretty pervasive in human life and so in practical reasoning’ (1995b: 59). In Two Faces of Liberalism, Gray seems to give a more limited remit to radical choice than he does in Enlightenment’s Wake and Berlin. In the last two works, radical choice appears as a regular feature of our lives, and Gray presents it as a central feature of agonistic liberalism. But in Two Faces of Liberalism he remarks that ‘radical choices occur as crises in ethical life, not as normal episodes within it’ (2000a: 65). That may be because he has become even more convinced than formerly that
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the most significant incommensurabilities arise among communal ways of life rather than within them (2000a: 12–13, 121; 2000b: 329–331). In so far as people find themselves already embedded within a way of life, rather than having to choose amongst several ways of life, they are spared a major occasion for radical choice. The need for radical choice will arise most frequently amongst those who are heirs to different ways of life and who therefore have to choose between the conflicting demands of those different ways of life. Yet Gray also observes that nowadays ‘nearly all of us belong in several ways of life’ (2000a: 52) and that ‘as more people come to belong to several ways of life, choices of this far-reaching kind tend to become more frequent’ (2000a: 65). Although a radical choice looks as though it must be a mere act of will, Gray suggests that it may be more than that (1995b: 158–160; 2000a: 54–55). Pressed to its full conclusion, the view that a particular context will provide us with grounds for favouring one value over another, or for opting for a particular balance of values, could mean that we never, in reality, have to wrestle with incommensurability. Values that are incommensurable and that confront us with radical choices when considered in the abstract will be rendered commensurable and objects of rational choice by the specific circumstances of any real-life situation. For an optimistic account of how we can reasonably resolve conflicts arising from incommensurability and incompatibility by reference to traditions and conceptions of the good grounded in them, see Kekes (1993), especially ch. 5. Kekes’s view is not that a particular tradition and an associated conception of the good will remove incommensurability and incompatibility as causes of conflict but that they can provide us with reasons for responding to those conflicts in specific ways (1993: 94). Gray is more sceptical than Kekes of the determinacy of traditions in late modern societies (2000a: 53–54; 1997: 86–90), but he too emphasises that ‘the context of my history and circumstances’ can render my choice between conflicting incommensurable goods either right or wrong (2000a: 43). More generally, though in a different context, Gray has observed that ‘Humans cannot live without illusions’ and that ‘Illusion is our natural condition’ (2002: 29, 81, see also 82–83). In contrast with Gray’s willingness to indulge illusion, Bernard Williams, commenting on the value-pluralism of Isaiah Berlin, suggests that recognition of the truth of value-pluralism is itself valuable: ‘the consciousness of the plurality of competing values is itself a good, as constituting knowledge of an absolute and fundamental truth’ (1980: xviii). He goes on to suggest that Berlin ‘finds value in knowledge and true understanding themselves, and regards it as itself an argument for the liberal society that that society expresses more than any other does a true understanding of the pluralistic nature of values’ (1980: xviii). Crowder also argues that a life that recognises ‘the true nature of human values, including their pluralism’ is better for that reason (2002: 181–182). Galston, on the other hand, asserts, like Gray, that a life can be good even though based on illusion: ‘There are some genuine goods whose instantiation in ways of life allows or even requires illusion. … While selfaware value-pluralists cannot lead such lives, they must recognize their value. To demand that every acceptable way of life reflect a conscious awareness of value-pluralism is to affirm what valuepluralism denies – the existence of a universally dominant value’ (2002: 53). On this idea of ‘government house utilitarianism’, see Sen & Williams (1982: 16), and Williams (1973: 138–140). That term is not always used pejoratively; see, for example, Goodin (1995). I do not mean to imply that government house value-pluralism would be attractive to value-pluralists. They (like utilitarians) understand themselves to be propounding a practical rather than a merely theoretical truth and, for the most part, want it to be recognised so that people will adjust their thinking and, more especially, their conduct accordingly. Crowder makes his case partly by pointing out that, of the burdens of judgement that Rawls lists to explain the phenomenon of reasonable disagreement, the two that are specific to issues of value make claims that are, in effect, formulations of value-pluralism (see also Galston 2002: 46–47). But, whatever Rawls says, we can still distinguish between (a) differences amongst people’s conceptions of the good that are explicable in terms of incommensurability and conflicts amongst values and (b) differences that are grounded in people’s different and conflicting judgements about what is valuable. I concede that that distinction may be easier to make in principle than in practice and that there will be cases in which both factors contribute to differences among people.
96 8.
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10. 11.
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P. Jones The disagreement could also be about what is the set of incommensurably right answers, but then the dispute would be about which answers properly belong to that set rather than, per impossibile, about which answer in the set is the right answer. Thus, for example, throughout his discussion on rival freedoms in Two Faces of Liberalism (2000a: 69–104), Gray talks both of conflicting values, goods and liberties, and of conflicting judgements, views, conceptions and ideals of these, and comments (69, 72, 82) that reasonable people may differ in their judgements, views, etc. William Galston disagrees. He argues that, in reality, religions are internally sufficiently complex and diverse to be compatible with value-pluralism (1999: 880; 2002: 25–26). C.f. Gray’s remark (made in the course of criticising Oakeshott for neglecting diversity and conflict amongst, and within, political traditions): ‘when a society or a polity harbours diverse traditions or forms of life, with their associated worldviews, conceptions of the good and styles of political activity, political reasoning cannot be internal to any one tradition but must seek to identify human interests that are common to practitioners of different forms of life’ (1997: 88). Gray often describes the good that should drive us towards a modus vivendi as ‘peaceful coexistence’ rather than merely ‘peace’ and that would rule out securing peace through repression or the promotion of cultural uniformity. E.g. ‘The pluralist standard of assessment of any regime is whether it enables its subjects to coexist in a Hobbesian peace while renewing their distinctive forms of common life’ (1995a: 140). ‘The animating project of pluralism is that different cultures should dwell on the earth in peace, without renouncing their differences’ (1995a: 180). But if they have to embrace peaceful coexistence, the parties to a modus vivendi then need to be told why coexistence has value independently of peace. For Gray, the answer lies in the goodness of each of the several ways of life at issue. But another answer will be needed for those who do not share his value-pluralism or for value-pluralists who are in dispute about which ways of life are valuable. That is why I go on to argue that, in spite of his protests to the contrary, Gray needs a conception of right that is independent of the good. Even if we are agreed on the good, that does not tell us whose good should count and in what measure. Compare Williams’ oft-quoted claim that ‘if there are many and competing values, then the greater the extent to which a society tends to be single-valued, the more genuine values it neglects or suppresses. More, to this extent, must mean better’ (1980: xvii). At one time Crowder insisted that there was no logical link between pluralism and valuing diversity (1994: 300–301), but he too now argues that, subject to a coherence test, pluralism does imply that more diversity is better than less and that we have a duty to promote diversity (2002: 136–137). Crowder adopts (what he reckons to be) a less strong conception of incommensurability than Gray, according to which incommensurable values are unrankable rather than incomparable (2002: 49). But that makes no difference here: if justice and mercy are unrankable, we still cannot say that a world in which there is some justice and some mercy is better than one in which there is full justice and no mercy. Crowder’s argument seems to depend on his relaxing the assumptions of value-conflict and uncombinability so that, to a significant extent, opting for more or less diversity is just like choosing amongst X alone or X + Y or X + Y + Z (in which case the pluralist clearly would opt for X + Y + Z). He also claims that the pluralist must endorse all ultimate goods equally ‘in the sense that they have an equal claim on us’ (2002: 137). That comes very close to saying that the pluralist should attribute equal value to ultimate goods but, as Crowder himself points out, that is inconsistent with their being incommensurable. He appeals to Berlin’s description of ultimate goods as ‘equally ultimate’, but that means no more than that they are equally irreducible. One thing that may seem to make a difference here is how we suppose people benefit from ways of life. Do we benefit only from our own way of life, or do we also benefit from the existence of ways of life that we ourselves do not live? If ways of life have benign spill-overs or externalities (e.g. the joy of encountering and experiencing another’s culture), that may seem to provide a powerful Paretian argument for diversity. In a world in which there are ways of life X, Y and Z, people living life X will gain some external advantage from those who live life Y or Z, and the same will apply, mutatis mutandis, for those who live lives Y or Z. In that case, it might seem that a world in which
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15.
16.
17. 18.
19.
there are ways of life X, Y and Z must be better than one in which there is only one of those ways of life. That, however, does not follow. It would follow if X, Y and Z were of equal value, but we are supposing that these ways of life are incommensurable. In that case, we cannot know that a world in which all three ways of life are lived, and in which each yields benign externalities, is better than one in which only one way of life is lived. So, for example, those who live life X, and who gain benefit from others’ living lives Y and Z, are better off in that diverse world than they would be in a world in which everyone lived life X; but those who live life Y or Z, and who gain some benefit from others’ living life X, might be still better off if they themselves lived life X. So, even if we assume that ways of life yield benign externalities, we cannot conclude that diversity is better than uniformity, as long as the ways of life at issue remain incommensurable. ‘The right can never be prior to the good. Without the content that can be given it only by a conception of the good, the right is empty. A strictly political liberalism, which is dependent at no point on any view of the good, is an impossibility. The central categories of such a liberalism – ‘rights’, ‘justice, and the like – have a content only insofar as they express a view of the good’ (2000a: 19). Gray describes his own position as one in which ‘the good has priority over the right, but in which no one view of the good has overall priority over all others’ (2000a: 135). ‘Insofar as they have any determinate content principles of right embody substantive conceptions of the good. They express particular understandings of human interests and well-being’ (2000c: 86; see also 2000a: 15–20, 47–48, 69–104, 113–114; 2000b: 326–327; 1995a: 71–72). Gray describes human well-being as ‘the bottom line in moral and political reasoning’ (1995a: 107; 1993: 303). Contrast Nagel (1979: 128–141) who, in his version of value-pluralism, distinguishes not just between different values but between different types of value. Doubtless some will insist, even in this case, that it simply must be true that the content of the right is in the interest of, or is good for, the right-holder, whether individual or group. That insistence would indicate to me that the right is being used to give content to the right-holder’s good or interest, rather than vice versa. I require here only that the way of life be one to which its bearers are committed and not that it must be one that they have in any meaningful sense ‘chosen’. In addition, the entity that possesses the right of self-determination can be a group rather than an individual and will be where a way of life assumes a collective form. My argument here is not therefore necessarily ‘liberal’ as that term is ordinarily understood. Note, however, that a group right can be (though it does not have to be) conceived as a joint claim of the several individuals who make up the group rather than a claim of the group as unitary entity (see further, Jones 1999). In his determination to concede nothing to this form of valuing, Gray at one point seems to argue that it is forms of life, rather than the people who live them, that are the ultimate units of value and the ultimate source of rights (1993: 306–313, especially 311).
References Crowder, G. (1994) Pluralism and liberalism, Political Studies, 42, pp. 293–305. Crowder, G. (2002) Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London: Continuum). Fiala, A. (2003) Stoic tolerance, Res Publica, 9, pp. 149–168. Galston, W. (1999) Expressive liberty, moral pluralism, political pluralism: three sources of liberal theory, William and Mary Law Review, 40, pp. 869–907. Galston, W. (2002) Liberal Pluralism: the Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Goodin, R. (1995) Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gray, J. (1993) Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1995a) Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1995b) Isaiah Berlin (London: Fontana).
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Gray, J. (1997) Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity). Gray, J. (2000a) Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity). Gray, J. (2000b) Pluralism and toleration in contemporary political philosophy, Political Studies, 48, pp. 323–333. Gray, J. (2000c) Where pluralists and liberals part company, in: M. Baghramian & A. Ingram (Eds), Pluralism: the Philosophy and Politics of Diversity, pp. 85–102 (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (2002) Straw Dogs (London: Granta). Hare, R.M. (1981) Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Jones, P. (1999) Group rights and group oppression, Journal of Political Philosophy, 7, pp. 353–377. Kekes, J. (1993) The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Larmore, C. (1996) The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rawls, J. (1993) Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press). Sen, A. & Williams, B. (Eds) (1982) Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Williams, B. (1973) A critique of utilitarianism, in: J. Smart & B. Williams (Eds), Utilitarianism: For and Against, pp. 75–150 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Williams, B. (1980) Introduction, in: I. Berlin, Concepts and Categories, ed. H. Hardy, pp. xi–xviii (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Pluralism and its Discontents: John Gray’s Counter-Enlightenment PETER LASSMAN Department of Political Science and International Studies, European Research Institute, University of Birmingham, UK PeterLassman Taylor 0 2 9
[email protected] 00000June & Francis 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600655032 FCRI_A_165477.sgm 1369-8230 Original 2006 and Review Article (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
John Gray’s recent work is interesting because it raises in ways that are often markedly exaggerated what are for many some of the most central disquiets of contemporary political theory. Notably, he has objected to the excessive narrowness and artificiality of much of what counts as the academically respectable version of political theory that is generally taught in western universities. His progressive disenchantment with the dominant forms of liberalism that are of central concern in much of the Anglo-American academy is one theme of note.1 Much of what Gray has had to say about the state of academic political theory has found a sympathetic audience. However, this sympathy has probably been tested to an extreme degree by some of Gray’s most recent philosophical excursions.2 There is a concern, however, with three interrelated themes that seem to mark out the main direction of Gray’s most recent work in political theory. These are the rejection of those aspects of modernity that are presumed to be the consequence of an ‘Enlightenment project’; the idea that value-pluralism presents a central problem for political theory; and the response to
100 P. Lassman the challenge that both of these are thought to present which takes the form of the advocacy of a theory and practice of ‘modus vivendi’. The first theme to be discussed here is the thorougoing rejection, seen by some as ‘mysterious’, of what Gray sees as the fundamental philosophical claims of the Enlightenment (Ryan 2001). Gray’s account can be placed within a tradition of European disenchantment with the Enlightenment, which is as old as the Enlightenment itself. This form of anti-Enlightenment thought is powerfully represented in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, both of whom are referred to approvingly by Gray.3 In addition, and in a way that has become commonplace but is still no less controversial, Gray talks repeatedly of an ‘Enlightenment project’. Such language is often criticized by specialists concerned with the conceptual history of the Enlightenment. As far as they are concerned it seems that the more that they examine it the more complex our picture of the Enlightenment becomes, even to the extent that the term might itself become obscure or meaningless (Schmidt 1998). In fact, it appears that the existence of a coherent Enlightenment project seems to be most obvious for those who want to reject it, while those who examine it most closely are more likely to find its supposed unity dissolving into a mass of particulars (Schmidt 1995: 422). Nevertheless, Gray could argue that the question of historical accuracy is irrelevant to the general argument that he is making. If this is so, then what seems to be going on here is that the idea of the existence of an ‘Enlightenment project’ is being used more as a projection that attempts to give historical and intellectual legitimacy to contemporary political commitments, rather than as a statement claiming historical or philosophical accuracy (Schmidt 2000). The second theme is that of value-pluralism as both fact and theory. Gray’s advocacy of this idea owes much to his critical engagement with the work of Isaiah Berlin. However, Berlin’s pluralism is supplemented or corrected with reference to other influences including, most interestingly, that of Michael Oakeshott.4 The precise nature of the relationship between the first theme of hostility to the Enlightenment and the second theme of value-pluralism is not altogether clear. Although it can be argued that they are conceptually distinct theses it is certainly true that in the case of many who have made similar points, Nietzsche comes to mind here, there is no doubt that each deepens the effect of the other. The third major theme in Gray’s recent work is the presentation of a theory of modus vivendi as the best way to maintain what is valuable and philosophically defensible in modern liberalism. This response to our disenchanted and pluralist world draws, again, upon the seemingly opposing political philosophies of both Berlin and Oakeshott. Quite why we would want to defend even this version of liberalism, or post-liberalism, given the depicted emptiness of modern life is not made absolutely clear. After all there are many examples of political thinkers who have presented similar accounts of the ills of modernity and who have drawn the radically opposite conclusion that all forms of liberalism and democracy are part of the problem and hence the best policy would be to abandon them altogether.
The Political Theory of John Gray 101 The Enlightenment Project and Modernity A strongly propounded and overarching theme that has emerged in Gray’s work is his thoroughgoing ‘disenchantment with disenchantment’. Gray’s most recent work is animated by an almost total rejection of western modernity and its supposed foundations in an ‘Enlightenment project’. According to Gray’s diagnosis, Western civilization is best understood as a self-destructive nihilistic project. This is described, at times, in terms that seem to owe much to Nietzsche and Heidegger. For example, after criticizing the accounts of the Enlightenment offered by Rorty and MacIntyre, Gray commends Heidegger’s notion of ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit) as the appropriate response to the ‘post-modern condition of plural and provisional perspectives, lacking any rational or transcendental ground or unifying world view… given to us as our historical fate’ (Gray 1995b: 153). This Heidegger-inspired response is one in which we ‘let things be rather than aiming willfully to transform them or subject them to our purposes’. However, it must be added that Gray draws the line at what he calls Heidegger’s ‘nostalgia for Being’ and for the kind of pre-reflective existence that accounts for his never-renounced Nazi sympathies. Despite this thoroughgoing negative diagnosis, however, Gray also wants to argue the case for a form of political life that he calls ‘agonistic’ or ‘modus vivendi’ liberalism or ‘post-liberalism’. This seems puzzling. If western civilization, whether the product of an ‘Enlightenment project’ or not, is so doomed then why bother to defend any form of liberalism, modus vivendi or otherwise, at all? In Gray’s own words the political message of ‘the Enlightenment project’ (if we accept for the moment that there ever was such a thing) is in a state of ‘world-historical collapse’ (Gray 1994: 721). Gray clearly endorses the view, itself a mark of the counter-enlightenment, that the Enlightenment must be thought of as a selfconscious project designed and carried out by a relatively small group of early modern philosophers (Lilla 2003). Curiously, Gray’s constant appeal to the idea of an ‘Enlightenment project’ can itself be regarded as a symptom of modernity. Gray paints with a broad brush when he discusses the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment. As a consequence, there is a general lack of detail in his arguments and some fairly controversial, and generally unsubstantiated, claims are made.5 Although there is a contemporary tendency to refer to modernity as a ‘project’ the origins of this trend are often overlooked. It has been pointed out that as recently as the 1950s Leo Strauss was heavily criticized when he described modernity as a project. However, over the next 30 years this description had become a commonplace. A notable example, and one to which Gray refers uncritically, is to be found in MacIntyre’s After Virtue (MacIntyre 1991). As Bernard Yack has pointed out, the familiarity of this term has prevented us from noticing how odd it really is. By way of comparison, we do not talk of the Renaissance or of the Christian Middle Ages as a project. In response, it could, perhaps, be argued that there is some plausibilty to this identification of modernity as a project. This could rest upon the idea that the thinkers of the Enlightenment did in varying degrees
102 P. Lassman think of themeselves as creating a new age. So, it could be conceded that it is permissible to speak of a modern or of an Enlightenment project.6 However, and more questionably, what seems to happen in Gray’s work, as in so much contemporary writing, is that there is a slide from the identification of a modern or Enlightenment project to the assertion that modernity itself is a project or the outcome of a project (Yack 1997: 112–141). It must come as no surprise to see that Gray is prepared to quote Heidegger in support of his view of the nihilism of modernity. Heidegger’s work itself is marked by and exploits this ambiguity in his diagnosis of the state of the modern world. Gray’s appreciation of modernity and the Enlightenment is in many ways a reiteration of ideas that were commonplace in pre-Second World War Europe. For example, the critique of modernity that emerged after the First World War and to which Heidegger was a notable contributor went beyond the earlier Counter-Enlightenment associated with thinkers such as Herder and Vico which so much occupied the attention of Isaiah Berlin. The basic point made by this more extreme version of the counter-enlightenment, represented in particular by Nietzsche and Heidegger, was that responsibility for the failings of the modern age must be attributed to the success of the project of modern philosophy. Mark Lilla has summarized the novelty of this intellectual departure. Thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Schmitt, Marcuse, Benjamin and Karl Barth all assumed ‘that the modern age had entered a decisive historical crisis whose original source was philosophical. They all conceived modernity as a ‘project’ whose fruits could now be seen in the development of mass society, uncontrolled technological advance, mechanized killing, the trivialization of religion and art, and the flattening of human aspiration. In short, modern humanism had brought about the dehumanization of man’ (Lilla 2003: 2–3). It is interesting to observe just how much of this critique of western culture as well as its often accompanying apocolyptic vision permeates modern political thought. Paradoxically, as Lilla has pointed out, this critique of modernity is itself the work of modern thinkers. Such thinkers, he notes, are in the modern age but claim not to be of it. ‘Their very existence would therefore seem to contradict the claim many of them make, that modernity is a historical bloc with a single meaning or tendency. The critique of modernity itself shows that the modern age is divided, at least intellectually, over its own legitimacy and worth’ (Lilla 2003: 4). John Gray’s recent work in political theory can be seen as a particularly forceful example of what Isaiah Berlin called ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ thought. Gray’s work seems to fit squarely into this distinctly modern critique of modernity. His appreciation of the work of Isaiah Berlin ought to be read with this in mind. What Gray brings to his important and suggestive account of Berlin’s ideas is a sensibility permeated with an extreme critique of modernity for which Berlin himself had no patience. For example, when interrogated on the subject Berlin was not reluctant to express his distaste for the ideas of Heidegger and those influenced by him, notably in this context, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt.7 The confusion concerning the distinction between thinking of the reality of a modern project and of modernity as itself a project is clearly illustrated by the way
The Political Theory of John Gray 103 in which Gray falls into the trap of what could be called the ‘systemic fallacy’. This fallacy, typical of much contemporary social science, assumes that events, phenomena and practices that coexist at any given time must all be part of a systemic whole or, in another terminology, a totality. Given this unargued assumption it is relatively easy to find hidden causal connections that provide ready-made explanations without the inconvenience of taking stock of the inconvenient facts that always inhabit the world of historical particulars. In Gray’s case this totality is called ‘modernity’. Everything that happens, or, at least, everything that goes wrong can be attributed to the failings of modernity. And, as we know, modernity is itself the outcome of a project. For example, Gray links Al Qaeda to modernity in a way that is reminiscent of earlier arguments about the modernity, or otherwise, of the Nazi policy of the extermination of the European Jews (the Holocaust). Al Qaeda did us a service in their demolition of the World Trade Centre, Gray tells us, insofar as they ‘destroyed the West’s ruling myth’ that modernity is a single condition, ‘everywhere the same and always benign’ (Gray 2003: 1). Despite that, however, Gray argues that Al Qaeda is itself a product of modernity, a byproduct of globalization. It is on a par with all other forms of revolutionary terror, which is itself a distinctly modern reality. In Gray’s words anyone who doubts that revolutionary terror is a modern invention has contrived to forget recent history. The Soviet Union was an attempt to embody the Enlightenment ideal of a world without power or conflict. In pursuit of this ideal it killed and enslaved tens of millions of human beings. Nazi Germany committed the worst act of genocide in history. It did so with the aim of breeding a new type of human being. No previous age harboured such projects. The gas chambers and the gulags are modern. (Gray 2003: 2) The problem here is that this usage of the concept of modernity tends to assimilate to itself any and every kind of political movement and ideology. Thus anything, such as Al Qaeda, that appears on the political horizon as a new political reality is immediately subsumed under the category of modernity. As a consequence, the precise nature of the novelty and uniqueness of such political forces is completely missed. The characterization and interpretation of a new political form, in this case Al Qaeda, is guided by the assumption that modernity and the project of modernity form a coherent and integrated totality or system. Clearly Al Qaeda (and the Holocaust) are modern in a temporal sense but not necessarily in a substantive sense.8 Gray, it would appear, moves too easily between a temporal and a substantive sense of modernity. After all, it is much more of a challenge to our understanding to recognize that perhaps a defining feature of the political world is that it is open to new developments that are not best described in such a predictable and formulaic way. Doing so has the unintended effect of completely disguising their distinctly new and unprecedented character. Using a general category such as ‘modernity’ here obscures at least as much as it illuminates. After all, in this kind of analysis what is not modern in the modern world?
104 P. Lassman A clear example here of the problems created by relying upon this blanket concept of modernity is Gray’s much too easy explanation of the emergence of Al Qaeda and similar organizations in terms of the general category of ‘modernity’. For Gray, ‘radical Islam is modern. Though it claims to be anti-Western, it is shaped as much by western ideology as by Islamic traditions. Like Marxists and neo-liberals, radical Islamists see history as a prelude to a new world. All are convinced they can remake the human condition. If there is a uniquely modern myth, this is it’ (Gray 2003: 2). However, Al Qaeda is also described as being modern insofar as its intellectual roots are, to a large degree, to be found in the influence of the radical romantic European counter-Enlightenment upon the Islamic world. There is something comforting about the kind of explanation that Gray is putting forward here. Although there is, if we accept this view, something unnerving in accepting that the Enlightenment or modernity is responsible in some way for our problems, it is also a consolation to think that unfamiliar and unpleasant realities can be subsumed under familiar causes. This is curious in the context of Gray’s reiteration of the openness and unpredictability of human history. Of course, the modern west rather than Al Qaeda is Gray’s real target. Gray’s conclusion is that far from there being a ‘war of civilizations’ there is, in reality, only one war and that is the civil war within western civilization. Unfortunately, only Gray and a few other visionaries understand this fact. Without going into detail here it would appear that, in stark contrast to Gray’s assertions, a much more cautious reluctance to theorize and generalize in this way was a central feature of Berlin’s political thought, which is characterized throughout by an appreciation of the ‘sense of reality or of history which enables us to detect the relationships of actual things and persons’ and is aware of the tension that must always exist between that appreciation of the particular and the need to make use of general theoretical abstractions.9 The main complaint that Gray makes against Enlightenment liberalism is that it mistakenly claims for itself a false universalism. According to Gray this ‘universalist claim of political philosophy in the central Western tradition is transmitted to the political thought of modernity, which in all its varieties, liberal or otherwise, is an application of the Enlightenment project – the project of giving human institutions a claim on reason that has universal authority’ (Gray 1995c: 111). This political philosophy appears in another guise as a philosophy of history. Its main characteristic is that it propounds a vision of progress and of cultural and social convergence towards a rational and cosmopolitan universal civilization. Gray dismisses the objection to his argument that it would point to the diversity of ideas and locations within the movement of ideas generally referred to as ‘the Enlightenment’ and, therefore, the dubiousness of speaking of a unified Enlightenment project’. The ‘core project of the Enlightenment’ Gray argues ‘was the displacement of local, customary or traditional moralities, and all forms of transcendental faith, by a critical or rational morality, which was projected as the basis of a universal civilization. Whether it was conceived in utilitarian or contractarian, rights-based or duty-based terms, this morality would be secular and humanist, and it would set universal standards for the assessment of human institutions. The core
The Political Theory of John Gray 105 project of the Enlightenment was the construction of such a critical morality, rationally binding on all human beings, and, as a corollary, the creation of a universal civilization’ (Gray 1994: 724). This aspect of Gray’s account seems to be indebted to Oakeshott’s rejection of rationalism. Another aspect of the enlightenment project, as defined by Gray, is its support for a particular and distinctive image of man, a philosophical anthropology, which regards cultural identities as personally chosen ways of life whose proper place is in the private realm. Gray argues that this is a deeply misleading view. It is a fact of modern political life that contemporary liberal political thought finds very difficult to accomodate that such identities are not chosen but are more accurately understood as the product of fate rather than of choice. It is, therefore, most important for political understanding that we recognize this as the source of the agonistic and, often, tragic character of modern political life. The idea of an Enlightenment project which is of central importance for Gray’s version of pluralism is also indebted to large extent to the account put forward by Alasdair MacIntyre. Gray accepts MacIntyre’s belief that it makes sense to speak of the Enlightenment as a unified and coherent intellectual and political movement. In order to make sense of the political, cultural, and intellectual life of our own time it is essential that we understand how we have been shaped by this project and also by its inevitable failure. Gray enthusiastically endorses MacIntyre’s identification of the Enlightenment with the idea of providing an independent rational justification for morality. The inevitable failure to do so has created a world in which moral and political debate is typically regarded in terms of a confrontation between incompatible and incommensurable premises. Moral commitment can be no more than a criterionless choice between such premises, a type of choice for which no rational justification can be given. This description of the moral consequences of Enlightenment modernity gains support, in Gray’s view, from the political thought of Isaiah Berlin, which many would see as an unlikely source. Value-pluralism: The Road from Berlin An important move in Gray’s progressive disenchantment with the dominant schools of Anglo-American political theory can be found in his interpretation of and enthusiasm for the work of Isaiah Berlin. The central idea that inspires Gray in Berlin’s work is that of value-pluralism. Gray’s own proposal of a theory of ‘agonistic liberalism’ owes much to Berlin’s influence. This, however, has itself evolved into a theory of ‘post-liberal pluralism’ that many would think of as being at odds with the general direction of Berlin’s political thought. This particular construction, in turn, proposed that the most realistic response to the disenchanted and post-liberal predicament is to embrace a form of pluralism that Berlin would probably have found uncongenial. In Gray’s opinion, the true implication of Berlin’s political thought resides in the acceptance of a radical value-pluralism that has the unintended consequence of undermining the claims of traditional liberalism. The outcome of this diagnosis is an
106 P. Lassman argument for a form of what Gray calls ‘agonistic liberalism’. The key question then becomes one of the coherence and viability of this new political form. While many of the tensions in Berlin’s political thought rest upon the way in which he was influenced by the divergent calls of both his favourite Enlightenment thinkers and their Romantic critics Gray’s argument is much more, one-sidedly, indebted to the ideas of the counter-Enlightenment. The campaign that he is fighting is much more unambiguously an assault upon the Enlightenment citadel. If this is so, then it is hard, ultimately, to accept the use to which Berlin is put as an authority for the legitimation of this account. One of the most significant differences between Gray’s pluralism and that of Berlin is to be found in their interpretation of the nature of modernity. For Gray this is tied in to his depiction and rejection of what he refers to as ‘the Enlightenment project’. In his turn towards a ‘modus vivendi’ response to modern pluralism Gray draws inspiration from Hobbes. What seems to ensue is an unstable mixture drawing upon the seemingly incompatible influences of Berlin, Hobbes and Oakeshott. Gray often refers to the influence of Oakeshott, one of the most significant of Hobbes’s interpreters, although its precise nature is not easy to decipher. Gray has referred to both Berlin and Oakeshott as important thinkers who have upheld a style of political thought that stands in stark contrast to the predominant (American) forms of liberal theorizing. The political thought of both Berlin and Oakeshott is commended for not being based upon ideas of consensus or rational choice (Gray 2000: 138). In response to what he considers to be the central Anglo-American orthodoxy, Gray offers a ‘neo-Hobbesian philosophy of modus vivendi’ as his response to the condition of modern pluralism. But, of course, just as Berlin’s theory of value-pluralism need not necessarily lend support for liberalism, as Gray has himself argued, it is equally true that Hobbes’s philosophy does not provide unambiguously clear support for Gray’s agonistic alternative. After all, as has been pointed out many times, Hobbes did not believe that a stable peace within or between states could be based upon a modus vivendi. The whole idea of the ‘generation of the Sovereign’ is to escape from the uncertainty of this state of affairs. And one might also add that, far from the prospect of cultural coexistence that Gray at times refers to, as far as Hobbes was concerned this arena of civil life can never escape completely from ‘the natural condition’ of war10. Nevertheless, Gray characterizes his response to the challenge of modern pluralism as a form of ‘neoHobbesian liberalism’. Labels are not the most important thing in political theory but this self-characterization ought to put us on guard against other contestable interpretations or ‘creative misreadings’. The precise nature of the relationship between Berlin’s pluralism and his liberalism is still a controversial topic. Gray’s interpretation of Berlin’s political thought has the merit of bringing into the open many of its inherent tensions and problems. His central argument is that ‘Berlin’s master-thesis of value-pluralism, which is defined as a thesis of the incommensurability, or incomparability by reason, of rivalrous goods and evils and forms of life, has the role in his thought of privileging choice-making as the embodiment of human self-creation’ (Gray 1995a: 142).
The Political Theory of John Gray 107 Gray’s interpretation of Berlin’s pluralism emphasises what he sees as the more existentialist and ‘decisionist’ aspects of his thought. At the same time, Gray joins the ranks of a small but controversial band of political thinkers who question the way in which Berlin and some other proponents of pluralism seem generally to accept the idea that there is a general harmony between it and liberalism. According to Gray, there are three main ways in which Berlin connects pluralism to liberalism. The first rests upon Berlin’s defence of the value of negative liberty. If the quality of ‘self-creation’ is emphasized then, on Gray’s account, negative liberty is the pre-eminent value because ‘it facilitates human self-creation by choicemaking among goods and evils that are rationally incomparable. Value-pluralism supports liberalism here in that it is by the choices protected by negative freedom that we negotiate our way among incommensurable values’ (Gray 1995a: 143). The second component of Gray’s interpretation of Berlin’s attempt to link pluralism and liberalism rests on the argument that as values are rationally incommensurable it must follow that no state or other political authority can have good reason to impose any particular values or combination of values upon its citizens. If value-pluralism is true then it can also be argued, as does Bernard Williams, that the consciousness of this pluralism is itself a good (Williams 1980). Authoritarian or illiberal regimes, in contrast, deny the validity of pluralism. Gray sees Berlin as the author of a highly distinctive form of liberalism. He goes so far as to say that Berlin’s liberalism is ‘the most profoundly deliberated, and most powerfully defended, in our time, or, perhaps, in any time’ (Gray 1995a: 145). In saying this, as Michael Walzer pointed out, Gray was inadvertently assuming that Berlin’s liberalism is itself not incommensurable with other twentieth-century forms of liberalism (Walzer 1995: 29). However, even if that is so, the distinctive character of Berlin’s liberalism, it is claimed, resides in what Gray calls its ‘agonistic’ character. Gray’s interpretation of the significance of Berlin’s work is stated in highly dramatic and portentious terms. The idea of pluralism that ‘animates all of Berlin’s work, both in intellectual history and in political theory, is one which, if true, as I take it to be, strikes a death-blow to the central, classical Western tradition - and, it must be added, to the project of the Enlightenment’ (Gray 1993: 64–65). The ‘agonistic’ character of this new form of liberalism resides in the fact that ‘ultimate values are objective and knowable, but they are many, they often come into conflict with one another and are uncombinable in a single human being or a single society, and that in many of such conflicts there is no overarching standard whereby the competing claims of such ultimate values are rationally arbitrable. Conflicts among such values are conflicts among incommensurables, and the choices we make among them are bound to be radical and, often, tragic choices. There is then no summum bonum or logos, no Aristotelian mean or Platonic form of the good, no perfect form of human life, which we may never find but towards which we may struggle, no measuring rod on which different forms of human life encompassing different and uncombinable goods can be ranked. This assertion of the variety and incommensurability of the goods of human life is not, it is worth noting, the Augustinian thesis that human life is
108 P. Lassman imperfect, and imperfectible: it is the thesis that the very idea of perfection is incoherent’ (Gray 1993: 65). This means that Berlin, in putting forward a new agonistic form of liberalism recognizes a thoroughgoing pluralism of values that includes the negative and positive liberties, and is arguing for something that is clearly distinct from the main forms of contemporary liberal theory with its obsessive concern to discover secure foundations for theories of rights and justice. Indeed, the radical nature of Gray’s interpretation of the true implications of Berlin’s pluralism is shown in his claim that it produces not only a distinct form of liberalism but, more significantly, that it undercuts all rival forms. The reason given for this is simply that if value-pluralism is true then liberty can only be one of many other incommensurable values. Berlin’s own famous working out of the distinction between positive and negative liberty itself illustrates the reality of the incommensurability and conflict between rival values. For Gray, all the predominant forms of liberalism contain within themselves an idea of rational choice which is subverted by Berlin’s thesis of value-pluralism. Gray’s conclusion is that the lesson to be learnt from this is that if we accept the truth of value-pluralism we must acknowledge the limits of rationality and embrace the fact of radical choice. Gray softens his argument a little when he concedes that where there is a conflict of values a way for resolving such a conflict will, often, be suggested by the cultural context. This is, perhaps, where an Oakeshottian remedy is being offered for a Berlinian problem. However, this is in stark contrast to Berlin’s suggestion that when possible we ought to look for trade-offs and compromise between conflicting values and goods even when we know that there is no principle that shows it to be the most rational solution. In facing up to this problem Berlin agreed that, in the context of ‘the fallacy of realizing ultimate harmony’, the problem of the existence of mutually exclusive choices as the foundation of human creativity seems to have no clear answer. However, Berlin went one step further in not leaving the argument there. As far as he was concerned, there was an obligation to ‘soften’ those collisions of values that cannot be avoided. In Berlin’s words ‘claims can be balanced, compromises can be reached: in concrete situations not every claim is of equal force – so much liberty and so much equality; so much for sharp moral condemnation, and so much for understanding a given human situation; so much for the full force of the law, and so much for the prerogative of mercy … Priorities, never final and absolute must be established’ (Berlin 1991: 17). At the heart of Berlin’s political thought there is a tension between the emphasis upon the reality of pluralism which, at the same time, recognizes the danger of dramatizing the incompatibility of values. At the heart of Berlin’s support for the idea of pluralism there seem to be two motivating ideas. Pluralism is enlisted as an intellectual weapon against the appeal of perfection which, for Berlin writing in post-war Europe, means Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. On this, there can be no compromise. On the other hand, non-totalitarian states can aim for an ‘uneasy equilibrium’ that is the ‘necessary precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behaviour’ (Berlin 1991: 19). Berlin wanted, ultimately, to enlist his controversial
The Political Theory of John Gray 109 thesis of value-pluralism in defence of the principles of the Enlightenment. In Gray’s case, the fact and the theory of value-pluralism serve to undermine it. Although it is true that one can find some contradictory statements on the question of the relationship between pluralism and liberalism in Berlin’s texts, the real question here is the one that Gray asks: does pluralism support liberalism or does it come into conflict with it? One of the most controversial claims to emerge from Gray’s interpretation of Berlin’s work is that if we accept the full implications of the truth of pluralism then we are led to the inescapable conclusion that liberal regimes cannot claim to have a privileged position. In Gray’s words, where ‘liberal values come into conflict with others which depend for their existence on non-liberal social or political structures and forms of life, and where these values are truly incommensurables, there can – if pluralism is true – be no argument according universal priority to liberal values. To deny this is to deny the thesis of the incommensurability of values’ (Gray 1995a: 145). It is this that separates Gray’s claim from what he refers to as ‘the weak form of pluralism’. The mistake made by weak pluralists, according to Gray, is that although they accept the uncombinability of values or human goods they maintain that they are open to rational comparability. Controversially, Gray avoids this option. He gives two reasons. He asserts that this is clearly not Berlin’s position. Even more controversially, he asserts that claims that comparability is compatible with incommensurability would require a general theory or general account such as that provided by classical utilitarianism to deliver a framework for rational choice. Although Gray admits that reasoning about value conflicts is possible within particular contexts it does not follow, as he implies, that we ought to think that any universal principles have to be involved. The main point that Gray derives from this suggestion is that given that we accept the reality of value-pluralism as he describes it then liberal values, that is the values embodied in liberal institutions, are unable to claim any privileged status. Liberal ways of life cannot claim any kind of uncontested superiority over non-liberal ways of life. As a consequence, Gray claims that the true message of Berlin’s liberal pluralism is the creation of a form of ‘agonistic liberalism’ that is clearly distinct from all other traditional forms of liberalism. Gray’s own development of the case for ‘agonistic liberalism’ rests, to a large degree, upon the inspiration that he derives from his interpretation of Berlin. This is of general significance because what we see here, in the debate between Gray and his critics, is an airing of some of the most difficult and contentious problems raised by the idea of pluralism. In short, it appears that Gray’s portrayal of Berlin as ‘the Nietzsche of All Souls’ indicates but also exaggerates some of the apparent uncertainties to be found in his thought.11 More to the point, it also shows how the idea of value-pluralism can be fused with other notions that owe more to the general permeation of postmodernist and counter-Enlightenment ideas than they do to traditional liberalism. Nevertheless, Gray’s work is instructive and challenging. Although he claims a Berlinian inspiration, when taking on these issues there is one area where Gray is clearly un-Berlinian. This is his general attitude to the Enlightenment. The key move in Gray’s transition
110 P. Lassman from his earlier liberalism to his later ‘post-liberal’ and pluralist standpoint would appear to be the relatively under-theorized endorsement of a theory of radical pluralism. This, in Gray’s account, undermines the claims of traditional liberalism, including, by implication, Berlin’s attempt to combine pluralism with liberalism. However, the addition of an outright condemnation of the “Enlightenment Project” and of the ‘nihilism’ inherent in Western civilization provides the guiding thread to Gray’s reflections. The thesis of radical value-pluralism combined with a general hostility to the ideas perceived as constituting the core of the ‘Enlightenment project’ provide support for each other. But, if this is so, one is still left wondering why this move does not deepen the nihilism of modernity. Is it possible to have a viable form of liberalism that so resolutely rejects the ideals of the Enlightenment as they are generally understood, irrespective of their being correctly or incorrectly understood as emanating from a ‘project’? Gray’s answer comes in the form of a third kind of liberalism that attempts to do without the support of Enlightenment ideas. Modus vivendi: From Kant to Hobbes and Heidegger? A fundamental idea in Gray’s reformulation of the future for liberalism is that of a ‘modus vivendi’. He argues that liberalism has two faces; it contains two contrasting philosophies. ‘In one, toleration is justified as a means to truth. In this view, toleration is an instrument of rational consensus, and a diversity of ways of life is endured in the faith that it is destined to disappear. In the other, toleration is valued as a condition of peace, and divergent ways of living are welcomed as marks of diversity in the good life. The first conception supports an ideal of ultimate convergence on values, the latter an ideal of modus vivendi’ (Gray 2000: 105). For Gray liberalism must abandon any idea of achieving a rational consensus and must seek, instead, a modus vivendi as its basic rationale. Gray also describes this as a move back from Kant to Hobbes as a source of inspiration for contemporary political thinking. Gray understands liberalism as a doctrine that is deeply divided. Liberalism, he argues, has ‘two faces’. One face looks towards a world of toleration as the pursuit of an ideal form of life. The other face is turned towards a search for terms of peace that would allow different forms of life to coexist: In the former view, liberal institutions are seen as applications of universal principles. In the latter, they are means to peaceful coexistence. In the first, liberalism is a prescription for a universal regime. In the second, it is a project of coexistence that can be pursued in many regimes. (Gray 2000: 2) Clearly, the first version owes much to Kant and Rawls while the second is derived primarily from a controversial interpretation of Hobbes. Gray also mentions in this context both Isaiah Berlin and Michael Oakeshott as exemplars of this more restrained form of liberalism. It would seem that at the heart of Gray’s thought here we can detect an unstable mixture of an Oakeshott-inspired rejection of all forms of rationalism in politics and a Berlin-inspired espousal of the truth of pluralism.
The Political Theory of John Gray 111 Where Gray, it must be presumed, departs from the the spirit of Berlin’s political thought must reside in his fundamental idea that value-pluralism undermines the claims of liberalism. Of course, it can be argued that Gray is pointing to a dilemma that has been noted many times in Berlin’s pluralism. This is to the effect that a radical pluralism that stresses the radical incommensurability of values does not, in itself, establish the primacy of liberalism or of liberal values. Berlin’s pluralism, if taken to its logical conclusion, the argument goes, undermines his liberalism. In fact, it is argued, Berlin’s support for liberalism is derived from considerations other than his avowed pluralism.12 Berlin draws upon ideas of a distinctly Enlightenment-influenced kind. He sets limits to pluralism that are based upon non-pluralist ideas of a common human nature and of the minimum and universal requirements for a decent human life. In contrast to Berlin, Gray’s expressed aim, despite his apocalyptic warnings about civilizational doom, is to argue for a form of modus vivendi liberalism. Gray presents himself as an opponent of all forms of foundationalism in political theory. However, it is clear that his version of value-pluralism, which is itself best understood as a highly controversial theory, plays a foundational role in his account of modus vivendi. As Gray tells us, ‘modus vivendi articulates a view of the good. It is an application of value-pluralism to political practice’ (Gray 2000: 25). Given his characterization of liberalism as having two faces Gray is forced to place all liberal political thinkers into either one of these two categories. This, argue his critics, is where the trouble begins. Although Gray’s dichotomy is extremely useful, the charge is that in forcing a complex tradition into this categorial net serious misreprestation of the main rival theories as well as of his own is bound to ensue. The question here is whether modus vivendi can provide a ‘renewal of the liberal project’ that is genuinely distinctive and superior to its rivals (Gray 2000: 33)? The obvious rival theory is the Political Liberalism championed most notably by John Rawls. The problem here is that Rawls’s theory of political liberalism has been created on the basis of an attempt to answer the same problems as Gray’s modus vivendi. However, Rawls’s ‘anti-philosophical’ and ‘anti-universalist’ theory does not fit easily into Gray’s dichotomy. If this is so, then there must be room for at least one other face of liberalism (Talisse 2000). It is misleading to characterize Rawls’s theory, as Gray does, as being just another form of Enlightenment liberalism. Rawls’s discussion and rejection of the claims made for modus vivendi plays a central role in his argument for political liberalism. Rawls, it must be remembered, rejected the idea of a modus vivendi on the grounds that it would be inherently unstable. Gray misrepresents Rawls’s alternative response to the problem of pluralism. As a consequence, he has not demonstrated that Rawls’s alternative of an ‘overlapping consensus’ is unworkable. Whatever our verdict might be on the success of Rawls’s political liberalism, it is clear that the idea of an overlapping consensus is meant to be a ‘post-Enlightenment’ alternative to the two versions of liberalism that Gray offers. Gray’s own solution of modus vivendi is unsuccessful in its own terms. It either promises too much or too little. In effect, Gray smuggles in through the back door
112 P. Lassman the considerations that he found so objectionable in other forms of liberalism, including those clearly belonging to the Enlightenment tradition. According to Gray, ‘Liberals and pluralists walk side by side in resisting totalitarian and fundamentalist regimes. Modus vivendi is impossible in a regime in which the varieties of the good are seen as symptoms of error or heresy. Without institutions in which different ways of life are accorded respect there cannot be peaceful coexistence between them. Where liberal regimes foster this coexistence, pluralists are bound to support them’ (2000: 20). This clearly claims much more from a modus vivendi than we were initially led to expect. Gray makes the value of respect for other ways of life central for the stability of his version of modus vivendi. He is also assuming that rational citizens of a regime of modus vivendi would prefer compromise to conflict. It is hard to see here where the clear difference exists between Gray’s modus vivendi and some of the versions of liberalism that he wants to reject. The problem here is that Gray’s modus vivendi alternative to the nihilism engendered by the ‘Enlightenment Project’ itself relies upon the assumption that citizens of a post-liberal state have accepted the truth of value-pluralism. But value-pluralism is itself a highly controversial theory and as such it is hard to see how it could provide support for a political regime.13 In other words, Gray’s solution to the problem of pluralism does not escape from the difficulties that he identified in Enlightenment liberalism. His own account of modus vivendi rests upon the general acceptance of a controversial comprehensive doctrine (to use Rawlsian terminology). It would appear that the kinds of people who would inhabit Gray’s modus vivendi society would have to be the kind of people that many Enlightenment thinkers hoped would be the citizens of the future; tolerant citizens of a liberal state.14 Furthermore, insofar as there are to be limits to what can count as a legitimate form of modus vivendi it seems that Gray has not escaped making the kind of universalist claims that he has otherwise condemned. It would appear that our problem is that we cannot both totally dispense with the ideas that we owe to the Enlightenment and argue for any form of liberal regime, even if it takes the form of a ‘modus vivendi’. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
6. 7. 8. 9.
See, for example, ‘Notes toward a Definition of the Political Thought of Tlon’ in Gray (1995b). For example, Gray (2004) and Gray (2002). Gray does also refer mischievously to Nietzsche as ‘late modern Europe’s greatest Enlightenment thinker’ in Gray (1999). There is a brief comparison of the two thinkers in ‘Berlin, Oakeshott, and the Enlightenment’, in Gray (1997). Gray does sometimes present a more nuanced picture of the Enlightenment. See, for example Gray 1998: 3, where he refers to the Enlightenment as ‘an extended family of intellectual and political movements’. See, for example Wokler (1998). See Berlin’s remarks in Jahanbegloo (1992). See Bernard Yack’s discussion of this distinction (Yack 1997: ch. 2). See, for example, Berlin (1996).
The Political Theory of John Gray 113 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
This point has been made most clearly by Gaus (2003: ch. 3). This phrase is used by Ryan (2001). See Gaus (2003: 49). See Talisse (2000: 441–458) and Larmore (1996: 152–174). See Ryan (2001).
References Berlin, I. (1991) The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: Fontana). Berlin, I. (1996) The Sense of Reality (London: Pimlico). Gaus, G. (2003) Contemporary Theories of Liberalism (London: Sage). Gray, J. (1993) Post-Liberalism. Studies in Political Thought (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1994) After the new liberalism, Social Research, 61(3), pp. 719–735. Gray, J. (1995a) Berlin (London: Fontana). Gray, J. (1995b) Enlightenment’s Wake (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1995c) Agonistic liberalism, Social Philosophy and Policy, 12(1), pp. 111–135. Gray, J. (1997) Endgames. Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity). Gray, J. (1999) Voltaire (New York: Routledge). Gray, J. (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity). Gray, J. (2002) Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta). Gray, J. (2003) Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Faber). Gray, J. (2004) Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (London: Granta). Jahanbegloo, R. (1992) Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Phoenix). Larmore, C. (1996) The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lilla, M. (2003) What is counter-Enlightenment?, in: J. Mali & N.D.R. Wokler (Eds), Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society). MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue (London: Duckworth). Ryan, A. (2001) Live and let live, New York Review of Books, 48(8), pp. 54–57. Schmidt, J. (1998) Civility, Enlightenment, and society: conceptual confusions and Kantian remedies, American Political Science Review, 92(2), pp. 419–427. Schmidt, J. (2000) What Enlightenment project?, Political Theory, 28(6), pp. 734–757. Talisse, R. (2000) Two faced liberalism, Critical Review, 14(4), pp. 441–458. Walzer, M. (1995) Are there limits to liberalism?, The New York Review of Books, pp. 28–31. Williams, B. (1980) Introduction, in: I. Berlin, Concepts and Categories, ed. H. Hardy, pp. xi–xviii (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wokler, R. (1998) The Enlightenment project and the French revolutionary birth pangs of modernity, in: J. Heilbron et al. (Eds), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity, pp. 35–76 (Dordrecht: Kluwer). Yack, B. (1997) The Fetishism of Modernities (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame).
Gray’s Elegy for Progress GLYN MORGAN Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA GlynMorgan 0 2
[email protected] 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600655040 FCRI_A_165478.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 9 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
One of the great merits of John Gray’s work is that it locates the concept of ‘progress’ at the very centre of the western intellectual tradition. Gray is sometimes criticized for his ‘intellectual gyrations’ (Skidelsky 1998: 11–12), but he has never shifted his focus away from the concept of ‘progress’. Thus in his early writings, Gray (1983) emphasized the role that ‘progress’ played in John Stuart Mill’s moral and political thought. Gray rightly argued that key features of Mill’s defense of the ‘Doctrine of Liberty’ turned on the plausibility of an account of progress. In later writings, Gray (1989: esp. chs 1 and 12; 1993 esp. ch. 20; 1995; 1996a; 1996b) has grown increasingly skeptical of Mill’s theory of progress and liberal theories of progress in general. In his most recent writings (2002, 2003, 2004), Gray has taken these doubts a stage further to question the very effort of subjugating nature for human purposes. This promethean project ends, so Gray now fears, in a traduced
116 G. Morgan and uninhabitable planet. His proposed solution involves a thorough rethinking of the anthropocentric framework that has dominated the western intellectual tradition. In attacking progress, Gray is taking aim at a central legitimating myth of western societies. These societies assume that progress or improvement lies in the direction of a universal liberal civilization – a civilization of wealthy, self-fulfilled, selfgoverning individuals. Gray wants to dislodge this myth in favour of an alternative: the myth of diversity. He envisages a world of different political regimes, each of which has established in its own way a minimal modus vivendi that protects its members from ‘generic evils’ (Gray 2000: ch. 4). This essay argues that Gray’s alternative to a universal liberal civilization is implausible in theory and unworkable in practice. To the extent that we wish to protect ourselves from ‘generic evils’, then, a universal liberal civilization is our best bet. Fortunately, the liberal conception of progress – far from being obviated by historical developments, as Gray maintains – remains in a relatively good state of repair. History and the Liberal Idea of Progress John Gray thinks that liberals have failed to appreciate the extent to which their moral and political prescriptions depend upon a conception of progress that actual historical developments have rendered false. Modern history, so Gray argues, has undermined liberal doctrines in two related ways: one, there has been no historical convergence on liberal political institutions; and two, the historical emergence of relatively successful non-liberal capitalist states undermines the claims of individualist liberalism to universal authority. It is far from obvious that liberal political doctrines are, in any shape or form, committed to a theory of history, still less a theory that might be refuted by actual historical developments. Thus a first step in assessing Gray’s critique is to examine the extent to which liberal political doctrines might be corrigible and even falsifiable in the light of historical developments. It would help here if we also recognized the variegated nature of liberal political doctrines, not all of which are, on the face of it, equally vulnerable to empirical or historical falsification (Morgan 2007). Consider, for instance, that strain of the liberal tradition – call it Socratic liberalism – that values the iconoclastic individual and the type of society that sustains such a character (Mill 1859: ch. 2; Villa 2001). This conception of liberalism is anchored in a timeless, trans-cultural conception of human flourishing. It generates a conception of progress linked to the presence, strength and number of social states that nurture the iconoclastic, inquiring Socratic individual. Whether the passage of history is more or less favourable to such societies does not invalidate the claims of Socratic liberalism to define the model of human flourishing. Indeed, Socratic liberalism appears to be more or less boiler-plated against the slings and arrows of historical fortune. There is, however, a price to pay for this type of protection. The great weakness of Socratic liberalism is that its claims to identify the model of human flourishing are very difficult to justify. It is not obvious why this type of individual – one type amongst many – ought to be privileged over others. Furthermore, there are
The Political Theory of John Gray 117 likely to be many social states where the Socratic individual, far from ‘flourishing’, is likely to lead a thoroughly miserable existence – modern day Japan, for instance (Miyamoto 1994). Most contemporary liberal theorists have recognized these problems and have sought to justify liberal political doctrines on less controversial and more culturally specific grounds (Rawls 1991; cf. also Katznelson 1996; Larmore 1996; Moon 1994). Emile Durkheim’s writings (1995, 1997) provide us with a good example of a historically more specific liberalism. Durkheim conceived of a liberal society as the historical achievement of complex societies that had seen the progressive weakening of a thick, shared collective conscience. For Durkheim (1997), the individual was a social role that simply did not exist in pre-modern societies. In modern societies, in contrast, the individual becomes ‘the sacred’ basis of social cohesion (Durkheim 1995). While a corrosive rationality de-mythologizes all other religions, rendering them ineffective as bases of social order, the individual becomes the centre of a new religion of humanity. Here I am less interested in the plausibility of Durkheim’s theory of social cohesion than in the claim that liberalism is a social and political doctrine that belongs to a modern socially complex society. A similar view, although expressed in a very different idiom, informs some of Jυ¨ rgen Habermas’s writings (1988, 1992). Like Durkheim, Habermas thinks that the conditions under which a liberal society becomes inescapable presuppose a certain stage of societal development. Not only must societies have achieved a certain level of social complexity, but they must also have adopted a post-metaphysical perspective, which is to say that they are no longer held together by the more primitive myths of religion. Regardless of the plausibility of Durkheim’s and Habermas’s theory of social development, these theories provide an important example of a form of liberalism – call it Durkheimian liberalism – that is tied to a particular, historically formed social state. In this respect, this form of liberalism is very different from the Socratic liberalism discussed earlier. My third example of a liberal doctrine is drawn from the Scottish Enlightenment. For Adam Smith (1981: 5), the measure of a society’s wealth was a function of its ability to provide its members with ‘the necessaries and conveniences of life’. Smith himself tended to think of these ‘necessaries and conveniences’ in terms of basic social goods like security, food, clothing and lodging. He was quite confident in his judgement that all human beings everywhere would prefer a society with a greater supply of these goods. He was no less confident in his capacity to identify not just the behavioural characteristics necessary to sustain a wealth-producing society, but also the requisite social and political institutions. This line of argument – whether Smith himself ultimately pursued it or not – can easily sustain a liberal political doctrine. Interestingly, it can do so in two rather different ways. In one form, liberal political institutions can be related to ‘the necessaries and conveniences of life’ on categorical grounds. In other words, it might be argued – in ways not too dissimilar from Socratic liberalism – that liberal institutions are essential or categorical components of ‘the necessaries and conveniences of life.’ In another form, liberal values and institutions can be related to ‘the necessaries and conveniences of life’
118 G. Morgan not categorically but instrumentally. From this perspective, liberal institutions have no intrinsic value; they are valuable insofar as they are necessary to enable individuals to acquire and secure more basic goods like security, food, lodging and clothing. Scottish Enlightenment liberalism thus generates two different forms of liberalism: categorical and instrumental. One way of interpreting John Stuart Mill’s liberalism – and the widely noted tensions within that liberalism – might be to say that Mill never fully made up his mind whether he wished to endorse liberal political institutions on categorical or instrumental grounds. The great achievement of John Gray’s scholarship on Mill is to lay bare this tension within Mill’s writings. In his first major work on Mill, written while Gray was committed to the so-called ‘revisionist camp’ of Mill scholarship, Gray interpreted Mill (albeit with some misgivings) as an instrumental liberal. The alternative, as Gray saw it then, was ‘the desperate essentialist expedient of simply defining human flourishing as bounded by the condition of human freedom’ (1983: 120). Yet in interpreting Mill in an instrumentalist light, Gray makes Mill’s liberalism hostage to a range of empirical issues that Mill himself did little to resolve. As Gray puts this absolutely critical point: I suggest we adopt a strategy of argument more consistently empiricist than Mill’s if we treat the commitment to liberty as grounded in an inductive wager about human nature. If we do this, we will be sacrificing the moral certainty that Mill’s liberal beliefs afforded him, but to which he has no right in the empiricist terms of his general philosophy … The Doctrine of Liberty … will depend on certain social and psychological conditions and hold good only in cultural milieux where these conditions are satisfied. We will be going one step further than Mill, who allowed that the Doctrine of Liberty applied only when a definite stage of civilization had been achieved, by acknowledging (as Mill rarely did) that we have no assurance that civilization can always be maintained. Barbarism remains a permanent possibility, and where the social and moral psychology of barbarism prevails, the conditions demanded by the Doctrine of Liberty are no longer met. (1983: 120) Given this interpretative tack, it is perhaps not surprising that Gray was later to change his mind about Mill and the instrumental liberal argument in general (Gray 1989: ch. 12). More surprising is that one of the principal reasons for this change of mind is the recent success of East Asian capitalist societies (Gray 1993: 204, 246– 247; Gray 1995: 14, 16, 55, 83, 101, 169; Gray 1996: 153–154). These societies (especially Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan) seem to have convinced Gray that there is no close link between, what might be termed, ‘the necessary and conveniences of life’ and the individualist form of liberalism defended by Mill and his contemporary epigones. To the extent that these societies prosper while retaining non-liberal values and practices, then, Gray believes, instrumentalist liberalism loses much of its normative authority. It should now be clear that the three different conceptions of liberalism discussed above – Socratic liberalism, Durkheimian liberalism and Scottish Enlightenment
The Political Theory of John Gray 119 liberalism – are vulnerable to historical developments in different degrees and in different ways. Socratic liberalism is the least vulnerable. Indeed, this form of liberalism is hardly vulnerable at all. Proponents of this form of liberalism recommend it to all people in all societies; they measure progress by the spread of societies that sustain the form of iconoclastic individualism that defines this conception of human flourishing. The fact that history might be yielding a global society of conformist clods simply reinforces the urgency of the Socratic liberal message. There are some fairly obvious drawbacks to a theory of liberalism that remains so detached from the movement of history. But Socratic liberalism is one form of liberalism that cannot be falsified by history. Durkheimian and Scottish Enlightenment liberalism are, in contrast, much more sensitive to historical developments. Thus Durkheimian liberalism presupposes a complex socially differentiated society that can no long depend upon any collective myths other than those that celebrate the individual. This line of argument would be falsified if modern complex societies depended for their social cohesion on something other than individualist norms and practices. Scottish Enlightenment liberalism seems even more vulnerable to historical falsification, because it suggests that liberal institutions are instrumental to ‘the necessaries and conveniences of life’. Gray’s argument is then up to this point quite correct: some influential conceptions of liberalism do depend upon a conception of progress that is open to historical falsification. To concede, however, that Durkheimian and Scottish Enlightenment liberalism are sensitive to historical outcomes is not, however, to conclude that these forms of liberalism have been refuted by history. Indeed, it is not altogether clear how and why Gray reaches this conclusion. His first criticism is that there has been no historical convergence on liberal institutions. At first glance, it is difficult to understand why the alleged absence of historical convergence matters. Neither Durkheimian nor Scottish Enlightenment liberalism needs to be embarrassed that some societies remain stuck in earlier stages of development. It would only be embarrassing if the most advanced economies and the most highly differentiated, complex societies lacked the key elements of a liberal regime. It would be even more embarrassing if it could be shown that liberal political institutions (the rule of law, property rights, a competitive electoral democracy, and so forth) act as a significant constraint on economic and social development. Liberals would then have to defend their preferred institutions even at the price of their economic inefficiencies. Thus if we were to live in a world where traditional or authoritarian societies were all wealthy (in the Smithian sense of the term) while the liberal states were impoverished - unable to provide their citizens with security, food, clothing, and housing – then Gray might be correct. But this is not our world. Most wealthy countries possess liberal democratic institutions. Thus of the top thirty countries on the UN Human Development Index, 28 are ‘free’ as defined by the Freedom House Index; the two exceptions are Hong Kong and Singapore (United Nations 2004; Freedom House 2004). Furthermore, contrary to Gray’s constant reference to the absence of convergence, there are clear signs that the most economically-advanced societies – the Arab oil states are
120 G. Morgan the exception - are adopting not just similar institutions but many of the same policies (Wolf: 2003). Perhaps we would be forced to abandon this rather optimistic liberal view if China and India were to become wealthy societies without adopting liberal political institutions. But this seems unlikely. India already possesses liberal democratic institutions, so its further economic growth cannot easily be taken as evidence of the failure of the liberal philosophy of history. China, to be sure, currently lacks anything even approximating to liberal democratic institutions. But it is unlikely to be able to continue its current economic growth without moving in a liberal direction. Here the evidence of the successful East Asian societies tends to confirm rather than refute the liberal theory of progress. None of these societies is likely to remain economically successful, unless it develops liberal institutions that protect the freedoms of the individual. There is, in explanation of this trend, an important socioeconomic mechanism that these societies find difficult to ignore. Simply stated, modern wealthy societies are based upon a knowledge-intensive production process. No state can remain wealthy without developing, attracting and retaining a sufficient number of educated scientific, technical and administrative personnel. These people – mobile, easily bored, iconoclastic and sybaritic – will live and work only in societies that permit the unconstrained development of their individuality. Thus a country like Singapore – dull, conformist and authoritarian - has found it very difficult to attract a sufficient number of the most creative people in the world. Its ability to compete in the new global marketplace has, in recent years, suffered accordingly. Consider, for instance, the following remarks by Goh Chok Tong, Singapore’s former prime minister: To support our entrepreneurs, we need to develop an overall environment that encourages people to discover, create and experiment … Studies have shown that the arts can help individuals to become more creative, in areas beyond the arts. They are an important source of inspiration and a powerful avenue for individual expression. Furthermore, a culturally vibrant city attracts global creative talent. Creative people are highly mobile. They do not slavishly go to where the jobs are. They choose where they want to work based on their lifestyle interests, and the jobs and prosperity follow them. They want an authentic street and neighbourhood environment, a thriving music and arts scene, openness and diversity. Singapore needs a few little ‘Bohemias. (Tong 2002) The political and business elite in Singapore, having belatedly recognized this problem, have now introduced some of the necessary reforms – finally tolerating, for instance, ‘bar-dancing’ (Agente France Press 2003). John Gray’s writings have done us the great service of reminding us that some important conceptions of liberalism are based upon an idea of progress. Gray is quite correct to think that the liberal idea of progress contains a philosophy of history. Crudely stated, liberals think that the story of the expansion of human welfare is a story in which liberal institutions play an important role. If our actual
The Political Theory of John Gray 121 empirical history had worked itself out in such a way that liberal institutions were either irrelevant or an obstacle to the expansion of human welfare, then the liberal idea of progress would be in trouble. But for the reasons mentioned in this section, our actual empirical history does not support this conclusion. The cunning of history has not, in short, outfoxed the liberal idea of progress. Progress and Value-pluralism A second criticism that Gray makes of the liberal idea of progress is that it denies, what might be termed, the fact of value-pluralism. Liberals are, as Gray rightly notes, committed to the view that liberal societies are generally superior to or more advanced than non-liberal societies. Gray argues that this view would be impossible to sustain, if it could be shown that our fundamental values are rival and incommensurable. In many of Gray’s writings (1995 chs 9–10; 1996a: ch. 2; 2000: ch. 2), he has sought to persuade us that values take precisely this form. For Gray, in short, ‘there are many kinds of good life, some of which cannot be compared in worth’ (2000: 34). Gray seems to think that to recognize the fact of value-pluralism is to relinquish any idea of progress, because it will be impossible to judge one social state as better, more advanced, or further along the path of progress than any other. The ‘goods’ made available in, say, the society described in Homer’s Iliad are not available to those of a modern liberal society, which makes possible a set of very different – and for the most part incompatible – goods. Human flourishing, as Gray notes, ‘can come in many different forms’ (1989: 257). Gray’s argument here might be clarified by way of a comparison with the eighteenth-century German romantic J.G. Herder, for whom human nature is not the vessel of an absolute, independent, unchangeable happiness, as philosophers assert; rather, it attracts as much happiness as it can; it is a malleable clay that can conform itself to the most different situations, needs, and influences. Even the image of happiness changes with every condition and location … All comparison misses the point … Who can compare the different satisfaction of different senses in different worlds … Every nation has its centre of happiness within itself, just as every sphere has its centre of gravity. (1979: 34–35 my translation) Herder’s writings are animated by hostility towards the universalist pretensions of the French lumières. He refuses to allow, what he regards as the evaluative standards of French urban intellectuals to serve as the evaluative standards for Germany. Herder is no crude nihilist; he recognizes objective evaluative standards that can be employed to criticize nations and their practices. Herder remains, however, partially a relativist - a national cultural relativist - because he holds that the relevant objective evaluative standards are culturally and historically specific to each national culture. Germany (and likewise any other nation) could thus be criticized for failing to live up to the standards embedded in its own national traditions. One important
122 G. Morgan point to recognize about Herder’s position is that it is flatly incompatible with the developmental theory of history that informed many of the key texts of the Scottish Enlightenment (Meek 1976). Thus in some of Adam Smith’s writings (1981: 689– 691), we find a narrative history that runs from an age (or nation) of hunters, through the ages of shepherds and husbandmen, up to the current age of commerce. For Smith, these ages can be interpreted as unambiguous stages on the road to improvement. Against the Herderian view of the incomparability of the forms of happiness, Smith thinks that there is a stable, basic, and measurable conception of human well-being, a conception that he captures, as we have seen in the previous section, with the term ‘the necessaries and conveniences of life’. Smith believes that commercial societies are, all things considered, superior, simply because they can provide more people with more of these ‘necessaries and conveniences’ (food, clothing, lodging and so forth). Thus even the least well off in a commercial society (‘a workman of the lowest and poorest order’) will, so Smith argues, generally ‘enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire’ (Smith 1981: 10–11). It follows from this perspective that a commercial society represents an achievement of progress or improvement. Moreover, it is an achievement that is made possible by the application of the type of moral and scientific knowledge found in Smith’s writings. If, as Herder suggests, human nature lacks any stable, culturally transcendent core, then it would be impossible to describe any nation or age as more advanced or better than any other. The Yanomami Indians are happy in their way; contemporary Italians are happy in theirs. While Gray sometimes writes favorably of Herder (see especially, 1995: 136; 1996a: 129–132), Gray is neither a nihilist nor a national cultural relativist. For Gray (as for many contemporary value-pluralists), there are evils – ‘universal’ or ‘generic evils,’ as he calls them (2000: 50–53, 66–67) – that prevent almost anyone, no matter what their ethical beliefs, from living a decent life (cf. also Hampshire 1989: 155; Galston 2002: 30). These evils are grounded upon a common, fixed human nature. As Gray (2000: 66) puts it: To be tortured, or forced to witness the torture of loved ones or compatriots; to be separated from one’s friends, family, or country; to be subjected to humiliation or persecution, or threatened with genocide, to be locked in poverty or avoidable ill-health – these are great evils for all who suffer them. Gray’s provisional list of evils does not, so he believes, entail any broader substantive universal morality. Indeed, he seems to think that these evils have been recognized as such by numerous different, otherwise conflicting, moralities. In other words, these ‘evils’ define only a minimum standard that can be satisfied by a polity that defines a modus vivendi between groups that otherwise share no thicker or substantive conception of the good. Gray offers a number of different accounts of the type of modus vivendi regime that he has in mind (1989: 262–264; 1993: 314– 320; 1995: 136–143; 2000: 106–107). But all of these accounts share one fixed point of agreement: they reject the individualist liberal political culture that Mill and
The Political Theory of John Gray 123 his epigones envisioned as the telos of human development. Gray repeatedly criticizes the pretensions of liberal political systems to be uniquely well-suited to protect against ‘generic evils’. Liberal political regimes have no moral or political authority – no claim to superiority – over the many other political regimes that can and have protected their members from ‘generic evils’. For Gray, we should renounce the idea of a liberal political regime as a universal project. We should seek instead a multiplicity of different regimes that provide their members with a stable modus vivendi. To fully come to grips with this aspect of Gray’s argument, we need to consider in more detail his account of the ‘generic evils’. The Political Solution to ‘Generic Evils’ In a critical contemporaneous review of Francis Fukuyama’s (1989) essay concerning ‘the end of history’, Gray (1993: ch. 17) challenged Fukuyama’s claims about the unique success of the liberal democratic model of capitalism. ‘Who can doubt’, Gray asked (1993: 246). ‘that human beings flourished under the feudal institutions of medieval Christendom? Or under the monarchical government of Elizabethan England?’ If Gray is correct to think (a) that ‘generic evils’ provide the only plausible universal standard of evaluation, and (b) that a wide range of non-liberal regimes can satisfy this standard of evaluation, then his case against liberal theories of progress (whether those of J.S. Mill, Fukuyama, or any one else) would appear to be on strong ground. But Gray’s argument here is not persuasive, because it rests on the assumption that people have no greater security against ‘generic evils’ in a modern liberal democracy than they do in non-liberal societies. Contrary to Gray’s suggestion, the protection that modern liberal societies offer against ‘generic evils’ is superior in two different ways. First, modern liberal societies are wealthier – in the Smithian sense of the ‘necessaries and conveniences of life’ – than nearly all pre-existing historical societies. It is simply impossible for a government to eradicate such ‘generic evils’ as malnutrition and grinding poverty unless one has the wealth that a modern capitalist economy can alone make available. Second, modern liberal societies are premised on the idea of equal recognition, a point that Fukuyama (1992) rightly emphasizes. Whereas feudal and early modern European regimes secured some people against ‘generic evils’, the modern liberal state is premised on the idea that all citizens have an equal claim to be protected against these evils. Clearly, no one can doubt that some people flourished under the political systems of medieval Christendom. But the same might be said of almost any regime, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Duvalier’s Haiti, and apartheid-era South Africa. The aim of modern liberal societies is to protect all citizens on roughly terms against ‘generic evils’. Indeed, one of the great achievements of modern liberal civilizations is that they consider unequal recognition to be one of the most serious ‘generic evils’. From this perspective, any society that does not accord its citizens with equal recognition is ipso facto illegitimate. The trouble with Gray’s evaluative standard – an unduly limited account of the ‘generic evils’ – is that he sets the bar too low, thereby allowing societies to pass
124 G. Morgan muster when they ought to be condemned as illegitimate. Another way of putting this point is to say that any adequate standard of political legitimacy needs to consider both the goods that a polity makes available to its members (a goaloriented standard) and its conception of membership (a fairness-oriented standard). A political regime can fail its members either because it cannot deliver the goods – it cannot provide, in other words, sufficient security against ‘generic evils’; or because it is unfair – it does not treat its members, in other words, as equals. The fairnessoriented component of a legitimate political regime is not captured by Gray’s account of ‘generic evils’ grounded in certain alleged commonalities of human nature. Indeed, the very idea of being treated as an equal has very little to do with any ‘constancy in human nature’. Most societies in most periods of history have been hierarchical and exclusionary. Indeed, our natural human inclinations may well tend towards domination and submission. But these observations do nothing to justify hierarchy and domination. Equality of moral status and the political recognition of that fact are achievements of the modern world; they are uniquely realized in modern liberal societies. Even if we were to grant arguendo that Gray’s very spare account of the ‘generic evils’ were acceptable, his own political recommendation for eradicating these evils – a modus vivendi polity that establishes ‘articles of peace’ – is still inadequate. The problem with Gray’s proposals for a modus vivendi polity is that they trade upon an ambiguity in his argument concerning value-pluralism. Consider the following revealing passage (Gray 1995: 136): In polities that are plural or divided, the legal recognition of different communities, and of their different jurisdictions, may well be mandated on the Hobbesian ground that it promotes peace. It may be justified on another, independent ground – that it enables practitioners of distinctive cultural traditions to have these mirrored in the legal orders to which they are subject … Such legal pluralism is justifiable, in other words, not only on the Hobbesian rationale of promoting the peace, but also on the Herderian ground that it allows even peoples commingled in the same territories or human settlements to recognize their cultural identities in the legal orders to which they are subject. The difficulty with this line of argument is that it fails to explain why a dominant group has any reason to refrain from excluding cultural minorities from the public sphere. Dominant groups have acted in this way for centuries; and minorities often put up with such treatment, simply because they lack the power to threaten the established articles of peace. Gray thus mentions an alternative Herderian ground for recognizing cultural identities. Here the ambiguity arises. On a nationalist reading of Herder, all people have a reason to value their own distinctive cultural heritage. The fact that I have a reason to value my Welsh heritage, does not mean, however, that I have a reason to value the Englishman’s heritage. Nor does it mean that I have a reason to respect the Englishman who values his heritage as much as I value mine. On another (more accurate) multiculturalist reading of Herder, all
The Political Theory of John Gray 125 people have a reason to respect not merely their own cultural heritage but that of others too. From this perspective, I have a reason to respect the Englishman who values his heritage; he has a reason to respect me for valuing mine; and we both have a reason to respect the Scots for valuing theirs. It should now be quite clear that any modus vivendi based on Herderian grounds will only be sufficient to engender stability insofar as people are (in the terms I’ve used here) multiculturalists rather than nationalists. In a society of nationalists, the dominant national group will have no reason to accord equal recognition to national minorities. In such a society, the most that can be attained is a mere Hobbesian peace. Nationalists in this Hobbesian society will have to become multiculturalists, before minority groups will be able to secure any form of equal recognition. But if Gray’s argument for a modus vivendi depends upon wide public acceptance of this form of multiculturalism then Gray’s modus vivendi rests upon foundations no less controversial, no less sectarian, than the substantive form of liberalism that he is so eager to dispatch. Indeed, Gray’s argument for a modus vivendi polity involves the abandonment of a ‘myth’ of progress in favour of a ‘myth’ of diversity. This aspect of Gray’s argument deserves further comment. The Myth of Progress Gray’s most recent work (2002, 2003, 2004) focuses on the role of a ‘myth’ of progress in the self-understanding of modern western societies. Consider here, for instance, the following claim: The modern myth is that with the advance of science one set of values will be accepted everywhere … The trouble with this belief is not that it is a myth but that it is harmful. Human life could scarcely go on without myths. Certainly politics cannot. The flaw in the modern myth is that it tethers us to a hope of unity, when we should be learning to live with conflict. (Gray 2002: 103–104) The name that Gray gives to this modern myth is ‘positivism’, a worldview that exercises a powerful hold on modern societies. For Gray, the positivist conception of progress contains three interlocking ideas: (a) Science enables humanity to conquer nature, thereby solving problems arising from scarcity; (b) Progress in science goes together with progress in ethics and politics; and (c) Progress in science leads societies to converge on a common model. Gray is doubtless correct to argue that this positivist conception of progress does inform ways of thinking and acting in modern liberal societies. But it would be a mistake to exaggerate the importance of this myth, because it co-exists with – and is tempered by – a number of other ‘myths’ that are no less deeply entrenched and influential (Midgley 2003). Let me mention three.
126 G. Morgan The Diversity Myth In his recent work, Will Kymlicka (2000: 43) has noted an emerging consensus among political theorists around what he terms ‘liberal culturalism’. In employing this term, Kymlicka has in mind the now widespread assumption that modern liberal societies ought to accord – not out of expediency but out of justice – some form of recognition and support for ethnocultural minorities. This ‘liberal culturalism’ has now displaced earlier conceptions of universalism and assimilation. No one can now read without feeling a certain sense of shock John Stuart Mill’s description of, especially, the Welsh, but also the Scottish Highlanders and the Bretons, as ‘half-savage relics of past times’ (Mill 1861: 431). The intellectual effort to revive liberal universalism in, say, the work of Brian Barry (2000), has likewise been widely perceived as shocking and disreputable (Levy 2004). Even in comparison to the 1960s and 1970s, modern liberal societies have undergone a seachange in their attitudes and policies towards ethnocultural minorities. The very idea of assimilation has now become largely discredited. More generally, modern liberal societies all now tend to make efforts to ensure that leading public institutions are, in some way, ‘representative’ of the ethnocultural diversity of their societies. Any important public institution that consists exclusively of white males is prima facie illegitimate.
The Spirituality Myth Most modern liberal societies – with the notable exceptions of the United States and Ireland – are predominantly secular, both publicly and non-publicly. True, these societies are considerably less secular than many nineteenth-century social theorists would have expected. The monotheistic religions continue to command the allegiance of a significant percentage of the population in every western industrial society. Even if ‘Christianity’ is not now a legitimating myth of modern liberal societies, the same cannot be said of a more diffuse ‘spirituality’. The rise of secularism, in other words, has not been accompanied by a rise of any form of philosophical ‘materialism’. Indeed, the materialist – the individual with a dogmatic allegiance to a scientific worldview – remains in modern literature a comic figure; someone who is incapable of full self-understanding until he or she has come to terms with his or her ‘spiritual’ side. Some sense of ‘spirituality’ is now widely believed to be a necessary feature of every fully developed human being and every fully decent society. Thus during the period of the Cold War, the intellectual defenders of western liberal societies would often emphasize the one-sided materialism of communist regimes. Even today the problems of post-communist societies are often blamed on the legacy of their ‘soulless’ materialism. ‘Spirituality’ functions as a self-identifying, self-valorizing myth of modern liberal societies, because it reinforces an important element of the self-conception of individuals in these societies. People in modern liberal societies want to think of themselves and their society as open to the spiritual dimension of human life. They
The Political Theory of John Gray 127 react with horror when critics such as Osama bin Laden claim that modern liberal societies are ‘materialistic’. Yet while people strongly identify with ‘the spiritual’, they disagree about the range or content of the spiritual realm. For some, it remains the traditional theocratic religions; for others, it is some new eastern religion; and for still others, it is some more diffuse animism that treats as a spiritual object ‘the earth’ and ‘all living animals’. Thus in contrast to Durkheim, who, as we have seen, expected ‘the individual’ to form the core of our sense of the sacred, modern liberal societies have sacralized a whole range of other elements of the cosmos, including animals, the environment and even crystals. The Democracy Myth Modern liberal societies imagine themselves as democratic. Members of such societies not only think that democracy is, at least for societies like theirs, the only legitimate form of government. No less importantly, they think of their society as democratic in the Tocquevillean sense of the term: a society of natural and social equals. The ‘democracy myth’ works to delegitimate any natural or entrenched hierarchies. In a fully democratic society, any form of ‘elite’ becomes controversial and a target for social reform. Thus in most modern liberal societies, the idea of tracking (or ‘streaming’) high-school students is considered unacceptable. In some modern liberal societies such as Germany and Spain, even the idea of elite universities is considered unacceptable. Democracy is probably the most powerful ‘myth’ in modern liberal societies. It forms a central element in the self-understanding of these societies. As is the case with the other ‘myths’ discussed here – those of ‘diversity’ and ‘spirituality’ – there is something shocking, even offensive, about arguments that reject ‘democracy’. To question the natural, political and social equality of one’s fellows is to call into question one’s standing as a full member of modern liberal society. Indeed, in some liberal societies to claim that some particular group is naturally inferior to others is a criminal offense. This brief account of three ‘myths’ of modern liberal society is not meant to be exhaustive. Doubtless, there are other important ‘myths’. (All modern liberal societies rely, for instance, on various more specific ‘national’ myths, which serve to provide each with a particular geographical and historical identity.) The three myths of ‘diversity’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘democracy’ are important, however, because they complicate any simple story of the commitment of modern liberal societies to a positivist conception of progress. Gray is thus only in part correct, when he describes progress as the modern myth. It is a modern myth, but its importance is qualified and often subordinated to other ‘myths’. Thus many aspects of modern liberal society are not governed by the imperatives of science and technology. We resist control by technocrats out of democratic considerations; we refuse to allow cloning – and even, in the case of the United States, stem cell research – out of spiritual considerations; and we resist (for the most part) forcing other societies to become modern and liberal partly out of diversity considerations.
128 G. Morgan Despite the presence of these counter-myths to progress, Gray nonetheless worries that western societies remain unduly wedded to an overweening myth of progress. Yet insofar as we take seriously ‘generic evils’, it is difficult to accept Gray’s line of argument here. We need the discoveries of science and the benefits of technology, if we are to secure ‘the necessaries and conveniences of life’. The greatest threat to this endeavour now comes not from the belief in progress, but from those who would elevate religion above science, diversity above individuality, and democratic levelling above the training of an intellectual elite. These developments, which Gray appears to welcome, promise nothing but to make us all less happy than we otherwise could be.
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Straw Dogs, Blind Horses and Post-Humanism: The Greening of Gray? JOHN BARRY Institute of Governance, Public Policy and Social Research, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland
[email protected] 0 2 9 Dr 00000June JohnBarry 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600655057 FCRI_A_165479.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
Introduction With the exception of political theorists such as Brian Barry, and to a lesser extent Charles Taylor and David Miller, John Gray is one of the few major modern thinkers within what one can call the ‘mainstream’ of contemporary political theorizing of to have discussed Green or ecological issues and ideas. Equally, he is one of the most intriguing and idiosyncratic. While the overwhelming bulk of contemporary political theory, particularly debates within liberalism, has little if anything to say about ecological concerns, Gray has been a notable exception in his interest in and integration of ecological themes and issues into his thinking. An important landmark in Gray’s journey from supporter of the free market distemper of the 1980s to a Green, scientifically based post-humanism in his latest works, can be traced to a chapter entitled ‘An Agenda for Green Conservatism’ in his 1993 book, Beyond the New Right, which offers his first exploration into distinctly ‘Green’ political territory. From this exploratory article onwards, significant aspects of Gray’s thought
132 J. Barry and the themes he has tackled in his ‘post-liberalism’, has seemed to move in a ‘Green’ direction. From his trenchant critique of the Enlightenment and the selfdefeating Prometheanism of a technologically focused conception of progress,1 his rejection of globalising capitalism as a dystopian fantasy, to his wholesale embracing of James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’, to his defence of better treatment of animals and championing of non-western and mystical traditions of thinking and the integration of these normative concerns with a hard-headed ‘realpolitik’ analysis of geopolitical conflict in an age of ecological scarcity are all themes that, on first gloss, make him a ‘Green’ thinker. However, the level of engagement with Green thought is, as suggested below, rather cursory and superficial, given it is confined to some marginal thinkers and ideas within Green theory – a pattern that, as this essay will seek to demonstrate, has continued to mark the ‘Greening’ of Gray’s thought in an idiosyncratic manner. Thus Gray’s take on Green ideas is one that is, to say the least, unique to Gray, and not in keeping, either in spirit or substance with the core concerns of Green thought, especially his neglect of the non-ecological progressive agenda of Green thinking relating to political and economic issues. Nevertheless, there are interesting points to be discussed in the engagement of Gray with Green ideas, and while Gray could learn much from a more comprehensive reading of Green thought, there is also much of interest in Gray’s ideas from a Green perspective. This essay offers a Green critique of Gray, which while pointing out the ways in which he can be considered as a putative Green thinker, also seeks to demonstrate how he misunderstands basic Green concepts and ideas, and that his particular Malthusian, population-obsessed, scientistic and religious-spiritual version of Green thinking is at the very least radically incomplete, and at worst a caricature. The essay concludes that despite the problematic character of Gray’s engagement with Green thinking, there is much potential in this exchange, and that Green political thought can be enriched by addressing the issues Gray identifies. Equally, it concludes that it is an open question as to whether Gray is willing to integrate the distinctly ‘progressive’ political concerns that are at the core of Green politics, inter alia, an unashamedly egalitarian conception of social, environmental and global justice, the democratization and decentralization of social, political and economic life and the creation of a sustainable ‘post-capitalist’ economy. Scientific and Ethical Naturalism, Post-humanism and Green Politics Gray’s attempt to articulate a post-humanist, naturalist theory of humanity is one that finds an echo in some recent attempts to more fully develop Green politics based on naturalistic foundations. In seeking to shift the terrain of political debate to a serious consideration of naturalism, Gray’s thinking is compatible, I think, with an ethical naturalist theory of Green politics that I briefly sketch below. In other words, what I outline below is an account of Green normative theory which is compatible with Gray’s post-humanist thinking, though as I indicate it also parts company with his condemnation of humanism.
The Political Theory of John Gray 133 Greens may be better known for defending animal rights/better treatment of animals but equally Green thinking has been also about challenging the normative significance of the distinction between ‘humanity’ and ‘non-humanity’ and creating a space in which new moral norms are needed to regulate the relationship between humanity and non-humanity. This is something that has animated Gray’s ‘posthumanist’ turn for some time now, and thus is another piece of evidence for suggesting him as a Green thinker. Both Gray and Green thinking begin from a concern with the character, dynamics and implications of the ‘human condition’ for how we are to live, relate to each other and the non-human world. As I understand it, the Green take on the ‘human condition’ is one that overlaps considerably with that of Gray in terms of denoting a series of ineliminable dimensions of human existence on this planet and covers not just natural limits, constraints or considerations that need to be taken into account for human endeavours (ecological limits and scarcity, for example, being the most prominent), but also limiting conditions arising from human nature itself, including ineliminable contingency, plurality and conflicting human interests and concerns. A naturalistic approach to Green politics starts from the view that attention to what it means to be human not only shows the continuity between the human and non-human worlds, but also delimits the effective range of moralized human-nature relations. On this point Gray is shoulder to shoulder with Green thinkers who (at least morally, if not always and consistently politically) have been labouring for years to demonstrate that humans are not just like animals, but are animals. Like Gray, Green thinkers have used evolutionary and Darwinian thinking to undermine humanism, anthropocentrism and the belief in the uniqueness and moral superiority of humans (Barry 1999a). Or rather, as will be pointed out below, the ‘arrogance of humanism’ (Ehrenfeld 1978) has been a constant target of Green thinking for over three decades. However, going against the grain of most environmental ethics and Gray’s ‘posthumanism’, I contend that a naturalistic meta-ethical position turns on the idea that being human counts for something, concern with human interests is normatively significant, and that ‘speciesism’ or prima facie favouritism towards members of ones own species is neither an ‘irrational bias’, nor akin to sexism or racism as typically held by non-anthropocentric, ecocentric or deep ecological theorists. Rather, it is at the centre of any workable moral theory covering human-environmental interaction. Thus, this naturalistic theory of Green politics goes against the ‘ecocentric’ impetus of much of the thinking within environmental ethics and Green thinking, and indeed represents a more nuanced view of ‘naturalism’ as not necessarily implying a post or anti-humanism, as Gray seems to suggest. However, there is much merit in Gray’s concern with the importance of a naturalistic understanding of the ‘human condition’ in discussing ethical and political questions. In adopting a naturalistic ethical position, this should not be taken to imply that the moral foundation of Green politics rests on a strong and determinate account of ‘human nature’. Rather, it highlights certain salient features of human beings that are more or less ‘givens’, which any ethical theory must take into account. As Gray
134 J. Barry comments, ‘other animals are born, seek mates, forage for food, and die. That is all. But we humans – we think – are different’ (Gray 2002: 38). Again to repeat, the Green starting point, and one which Gray also seems to accept, is that we are not just like animals, but we are animals with all that entails in terms of understanding ourselves as a particular species of primate, and our capacity for ethical thinking and acting having its origins in our evolutionary origins (Barry 1999a). Humanity is unique in the range and variety of ecological possibilities open to us. It is precisely this self-reflexively grounded capacity for choice that allows the possibility of moral concerns to be a factor permeating social-environmental exchanges. Here, Gray’s support for better treatment of animals is a case in point (Gray 2004: 72–79). One way of looking at this from a naturalistic perspective is to note the difference between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ instincts (Midgley 1995: 52–57). Closed instincts are fixed and unchangeable, triggering automatic responses; that is closed instincts ‘determine’ action. Open instincts are tendencies for certain general kinds of behaviour that are learnt by experience. It is clear that Gray’s conviction that we do not possess ‘free will’ in anything like the way most modern political theorists suppose is close to saying that we only possess closed instincts, and that focusing on institutional changes in how we manage our metabolism with nature is, at best, a secondary issue, or one that ought not be the main focus of concern, a position which, as suggested later, is a programme for political passivity and quietism. His frequent positive endorsement of the Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’ can be understood as underwriting his post or anti-humanist or ‘Earth-centred’ thinking. The Gaia hypothesis suggests that the earth is a living organism, with its own inbuilt feedback mechanisms. It is often used within Green thinking to buttress arguments for saving the planet, but the real upshot of the Gaia hypothesis is that the planet does not need saving, as Lovelock himself has forcefully suggested (Lovelock 1988: 212). The reality of the Gaia hypothesis is that if humans continue to inflict ecological damage on global and local scales then the earth will no longer function as our species’ life support system. In other words, the planet will continue and prosper without humans. This is the upshot of Gray’s ‘post-humanist’, Gaia-inspired vision – a vision of the planet that is, quite literally, ‘posthuman’. The main reason for this, as Lovelock himself indicates and as some Greens have recognized (Dobson 1990), is that the Gaia hypothesis is essentially anti- or non-anthropocentric/humanist, in the sense that its focus is not humanity or its interests or its long-term survival, but the planet and its living and non-living entities and processes considered as an inter-related whole. For example, as Lovelock rightly points out, ‘the very concept of pollution is anthropocentric and it may even be irrelevant in the Gaian context’ (Lovelock 1988: 110). It is clear that Gray’s use of the Gaia hypothesis moves him in this ‘post-humanist’ direction, since as he puts it: ‘it may indeed be that the Gaian vision, being free from anthropocentrism which privileges humans in the universe … is the most appropriate antidote to this [sentimental-humanist] malady of the spirit that parades as enlightenment’ (Gray 1993: 177).
The Political Theory of John Gray 135 As even a cursory knowledge of the evolution of human society and the histories of human societies indicates, relations between humans and parts of their environment, particularly domesticated animals, has never been entirely devoid of moral content. Indeed, in keeping with Gray’s (Humean and Burkean) stress on history and practices – that is focusing on what human beings did and do, rather than abstractly hypothesising about what they may or should do – in every human society we find social relations co-existing alongside productive relations between human and non-human animals. A strong interpretation of this is Benton’s statement that ‘humans and animals stand in social relationships to one another … It implies that non-human animals are in part constitutive of human societies’ (1993: 68). We need not accept this strong version to see that human culture goes beyond relations between humans. Gray’s version of this strong non-instrumental connection between humans and non-humans is Wilson’s ‘biophilia’ hypothesis that denotes affective relations and feelings of kinship that humans have with other living entities. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that to interact with other species according to criteria other than those pertaining to material consumption is itself constitutive of human nature and culture. A person who, or a human culture that, treated and used other species as non-humans treat and interact with one another, i.e. with no moral dimensions whatsoever, would be strange to us. The central claim of a naturalistic ‘ethics of use’, as opposed to an ‘environmental ethic’ (Barry 1999a), is that an extension of human interests can achieve many of the practical outcomes desired by non-anthropocentrists but on a more secure basis, that of critically interrogating human interests in the world. A broader view of human values and interests in the world may obviate the necessity for non-anthropocentric sources of moral concern. Part of this broadening process involves the examination of human interests, not the rejection of ‘humanism’. Re-assessing human interests opens up another way to understand Gray’s ‘post-humanism’, and one that may be more in keeping with the broad thrust of Green thinking. Rather than seeing it as denoting a wholesale condemnation and rejection of humanism, one could understand it as a plea for the inclusion of non-human concerns and perspectives, and for the displacing of human interests (narrowly viewed in instrumental terms) as the only or most important morally relevant considerations. Gray’s ‘post-humanism’ could be viewed more correctly as a critique of the ‘arrogance of humanism’ (Ehrenfeld 1978) rather than humanism per se, in the same manner as I have argued here and elsewhere (Barry 1999a) that the focus of Green ethical arguments should be seen as critiques of narrow or unreflective anthropocentrism, and of how the latter reduces human interests to economic and self-interested ones, rather than a wholesale critique and rejection of anthropocentrism per se.
Gray’s Misunderstanding of the Green Thought Green thinkers understand that humans can never be masters of the Earth. Yet in their Luddite struggle against technology they renew the illusion that the
136 J. Barry world can be made the instrument of human purposes. Whatever they say, most Green thinkers offer yet another version of humanism, not an alternative to it. (Gray 2002: 15) As far as sweeping statements go, one cannot get much better than this! Not only does Gray signally fail to reference one ‘Green thinker’, and unfairly and wrongly characterize all Green thinking as ‘Luddite’, but how does one respond to the dogmatic assertion that ‘whatever they say’, Green thinkers are ‘really’ humanists?! While of course part of the rhetorical polemical style that Gray has developed and honed over many years, less charitably one could put this assessment down to sloppy or even a lack of scholarship. It is clear from Gray’s work that he has not read much in the way of ‘Green political theory’, his sources of ‘Green’ thinking are, as far as I can make out, Thomas Malthus, Ivan Illich, James Lovelock, Edward Goldsmith, E.O. Wilson, Lynn Margulis and other recent scientific sources on human-nature interaction. Nowhere does he mention recent scholarship in the area of Green political theory. Now while of course one cannot fault Gray for not knowing everything about Green political theory, he can, and should be criticized, and criticized roundly, for firstly knowing nothing about it and then compounding this by rejecting and lampooning that about which he knows nothing. Hence, as a selfprofessed Green political thinker, I am almost tempted to dismiss completely what Gray says about Green thinking, since what he presents indirectly as Green thinking bears no resemblance to either the common areas of agreement and overlap within this body of knowledge, or to the areas of on-going and persistent disagreement and dissensus. Rather like Anthony Giddens, who like Gray has also wrongly ‘understood’ Green thinking - in Giddens’ case portraying ‘Green thought’ as ‘traditionalist’ and essentially conservative, something of course which might please Gray, but which is a ‘category mistake’ in terms of the overwhelming majority of Green political scholarship and normative thinking (Barry 1999b) – Gray needs to read more Green political theory in order to substantiate his sweeping claims about it. It is a modest suggestion in the sense that while it is of course perfectly possible for Gray to reach the same conclusions about the ‘Luddite’ and ‘humanist’ pretensions of Green political theory, at least this would now be based on his having read some Green theory, rather than assuming he knows what it is without reading it. Just as the plural of anecdotes is not ‘data’, equally, a collection of ‘impressions’ and ‘senses’ one has about something is not an interpretation one normally expects within the serious discussion of ideas. Reducing Green thinking to Luddism and humanism not only fatally undermines Gray’s ‘argument’ (if one can call it that), but is also based on flawed scholarship since he has not (as yet) engaged fully with the growing literature and debates within Green political theory. According to Gray: Humanism is a doctrine of salvation – the belief that humankind can take charge of its destiny. Among Greens, this has become the ideal of humanity becoming the wise steward of the planet’s resources. But for anyone whose
The Political Theory of John Gray 137 hopes are not centred on their own species the notion that human action can save themselves or the planet must be absurd. (Gray 2002: 16–17) I would certainly agree with Gray that most Greens are humanist in the sense of believing that there is some degree of control humans have over their (and the planet’s) fate – note I say some control, not ‘take charge of its own destiny’ or indeed that of the planet as a whole – otherwise why bother writing, thinking or engaging in action motivated by trying to make a difference to how humans interact, behave and think about the world and human-non-human relations? I would also agree with the notion of stewardship, which Gray talks about as being central to Green thinking (and indeed non-Green thinking about the environment and ‘resource use’ that one finds in debates and literature on environmental policy-making and how to deal with the ecological crisis). However, on both counts – humanity having some control or influence over their destiny and that of the non-human world and stewardship as being the most appropriate way in which to express this – Greens have strong normative arguments to support their case, especially obligations to future generations that constitute the ethical core of ‘sustainable development’. Green theory is clear about the limits of ‘human control’ over the environment, rejecting, for example, the Enlightenment view of dominating and exploiting nature as the necessary cost of human emancipation (Barry 1999b). Rather, Greens promote negative duties and refraining from action in achieving provisional harmony and human ‘management’ of the(ir) environment. That is, a Green view of managing our metabolism with nature is one based explicitly on precaution and as a ‘coping mechanism’ rather than any final and definitive ‘solution’ to the ‘humannature’ dynamic. Hence, while ‘wise stewardship’ might be something to aspire to, the ‘management of the environment’ at the heart of what I have elsewhere discussed as ‘collective ecological management’ (Barry 1999a), is explicitly based on incomplete knowledge, uncertainty, provisionality and contingency. In short, the stewardship at the heart of Green thinking (as least how I understand it) is one based on finding ‘coping mechanisms’ to continually negotiate and re-negotiate our relationship with the natural world. This negotiation has moral and material (metabolic) dimensions, such that what Green thinking aspires to in terms of ecological stewardship is a sustainable material metabolism between human and non-human economies, and a moral symbiosis which demarcates ‘legitimate’ use of the natural world, from illegitimate ‘abuse’. Green politics has always been as much about reminding those who would have us believe that the ‘market’ or even the ‘state’ provides all that we need to survive and prosper, that everything, I repeat, everything, we as humans consume and use has its origins in the earth, worked on and transformed by humanity of course – but having its origins in processes outside of human control. In this respect Green thinking has been a corrective to the ‘arrogance of humanism’, which is based on the unreal situation of humans having escaped our dependence upon and vulnerability to the natural world and the ‘human condition’ in relation to our ineliminable dependency upon the earth.
138 J. Barry We have not, despite those in the chattering classes and think tanks who prattle on about a ‘weightless world’ and a ‘knowledge economy’, escaped from our material embeddedness that is at the heart of the ‘human condition’. A cursory knowledge of the latter gained either from human history (and here I can only agree with Gray in his constant reference to the lessons from history as guides – not prescriptions – for present action) or in light of the physical impossibility of the human economy, as a subsystem of the larger natural economy, to grow indefinitely (the original insight of the Limits to Growth report), shows that we have not as a species transcended the human condition. As the ecological economist Kenneth Boulding put it, ‘no one can repeal the second law of thermodynamics – not even the Democrats’. Despite a small minority of humanity temporarily succeeding in unjustly ‘displacing’ (as opposed to ‘dissolving’ or ‘solving’) its ultimate dependence upon and vulnerability to the non-human world, it is an illusion, and a dangerous one, as Greens never tire of pointing out, to imagine that the materially unsustainable and morally unjust (from a global ecological justice perspective) lifestyles of a minority of the world can either be enjoyed by the world’s population as a whole or continued indefinitely into the future. Again to quote Boulding, ‘anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist’. Gray, from his 1993 essay, seems to understand this implication of the basic Green critique of economic growth, calling it a ‘wholly unrealisable fantasy’ (Gray 1993: 142), and is also aware that ‘the political legitimacy of Western capitalist market institutions depends upon incessant economic growth; it is endangered whenever growth falters’ (Gray 1993: 152), to his more recent and sweeping condemnation of ‘global capitalism’ in False Dawn (1998) and Heresies (2004). It is clear in his volte face on the neo-liberalism he promoted in the 1980s that he now sees neo-liberal economics as a form of insanity, without foundations or proven contribution to human well-being, but buttressed by the brute political power of the ‘minority world’ – led by the United States – and backed by a willingness to use military strength if ‘free trade’ fails to procure the necessary resources. In short, a small minority of the world, and it alone, enjoys the cornucopian consumer lifestyles afforded by a globalising capitalist economic system and advertised by everything from the corporate media to soap operas, and forced onto more and more countries by the neocons in Washington and the neo-liberal economists of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization. However, an awareness of the conditions within which people in the developing world live offers a necessary corrective to the nonsense and unreality of those who seek to make this geographically and temporally specific achievement a universal goal and telos for the species as a whole. Green thought has been resolute in also discussing what is the appropriate moral/ ethical response to our dependence on the non-human world. In general here, although articulated in different idioms and with different emphases, the Green position is that the most appropriate ethical attitude towards that which you (a) have not created, or (b) do not control yet, or (c) are completely dependent upon, is one of respect (Barry 1999a). Though some within Green political theory do go beyond
The Political Theory of John Gray 139 respect to advocate love or a duty of care to the non-human world, this deep ecological position is not typical. It is thus interesting that the nearest Gray gets to this Green moral position is ‘biophilia’ – love, fellow-feeling and solidarity and kinship between humanity and other species (Gray 2002: 17). It is also noteworthy that this term comes not from Green political theory – where its use is limited – but the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson.2 Equally objectionable is his view that Greens (as ‘Earth lovers’) should adopt an anti- or post-humanism that has the non-human rather than the human world as its focus and subject. According to Gray, ‘it is not of becoming the planet’s wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter’ (Gray 2002: 17). Again, while this is true of a small and unrepresentative minority of those who call themselves ‘Green’, it is not true of Green thinking as a whole. However, in order to further explain why Gray, to the extent that some of his writing fits within the category of ‘Green’, is closest to a particular and untypical type of Green thinking, it is worthwhile spelling out in more detail the thinking behind those Greens who do advocate a position similar to Gray’s. In a now infamous article, penned appropriately under the pseudonym ‘Miss Ann Thropy’, a member of the radical US environmental group Earth First! welcomed AIDS as a necessary corrective to curb growing human population numbers The article and the sentiments within it are close to Gray’s thinking: If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS. So as hysteria sweeps over the governments of the world, let me offer an ecological perspective on the disease … I take it as axiomatic that the only real hope for the continuation of diverse ecosystems on this planet is an enormous decline in human population. Conservation, social justice, appropriate technology, etc., are great to discuss and even laudable, but they simply don’t address the problem … Barring a cure, the possible benefits of this (AIDS) to the environment are staggering. If, like the Black Death in Europe, AIDS affected one-third of the world’s population, it would cause an immediate respite for endangered wildlife on every continent. More significantly, just as the Plague contributed to the demise of feudalism, AIDS has the potential to end industrialism, which is the main force behind the environmental crisis. None of this is intended to disregard or discount the suffering of AIDS victims. But one way or another there will be victims of overpopulation - through war, famine, humiliating poverty. As radical environmentalists, we can see AIDS not as a problem, but a necessary solution (one you probably don’t want to try for yourself). To paraphrase Voltaire: if the AIDS epidemic didn’t exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent one. (Anthropy 1986) The Malthusianism, explicit realpolitik, stress on population control and critique of concerns with social justice are all consonant with salient aspect of Gray’s thinking on this issue. Yet, there are very few Greens who would hold such extreme and
140 J. Barry morally obnoxious views – yet for Gray this rejection would simply confirm the ‘Maoist attitudes among radical Greens, who see calls for population control as veiled policies of genocide on poor peoples’ (Gray 1993: 144). And at this point, we perhaps have to ask whether Gray is more accurately described as an ‘ecological’ thinker, rather than a ‘Green’ one. What I mean by this is that Gray is more concerned with the ecological, material and scientifically informed dimensions of the modern ‘human condition’ (such as given by a Malthusian-obsession with population control to a complete reliance on the Gaia hypothesis), rather than integrating the latter with the non-ecological concerns of Greens and their clearly progressive and left-wing normative goals. As with his selectively chosen ‘Green’ sources, such as what one may call ‘scientific ecorealists’ like Garret Hardin and James Lovelock, Gray does not seem to be interested in, and indeed is dismissive of, this non-ecological, politically progressive agenda. In this he may be revealing his lingering conservatism, buttressed by the ‘apolitical’ analyses gleaned from ‘eco-realism’, or what will be described below more accurately as ‘eco-authoritarianism’. Gray’s Misunderstanding of the Causes (and Solutions) to the Global Ecological Crisis Gray writes: the destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary process of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation. (Gray 2002: 7) Now, this is not only questionable but plain wrong. However, before proceeding to demonstrate how and why Gray is wrong in ascribing global ecological devastation to the evolutionary advance of homo sapiens, it is important to point out that it is because Gray thinks the general success of our species is the cause of ecological destruction that his general ‘solution’ or response to the latter is population control, usually expressed in characteristically ‘realpolitik’ Malthusian language. The sweeping statement that all human advances have led to ecological devastation is untenable, as there have been historically documented examples of human societies and cultures that have developed in harmony with their natural environment. While these can be misunderstood and misused (Barry 1999b), nevertheless they do demonstrate that there is no intrinsic ‘species interest’ or in-built rationale for environmental degradation to accompany human advance and development. This undercuts one of the main metaphorical devices used by Gray (borrowed from Lovelock) about human beings being a ‘plague’ that by its ‘nature’ must necessarily (and inexorably) destroy that which surrounds it and upon which it depends. This view of humanity as a ‘parasite’ is of course common in some extreme ‘deep
The Political Theory of John Gray 141 ecological’ and authoritarian Green writing (Barry 1999a), and can be found throughout Gray’s recent thinking, from his analysis of ‘Homo rapiens’ to his discussion of The Matrix (Gray 2004). However, to say that all human development is necessarily anti-ecological is untenable, as there are examples of ecologically sustainable societies and policies, institutional changes etc. which point in a more sustainable direction, as is his council of despair that ‘Humanity will never initiate a symbiosis with the Earth’ (Gray 2002: 8). Indeed, Gray’s ‘naturalised’ version of humanity’s ‘hard-wired’ and therefore ineradicable tendency to environmental destruction leaves us without any hope of change, any possibility of achieving some degree of equilibrium with the planet. It is akin to and based upon the Christian idea of the sinful and fallen state of humanity, that is, we are always already ‘anti-ecological’, always already ‘ecologically sinful’ and that the best we can hope for is that there are fewer of us on the planet to make too much mischief. Apart from Gary’s injunction for population control (which puts him firmly with eco-authoritarian and Malthusian-inspired writers and thinkers of the 1970s such as William Ophuls, Garret Hardin and Robert Heilbroner, as well as some deep ecological thinking of the 1980s and 1990s), his anti-humanism might also go so far as to mean that Gray’s point is not to provide ‘solutions’ or ‘coping mechanisms’ to help us in our ecological crisis. Rather, one could plausibly interpret his anti-humanism to mean that he does not care or is not interested in providing analyses that may be useful to helping humanity (or parts of it) cope with the ecological crisis. As he accepts, as most Greens do, that the planet will cope without us and that humans are not the most important or central subjects of thinking, Gray’s view could be said to be that of a worldly and world-weary, dispassionate observer, surveying the human and natural wreckage of humanism’s folly and siding with the planet in terms of knowing that whatever we do (short of planetary nuclear holocaust), like the dinosaurs before us, the earth will continue and endure perfectly well without ‘homo rapiens’. It is for this reason that Gray bases his arguments on the ‘rigorous scientific naturalism’ of Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ (Gray 2003: 32; 2004: 37), as it is a theory of human-nature relations in which human internal institutional, political, economic or cultural change, innovation and practices, have little or no impact at the global/macro level of the relationship between the ‘species’ and the ‘planet’, which is established by cybernetic relations, and not ones of (local) human intention and collective action (or inaction). However, his ‘naturalistic’ understanding of the causes of human-induced environmental degradation is not only normatively objectionable, but also historically untrue as indicated above. Normatively, his naturalistic view about the inevitably of human-caused environmental harm is about as tenable as the view that ‘globalization’ is also a force of nature, something we simply have to accept, adapt to and ‘get with the programme’. Yet, whereas Gray has rightly criticized the view of globalization as ‘natural’, his critical powers seem to have left him when it comes to offering a similar view about the inevitability of global and local ecological damage. Perhaps it is a hangover from a conservative-religious mindset, but the idea that there is no institutional, cultural, economic or political causes and drivers of humanly caused
142 J. Barry ecological damage, is quite simply untenable. What Gray seems to be saying is that humans wake up in the morning and like good parasitic ‘homo rapiens’ think to themselves, ‘Now, how best can I degrade and damage the host, this planet today’? If one thinks of humans, as conservative-religious thinkers do, as essentially ‘wicked’, or in this case constitutively possessed of ‘ecological vices’, then there is very little human institutional change can do to halt, change or challenge our inexorable slide towards ecological catastrophe. This is especially so when one of the ‘ecological vices’ is what might be called ‘ecological cognitive dissonance’; that is, a wilful refusal to accept the connection between our individual and collective actions and ecological destruction, and an unwillingness to change our patterns of ‘commodious living’ (to use the Hobbesian term Gray is fond of using).3 All in all, Gray’s political quietism, which is something he shares with deep ecological thinking (Barry 1999a), perhaps confirms his continuing conservative disposition. Here I think Postel’s remarks in reviewing Straw Dogs are apposite: Gray has outlined a program for complete political passivity. There is no point whatsoever in our attempting to make the world a less cruel or more livable place. Such matters are beyond our control – and to think otherwise is humanistic hubris. If war becomes even more ruinous, if new diseases kill unfathomable multitudes, if technology renders our bodies immaterial – so be it. The problem is not the unimaginable suffering such developments would cause, but the foolishness of humanists for thinking things could be otherwise. (Postel 2003) The idea that institutions, cultures, social norms, practices, economic arrangements and so on have little impact on human behaviour and thinking is of course one at the heart of conservative thinking, and in the case of ecological destruction means that whether the prevailing economic arrangements are capitalist, socialist or any other makes no difference. Here, despite many Greens seeing themselves as neither left nor right, Green thinking does assume and is premised on the view that institutional arrangements, incentives for behaviour and action do matter for achieving a more sustainable relationship with the environment. And these institutional prescriptions, by and large, are demonstrably closer to libertarian socialist than to conservative or ‘free market’ thinking. Green political theory has analysed the unsustainability of an economic system based on the institution of private property (Barry 2001), as well as addressing the need to construct an economy (and economic theory) based on the dependence and embeddedness of the human economy within the larger natural world (Barry 1999b; Daly 1973), or the relationship between unsustainability, inequality and the openness and democratic nature of political and economic structures (Dobson 1990; Eckersley 1992), or legitimacy and unsustainability and levels of socio-economic inequality (Barry & Doherty 2001), or the positive correlation between social solidarity and the transition to a sustainable society (Achterberg 1996). While one must always be sceptical of the degree to which institutional changes will mono-causally and unproblematically
The Political Theory of John Gray 143 produce or lead to change (and in particular some desired and designed change) in human thinking and acting, this is compatible with viewing political and institutional change as important elements in seeking to change human thinking and acting in a more sustainable direction. However, certain deep ecological thinking, in focusing on individual levels of consciousness, and being sceptical regarding political and institutional change, and viewing such institutional change as secondary to primary or deeper moral and psychological transformation (Barry 1999a), does seem to accord more with Gray’s conservative-religious outlook on the ecological crisis. The deep ecological view of ‘if you can’t change the world, change yourself’ does seem to be in keeping with Gray’s thought – especially in terms of his positive regard for Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Chinese mysticism, as represented by the Chuang-Tzu and Lieh-Tzu, and not least deep ecology’s stress on the importance of spirituality and humility in achieving ecological balance. However, the focus on population completely misses the fact that it is not population increase per se that is the main cause of ecological devastation, but per capita environmental impact. To state the issue briefly: focusing on population increases means one misses out on the ‘resource intensity’ of different population groups, such that the average US or North European individual has the same ‘environmental impact’ of perhaps 10 or 20 individuals living in other parts of the world. It is clear that a minority of the world’s population consumes a disproportionate amount of the world’s resources – energy and materials – as well as using a disproportionate amount of the world’s ‘absorption capacity’ in terms of contributing most to carbon emissions and other pollutants. It is odd that Gray, who has perceptively analysed the war and occupation of Iraq as, in part, the first resource war of the twenty-first century and a harbinger of future ‘Malthusian’ wars to come (Gray 2002: 180–182), does not connect the need for cheap and secure sources of this resource, which is the life-blood for the oil-dependent lifestyles, cultures and political power of the minority world, especially the United States, but also the states of the European Union, Canada and Australasia, to the issue of population. According to the United Nations Development Programme’s 1998 report, It has been estimated that the richest 20 per cent of the world’s population accounts for 86 per cent of total private consumption expenditure, consumes 58 per cent of the world’s energy, 45 per cent of all meat and fish, 84 per cent of paper, and owns 87 per cent of cars and 74 per cent of telephones. Conversely, the poorest 20 per cent of the world population consumes 5 per cent or less of each of these goods and services. (UNDP 1998) A UNEP report has recently documented how the regional ‘ecological footprint’ of Africa is less than 2 while that of North America is 12 (UNEP 2003). Therefore if one were seeking to curb human numbers for ecological purposes, one would be advised to seek a radical reduction in the numbers of high per capita environmental impact societies such as America or Britain, rather than in the developing world.
144 J. Barry The exclusive focus on population control (especially since it seems to be focused only on the developing world) again places Gray’s ‘Green thinking’ firmly within an eco-conservative and minority position, and one that has echoes of the debate over the ‘population bomb’ associated with writers such as Paul Ehrlich and Garret Hardin in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the reasons why most Greens reject the exclusive focus on population as either the main or only reason for the ecological crisis is that there is more than a whiff of racism and xenophobia often underpinning arguments for population reduction. It is easier to demand population reduction in the teeming hoards of Africa and Asia in the name of lessening the human impact on the global environment, than challenge the unjust and profligate use of finite resources by a comfortable minority; easier to demand ‘they’ reduce their population than ‘we’ curb our consumer lifestyles. According to Gray: A high-technology Green utopia, in which a few humans live happily in balance with the rest of life, is scientifically feasible; but it is humanly unimaginable. If anything like it ever comes about, it will not be through the will of homo rapiens. So longer (sic) as population grows, progress will consist in labouring to keep up with it. There is only one way that humanity can limit it labours, and that is by limiting its numbers … Zero population growth could be5 enforced only by a global authority with draconian powers and unwavering determination. There has never been such a power, and there never will be. (Gray 2002: 184–185) In this stress on population as the only way to lessen ecological degradation and the explicit link to authoritarianism, Gray’s thinking mirrors that of other eco-authoritarians, who like Gray have a clear scientific analysis of the causes of the ecological crisis and come to an equally dogmatic and eminently logical conclusion. Gray’s authority, charged with zero population growth using draconian powers, has been imagined and defended by one of the most well known eco-authoritarian writers, Garret Hardin. Hardin’s analysis of the ‘ecological crisis’, from his initial and infamous ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ article to his articulation and defence of a selective approach to overseas aid outlined in ‘Lifeboat Ethics’, his support for zero population growth and resolute conviction that he was simply ‘telling it like it is’, which went against both the prevailing economic wisdom and the progressive self-understanding of Green thinking, makes Hardin an obvious basis for Gray’s thinking. Yet, Hardin and other ‘eco-authoritarian’ thinkers that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s are, and always have been, minority figures in the Green pantheon, their right-wing and conservative conclusions out of step with the progressive and radical policy agenda of Green thinkers, parties, organizations and movements. Most Green thinking and politics have largely rejected Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’, which he used to justify the parcelling of ‘common property’ into private property as the solution to overuse. Although there are a number of grounds for this, I will focus on one,
The Political Theory of John Gray 145 perhaps the main one. Hardin’s analysis of how ‘common ownership’ of natural resources meant in effect that ‘no one’ owned or controlled the resource has been demonstrated to be both empirically and theoretically deficient. What his analysis misses, as the authors of the Ecologist magazine (1993) and other analysts of ‘commons regimes’ such as Eleanor Ostrom (1990) and Michael Taylor (1982) have pointed out, is that it does not allow for a commons regime to include ways of both excluding ‘strangers’ from using the resources and also from generating norms, rules and sanctions for governing the sustainable use of the resource without recourse to privatization. Existing commons regimes from fisheries to agricultural common land demonstrate the variety of ways local commons regimes do generate such norms and practices that enable them to avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’, such that Hardin’s solution is not appropriate as it is based on an erroneous view that a system of common ownership cannot generate norms and practices for its sustainable use and enjoyment. In fact, what Hardin misdescribes as a ‘commons regime’ is an ‘open access regime’, a category mistake that has left a legacy of misunderstanding marking debates within environmental policy formulation for over 30 years. As Hardin does not analyse a commons regime, his conclusions and solutions only apply to open access regimes and therefore commons regimes do not stand accused of inexorably leading to ecological over-use and degradation. Equally, Hardin and others such as Ehrlich and Lovelock (and of course Gray himself) who focus on ‘population control’ are largely concerned with the population of the non-western world, a view as indicated in the quote from ‘Miss Anthropy’ above that does find an echo in an untypical minority view within ecological thinking, particularly in the United States. The suspicion of racism and xenophobia (or realpolitik in their view) associated with this way of thinking about the ecological crisis might be allayed somewhat if they considered that it would make more sense from a Gaian point of view to concentrate on decreasing the population of the most ecologically destructive parts of the human population. In Gray’s terms an eminently more realistic and normatively desirable approach to population control would be to identify the more destructive sub-populations of ‘homo rapiens’ and subject them to Hardin’s ‘coercive’ measures for decreasing their numbers. That is, given that the average North American or European causes more ecological damage than the average sub-Saharan African or Asian, then it is clear that targeting the ‘minority’ world for population control is a more effective way of lessening the global impact of ‘homo rapiens’ on Gaia. Yet, strangely enough, this is not prominent as a preferred course of action by ‘zero population growth’ advocates. While there are many reasons one can adduce for this, perhaps the main reason lies in a ‘realpolitik’ analysis of the sort Gray, Hardin and other eco-authoritarians articulate that the real reason for focussing on the reduction of the population of non-western peoples in the ‘majority world’ makes sense as part of an overall strategy to maintain the privileged position and uninterrupted consumer lifestyles of the minority world. In keeping with what I think is Gray’s correct analysis of the war in Iraq as a harbinger of future ‘resource wars’, whereby the minority world needs to ensure access to and use of dwindling scare resources, forcing non-western populations to
146 J. Barry decrease their numbers in the name of reducing global ecological stress is perfectly consistent. Blaming the population increases in the non-Western world for the real causes of global ecological crisis sits rather well with ‘wars of liberation’ (Iraq) or ‘rule-based global trading systems’ (the World Trade Organization) as a means by which to expropriate precious resources the minority world needs but which are inconveniently located outside their sovereign territories. It is odd that the laudable ‘realpolitik’ that characterizes Gray’s thought does not seem to be evident when he focuses on population control rather than resource control as one of the main upshots of a disproportionate distribution of energy consumption and ‘ecological space’ across states.4 The reality of the ecological footprinting analysis has not been lost on current and past American administrations. Whether it is George H. Bush’s statement at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 that the ‘American way of life is not up for negotiation’ or George W. Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the emerging ‘ecological Mercantilist’ world of global geopolitics in the twenty-first century is part and parcel of the neoconservative’s foreign policy. This ecological mercantilism includes not just dwindling sources of hydrocarbons upon which America (and Europe) are dependent (and are inconveniently located in geopolitically unstable places such as the Middle East and the former Soviet Union), but also the millions of environmental refugees who already outnumber refugees from wars and political upheaval, and the recognition of ‘ecological security’ as a new but now fixed part of realpolitik international relations. US foreign policy is proof of the Green argument for the power of the ecological footprint idea. Of course, whereas the Republicans in the White House accept the power of the idea in that it clearly lays out both the uneven distribution of ‘ecological resources’ across the planet (which they accept and upon which base policy), they reject the normative implication of the ecological footprint, which Greens are keen to exploit. The main normative implications of the ecological footprint leads in the direction of global ecological justice and a more equal distribution of the benefits of the use of the world’s finite resources. It also has been used to turn the tables on the usual discussion of ‘global debt’, usually cast in terms of the money owed by the developing world to the developed world, or what the majority world owes the minority one. The ecological footprinting idea reveals that in fact the debt lies with the minority world. That is, the developed countries owe the developing world, as they are not only using an unfair proportion of the world’s resources, but also the ecological damage caused as a result of their use of energy and materials is, via such transnational ecological phenomena such as global warming, disproportionally experienced by the developing rather than the developed world. Yet, all Gray offers are injunctions-cum-predictions that only ‘population reduction’ measures (of the sort Malthus identified – namely war, disease and fertility/reproductive control) will reduce the numbers of human ‘plague animals’ and lessen the environmental impact of homo rapiens. One is tempted to ask, if Gray allows for the empowering of women to control their own fertility, through abortions and other reproductive control techniques and presumably female political and economic equality, why
The Political Theory of John Gray 147 does he not allow for other institutional changes to alter human thinking and acting in relation to the environment? The lamenting tone is unmistakeable in his musings on how the earth will continue long after homo rapiens have destroyed themselves, in his comment, for example, ‘The earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on’ (Gray 2002: 151). However, laments coupled with a naturalist/fatalist view of our relationship with nature are cold comfort indeed for those of us who do care about the earth, and who are concerned about those who will come after us (both human and non-human), and who, by the present actions not of homo rapiens but specifically chosen and maintained institutions, policies and projects, are condemned to live their lives in an impoverished world. It may already be too late for us, and indeed this may be what really lies behind Gray’s fatalism (based on his extensive reading of modern scientific diagnoses of the biological and ecological crises occurring all around us), but laments and a tragic knowingness are morally inappropriate reactions for those who have seen the reality of the situation humanity and non-humanity are facing. Contemplation on the worsening human and natural conditions should be followed by action, not laments and mysticism.5 Conclusion Gray as a Green seems, in the words of the Grand Inquisitor of The Brothers Karamatzov, to combine ‘miracle, mystery and authority’, together with a half-longing for the uncertainties and illusory freedoms of the early romantics. That is, Gray’s thought seems to be a combination of the gentleness and subtlety of eastern and mystical thought, with a dash of western romanticism – as early critiques of the ecological and human costs of the industrial revolution – fused together with the authority of science and an authoritarian/conservative/realpolitik political analysis. Now while this many not be either a particularly coherent or indeed attractive disposition, it is one that is discernable as intelligible from a broad ‘Green’ perspective. Gray’s insight about the disconnection between scientific and technological advance and human progress is one that Greens accept, but it is also the case that it is science itself which tells us that we are destroying the planet. Thus like Greens, Gray while aware of the misuses of science, or more accurately of the ‘Promethean’ and destructive technological abuses of scientific knowledge, also bases his thinking, like Greens, on a firm scientific epistemological ground, especially to advances in scientific knowledge in the areas of evolutionary biology, the debates and insights of Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’, ecological science, cosmology and quantum physics. Gray perhaps can be better described as an ecological rather than a Green thinker – accepting the ecological ‘humans condition’ - our utter dependence upon nature and the futility of attempts to ‘master’ and ‘dominate’ it through technology, our continuity with non-human animals and so on - but rejecting all the ‘humanist’ and progressive baggage of social, global and environmental justice, socio-economic equality as a precondition for a politics of quality of life for all, the extension of democracy and citizen activism etc. with which most ‘Green’ political theory is concerned.6 Despite his lack of knowledge of Green thinking, it is in this thinking
148 J. Barry that lies some of the most congenial schools and styles of modern thought for a free and provocative thinker such as Gray. The Green perspective, on my reading or interpretation of it, is not, despite what Gray may mistakenly think, yet another version of the humanist-Enlightenment project of finding paradise on earth, eliminating the natural inconveniences of the ‘human condition’, including the inevitable conflicts between competing needs and ends. Rather, its aim is much more modest, but nonetheless radical in its implications for how we live today, that is, how we can cope with, acknowledge and negotiate our dependence on the earth and our dependence on one another in a sustainable and just manner. In opposition to the Enlightenment vision of mastery, control and dream of self-directed evolution – which has infected the political imagination of both left and right as Gray points out, and with which Greens agree - the Green vision stands for prudence, modesty and harmony. In the context of the increasing complexity, uncertainty, risk, opaqueness and growing interdependence of the natural and social worlds we inhabit, Greens convincingly argue for recognition of the vulnerability of humanity to both each other and the earth. Greens, in their championing of unfashionable ideas and causes which go ‘against the grain’ of the modern world; from ‘slow food’ and ‘slow cities’; to urging precaution in scientific and other forms of development and human interventions in nature (both human and non-human); to defending an ideal of material sufficiency and satiety (Gray 2002: 163) in opposition to the cult of ‘more’ and ‘economic growth’ which dominates globalized, homogenized culture and politics, in all of these and more, Gray’s membership of the ‘awkward squad’ of contemporary political theory is his invitation to the Green perspective. Greens are modern versions of those for whom speed, control, mastery and ‘solving’ problems for good are illusory, temporary at best, and usually come back to haunt others more vulnerable. Greens, and Gray, I suggest are united in their acceptance of the wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas who wrote that ‘it is better for a blind horse that it be slow’. As I hope to have indicated, the joining of Gray’s Straw Dogs with these blind horses may yet be a potent combination. Notes 1.
However, while Gray’s critique of progress often tends to lead to the complete rejection of the notion and project of progress, similar to Christopher Lasch’s thinking (Lasch 1991), Greens, as I suggest elsewhere, should avoid simply rejecting the idea of progress (1999a). 2. See Brian Baxter (1999) for an analysis of the relationship between Green political theory and biophilia. 3. Gray holds a similar ‘naturalistic’ understanding of technology (perhaps Heideggerian in origin) which he views as something over which humans have little control. As he puts it, ‘technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event than has befallen the world’ (Gray 2003: 14; emphasis added). Once it has entered the world, like Prometheus, humanity cannot control it and inevitably it is used for evil as much as good (with echoes here of Plato’s myth of Gyges’ Ring in the Republic). 4. In his first foray into Green territory, Gray concluded that ‘Greens need from conservatives a vital tincture of realism without which their thought, and so their policy proposals, become merely utopian’ (1993: 173). This ‘realism’, as understood by Gray in terms of always placing his ideas firmly within his own reading of global political developments or policy debates, has been a constant
The Political Theory of John Gray 149 feature of his thought and has characterised his engagement with Green theory. Indeed, in adopting this approach, as opposed to sharing many of the substantive principles of Green politics, Gray follows the style and method of most Green thinking in its integration of normative principles or policy prescriptions with analyses of the economic, political and ecological ‘realities of the world’. 5. However, it has to be acknowledged that this lamenting and tragic tone does exist within Green theory, from Bill McKibben’s (1989) eloquent elegy The End of Nature, to the ‘Green nostalgia’ that peppers aspects of the Green political imaginary. In embracing of eastern and non-western traditions of thinking, Gray is following a well-worn path within certain strands of Green thinking, which like Gray are profoundly dissatisfied with dominant Western modes of thought. At the same time Gray also shares with certain aspects of Green thinking a positive regard not just for the religious mind and worldview, but a mystical version of religious experience. When Gray points out that from a western perspective ‘the idea that freedom means becoming like a wild animal is offensive to Western religious and humanist prejudices, but it is consistent with the most advanced scientific knowledge’ (2003: 115), he is echoing debates that self-professed Green thinkers and activists have been having for over 40 years (or more if one includes the likes of Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy written in the 1930s, as well as more obviously Brave New World and Island, as part of the historical intellectual lineage of Green thought). One has only to look at the extremely influential writings of Fritjof Capra and others who have sought to combine eastern and mystical modes of thinking with (western) scientific insights (gained either from ecological science or sub-atomic and quantum physics), in books such as The Tao of Physics (Capra 1992) or The Turning Point (Capra 1983) to see both the tradition within which Gray is writing and also that this tradition or fusion (and healthy confusion) between Eastern and Western has been pioneered by Green thinking. Equally, Green thinkers have explicitly recognised the religious roots of the still powerful language of ‘stewardship’, which has its roots in seeing the earth as God’s property and not humanity’s, meaning humanity has no right to destroy or abuse what was not theirs. Rather than the earth being made for humans, i.e. metaphysical anthropocentrism, the Christian doctrine of stewardship held the opposite: that we were made for the earth, as the stewards and custodians of God’s creation (Barry 1999a; 1999b). 6. Equally, it might be suggested that Gray is a modern version of a ‘high-Tory’ ecologically-inspired and based politics which was prevalent in Britain in the years between the first and second world wars (Bramwell 1989).
References Achterberg, W. (1996) Sustainability, community, and democracy, in: B. Doherty & M. De Geus (Eds), Democracy and Green Political Thought: Sustainability, Rights and Citizenship, pp. 170–187 (London: Routledge). Anthropy, Miss (1986), AIDS and Africa, 〈http://www.off-road.com/green/ef_aids_wish.html, 5th November 2004〉. Barry, J. (1999a) Rethinking Green Politics: Nature, Virtue and Progress (London: Sage). Barry, J. (1999b) Environment and Social Theory (London: Routledge). Barry, J. (2001) Greening liberal democracy: theory, practice and political economy, in: J. Barry & M. Wissenburg (Eds), Sustaining Liberal Democracy: Ecological Challenges and Opportunities, pp. 59–80 (Basingstoke: Palgrave). Barry, J. & Doherty, B. (2002) The Greens and social policy: movements, politics and practice?, Social Policy and Administration, 35(5), pp. 587–607. Baxter, B. (1999) Ecologism: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Benton, T. (1993) Natural Relations: Ecology, Animals and Social Justice (London: Verso). Bramwell, A. (1989) Ecology in the 20th Century: An Introduction (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Capra, F. (1983) The Turning Point (London: Flamingo). Capra, F. (1992) The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (London: Flamingo).
150 J. Barry Daly, H. (1973) The steady-state economy: toward a political economy of biophysical equilibrium and moral growth, in: H. Daly (Ed.), Toward a Steady-State Economy, pp. 149–174 (San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman & Co). Dobson, A. (1990) Green Political Thought (London: Unwin Hyman). Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (London: University of London Press). Ehrenfeld, D. (1978) The Arrogance of Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Goldsmith, E. et al. (1992) Whose Common Future?, The Ecologist, 22(4), pp. 122–210. Gray, J. (1993) Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1998) False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London: Granta). Gray, J. (2002) Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta). Gray, J. (2004) Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (London: Granta). Lasch, C. (1991) The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (New York: Norton). Lovelock, J. (1988) The Ages of Gaia (Oxford: Oxford University Press). McKibben, B. (1989) The End of Nature (New York: Random House). Meadows, D. et al. (1972) The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe). Midgley, M. (1983) Animals and Why They Matter (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Midgley, M. (1995) Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature, rev. ed. (London: Routledge). Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Postel, D. (2003) Gray’s anatomy, The Nation, 22 December, 〈(http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i= 20031222&s=postel〉. Taylor, M. (1982) Community, Anarchy and Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). United Nations Development Program (1998) Human Development Report 1998 (New York, United Nations Development Programme). United Nations Environment Program (2003) GEO: Global Environment Outlook 3: Past, Present and Future Perspectives, 〈http://www.unep.org/geo/geo3/english/086.htm〉.
Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project GLEN NEWEY School of Politics, International Relations and the Environment, Keele University, UK
[email protected] 0 2 9 GlenNewey 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600655073 FCRI_A_165481.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but our optimism or pessimism … that makes our ideas. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist – a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist – only when life has been defeated many times in its battle against depression. E.M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
152 G. Newey Perfection and the Enlightenment Amid the many turns in John Gray’s political thought, two core beliefs persist. First, and perhaps most significantly, Gray doubts that politics can implement ideals of the human good. This anti-perfectionism is particularly clear in his hostility to central planning, and to liberal and non-liberal projects of political design. This hostility also underlies his rejection of ideals of human progress and their attendant historical teleologies, particularly where progress is wrought by political means (Gray 2002b: 47–48; Gray 2000: 23; Gray 2002a: 120–121; Gray 1996: 153–158; Gray 1993a: 138). Then, second, Gray is unrelentingly sceptical throughout his work about the ‘Enlightenment project’1 of justifying action (including moral or political action) by universal norms whose authority derives from human reason (Gray 1995a: 149; Gray 1998b: 17).2 These two positions are independent of one another, since one might be optimistic that reason could create universally authoritative norms, while doubting that these norms could be effected politically. By the same token, one might be optimistic about improving the human lot by political action, but deny that human reason provides universal norms authorizing this improvement. However, anti-perfectionism and scepticism towards the Enlightenment project do not seem wholly independent of one another in Gray’s thought. This is partly because his view of the discipline is less austere than that of most political philosophers,3 so that what matters in assessing a political position is not what is logically possible, but whether political experience suggests that it is liveable (Gray 1995a: 9). Practice can show up the shortcomings of theory. Equally, theory can show why certain political projects are doomed because of problems in their conception (Gray 1995a: 10, 73ff). The proper role of reason is not to issue grand prescriptions for politics,4 but to show where these prescriptions are liable to fail.5 Anti-perfectionism takes its cue from the débâcle of perfectionism in practice, but this débâcle is symptomatic of the theoretical blunders which explain it.6 Gray’s anti-perfectionism and scepticism towards the Enlightenment project are thus mutually reinforcing. Nor is this surprising, since much modern political history is the precipitate of failed attempts to project theoretical reason into politics, itself a prime legacy of the Enlightenment (Gray 1995a: 146–147). Practice is not an autonomous activity to which theory comes as an afterthought. Instead, by now, false theory and decadent practice are complementary and mutually supportive … [no] practice is innocent of corruption by rationalist theorising. (Gray 1989: 213) Anti-perfectionism also follows, for Gray, from a more specific failing of the Enlightenment project. The project overestimates the power of reason qua conscious reflection to deliver a single, universally valid account of the human good, which can then be used to reconstruct society along rational lines. Gray follows thinkers such as Hayek, Wittgenstein, Polanyi and Oakeshott, in arguing that theoretical reason is impotent to guide us in constructing social reality, compared with the tacit
The Political Theory of John Gray 153 knowledge embodied in actual social practices (Gray 1989: 203–204).7 These practices have to exist before their fundamental presuppositions can be spelled out, and may not be articulable even after the fact (Gray 1998a: 16; Gray 1993a: 70); they are themselves beyond criticism, i.e. beyond rational critique (Gray 1998a: 114). As bodies of knowledge, they also incorporate pooled understandings, beyond the compass of any single mind (Gray 1993b: 34–35). Hence attempts at radical reconstruction of these practices using free-standing ideals derived from pure reason are quixotic (Gray 1998a: 14–16). Anti-perfectionism also rests on what Gray takes to be a further difficulty for the Enlightenment project, namely value-pluralism (Gray 1995b: 70–71; Gray 1996: 149–150; Gray 1995a: 69; Gray 1993a: 139).8 In recent writings Gray takes valuepluralism to show that there is no human summum bonum derivable from human reason, and that therefore perfectionism, or at least the forms of it pursued since the Enlightenment – such as socialist, Marxist and nationalist utopianisms – are doomed. Some valuable forms of life do not merely happen to clash with others, but preclude them. More generally, different forms of life embody different and incommensurable values, such that no one form can be said to maximize value, or embody more value than each of the others. So the idea that there could be some form of life which embodied the supreme human good is illusory.9 Like the argument from tacit knowledge, the one from value-pluralism moves from a claim about the limits of reason to a conclusion about what is politically possible. Conversely, Gray also seems to think that the failure to realize political ideals such as equality, a purported universal norm derived from human reason, shows that the Enlightenment project cannot deliver what it promises. The failure of large-scale social engineering on socialist or Marxist lines indicates that reason cannot provide a workable blueprint for society (Gray 1993b: 36). Political experience thwarts a prime aspiration of theory, to base political outcomes on reason: ‘in political life, as in moral life, we are in the business of making trade-offs’ which are ‘given to us by no supreme principle … reason leaves us in the lurch’ (Gray 1995b: 71; Gray 1995a: 69). Here Gray moves from what has proven politically possible to conclusions about the limits of reason.10 To judge by its name, ‘perfectionism’11 might seem so demanding that antiperfectionism was by contrast not merely true, but a truism. In rejecting perfectionism, however, Gray is rejecting the utopian orthodoxy of modern political philosophers, which usually confines itself to expounding theoretical ideals – of justice, equality, liberty and so forth – without pausing to ask whether these ideals can be realized politically (Gray 1995a: chs 1–2, e.g. p17; Gray 1993a: 49–50). But he is equally hostile to meliorism, the belief that ‘human institutions [are] open to indefinite improvement by the judicious use of critical reason’ (Gray 1995a: 134; Gray 1995b: 82–83, 139–140; Gray 1993b: 299; Gray 1993a: 139). Thus Gray dismisses the progressivist historicism of Christians, philosophes, Whig historians, positivists, Millian liberals, Marxists and Francis Fukuyama (Gray 1993b: 245; Gray 2003: chs 2–3). These meliorisms succumb to the same objections as perfectionism – their defining philosophical anthropologies founder
154 G. Newey on value-pluralism, and their own often murderous political records. They ‘cannot help encouraging unreal hopes of the human future and distracting us from dealing with the minute particulars of our lives as they are now’ (Gray 1995a: 107). In repudiating their grand narratives of political transformation, he points insistently to what is simply and untransformably there, exposing these narratives as fantasy (Gray 2003: 3).12 Pessimism, Disappointment and Politics Gray’s view of the world is, in consequence, none too cheerful. He lauds the archpessimist Schopenhauer (Gray 2002b: 38–47), bemoans the current ‘plague of people’ (Gray 2004: 37), insists that the ‘evils which abound in our experience are permanent features of the human condition’ (Gray 2004: 12), and deplores faith in technology (Gray 2004: 23), science (Gray 2004: 71), and progress (Gray 1997: 176). Gray rejects the Enlightenment project’s secular version of Christian theodicy, with its blind confidence that human history describes a smooth upward curve (Gray 2004: 13). He scorns its misplaced trust in the power both of reason to excogitate the best human life, and of politics to bring this life about (Gray 2004: 108). Central to Gray’s pessimism is his view that practice provides a test-bed for the ideals of political theory, whose errors or confusions inevitably surface in political failures such as those of twentieth-century collectivism. This testing of theory at the bar of practice defines Gray’s engagement with politics as a thinker. He reads modern history as refuting the ideals – socialism, Marxism, positivism, liberalism, humanism – which originated with the Enlightenment project and its hope that human beings could reach perfection, or at least progress, through political action (Gray 2004: 14). Disappointment at the dashing of these ideals and hopes can be met either with persistence or therapy. Political optimists faced with disappointment – the failure of their ideals to be realized in practice – respond with persistence. First, they may continue seeking to change the world to fit the ideals, as in the famous conclusion to Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (unless one passively hopes that the world will change of its own accord). Clearly this renewed engagement demands faith in political methods. The more obvious it is that the ideals cannot be achieved, the more wilfully obtuse this faith appears. A well-known example is Gramsci’s remark that ‘pessimism of the intellect’ about the achievability of communism should be balanced by ‘optimism of the will’. For Gray, committed to the trial of political ideals by practice, it is simply delusional to put down political failure to contingency or bad luck. The more widespread the failure, the likelier it is that failure was intrinsic to the project (Gray 1995a: 9–10). As a second mode of persistence, the political optimist may infer from failure that the theory is inadequate, and revise it accordingly. This response no longer seeks to change the world so as to fit the relevant theory, but to change the theory to fit the world. It aims to adapt former ideals to the political climate by revising or amplifying the theory, as in the substitution of parliamentary or social-democratic for
The Political Theory of John Gray 155 revolutionary socialism. Adapting the theory is viewed as a way of holding onto the core ideals – a much-gnawed bone of contention between trimmers and true believers.13 This response can be found in Gray’s work: he radically revized his theoretical view of liberalism between the 1983 monograph Mill on Liberty and Two Faces of Liberalism in 2000, in part because of what he recognised as a changed political landscape. Liberalism has become but one creed in a culturally plural world, and attempts to impose it are pragmatically contradictory; the contradictions or problems facing neo-liberalism in practice have also become clearer. More generally, as Gray revises his political theory, the ideals become ever less realizable, and the space for a positive politics contracts. Hence persistence as a response to disappointment becomes less and less tenable, while pressure builds to adopt the alternative response of therapy. Therapy is the pessimist’s reaction to political failure. It accepts that the ideals cannot be implemented. The mark of the therapeutic response is to disengage from the ideals or desires whose frustration first gave rise to disappointment, by changing not the ideals themselves, or the theory associated with them, but one’s attitude towards them. This attitude can be more or less celebratory: at one end of the scale, failure may be greeted with rapture, as the old idols fall and – often – new ones take their place. This, the response of celebration, is the political version of adaptive preference formation, whereby those whose hopes have been disappointed fête, in the spirit of a Nietzschean Ja-sager, what they take to be the new reality. They denounce their former ideals, as often with those who have travelled the familiar route from leftist radicalism to rightist complacency. Gray sometimes reads like a zealous proselyte. He can signal insouciance or even glee at the crash of big political ideals like socialism or humanism (Gray 2002b: 30– 31). Often he presents himself as a bearer of unwelcome truths – ‘heresies’ – which refute conventional fallacies (Gray 2004). Beneath the iconoclastic glee, however, it is difficult not to detect regret at the dashing of Gray’s own Enlightenment hopes for a politics of reason, for a world to which humanity is central. Gray is no mere Ja-sager. His work is marked strongly by the other two attitudes available to the pessimist faced with political disappointment, namely resignation and contemplation. Unlike the Ja-sager, someone who is resigned greets the failure of his ideals with regret rather than celebration. Beside resignation and celebration as responses to disappointment lies the neutral path of contemplation, which faces the facts with neither regret nor enthusiasm, but equanimity. Stoics, for instance, have thought the best response to the fact that the world may frustrate one’s desires or ideals is to renounce them. At the end of Straw Dogs, Gray candidly advocates contemplation as the alternative to action (Gray 2002b: 199). He is less explicit about his own resignation, displacing this attitude onto others. Hence we find him saying of Freud and Russell, for example, that ‘resignation seems to have been their final mood’ (Gray 1998b: 15) once they had concluded that humans were incurably irrational, a judgement which Gray clearly shares. After all, the judgement underlying these three pessimistic attitudes is the same. It is tempting to think that Gray imputes resignation to
156 G. Newey others, and is more comfortable expressing the attitudes of contemplation and celebration, because of his own struggles with resignation. Resigning himself to resignation would show up all political engagement, including his own work, as pointless. Contemplative and resigned attitudes accept political realities for what they are. The realities which Gray has in mind are fundamental and unalterable – that externalities and scarcity limit economic growth (Gray 2004: 35), that reason is impotent to determine all political or moral action (Gray 2000: 50), or that homo sapiens is a brief episode in the meaningless history of the planet (Gray 2004: 14). They can evoke resignation, or the contemplative indifference which Gray has expressed of late. But, since these attitudes accept the realities as unalterable, they issue in no obvious positive political programme. Each is the result of pessimism, and points away from political action.14 It is Gray’s increasingly explicit naturalism (Gray 2002b: 30) which fuels his pessimism. He insists that there are ineliminable checks on the attainment of political ideals, particularly those bequeathed by the Enlightenment project, with its dreams of politically engineered improvement. The checks arise from the nature of markets, of value, of global resource endowment, and, perhaps most fundamentally, our nature as a species (Gray 2004: 110). Gray has become ever more cognisant of what is given and unalterable, so that the scope for effective political action has correspondingly narrowed. As Gray’s naturalism has become more explicit, it has also become more disenchanted. Other naturalists, especially Aristotelians, have been optimists, thinking of nature as harmonizing with human ideals (themselves given by nature). For Gray, by contrast, nature constantly thwarts these ideals (Gray 2004: 14). Seen in his earlier writings as the empty half of a half-full glass, nature has swollen to fill virtually the whole glass, with less and less left for humans to aspire to. Nearly all human thought displays an ‘unwearying concern with the salvation of mankind’, but homo sapiens ‘is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct’ (Gray 2002b: 151). The odd thing about Gray is that he has not given up, despite the very strong stress in his work on the futility of politics. Gray’s repeated bewailing of the Enlightenment project’s failure expresses the still-active attitude of disappointment, where hope remains alive. And insofar as it is active, hope goes beyond the mere wish that things were better, to efforts at improvement. Gray’s continuing engagement is apparent not only in his journalism, think-tank papers, and public appearances, but also – in sharp contrast with most contemporary political philosophers – in his attempt to take account of recent political developments such as post-colonialism, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, globalization, the growth of international terrorism, and failed states in post-colonial Africa.15 Gray has elaborated and extended his critique of both the Enlightenment project and perfectionism. He continues to emphasise the role of theory, however attenuated, and still relies on argument – that is, the mobilizing of reasons in support of a proposition – to make his case. Indeed, as I show below, Gray’s thought can be read as a dialectical progression from theory to theory. This suggests the powerful
The Political Theory of John Gray 157 driving force of hope, even as the potential for theory continually shrinks and chokes off the scope for hope. The ambivalence underlying Gray’s salvoes against the Enlightenment is summed up in a remark about Nietzsche, whose ‘incessant attacks’ on Christianity’s ‘beliefs and values’, Gray writes, ‘attest to the fact that he could never shake them off’ (Gray 2002b: 43). Thus Gray has found he cannot rest content with withdrawal as a response to the facts of political life. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, such as Hume (Gray 1997: 93), Gray ultimately seeks to work within the natural, and to understand how politics can work within the natural limits on political power – to regulate markets, for instance, or to deal with human diversity or the persistence of human conflict. Gray’s is a counsel of modesty rather than of impossibility: politics has to accept the unalterable, the better to achieve those goals which are possible. ‘Building a political philosophy on the denial of human nature is foolish’ (Gray 2004: 110), but the positive task of ‘political philosophy is to return to practice with fewer illusions’ and continue the ‘search for peaceful coexistence’ (Gray 2000: 139). His continued willingness to engage with practice sets Gray apart from academic political philosophy. Academic philosophy is ‘a self-referential text’ (Gray 1995a: 17), ignoring the complex negotiations which ideals always undergo in practice. Philosophers ‘neglect … feasibility constraints on the attainment of political ideals as these are found in the real world’ (Gray 1995a: 15). In consequence, they never risk disappointment. They purvey an escapist ‘subgenre in fantastic literature’ (Gray 1995a: 12); political philosophy bulks large among the fantasy narratives which Gray identifies as a legacy of the Enlightenment (Gray 1995a: 120; Gray 1997: 173). By seeking refuge from political realities in theory, philosophers dismiss practical politics as a hopeless case, and in effect withdraw from it (Gray 1995a: 16–17). In response, orthodox philosophers could say that their work has taken account of political developments, for example by attempting to incorporate multiculturalism into Rawlsian liberalism. But for Gray they abstract grossly from political realities by assuming that basic liberties can be combined, or that parties are reasonable: in other words they imagine away the very conflicts which make for political conflict (Gray 1995a: 76; Gray 2000: 47–48, 69–70; Gray 2004: 109). They assume, however unconsciously, that they can mould political realities to fit theoretical ideals, as a means of keeping the ideals intact (Gray 1995a: 76–78). Gray’s work confronts real politics, exploding theorists’ fantasy that everything is possible (Gray 2002b: 151). Set against practitioners of ideal theory, who write as if virtually anything is politically possible, Gray can seem to be arguing that virtually nothing is possible. In contrast with their boundless utopian optimism, his insistent pessimism seems to foreclose on politics entirely. But it would be too hasty to assert that pessimism is irredeemably anti-political. In traditional conservatism, active political engagement coexists with pessimism about human nature and the prospects for meliorist or bien-pensant political projects. Although pessimists highlight the unalterably bad – such as, for Christian conservatives, the innately fallen nature of humanity – the pessimist engages
158 G. Newey politically despite pessimism, asking what politics can achieve in the face of imperfection.16 The task of the pessimist, that is, to navigate around unalterable bads in pursuit of those goods which remain politically attainable. Admittedly, Gray’s hyper-pessimism does threaten to leave a vanishingly small space for politics. But, as I shall argue in the final part of this essay, there is no good reason to think that the life of disenchanted animals must be devoid of politics: any credible naturalism needs to accept the fact of collective action. This leaves space for politics, without denying the realities which give grounds for pessimism. Gray’s Phases of Pessimism Gray’s ambivalent relationship with pessimism can be seen as unfolding dialectically. By dialectical, I mean that his thought at any given stage is guided by contradictions within it at that stage. This has driven Gray through neo-liberalism, Oakeshottian conservatism, agonistic liberalism and modus vivendi pseudoliberalism17 to nihilism. Yet the resolutions he achieves repeatedly prove unstable. They represent what he calls (quoting E.M. Cioran) ‘the insoluble as solution, as the only way out’ (Gray 2002b: 117; Gray 1997: 176). He constantly seeks a role for theory in the face of political failure and, when faced with its practical confusions regroups, hoping to find for it a more modest role which acknowledges this failure. The dialectic thus allots an ever-shrinking role to theory. Stage (i): Neo-liberalism Gray’s 1984 monograph Hayek on Liberty (1998a) denies that the state can effect ideals of equality or social justice. ‘Need or merit’ cannot be determined except by market mechanisms, since claims based upon them are often incommensurable with each other (Gray 1998a: 73). Further, rupturing the link between production and reward will destroy efficiency (Gray 1998a: 73–74). The market is the only way of transmitting the information which economic actors need, particularly about prices (Gray 1998a: 38–40). Finally, the state would ‘not know enough reliably to implement and enforce’ redistribution (Gray 1998a: 75; Gray 1993b: 35–36). Gray complements this pessimism with cybernetic optimism about the market, which alone can deliver efficiency. He follows Hayek in arguing that money creation should be privatized to stabilize monetary values (Gray 1998a: 91–92; Gray 1993a: 22–23). Given an adequate legal-judicial framework, the market can also underwrite reciprocally advantageous transactions and ‘social competition ceases to be mutually harmful’ (Gray 1998a: 124). The market ‘allows for innovation and novelty in thought and practice in a way that collective decisions cannot’ (Gray 1993a: 15); it is the only effective source of incentives (Gray 1993a: 75). The market as a catallaxy also ‘supports the argument for liberty by showing that social order does not depend on any hierarchical structure’ (Gray 1993a: 69; Gray 1998a: 82–83; Gray 1993b: 181, 207).
The Political Theory of John Gray 159 After publishing Hayek on Liberty, however, Gray came to believe that neoliberalism exemplified the Enlightenment project, which had ‘become fatally intertwined’ with the free market. ‘A single global market is the Enlightenment’s project of a universal civilization in what is likely to be its final form’ (Gray 2002a: 3). In this it mirrors Marxism, another Enlightenment ideology: ‘both Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism … are variants of the Enlightenment project of supplanting the historic diversity of human cultures with a single universal civilization’ (Gray 2002a: 215; Gray 1995a: 101); both assume ‘ historical convergence on values’ (Gray 2002a: xxii). Neo-liberalism’s similarities to Marxism compound Gray’s worry that, far from shrinking the state, neo-liberalism needed to expand it. This was not just because of its policing and defence monopolies, but also because the state needs to regulate markets and retain residual welfare-state services. A strong state is needed to break up social institutions which impede the free market (Gray 2002a: 26; Gray 1998a: 151). Gray quotes Dicey: ‘believers in laissez faire found that for the attainment of their ends the improvement and strengthening of government machinery was an absolute necessity’ (Gray 2002a: 26). On the other hand, social and political order are jeopardized by unrestricted capitalism: ‘unregulated world markets threaten cohesion in society and stability in government’ (Gray 2002a: 201; Gray 2002a: 25– 27); ‘the innermost contradiction of the free market is that it weakens the traditional social institutions on which it has depended in the past – the family is a key example’ (Gray 2002a: 29). Thus ‘free’ markets demand the strong state which neo-liberalism deplores, while in many economies the success of the market depends on the very institutions which it erodes. Hence neo-liberalism undermines itself. Behind this, it seems, lies Gray’s unease that the political minimalism which led him to champion Hayek in the mid-1980s has proven morally empty. Gray repeatedly quotes Hayek’s apothegm (Hayek 1960: 41) that ‘Progress is movement for movement’s sake’, describing the remark as ‘candidly nihilistic’ (Gray 1995a: 89; Gray 1998a: 154; Gray 1993a: 139). The Enlightenment state is morally null (Gray 1995a: 20). Gray’s subsequent move towards conservatism attempts to keep a role for politics in the face of this moral evacuation. Stage (ii): Oakeshottian Conservatism For Gray, on the rebound from the market utopia of neo-liberalism, a prime attraction of conservatism lay in its insistence on imperfectibility (Gray 1993a: 47; Gray 1995b: 71), and rejection of political meliorism, a defining thesis of liberal ideology (Gray 1995a: 108; Gray 1993b: 299, 320). Conservatives ‘deny the evanescence of imperfection’, and therefore ‘they reject the Procrustean politics of the utopian blueprint’ (Gray 1993a: 48). Against liberal utopianism, Gray praises the ‘Tory pessimism, best exemplified in the writings of Lord Salisbury, that viewed with foreboding the prospects in the longer term of freedom and excellence under a regime of democratic capitalism’ (Gray 1993a: 64). Gray reaffirms that ‘the most fundamental tenet of the conservative outlook on politics is the limited character of
160 G. Newey … government … political life is not a project of world improvement or the reconstitution of human institutions on the pattern of any ideal model’ (Gray 1993a: 47). Again Gray infers anti-perfectionism from his rejection of Enlightenment rationalism. Now he appeals for justification to Rationalism in Politics, drawn by Oakeshott’s view that theory is implicit in social practice. For Oakeshott, the error of rationalism is to hold that ‘all genuine knowledge is statable entirely in explicit, theoretical terms,’ and that practice is ‘irrational’ unless ‘guided at every point by explicit principles’ (Gray 1989: 202–203). Oakeshottian conservatism refuses to base social or political culture on a universal template. Gray asserts actually existing forms of life against the totalizing theories of both socialist and market ideologues. ‘Social and political culture is the outcome of local happenstance – the meaning of life for all of us is a local matter’ (Gray 1995a: 106). The theorist should approach social and political life in the spirit of a bricoleur. The aims of political theory are necessarily modest, and duly sensitive to local idiosyncrasy (Gray 1993a: 56). At the same time, his ambitions for the practice of politics are also narrowly focused. In his 1988 article ‘Oakeshott on law’, Gray still argues that the state should confine itself to the morally pared-down task of holding the ring between vying civil-society interests: in modern conditions, ‘we seek for co-existence in the fragile peace of civil association’ (Gray 1989: 215). Gray identifies the state as a civil association in Oakeshott’s sense, which has no collective aim beyond enabling individuals to associate freely (Gray 1989: 207–208). By the later ‘A Conservative Disposition’ (1993), however, Gray advocates a ‘limited’ but larger role for government. He now thinks that conservatives should confine the job of government to preserving the conditions which make possible ‘common life’ (Gray 1993a: 60ff) – not just by keeping the peace, but by social work such as helping the needy, environmental protection, and regenerating social and cultural institutions, including traditions (Gray 1993a: 50). Conservatives must, Gray says, ‘resist the pressure for the political disestablishment of morality that is the common coinage of liberalism’; these tasks call for a ‘strong state’ (Gray 1993: 51). But even here he cautions that the state’s efforts are liable to backfire. To regenerate traditions ‘by deliberate contrivance’ is, Gray says, ‘as if one tried to repair a spider’s web with one’s bare hands’ (Gray 1993a: 59; Gray 1993b: 38–39, 265, 280). Again the power of government is severely limited. It cannot revitalize a real or imagined ‘organic’ past if society is, like modern Britain, culturally plural (Gray 1993a: 56–57; Gray 1995a: 99). Government cannot forge civic identity among its citizens from shared deep moral or cultural commitments, since these are ‘chimerical’ (Gray 1993a: 56). Nor can it resuscitate at will the family or other decaying social institutions (Gray 1995a: 99–100). Unsurprisingly, Gray’s attempts to reassert conservatism against modern social upheaval prove unstable. The upkeep of the life-world proves impossible given the virulence of market forces (Gray 1995a: 99). Modern conservatism tries to combine traditional values with a commitment to the free market, but ‘inherited institutions and practices have been swept away by the market forces which neo-liberal policies release or reinforce’; ‘the undoing of conservatism has come about as an unintended
The Political Theory of John Gray 161 consequence of Hayekian policy’ (Gray 1995a: 87). Conservatives applaud traditional and local knowledge, but have no idea how to protect it against the market (Gray 1995a: 106). Conservatism now comes to seem an unsustainably atavistic reaction against modern life. Gray rejects Oakeshottian conservatism as merely another totalizing narrative drawn, despite itself, from Kant (Gray 1997: 89), or from credulity about the integrity of traditions (Gray 1997: 87–88; Gray 2000: 53). Both Kantian universalism and Oakeshottian traditionalism flatten the contours of different political communities. Conservatives like Oakeshott overstate the homogeneity of traditional societies or overlook the clash between different cultures in late modernity (Gray 1997: 88). Hence conservatism ‘is no longer a real possibility for us’ (Gray 1995a: 93). Stage (iii): Agonistic Liberalism Conservatism founders in trying to reassert traditional values against social and economic forces which it cannot withstand. Gray takes this to show not just that social life is disrupted by the market, but also that modern conservatism faces an insuperable cultural obstacle: the fact that modern societies are pluralistic are riven with conflict (Gray 1995a: 111). Conservatives like Oakeshott blunder by imagining ‘that a pre-reflective form of common life is to be found anywhere which lacks experience of deep political conflict’ (Gray 1995a: 68). Gray insists that pluralism is a ‘fact’ or ‘truth’ about values, rather than merely being a version of scepticism or relativism (Gray 1995a: 67, 81; Gray 1995b: 46, 62–63, 154), so it provides an ‘objective’ theory with which politics and political theorists have to deal (Gray 1993b: 324). Individual traditions are internally pluralistic, including liberalism (Gray 1995b: 145). This position, taken from Isaiah Berlin (Gray 1995b: ch. 2), forms the basis of Gray’s ‘agonistic liberalism’: it infers from value-pluralism that ‘liberal selves and liberal cultures are particular social forms that are granted no special privileges by history or human nature’ (Gray 1995a: 84). Agonistic liberalism adduces value-pluralism in support of the two master-theses of Gray’s pessimism. Value-pluralism means that many goods cannot be combined in a single life, so the notion of a single ‘best’ life for human beings is empty. Perfectionism is not only false, but nonsensical. ‘The perfections identified by any morality … are plural and competitive, and the idea of a perfection that encompasses them all is incoherent’ (Gray 1995b: 45). This leads to a rejection of Millian liberalism: ‘Mill’s mistake was to think that the best life must be in its most central and important respects the same life for everybody’ (Gray 2000: 60; Gray 1996: 140, 145, 150–151). Equally, reason is powerless to tell us not just which life is best, but often also what we should do. Plural values are incommensurable with one another, and incommensurable values are rationally incomparable; so reason cannot always decide between practical alternatives embodying such values (Gray 1995a: 69). The ‘truth of value-pluralism’ suggests that what is central to political theory is ‘not
162 G. Newey rational choice but radical choice’ (Gray 1995a: 67), where ‘reason leaves us in the lurch’ (Gray 1995b: 71). This sinks the Enlightenment project. It also scuttles liberalism’s pretensions to authority. Value-pluralism means that liberty enjoys no primacy over other values (Gray 1995b: 152; Gray 2000: 71), so perfectionist liberalism, which presupposes such primacy, is false.18 A fortiori, reason cannot prove liberalism superior to other ideologies. Since specific cultures, some of them non-liberal, instantiate diverse values, value-pluralism requires that there be non-liberal cultures (Gray 1995b: 152): ‘liberal institutions can have no universal authority’ (Gray 1995b: 155). What authority can liberal institutions have? ‘The ground of liberalism must … be found in a particular cultural tradition or form of life in which choice-making is central’ (Gray 1995b: 161). But this does not give choice-making authority outside liberal culture. For Gray, forms of life lack cross-cultural validity. Attempts to unearth foundations for liberal traditions or forms of life are ‘bourgeois’: they vainly seek to parlay local mores into practices with universal authority (Gray 1995a: 83, 144; Gray 1993b: 321; Gray 1997: 56). The most we can hope for is that liberal values have authority for us. But here, again, instability looms. As Gray argues, value-pluralism is not to be confused with relativism (Gray 1995b: 55, 62, 64–66, 70, 72, 149–150). But if so, some political orders may surely be better than others at accommodating valuepluralism (though Gray rejects the claim that liberalism itself is such an order (Gray 1995b: 152)). It only seems to follow that no single type of regime is best at accommodating value-pluralism if each possible political order embodies a set of values, and value-incommensurability means that reason cannot decide which set is best. But then we seem to be left with relativism after all. So value-pluralism threatens to fork Gray between relativism and reinstated liberal universalism. He maintains however that ‘agonistic’ liberalism steers between universalism and relativism (Gray 1995b: 159ff; Gray 2000: 109). Agonistic liberalism avoids relativism because it does not claim that ‘no reasons at all can be given’ in its own support; Gray argues that this is consistent with valuepluralism but not relativism (Gray 1995b: 155). Meanwhile, agonistic liberalism avoids universalism, because it accepts that there ‘can be no argument according universal priority to liberal values’ (Gray 1995b: 155). Reasons depend for their validity on ‘specific cultural milieux’, so we may have valid reason to espouse liberalism while others do not (Gray 1995b: 155). Stage (iv): Modus Vivendi However, agonistic liberalism runs into a fairly obvious problem. How can Gray square his eschewal of relativism with his insistence that there can be no supreme value, such as liberty? Gray finds himself unable to abandon the Enlightenment idea that there are universal moral norms. In Isaiah Berlin he discusses ‘the universal minimum requirements of morality’, adding that ‘in our historical circumstances … it may be true that [these requirements] have the best chance of being met under
The Political Theory of John Gray 163 liberal institutions’ (Gray 1995b: 155). Still, there is no single institutional template which is best for all societies, irrespective of circumstances. Here Gray attempts a balancing-act, seeking to give universalism its due, while reaffirming that ‘value-pluralism demolishes’ the ‘universalistic premises’ to which many liberal and illiberal orders appeal for justification (Gray 1995b: 151). Gray implicitly accepts that in circumstances other than ours, liberal institutions may not best meet the minimum requirements of morality. What the universal moral requirements demand is practically indeterminate until local circumstances are filled in, in which the prevalent interpretation of local values plays a central part. So for Gray, value-pluralism is consistent, after all, with universal moral requirements, because plural values surface when universal norms are interpreted locally. Thus the key move away from agonistic liberalism is that Gray limits the scope of value-pluralism. This move occurs in Two Faces of Liberalism, where Gray talks of ‘universal human values’ which frame ‘constraints on what can count as a reasonable compromise between rival values’ (Gray 2000: 19, 20). The rivalrous values still exist, then, but they are now ‘framed’ by ‘constraints’ drawn from universal values. These determine which compromises are reasonable. Unlike Enlightenment liberalism, modus vivendi pseudo-liberalism seeks accommodation as the overriding political good (Gray 2000: 137). Unlike agonistic liberalism, modus vivendi does acknowledge that there are universal norms which politics should accommodate. When modus vivendi accords with the universal values, there is no best way to strike the necessary compromises. For example, liberty and welfare are presumably universal values, so denying them systematically to citizens would be illegitimate; but given that these values conflict, there is no best way of balancing them in the abstract. Underlying the universal values are ‘generically human evils’, which rest on ‘constancy in human nature’ rather than, as post-modernists and conventionalists argue, ‘agreement in opinions’ (Gray 2000: 66). Experience demonstrates that ‘humans have a stock of needs that does not change much’; denying these needs by torture, separation from loved ones, exile, humiliation, poverty, avoidable illhealth, and genocide is a ‘universal evil’ (Gray 2000: 66). However, accepting that there are ‘generically human evils’, and consequently that there may be some ‘universal human values’ is consistent with there being ‘many moralities’ (Gray 1998b: 34–35). Meanwhile the naturalistic tenets guiding Gray’s pessimism persist. He remains implacably opposed to perfectionism and liberals’ Enlightenment universalism (Gray 2000: 10; 35). Liberals have held that there is a ‘single, universal regime’ which is best for all human beings, but modus vivendi liberalism accepts that polities vary like other human cultural forms (Gray 2000: 21). We can only formulate ‘minimal standards of political legitimacy’, not ‘a charter for a worldwide regime, liberal or otherwise’ (Gray 2000: 106). Despite his earlier avowals (Gray 1995b: 155; Gray 1995a: 81–82; Gray 1993b: 303–304) Gray now denies that there is any ‘universal minimum morality’ (Gray 2000: 66): there is no rational method for choosing between universal evils. This is
164 G. Newey because we sometimes have to choose which evil to avoid and which to endure, and reason cannot fully determine our choice. Different cultures will choose differently (Gray 2000: 66–67). Stage (v): Nihilism Modus vivendi pseudo-liberalism attempts to peg theory back to what is realistically attainable. But the line between asserting that there are ‘universal evils’ and denying that there is a ‘universal minimum morality’ seems vanishingly thin. Surely the requirement to avoid these evils could itself form the basis of such a morality, even if there is no universally valid means of choosing between evils? After all, many Kantians argue that reason can generate a universal minimum morality, even if its application remains circumstantially variable. And Gray has some work to do to show that modus vivendi itself is not the super-value which he sought, and failed to find, in liberty.19 In Gray’s subsequent writings, modus vivendi comes under further pressure, from two main sources. The first is the nihilistic anti-humanism of Straw Dogs, Gray’s polemic against the humanist ‘illusion’ (Gray 2002b: 123) that human beings, alone among animals, can ‘transcend our animal natures’ (Gray 2002b: 31). The polemic includes Gray’s usual strictures against belief in progress, an ‘irrational faith’ which ‘may be the only antidote to nihilism’ (Gray 2002b: 29). If we are left with nihilism, there are no values, and so no basis either for agonistic liberalism or the basic goods which modus vivendi seeks to secure. Similarly, efforts to live by reason fail in an ‘irrational world’; humanists continue, ‘Tertullian-like’, to trust in reason, without which ‘the Enlightenment is a gospel of despair’ (Gray 2002b: 28–29). Second, Gray expresses renewed and deeper scepticism about politics. Faith in politics stands convicted of hubris in the face of nature. This faith presumes that we control our destiny, but natural facts about our condition prove otherwise: for example, the recent ‘spike’ (Gray 2002b: 11; Gray 2004: 40, 62) in human numbers will inevitably be reversed by a catastrophic drop in population regardless of ‘any of our hopes or plans’ (Gray 2002b: 9). Similarly, ‘technological globalization is an inexorable process, which no political decision can halt’ (Gray 2003: 112). Technocratic utopians fondly believe that the world can be indefinitely manipulated for human ends. But ‘humans can expect to achieve very little’ in conflicts with nature, including our human nature (Gray 2003: 115; Gray 2004: 110). Indeed, ‘humanism and naturalism’ are ‘irreconcilable’ (Gray 2002b: 31). With this Gray seems to reach the end of the line. His naturalism suggests that human striving is futile, while his nihilism about human values doubts whether there is anything of worth for humans to strive for anyway. Gray’s devaluation of all values and insistence on the vanity of action spell the death of politics, both in theory and practice. His comment on Isaiah Berlin could as well be applied to Gray himself: ‘Berlin’s voice … refuses with a passion the mocking harmonies of any theodicy. It is Job’s’ (Gray 1993a: 69).
The Political Theory of John Gray 165 Pessimism, Naturalism and Anti-politics Is Gray really as gloomy as he sounds? He has progressed through a variety of doctrines, each of which implies that the political prospects for the Enlightenment project are dim. His own pessimism is summarized by a remark on Freud and Russell: they ‘advocated a dictatorship of reason’ and in this ‘were typical thinkers of the Enlightenment, distinguished … only by the frankness of their pessimism’ (Gray 1998b: 33). Therapy is, of course, only one possible response to political failure, to the survival of the non-ideal. It confines its hopes to changing the attitudes which underlie pessimism – in Hegel’s phrase, seeking the rose in the cross of the present. The alternative, the path of persistence, is to continue in the effort to achieve the ideal. But, as noted earlier, persistence requires continuing faith in political methods. As Gray sees it, the problem for the method of persistence is that faith in politics looks like precisely that – an irrational clinging to belief when the rational grounds for it have disappeared (Gray 1998b: 51). Gray criticizes conservatism for its undue optimism about the potency of political methods, particularly given the late modern dissolution of traditional ways of thought and action. But he implies that virtually the whole run of political ideologies – socialism/Marxism (Gray 2003: 5–6; Gray 2002b: 167), anarchism (Gray 2003: 2–3, 24), fascism (Gray 2002b: 94, 134–136), neo-liberalism (Gray 1995a: 88–89), ‘East Coast’ academic liberalism (Gray 1995a: 2), communitarianism (Gray 1995a: 8), even Green ideology, with which Gray has latterly shown some sympathy (Gray 1997: 162, 172–174) – are likewise in thrall to the ‘Enlightenment superstition’ (Gray 1997: 174) that politics is omnicompetent. Gray moves from thinking that politics cannot do everything, to doubting whether politics can do anything worthwhile. Seen from this angle, the method of persistence is apt to look like blind obduracy. That leaves the method of therapy. Gray seems to embrace therapy in Straw Dogs, which concludes: ‘Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?’ (Gray 2002b: 199). Here Gray’s therapeutic goal is to transcend the desires wrought by humanism. But the aim of simply seeing does not lend itself to any recognizable programme for action – it looks like a withdrawal into theoria, or contemplation. In this Gray follows Freud and Russell, who ‘doubted that reason would ever be strong enough to withstand the force of destructive emotion’ (Gray 1998a: 15). Withdrawal into contemplation is not incoherent, and has philosophical precedents, most obviously the life which Plato commended for his philosopher-rulers in the Republic. But that, as Plato saw, was a life beyond politics. The political end, accordingly, was to support the contemplative life and render it immune from incursion – above all, incursion from politics. Withdrawal lies beyond politics: as a political project, contemplation is empty. By contrast, perennial disappointment is a real – that is, a coherent – possibility. But the complex of attitudes which disappointment elicits in Gray’s work proves unstable.
166 G. Newey Over the course of Gray’s career, persistence comes to look increasingly like the bad faith of Gramsci’s ‘optimism of the will’. On the other hand, the therapeutic responses open to Gray – celebration, resignation and contemplation – seem to signify withdrawal from politics. Gray now seemingly opts for contemplation. Past philosophers have seen contemplation as a path to truth, but Gray expresses profound ambivalence about this. On the one hand, he urges human beings to abandon the illusion that they are different from other animals, and become what they are. He acclaims the ‘luminous clarity’ of Voltaire’s pessimism (Gray 1998b: 52), and argues that our aim henceforward should be ‘simply to see’ (Gray 2002b 199). On the other hand, certain illusions are ‘invincible’: in future, Gray writes, ‘our aim will be to identify our invincible illusions. Which untruths might we be rid of, and which can we not do without? – that is the question’ (Gray 2002b: 83). If so, pessimists cannot console themselves as the ancient Stoics did, with the thought that by taking refuge in contemplation, they can at least have the truth and with it ataraxy, or peace of mind; this is merely another illusion. His pessimism is so strong that in the end Gray is led to abandon even the hope of attaining the truth through contemplation. This ambivalence pervades Gray’s discussion of human beings’ relation to the rest of nature. The belief that the human species is set apart from nature is a prime example of the illusions which Gray wishes to explode. In addition, exploding this illusion could have drastic political consequences. But what is it ‘simply to see’ an illusion? Presumably it is to see something as an illusion, such as the belief in human distinctness which Gray excoriates throughout Straw Dogs. But if this is an illusion, it is a distinctively human illusion, as Gray sees (Gray 2002b: 29, 81), and one we are probably stuck with. If we cannot ‘do without’ it, simply seeing it via contemplation will not disabuse us of it. So we do not know what to do with the thought that belief in human distinctiveness is an illusion, and hence we do not know how to respond to it politically. Naturalizing Politics Why does Gray cleave to contemplation, if it cannot deliver on its promise to grant peace of mind, and peace of mind is not worth much anyway? The answer seems to lie in his unquenched thirst for truth. Gray remains committed to inquiry, which is intelligible only if it aims at the truth. Even as he debunks contemplation, Gray advocates sorting invincible illusions from those which can be dispelled, a project which only seems worthwhile if the truth itself matters. A now familiar-looking dialectic rears its head, comprising a commitment – to truth – which seems to leave scope for theory, and the expansive dynamic of pessimism, which insists that the reflections of theory are practically futile. The dialectical movement charted above took Gray progressively further from faith in a progressivist politics. The given, which has encroached ever further on the space of politics, by the time of Straw Dogs seems to make politics either impossible
The Political Theory of John Gray 167 or irrelevant. But perhaps this is itself an illusion which can be vanquished. Once we contemplate the given, we may be able to find a route back to politics. This route, which by-passes perfectionism and rationalism, goes via an immanent critique of Gray’s naturalism. As we have seen, Gray constantly adverts to what is unalterable in our situation. His implicit question to political theorists is a good one: what is simply given, and what remains as raw material for political deliberation? In politics as elsewhere, what is simply given as an unalterable constraint on action, closes down possibilities which might otherwise be open.20 Where theorizing disregards the given, it is liable to seem merely obstinate and, in the pejorative sense, utopian. The issue is not so much whether theoretical ideals are revisable in the light of what is simply given, as what content the given has prior to politics. Modern liberalism, in common with other ideologies, takes certain political claims as given – indeed it is partly constitutive of ideologies to do this, through conceptions of human nature, say, or what Michael Freeden aptly calls ‘decontestations’ (Freeden 1996). Ideologies are not very good at exposing their own conceptions of the given, and asking whether they are arbitrary, though the self-reflectiveness in recent philosophical liberalism aims to lay its own presuppositions bare.21 But until politics has taken its course (and often not even then) it is far from uncontroversial what really is simply given. Although the given plays a central role in ideologies, only political processes can decide how workable their conceptions of the given are. This poses a problem for prescriptive political theory. Theory aims to excogitate the ideal, but what is ideal always presupposes relevant data about the human situation. What is simply given – what is a brute fact – is often not simply given to reflection. There are many relevant truths knowable only a posteriori. These truths importantly include how far specific political ideals are liveable. It is not clear to prior reflection whether an ideal is open to us, or is a mere phantasm. So theory, as prior reflection, is poorly placed to distinguish real from merely imagined constraints on action. We can tell real and imagined constraints apart only once political processes work themselves out – and then only imperfectly. What is given is, in part, the upshot of these processes, and will be subject to strong local variability. This implies, of course, that the other part of the given is there regardless of how politics goes, as for example the fact that resources are finite. But even here the significance of the given always has to be decided politically. Consider the debate over the justification of political authority. A strong tradition in political theory bases the justification on claims about the reasons people would ideally recognise that they had for submitting to such an authority if it did not exist, i.e. in a state of nature; the tradition then uses these reasons to reconstitute the authority, through a hypothetical narrative of state-making. A popular source of such reasons has been morality, since writers in this tradition often thought that morality has special authority, trumping other kinds of reason for action. However, even if morality has this special authority, we cannot assume that any moral norms to which we are subject here and now would apply with undiminished force if no political authority existed. What morality demands depends partly on what is given,
168 G. Newey so that asking what it will demand if some things which are given are imagined away, may not yield a determinate answer, at least until other features of the deliberative landscape are sketched in.22 This makes the tradition’s starting-point – imagining politics dissolved, and reconstituting it on the basis of given moral facts – look arbitrary. Why not imagine morality dissolved, and then reconstitute it on the basis of given political facts? Offering moral ideals to justify political authority risks begging the question if the ideals can only be imperfectly specified in advance of practice. One thing which is needed before the moral ideals can be more fully specified is an account of the political relations between people, including whether or not they belong to the same political association or state. There is no reason to think that when these relations are specified, they will conform to some uniform template. As with non-political relations, their moral content cannot be fully characterized in advance, since at that point we do not know what kind of relation it is. If something really is given, we cannot prevail against it. But often action involves a testing of whether something is given or not. Where political and moral controversy rages, it is seldom agreed what is given. There is no obvious political answer to the question, as there was for Aristotle: what is natural for us? Some givens are discoverable only through the process of practical engagement. Hence we do not fully know what is a proper ground for pessimism or what ideals are liveable for us until we try them out. Many courses of action which are not politically feasible wear their impossibility on their sleeve. But some apparent possibilities are shown to be impossible only by trial. The given may constrain or limit the ideals which we can live. But we do not know what is given until we are faced with the outcome of political engagement. Nor is this purely an ‘epistemic’ constraint, since as I have argued we should think of politics itself as helping to determine what is given. This more dynamic view of the given suggests a way to avoid the anti-political tendency of both the responses to disappointment laid out earlier. It eschews the false optimism of persistence, since it does not assume that the world can be moulded at will to suit political ideals. It also rejects the pessimism of therapy, since it does not commend attitudinal change to deal with disappointment. That is, the route back rejects the anti-political bias of ideal theory. The negotiability of ideals – what in them is inchoate and what is given – just is the space of politics. Politics is provisional, messy, slippery, but unavoidable.23 And, as such, politics itself is simply given. This understanding can be framed within Gray’s own naturalism. For on any view it comes naturally to human beings to act, and to tailor their actions to their ideas of what is valuable – which is far from saying, of course, that the actions themselves will succeed. Politics is one manifestation of this natural impulse, and to that extent is as natural to human beings as bipedalism. Human beings are by their nature creatures of politics. In this sense, the unavoidability of engaging in politics follows from any credible naturalism about human beings. Not that the human good must be advanced by political action, as perfectionism and meliorism assume. That may well be one of
The Political Theory of John Gray 169 the incurable human illusions to which Gray refers (Gray 2002b: 81). Equally groundless, however, is the hyper-pessimist view that politics must destroy what is valuable.24 Instead we can accept, less grandly, that action, including politics, is neither necessarily good nor bad, but simply given, and politics is cast as the enduring residue of the sub-ideal. What role does this leave for politics, and political theory? In doomsayer mode, as when suggesting that homo sapiens is but a brief and moribund spasm in the history of the planet (Gray 2004: 14), Gray sounds utterly dismissive of politics. He also scoffs at attempts to bring behemoths like biotechnology or population explosion under political control (Gray 2004: 28–29; 40). But, rightly, he does not therefore refrain from addressing concrete political issues. Gray is also correct to think that security remains a – in fact the – fundamental political value, notwithstanding the hugely exaggerated ‘terrorist threat’ which has thrown the politics of security to the fore recently (Gray 2004: ch. 12).25 It is clearly a political matter what security is, what it requires, and how it should be given its due when it conflicts with other concerns such as liberty. It follows from pessimism itself that security26 is the summum bonum. Pessimism implies non-nihilism: disappointment, and the expectation that the sub-ideal will triumph, only make sense if there are goods which characterize the ideal to start with. Pessimism also implies that goods are prey to contingencies, including those of politics. Since politics is a partly open process – this is implicit in the idea that politics helps to determine what is given – it can go more or less well, relative to these goods. It is not just the good but the bearably bad which is vulnerable, and can be secured more or less successfully. What is up for grabs in politics is, for the pessimist, the sub-ideal as opposed to something still worse. Hence it is the prime role of politics to secure what is securable – which, compared with some worse outcomes, may be quite a lot. The best may be the enemy of the good, as the saying goes, but the bearably bad can also be made the enemy of the worst. In our world, a lot is, as it were, up for grabs. A brief and selective list would include: hot and cold wars over control of natural resources; rivalries between sovereign states and transnational bodies such as the UN, the WTO, the international criminal court, and private corporations; nationalist, ethnic and religious tensions in the Caucasus, Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Balkans and elsewhere; the sustainability of free trade between economies with high unit labour costs and competitors from low-cost rivals in east Asia; the ailing power of the state as an executive agency, economic actor and provider of welfare in the face of demographic and economic pressures. All these political issues are theatres of conflict, and therefore have alternative possible resolutions, which can only be arrived at politically. It is conflict, rather than values, which drives politics, and conflict has a point only where there are real goods at stake.27 So pessimists can make room for politics after all. Above I have outlined a revised naturalism as a way to make sense of Gray’s present position and to get beyond the recurrent dialectic of anti-politics and anti-theory, where giving politics its due can occur only at the cost of theory, and conversely. My alternative suggests
170 G. Newey a pessimism which need not foreclose politics. But the considerations above do suggest that prescriptive theory has a less ambitious role to play, since its ideals make sense only in relation to an account of what is given, and politically what is given is indeterminate, as the unforeseeable result of collective action. What specifically is ruled out is political design, the philosophical project of determining in advance what is and is not fit material for politics. Philosophical theory is liable to arrive too early – before we know what is liveable – or too late. This does not mean that theory has no role to play. After all, nobody comes to politics wholly devoid of thought, and an over-drawn distinction between political thought and action has been one of my targets in this essay. What theory can do – and Gray has contributed amply in this area – is offer a salutary corrective to theory’s own delusions of grandeur, particularly when it gives way to facile moralism. This counsel of modesty commends reining in ideal theory and turning instead to understanding and description as prime aims of theory. The ideals with which actors come to politics are never more than provisional. Theory can articulate these and suggest ways to negotiate the conflicts which the ideals will encounter in practice. But theory is not a substitute for the encounter itself. My sketch of disenchanted naturalism in politics acknowledges the limits both on theory and practice. It tries to dispel the air of paradox surrounding political pessimism, without relapsing into anti-politics. It endorses Gray’s view that theoretical reasons for political action cannot be compellingly set out ex ante. It avoids the perfectionism or Enlightenment rationalism against which Gray repeatedly inveighs, and accepts his emphasis on local contingencies in deciding what is politic. And it is consistent with the tenor of his naturalism. To be sure, this involves a certain amount of appropriative reconstruction of Gray, as all such exercises do. But in so doing it remains true to the spirit of Gray’s work, and its striving to articulate ‘the Yes of the realist spoken because he must say yes, spoken because under every No lay a passion for Yes that had never been broken’.28 Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to Linda Holt for advice, criticism and encouragement at all stages of the writing of this essay. Thanks also to John Horton for detailed comments. Notes 1.
2. 3.
While Gray can display unease about an unduly monolithic gloss on the Enlightenment, citing Voltaire as an exception (Gray 2003: 7), and acknowledging that ‘there were many Enlightenments’, he nevertheless argues that ‘the core project of the Enlightenment was the construction of … a critical morality, rationally binding on all human beings’ (Gray 1995a: 123). I will take ‘the Enlightenment project’ or ‘rationalism’ to refer to this attempt to derive universal norms from reason. Of course, many political philosophers run together perfectionism and belief in the Enlightenment project, i.e. the positive counterparts of the two beliefs discussed in the text.
The Political Theory of John Gray 171 4.
5. 6. 7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12. 13.
14. 15.
16. 17. 18.
19.
20.
‘The rationalist ideal of the government of the mind by itself is delusive. How much more of a mirage, then, is the ideal of a society of minds that governs itself by the light of conscious reason’ (Gray 1993b: 34–35; Gray 1989: 186–192). Gray endorses James Buchanan’s view that reason is ‘in essence critical and fallibilist rather than apodictic or axiomatic’ (Gray 1993b: 52). Thus ‘with the transformation of liberalism into a tradition, the failure of the Enlightenment project is itself institutionalized’ (Gray 1995a: 150). Reason’s inability to construct an a priori standard of ‘efficiency’ to decide the rationality or otherwise of a given system of production is fundamental to Gray’s critique of G.A. Cohen’s defence of the Marxist theory of history (Gray 1993b: 111–114). Gray 1995a: 122–127 argues that the Enlightenment (despite possible appearances to the contrary) espoused a doctrine of human perfectibility, which runs afoul of irreducible diversity in values (Gray 1995a: 122–127; Gray 1995b: 36, 70–71; Gray 1996: 149–150; Gray 1993a: x). This however follows only if value-pluralism is held to preclude ranking of values, which as I have argued elsewhere (Newey 1997) is not entailed by value-incommensurability. The anti-perfectionism follows when the further claim is made that improving the measure of one value requires the diminution of another. E.g. Gray’s caustic dismissal of Habermasian discourse ethics as typifying ‘the Enlightenment expectation that in an undistorted dialogue human beings will come to convergence in their values, projects and perspectives. At no point in his prolix and voluminous theorizings does Habermas give this expectation any foundation in reason’ (Gray 1993b: 93). This is perhaps most clearly expressed in Gray 1998a: 114, where the Hayekian catallaxy is held to embody implicit knowledge which either cannot be fully articulated, or if articulated, discloses basic assumptions which cannot be derived from reason: ‘our reasonings always come to a stop at our most basic practices’. Also Gray 1993b: 34–35. In modern political philosophy ‘perfectionism’ holds that some conception of the good is best, and should therefore be implemented politically (Gray 1996: 149–150). Gray defines this as a ‘morality … in which an ideal of human character and a conception of the good life are central’ (Gray 1995b: 29), but it is important to add that perfectionists think that it is therefore justifiable to implement this ideal or conception politically – this is where they part company with neutralists. Gray would now add the grand narrative of capitalism’s inevitable global triumph (Gray 2002a: 120–121). The distinction between trimmers and true believers applies not just to socialist theorists and activists, but also for example to Rawlsians who modify a theory of justice to meet perceived shortcomings like its neglect of global or gender justice. For wider reflections on the cultural background to political pessimism, see Oliver Bennett, Cultural Pessimism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2001), esp. ch. 4. This marks not only Gray’s journalism but also his more theoretical writings. However, as I show above, Gray’s acknowledgement of political realities leads him to think that there are severe limits on effective political action, but his intellectual progress is marked by a continuing quest to discern – even amid the seeming despair of Straw Dogs – a role for politics, and for theory in politics. At one stage in his career Gray endorsed the Salisburian school of ‘Tory pessimism’, but also urged that ‘conservative values [can] be preserved’ through ‘One Nation’ policies (Gray 1993a: 64). ‘Pseudo-liberalism’, because Gray identifies modus vivendi as a ‘face’ of liberalism, but it is fundamental to his argument that there can be legitimate non-liberal regimes. As I argue (Newey 2001: ch. 3), value-pluralism is not, in itself, inconsistent with there being a master-value such as liberty which is lexically ordered, as in Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, over other values – indeed, lexical ordering is one form of incommensurability. Gray expresses hope rather than confidence that negative liberty can be reconciled with value-pluralism in Gray 1989: 66, but has abandoned this hope by the time of Isaiah Berlin (Gray 1995b: 154, 159, 161). And which do remain open when entertained in a different, non-practical mode, as in fantasy.
172 G. Newey 21. The problem lies in relying on presuppositions which have enough content to generate a theory, but not so much content that they become controversial and hence question-begging. 22. T.M. Scanlon’s well-known contractualist theory, for instance, seems to invoke a primitive desire to reach agreement on terms which nobody can reasonably reject, but unless this desire is regarded as a condition of having reasons for action at all (as Scanlon perhaps believes), it seems there can be situations where I can have reason to force agreements on others regardless of whether they reasonably reject them. 23. I argue this at greater length in Newey (2001). 24. The value-pluralism which Gray still endorses is as fatal to hyper-pessimism as it is to perfectionism, since it makes the notion of the worst as empty as that of the best. 25. This ‘threat’ operates largely rhetorically, to justify actions whose real rationale concerns strategic control of resources. 26. The following argument assumes a broad understanding of security, as the reasonable expectation that fundamental goods will be available. I develop this further in a paper for a forthcoming volume on security to be edited by Melissa Lane and Glyn Morgan. 27. As John Horton argues in his contribution to the present collection, and I argue in Newey 2001 ch. 3. 28. From Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du Mal. Quoted as the epigraph to Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana 1985).
References Bennett, O. (2001) Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Blackburn, S. (1998) Ruling Passions (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: a Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gray, J. (1989) Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1993a) Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1993b) Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1995a) Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1995b) Isaiah Berlin (London: HarperCollins). Gray, J. (1995c) Liberalism, 2nd ed. (Buckingham: Open University Press). Gray, J. (1996) Mill on Liberty: a Defence 2nd ed. (London: Routledge 1996) Gray, J. (1997) Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity). Gray, J. (1998a) Hayek on Liberty, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1998b) Voltaire and Enlightenment (London: Phoenix). Gray, J. (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity). Gray, J. (2002a) False Dawn: the Delusions of Global Capitalism, 2nd ed. (London: Granta). Gray, J. (2002b) Straw Dogs:Tthoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta). Gray, J. (2003) Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Faber & Faber). Gray, J. (2004) Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (London: Granta). Hayek, F. (1960) Constitution of Liberty (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press). Newey, G. F. (1997) Against thin-property reductivism: toleration as superogatory, Journal of Value Inquiry, 31(2), pp. 231–249. Newey, G. (2001) After Politics: the Rejection of Politics in Contemporary Liberal Philosophy (London: Palgrave).
Liberalism, Nihilism and Modernity in the Political Thought of John Gray NOËL O’SULLIVAN Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Hull, UK NOËLO’SULLIVAN 0 2 9
[email protected] 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600655081 FCRI_A_165482.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
John Gray has the distinction of polarizing critical opinion more profoundly than any other contemporary political theorist. One of his recent books (Straw Dogs, 2002a), for example, was hailed by Will Self (in The Independent) as ‘a remarkable new work of philosophy’ – nothing less, indeed, than ‘the full monty, with isms falling right, left and centre’ (Self 2002); while a tabloid newspaper announced that it would ‘probably prove one of the most important [books] this century’ (Corrigan 2002). At the opposite extreme are critics like Simon Blackburn, who caustically dismissed Straw Dogs as the ‘embittered renunciation of a life spent prescribing political nostrums’ (Blackburn 2002: 35–36), and Francis Fukuyama, who has recently described Gray as ‘in essence a cultural relativist who has lost his bearings’.1 My aim is to avoid both these highly polarized kinds of reaction to Gray’s thought in order to provide a more balanced assessment which does not conceal the more extravagant side of his work but seeks, more positively, to bring out its enduring interest in a way his critics have failed to do. This, I shall suggest, is twofold. First, what Gray has sought at the general intellectual level is what may be termed a philosophy of modesty with which to replace Western anthropocentric thought,
174 N. O’Sullivan especially in its post-Enlightenment form. As he himself has indicated, what modesty means is that we must abandon ‘the idea that we are categorically different from the animals’ and cease pursuing final solutions to the problems posed by political conflict, as well as ceasing to behave, more generally, as though we are masters of the universe (Gray 2002b). It may be that Gray has not always found the best way of defending a philosophy of modesty, but the sentiment which inspires his enterprise commands respect. Secondly, what Gray’s writings offer, at the more specifically political level, is a comprehensive exploration of the difficulties involved in applying the classical model of civil association first developed by Hobbes to contemporary western societies. In the last section, however, a major tension will be identified between Gray’s more recent vision of a coming nihilism and the ideal of civil association to which he is committed. In the conclusion an attempt will be made to clarify the two different ways of dealing with tensions that now confront him. Only one of these ways, it will be suggested, is open to him, if he is to resume his career as the most original and provocative contemporary theorist of civil association. Gray’s political thought will be considered first and his general philosophy afterwards. The Elements of Gray’s Political Thought The best way of understanding both the strengths and the weaknesses of Gray’s political thought is to begin by recalling the four key elements from which it is constructed. Value-pluralism, or the Tragic Vision The first element is a doctrine of value-pluralism heavily indebted, as Gray acknowledges, to Isaiah Berlin.2 This doctrine was initially mobilized by Gray in the course of his critique of J.S. Mill, which was to the effect that Mill’s pluralistic conception of happiness ‘fails to do justice to radical conflicts among [the] various ingredients [of happiness], that is to say, to their frequent uncombinability and incommensurability’ (Gray & Smith 1991: 18).3 Since that time, however, Gray has expanded the value-pluralist doctrine into a wider concept of modus vivendi politics, which will be considered later. In the present context the many conceptual problems presented by value-pluralism will be passed over in order to draw attention to the most fundamental issue it presents, which is the fact that, in Gray’s interpretation of it at least, it is an attempt to replace the rationalist theory of liberalism with a revised, non-rationalist foundation based on the tragic vision of life. Although Gray did not specifically use the term tragic in his early work on Mill, he has done so in subsequent writings. In the Martin Wight Memorial Lecture, for example, he explained that some fundamental conflicts ‘are tragic in [the sense] that wrong will be done however they are resolved’. By way of example, he noted that preserving peace ‘does not always coincide with the promotion of human rights’. The crucial point, Gray emphasized,
The Political Theory of John Gray 175 is that tragic conflicts of this kind ‘are not transitory difficulties which we can someday expect to leave behind. They are permanent ethical dilemmas, deeply rooted in conflicts that states will always confront, which will never be fully resolved’ (Gray 1998b:161). The folly of the ‘Enlightenment thinkers who inspire contemporary liberal thought’, he added, is their belief ‘that the ethical conflicts that arise from the incompatibility of universal goods [can] be overcome: at some future point in human progress [they believe that] the species [will] be rid of the burden of … tragic dilemmas’ (Gray 1998b: 162). Gray’s attempt to extricate the theory of civil association from liberal rationalism and refound it on the tragic vision creates several difficulties. The first is that the political implications of the vision are highly ambiguous. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was used by Benjamin Constant to defend a liberal position.4 In the twentieth century, by contrast, it was used by the Russian émigré philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev to defend a radical communist commitment (O’Sullivan 1998: 79–99). Ambiguity, however, is not the only problematic feature of the tragic vision. A further problem is that it obviously requires Gray to distinguish clearly between conflicts which are tragic and those that are not: otherwise it becomes little more than a formula for universal self-pity about the hardships of life. The difficulty is that any such distinction is, in that useful phrase, essentially contestable. The life of Anna Karenina, for example, is in some eyes an essentially tragic one. For others, however, she was merely a woman who had an affair with a soldier, with an unsurprising outcome. Finally, there is the danger that, far from escaping the ‘foundationalist’ conception of political philosophy Gray rejects, the tragic vision merely substitutes a non-rationalist foundation for civil association for a rationalist one. Although the problems created by the tragic vision have obviously only been touched on, what has been said is perhaps sufficient to indicate that invoking the tragic perspective may not provide quite such an effective means of castigating the folly of rationalist Enlightenment sympathizers as Gray seems to feel it does. Civil Society, the Free Market and the Problem of Social Fragmentation The second element in Gray’s thought is his endeavour to achieve a viable relationship between civil society and modern capitalism. His deepening pessimism about the possibility of doing so may be traced back to the 1980s, during which he moved from a brief flirtation with the New Right to a demand for a massive government assisted programme of cultural renewal. Gray subsequently explained the reason for his qualified sympathy for Thatcherism in an interview. ‘What I liked’, he said, ‘was Thatcher’s Bolshevik aspect, which was to shake up the whole of Britain quite fundamentally’. He immediately added, however, that ‘I never subscribed to the main delusion of the Thatcherites, which was that you could change everything and everything would remain the same’ (Gray 2002c: 4). On the ‘shake up’ aspect, Gray was surely right in at least one important respect, which is that by the 1980s Britain had become so exclusively concerned with distributivist issues that the prior
176 N. O’Sullivan necessity for production had been all but forgotten. What is more problematic, however, is Gray’s enthusiasm for New Right philosophy, more especially in the form of Hayek’s political thought, on which he published a full length study in 1984 (Gray 1984). A year earlier he had summarized the main reason for his admiration for Hayek in The Salisbury Review (1983b), where he praised Hayek’s concept of society as a spontaneous order – one, that is, in which highly complex integration is achieved without conscious planning or reflection. As Gray put it, Hayek’s significance is that his concept of the spontaneous order has freed classical liberalism from the burden of an hubristic rationalism. He has thereby produced a defence of liberty which reconciles the modern sense of individuality with the claims of tradition. Hayek shows that we are bound to rely primarily on inherited traditions of thought and conduct in all our dealings with each other. The inarticulate character of the great submerged part of our knowledge means that we always know far more that can ever say. It also means, crucially, that the rational criticism of social life must come to a stop when it reaches the tacit component of our practices. (Gray 1988: 256–257) It was not long, however, before Gray became deeply dissatisfied with Hayek, whom he came to feel was much too optimistic about the spontaneous forces of integration at work in capitalist societies. By the end of the 1980s, indeed, he cast Hayek almost completely to one side, on the ground that he was just one more purveyor of rationalist foundationalism.5 More generally, Gray’s disillusion with the New Right was evident in a series of eloquent articles that he published in The Guardian during the early 1990s. ‘Contrary to the New Right ideologues of the triumphalist eighties’, he wrote, who gibbered that Labour would never rule again, it is now unambiguously clear the neo-liberal project which is embodied in both Thatcherite and Majorist Conservatism is a self-defeating one. The unfettered individualism which it embodies dissolves the hierarchies and delegitimates the traditions on which market institutions have depended for their acceptability … [These traditions] have been comprehensively delegitimated by a philosophy that values nothing but consumer choice and is ready to junk anything that stands in the way of unfettered market forces. (Gray 1994) One danger which became apparent in Gray’s post-New Right phase was his tendency not only to demonize the concept of neo-liberalism but to apply it so sweepingly that a balanced political judgement became difficult to achieve. An example of this danger is provided by his response to the progress of European unification. From Gray’s perspective, this appeared as nothing more than an attempt to use the ideal of a federal super-state to promote the regional extension of market principles. ‘By any standards,’ he wrote in 1993, Eurofederalism is
The Political Theory of John Gray 177 anomalous in the highest degree. The European Union that is envisaged in the Maastricht Treaty is an integral part of the political project of the New Right, which is the project of insulating the principal institutions of economic management in the modern state from any kind of political accountability or democratic control. It is this monetarist economic philosophy that lies behind the proposal for a European Central Bank that, freed from the constrains of any kind of democratic accountability, will set interest rates, and administer a single currency, for the whole of Europe. (Gray 1993c) One may sympathize with Gray’s misgivings while still feeling that there is more to be said. His critique of the European Union relied, for example, on the assumption that Britain has a healthy alternative tradition of civil association to fall back on. Only two months after dismissing the European project in the above words, however, Gray noted that the health of the British tradition was in fact highly questionable since the most enduring impact of the present government and its Conservative predecessors may well be its undoing of the constitutional ancient régime in Britain. Nearly a decade and a half of Tory rule has issued in a situation in which most of the traditional institutions of governance in Britain have been virtually emptied of legitimacy and intermediary institutions of all sorts have been enfeebled or destroyed. (Gray 1994) Once again, one might sympathize with Gray while noting that this was a somewhat oversimplified interpretation of the undoing of the British constitution, the subversion of which owed at least as much to the doctrine of popular sovereignty on which the post-1945 British parliamentary system relied as to the activity of the Conservative Party. The second element in Gray’s thought, then, is one to which he has had great difficulty in finding a satisfactory solution. What is of particular interest at present is that one of the main answers he has considered, which is the promotion of a common culture, has created more problems than it has solved. This concern for a common culture, which is the third element in Gray’s thought, must now be examined more closely. The Need for a Common Culture to Undergird Liberty During the 1980s, Gray’s concern about the social fragmentation fostered by New Right ideology intensified. His mature response to it emerged at the end of the decade, when he published a short but comprehensive presentation of his mature theory of limited politics in an IEA booklet called Limited Government: A Positive Agenda (1989a). His contention, Gray explained, was that the market economy is not a self-sustaining order, but depends crucially on an undergirding culture of liberty. This culture, in turn, cannot be protected or
178 N. O’Sullivan reproduced primarily by legal or constitutional devices; its vitality presupposes a good distribution of resources and opportunities, such that no significant sections of society are excluded from being beneficiaries of, and participants in, the market economy. (Gray 1989a: 10) Unfortunately, Gray’s concern to promote a ‘culture of liberty’ threatened to subvert his commitment to civil association in a variety of ways. One was by promoting extensive state intervention. The extent of this danger is evident as soon as the three ‘positive responsibilities’ Gray now assigned to the state are noticed. These consisted of ‘emancipat[ing] the poor and the underclass from the culture of dependency’; promoting independence and freedom of choice; and facilitating ‘the transmission of valuable cultural traditions across the generations’ (Gray 1989a: 16). How, one must ask, did Gray think a state might pursue this hugely interventionist role without subverting the principal condition for a free society as specified by Oakeshott, whose view Gray cited with approval? This condition is the absence of an overwhelming concentration of power. Gray’s rather optimistic answer was that state action would be compatible with limited government provided it was constrained by the principle that ‘government may act to provide a public good so long as the coercive aspect of such action is confined to its financing from taxation and the provision of the good by the government does not tend to monopolise or dominate any market which may exist in that good’ (Gray 1989a: 32–33, italics in original). Financing a public good from taxation, however, inevitably extends government influence, especially over the content of the good and the mode of its distribution. The ease with which Gray passed over this obvious fact is puzzling. There was, however, an even more disturbing aspect of Gray’s new interventionist position, which was that it offered no convincing answer to the question of how the content of a common culture was to be determined (Macleod-Cullinane 1995). What made this issue particularly contentious was the growth of multiculturalism. Although Gray insisted that the responsibility of governments to ensure the ‘transmission of culturally valuable traditions’ requires them to acknowledge ‘the diversity of cultural traditions existing among us in Britain’ (Gray 1989a: 16), it is not clear how the precise value of those traditions is to be determined, especially if they are non-western ones. The possibility that Gray might be reluctant to attribute value to some at least of the latter is suggested by his response to Will Kymlicka’s Liberalism, Community and Culture (1989). Kymlicka’s weakness, Gray remarked, is his ‘neglect of the possibility, admittedly one that is deeply subversive of liberal theory, that a liberal civil society depends for its stability on a common culture which the legal enfranchisement of minority rights may tend to dissipate’ (Gray 1989b). This left the problem of how far multicultural toleration should go unresolved. His position did, however, have the merit of rightly emphasizing the naivety of the liberal assumption that ‘social order (including the order of a liberal society) can be guaranteed primarily by general principles of justice or right’ (Gray 1989b). Yet another problem created by Gray’s desire to alleviate social fragmentation by creating a common culture concerned his relationship to communitarianism. At first
The Political Theory of John Gray 179 sight his desire to strengthen communal ties suggests a convergence with the communitarian critique of liberalism mounted by theorists like Michael Walzer, but Gray rejects that critique on the ground that it still harbours the Enlightenment aspiration to create ‘a form of communal life from which are absent the practices of exclusion and subordination constitutive of every community human beings have ever lived in’ (Gray 1989b). Despite his overt rejection of communitarianism, however, Gray seems at times to be very close to it. In Beyond the New Right (1993), for example, he maintained that ‘though human beings need a sphere of independent action, and so of liberty … their deepest need is [for] a home, a network of common practices and inherited traditions, that confers on them the blessing of a settled identity. Indeed’, he added, ‘without the undergirding support of a framework of common culture, the freedom of the individual so cherished by liberalism is of little value, and will not long survive’ (Gray 1993b: 125). His proximity to communitarianism seemed even more evident when he described his own political morality as a ‘communitarian liberal’ one whose essence is ‘the renewal and creation of worthwhile social forms’ (Gray 1997: 330), including ‘a strong public culture’ without which the liberal ideal of individual autonomy is vacuous (Gray 1997: 329). What kind of policy proposals, it must be asked, does Gray think are required by his ‘communitarian liberal’ commitment? His answers suggest that he has found no way of overcoming the tension he notes between communitarianism and liberalism. Although Gray maintains that he is committed to the communitarian cause of preserving the family, for example, he adds immediately that his pluralism prevents any ‘restoration of vanished or dying forms of family … life’, and that the traditional form of family life in particular is ‘only one among a variety of kinds of families our society presently contains’ (Gray 1997: 329). In case pluralists are tempted to reject state intervention of any kind, Gray insists that it is unreasonable to adopt ‘the fashionable liberal ideal in which government is silent, or neutral, on the central issues of family life’ (Gray 1997: 331). What then is to be done? Gray opts for what he terms a ‘thin’ concept of the family. Although this may well be consistent with his pluralism, it is hardly likely to create a deep sense of communal roots. There is, then, a potential conflict between Gray’s commitment to the ideal of the civil or limited state, on the one hand, and his demand, on the other, for a common culture with which to resist the fragmentation of modern western societies wrought by capitalism. In trying to reconcile these concerns, the danger is that his ‘communitarian’ measures will either subvert his commitment to the limited state or, as his suggestion for reform of the family illustrates, will be so restricted that they make no significant contribution to strengthening communal ties. The Dangers of Neo-liberal Gobalization and Gobal Terrorism The fourth ingredient in Gray’s thought concerns the international order, on which his attention has increasingly been concentrated since the collapse of the Soviet
180 N. O’Sullivan Union. This ingredient consists, more precisely, of a sustained attack on the neoliberal ideal of globalization, expressed with particular intensity in False Dawn (1998a). Gray’s precise target was what he considered to be the late-twentiethcentury American commitment to reconstructing the entire world on a free-market basis. In this commitment Gray saw merely a perpetuation of the Enlightenment illusion previously manifest in the Soviet Communist project – the illusion, namely, that reason and will can reshape the world in accordance with some ideological vision of the good society. The most destructive aspect of this illusion in its neoliberal form lies in the attempt to extend the market mentality to every sphere of social life. In asserting the underlying unity of liberal and Communist ideological politics as joint heirs of the Enlightenment, Gray was on safe enough ground. What was problematic, however, was Gray’s previously noted tendency to demonize aspects of neo-liberalism he dislikes. In this case what got demonized was globalization, the evils of which Gray exaggerated in a way that left him exposed to three incisive criticisms by Robert Skidelsky. In the first place, Skidelsky maintains, ‘Gray’s account of the dislocating effects of capitalist civilization is … highly overwrought’ (Skidelsky 1998: 11). Skidelsky’s explanation of precisely why Gray’s account is ‘overwrought’ is worth quoting in full. ‘The market system’, he maintains in opposition to Gray, brings great benefits to most of its participants, but it is an inherently difficult discipline, which goes against deep-seated tribal instincts. The possibility of anti-market movements is therefore always there. But Gray fails to make a distinction, crucial to any sensible discussion of this matter, between stress and instability. Indeed, he conflates the two all the way through. Most people are fairly adaptable, and a sizeable majority welcome challenges. They are also very adept in preserving old forms of life in new conditions. What is lethal for a market-based order is violent instability, because this severs the connection between effort and reward. Keynes understood this better than anyone, and it is an insight we need to regain – for example, in our international monetary arrangements. The fluctuations of the dollar, the yen and the yuang certainly contributed to East Asia’s financial crises. But a general rant does nothing for clear thinking. (Skidelsky 1998: 11, emphasis added). Skidelsky’s second criticism is directed at Gray’s claim that the superior productivity associated with the American free market project destroys the possibility of creating viable social democracies in both Europe and Asia, since the latter cannot usually match free market productivity. The result is the global creation of proletarianized masses, along with the de-bourgeoisification of the European middle class. To this Skidelsky replies that it is not global markets which destroy the viability of social democracy. On the contrary, ‘Globalization has nothing whatever to do with the crisis of the welfare state. Rather, this crisis reflects ‘tax resistance’, an increased unwillingness to pay for social programmes by the average taxpayer’ (Skidelsky 1998: 12).
The Political Theory of John Gray 181 Finally, Skidelsky identifies Gray’s most serious error as his claim that the problems confronting such countries as Russia, New Zealand and Mexico can be attributed to the spread of global capitalism. In the case of post-Communist Russia, for example, Gray’s analysis is fatally flawed by his failure to allow for the extent to which the system had already ceased to function under Gorbachev. In the New Zealand case, likewise, Gray ignores the extent to which that country’s problems were ‘a by-product of liberalizing an economy which had become one of the most over-regulated and inefficient in the Western world. Contrary to Gray’s assertion that ‘income inequalities increased in New Zealand more than in any other western countries’, Skidelsky adds, ‘the increase in income inequality which occurred with rising unemployment has, in fact, been arrested since the labour market was freed up in 1991 and unemployment started falling’ (Skidelsky 1998: 12). In the case of Mexico, the same criticism of Gray’s analysis can also be made. The calamities which have befallen Mexican society, Skidelsky writes, ‘are not the consequence of the so-called “neo-liberal” project, but the product of many years of state intervention in, and massive regulation of, the Mexican economy, a “project” that was no longer sustainable by 1982’ (Skidelsky 1998: 12). Although Skidelsky’s stern comments about Gray’s tendency to demonize globalization are merited, it would be unfair to let them obscure the important insights his work nevertheless contains. His powerful critique of Francis Fukuyama, for example, rejects the latter’s claim that in the post-Cold-War era liberal democracy possesses a monopoly of political legitimacy, since its last great ideological rival – communism – has collapsed. Gray, by contrast, points out that a large variety of regimes have equally valid claims to legitimacy in so far as they contribute to meeting human needs. In addition, Gray rejects Fukuyama’s claim that all late modern societies are converging on the universal civilization which Fukuyama calls ‘democratic capitalism’. What Fukuyama fails to see is that the end of ideological conflicts does not mean the triumph of a single ideology but rather ‘a return to the classical sources of conflict among (and within) states’ (Gray 1998b: 150). Fukuyama also mistakenly takes it for granted, Gray writes, that modernization will mean secularization, despite the fact that ‘there is no reason to assume that countries whose central religious traditions are Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Muslim or Orthodox Christian will follow the Protestant and Catholic countries of western Europe in becoming more secular’ (Gray 1998b: 153). Fukuyama’s sympathy for Enlightenment optimism about progress means, in particular, that he cannot explain ‘why economic modernization and religious fundamentalism should in practice so often go together’ (Gray 1998b: 153). What is more, he ignores the fact that democratic institutions and free markets ‘are not, in any broad historical perspective, natural allies’ (Gray 1998b: 153). Finally, Fukuyama’s loose concept of ‘democratic capitalism’ conceals the fact that there are extremely different kinds of capitalism, between which conflicts may as readily arise as they have between democratic capitalist and communist ones in the past. Having demolished Fukuyama, Gray directs an equally powerful attack at Samuel Huntington, whose fear of a newly powerful non-western world was expressed in
182 N. O’Sullivan his prediction that a coming ‘clash of civilizations’ would replace the earlier clash of western inspired ideologies. Although one version of this critique appeared in False Dawn (1998a), an even more trenchant one was published in the same year in International Affairs (Gray 1998b: 149–164). Huntington is correct, Gray wrote there, in rejecting Fukuyama’s latter-day version of the Enlightenment vision of a world converging on a universal civilization. Huntington’s alternative analysis of the future course of international conflict as consisting in clashes of civilizations, however, is mistaken. It ignores, for example, the fact that major conflicts continue to occur within civilizations and not between them. It also ignores, more generally, the fact that international conflict today continues to come, as it has in every age, not from clashes of civilizations but from ‘the conflicting interests and policies of states’. By misrepresenting the contemporary international system as ‘the West versus the rest’, Gray adds, Huntington is in danger of converting these manageable conflicts into intractable ones (Gray 1998b: 150–151).6 Finally, Gray rightly notes that Huntington finds it as impossible as Toynbee did before him to define coherently what a distinct civilization is. As Gray acerbically remarks, If one seeks for the criterion Huntington tacitly invokes for identifying a civilization, one soon discovers that it is an artefact of American multiculturalism: for Huntington, a community or culture qualifies as a civilization if has established itself as an American minority. Otherwise it does not. (Gray 1998b: 157) It is in polemics such as those against Fukuyama and Huntington that Gray is at his most compelling. No less illuminating, however, is his attempt to interpret the advent of global terrorism marked by Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 in the light of the naïve optimism imparted by the Enlightenment to western modernity. In Al Qaeda and what it Means to be Modern (2003), Gray advanced two contentions. One was that Al Qaeda’s attack had finally destroyed the ‘myth of Western modernity’, according to which the spread of science is bound to bring with it secularism, enlightenment and peace (Gray 2003: 118). The other contention was that Al Qaeda cannot be understood as a fundamentally pre-modern phenomenon, devoid of modern western influence and wholly opposed to everything western. Al Qaeda’s ideology is, on the contrary, ‘a typical modern hybrid. Though they claim to be exponents of an indigenous tradition, its founders have reinterpreted Islam in the light of contemporary western thought’ (Gray 2003: 77). For example, the ideas of Dr Abdullah Azzam, who drew up Al Qaeda’s founding charter in 1987–88 and did most to shape the views of bin Laden, are a ‘highly syncretic construction’ which combines Bolshevik ideology and Nietzschean antirationalist themes with Islamic ones (Gray 2003: 79). In this respect Gray is surely right, even if his conception of globalization is open to the charge of oversimplification. What, it may now be asked, emerges from Gray’s analysis of the post-Cold-War world for the study of contemporary liberal democracies? The main lesson he teaches is sobering: it is that their response to the threats presented by this world may actually make those threats worse, as he argues has been the case with the
The Political Theory of John Gray 183 American response to the Twin Towers atrocity; and partly that it is undoubtedly the new global terrorist groups like Al Qaeda which will win the new conflicts the democracies face if the ways in which they try to protect themselves against those conflicts gradually bring about the elimination of freedom itself. These then are the elements of Gray’s thought out of which he has sought to construct a revised theory of the limited state. What must now be examined are the ways in which he has tried to construct an intellectual framework that gives overall coherence to that project. Gray’s Search for a Conception of the Limited State Capable of Combining his Four Concerns In order to achieve this coherence, Gray has turned for assistance to four thinkers in particular. One is Isaiah Berlin, from whom he has adopted the tragic vision or, in more technical language, the concept of value-pluralism. The second is Michael Oakeshott, from whom he has taken over Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism, his commitment to tradition and his formal model of civil association as the core of the limited state. The third is Joseph Raz, whose appeal for Gray will be considered shortly. The fourth, whose shadow is perhaps the one in which Gray most firmly stands, is Hobbes, whose influence on him it will be useful to consider first. In Limited Government: A Positive Agenda, Gray remarked that shorn of its ‘contractarian metaphor and of its over-simple psychology’, it is ‘in a Hobbesian conception, in which the state is unconstrained by antecedent rights in pursuit of civil peace, that the best guide to an understanding of the character of limited government in Britain today is to be had’ (Gray 1989a: 18). What Gray admires in particular about Hobbes, other than his rejection of rights theory of the contemporary kind, is partly Hobbes’s commitment to a formal, non-purposive conception of the state which permits it to accommodate diversity of values, and partly his commitment to political integration through the rule of law. In one crucial respect, however, Gray’s own position differs so greatly from Hobbes’s that there are severe limits to the assistance which he can derive from the Hobbesian model of civil association. To be precise, Gray’s desire to create a common culture that can alleviate social fragmentation is not only alien to Hobbes’s model of civil association but also wholly incompatible with it. In order to find a more suggestive presentation of Gray’s thoughts on the continuing relevance of the civil model it is therefore necessary to look elsewhere in his writings. His best discussion of the subject is found in the concluding chapter of Post-liberalism entitled ‘What is Dead and What is Living in Liberalism?’(Gray 1993a: 283–328). In that chapter, Gray argues that ‘what is living in liberalism is not any doctrine or comprehensive theory, but … the historic inheritance … of civil society … with its key guarantees of liberty and the limits on government they imply …’ (Gray 1993a: 314). What then does Gray think this ‘historic inheritance’ involves? In order to answer that question, Gray maintains, it is first necessary to break completely with the dominant method of contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy, in
184 N. O’Sullivan which ‘free-floating abstractions are deployed in a void, having no concrete institutional, cultural or historical embodiment’ (Gray 1993a: 322). To put names to Gray’s villains among contemporary thinkers, Rawls, Dworkin and Ackerman all mistakenly regard political philosophy as an inquiry into the right whose agenda is justice and whose content is given, not by any investigation of human beings as we find them in the world, with their diverse histories and communities, but by an abstract conception of the person that has been voided of any definite cultural identity or specific historical inheritance. (Gray 1992) Amongst contemporaries, Gray has indicated, the most impressive living exemplar of the anti-rationalist conception of political philosophy to which he subscribes is Joseph Raz. He commends, more especially, Raz’s attempt to restate liberalism in a way which removes its dependence on individualism, grounds rights in their contribution to well-being rather than in universal reason, and rejects the liberal ideal of neutrality, on the ground that the animating ideal of a liberal state ‘will be toleration, not neutrality’ (Gray 1992). It is possible that Gray exaggerates the extent of Raz’s break with modern rationalism,7 but what may perhaps be granted is that he himself is one of the most eloquent defenders of the classical view of political philosophy as rooted in a concrete conception of the good life, in contrast to the abstract rationalism of many contemporary liberal thinkers. Suppose now that Gray’s appeal for a non-rationalist form of political philosophy is granted. What is it, then, that he thinks this can reveal about what he regards as the concrete historical practice of civil association? In response, Gray points in particular to six neglected aspects of that practice which need to be reincorporated into contemporary political science. The first is that civil society has no necessary connection with western culture, as is commonly assumed, but is now, on the contrary, a concept of global significance. This is the truth, Gray observes, recognized in a confused way by Fukayama’s thesis that the collapse of Communist power marks the end of history, which Fukayama maintains has now been replaced by the triumph of liberal democracy as the final form of human government. What is true in this view, Gray writes, is that ‘the viable post-totalitarian regimes which emerge in the wake of Communist totalitarianism must have the character of civil societies’ (Gray 1993a: 202). What is incorrect, however, is Fukayama’s assumption that these regimes must resemble western liberal democracies in other significant respects. The reality is that ‘contemporary Western democracies are in several respects defective models for the emergent post-Communist states’ (Gray 1993a: 202). The second aspect of civil practice to be disclosed is that, even within the west, civil society has no particular connection with liberal democracy but ‘may exist and flourish under a variety of regimes, of which liberal democracy is only one’ (Gray 1993a: 203). Civil society, Gray notes, is even perfectly compatible with authoritarian forms of rule: ‘Indeed, historically, civil societies have been more commonly associated with authoritarian regimes or limited democracies than with liberal
The Political Theory of John Gray 185 democratic institutions.’ Gray gives as examples Bismarckian Prussia, latenineteenth-century Russia and Whig England where, he observes, democratic participatory freedoms were extremely restricted. As these examples make clear, what is required for civil society is not a full range of political or democratic freedoms but only the protection of economic and personal liberties (Gray 1993a: 203). The third, closely related aspect of civil practice disclosed is that civil society is not only distinct from democracy but also exists in tension with democracy. This, as John Stuart Mill and many other defenders of liberal democracy have noted, is because the modern democratic doctrine of popular sovereignty is potentially an ally of despotism rather than of individual liberty. Democracy must therefore be limited, if civil society is to survive (Gray 1993a: 220). The fourth aspect disclosed is that the principal institutions of civil society – notably the rule of law and private property – now lack any coherent cultural legitimation, mainly because a rationalist mode of thought has disconnected them from the specific historic contexts to which they are relevant. A non-rationalist theory of civil society will restore civil society to its historic context by means of a cultural phenomenology which explores the kind of beings we have become in the course of our history, and then explores the ‘fit’ between this phenomenological self-portrait and the institutions of civil society. The fifth aspect of civil practice disclosed is the need to abandon the monistic ethical theories that have in the past unduly limited the ability of civil society to accommodate the radical plurality of values, which is central to Gray’s view of the human condition. It is this aspect to which Gray has devoted most philosophical reflection, and its fundamental position in his thought requires that it should be considered more closely. How then does Gray defend the concept of radical valuepluralism that lies at the heart of his revision of liberalism? Gray’s answer displays a certain ambiguity. At times he seems to assume that radical pluralism is simply an incontrovertible fact of life which only ideological dogmatism can conceal from us. This is what he appears to have in mind when he refers, for example, to the individualistic and pluralist ‘fate’ of the modern west.8 At other times, Gray tries to go beyond the concept of fate by attempting to underpin the need to recognize an irreducible diversity of values philosophically. His most ambitious endeavour to do this relies upon what he terms an ‘objectivist pluralist epistemology’ (Gray 1993a: 312). No matter how elaborate it may be, however, an epistemology cannot by itself legitimate pluralism in the way Gray’s project requires. On yet other occasions, a third position emerges which tends to be woven in with what Gray has to say about fate, on the one hand, and epistemology, on the other, yet is distinguishable as an independent thesis. This, somewhat more Hegelian, perspective is that pluralism is underpinned by recognition of others and finds expression in the deliberate cultivation of toleration of diversity as a desirable political virtue in modern western societies. Putting this last position somewhat differently, respecting human diversity is simply part of what it means to be civilized in modern western societies. Since what Gray’s project requires is a normative dimension which can only be provided by the third concept of radical pluralism, I
186 N. O’Sullivan shall credit him with ultimately adopting this position as his most fundamental one. Pluralism may of course be a fate, and perhaps there can be a coherent ‘objectivist pluralist epistemology’, but nothing Gray wishes to maintain either stands or falls on this being the case. The sixth and final aspect of Gray’s revision of the civil model is really an extension of his value-pluralist doctrine but deserves separate consideration because it involves one of the most suggestive postwar attempts to develop a non-rationalist version of liberalism that avoids both the universalism of foundationalist liberalism and the relativism of postmodern versions. It takes the form of the model of modus vivendi politics developed in Two Faces of Liberalism (2000). In view of its importance, it will be considered, as was said, in a separate section. Modus Vivendi Politics The essence of the modus vivendi model is that it does not aim to replace conflicting values by rational consensus but seeks instead ‘to reconcile individuals and ways of life honouring conflicting values to a life in common’. For this, we do not need common values but ‘common institutions in which many forms of life can coexist’ (Gray 2000: 6–7). Returning to the Hobbesian commitment mentioned earlier, Gray maintains that the political expression of this kind of politics is an instrumental, nondogmatic interpretation of the principal concepts in the liberal vocabulary. So far as human rights are concerned, for example, Gray writes that, as neo-Hobbesians, we will come to think of them simply ‘as convenient articles of peace, whereby individuals and communities with conflicting values and interests may consent to coexist’. More generally, ‘We will come to think of democratic government not as an expression of a universal right to national self-determination, but as an expedient, enabling disparate communities to reach common decisions and to remove governments without violence’ (Gray 2000: 105). The instrumentalism of the neo-Hobbesian standpoint is, however, only one aspect of modus vivendi politics. A second, no less important aspect is a rejection of the tendency to assimilate the political to the legal which Gray regards as especially prominent in Rawls’ Kantian version of liberalism. As Gray expresses it, ‘in [Rawls’s] political liberalism what justice demands is a matter not for political decision but for legal adjudication … All fundamental issues are removed from political deliberation in order to be adjudicated by a Supreme Court’ (Gray 2000: 16). Legalism of this kind not only undermines political responsibility by concealing the fact that rules themselves can never make the decision which is necessary to apply them to particular situations; it also encourages a rigid and inflexible culture of rights. The result is to eliminate the crucial place of compromise and negotiation in securing political agreement. A third aspect of modus vivendi politics is that it avoids both universalism and relativism. This is perhaps the most problematic aspect of Gray’s doctrine, since the third way he seeks commits him to a very definite concept of ‘what can count as a reasonable compromise between rival values and ways of life’ (Gray 2000: 20). The
The Political Theory of John Gray 187 difficulty, more precisely, is that he gives two potentially conflicting answers to how ‘a reasonable compromise’ is to be determined. One answer presupposes the neo-Hobbesian perspective already mentioned, taking the form of an appeal to ‘human needs’ as the ultimate reference point (Gray 2000: 20).9 According to this answer, even peaceful coexistence itself is only desirable insofar as it serves the ‘conditions of human well-being’ or ‘human flourishing’.10 This naturalistic or functional standpoint, however, is at odds with a second answer Gray offers to the question of how the limits of a reasonable consensus are to be determined. The second answer, in contrast, is non-instrumental and ethical, invoking universal values and rights rather than needs. Although Gray insists that such rights ‘are not a charter giving universal authority to liberal values’, they are nevertheless ‘a benchmark of minimal legitimacy for societies whose values are different’ (Gray 2000: 21–22). This second way of theorizing modus vivendi might seem at first sight to mark an unexpected return by Gray to the universalist Enlightenment heritage he so vehemently rejects. Gray emphasizes, however, that modus vivendi theory was never intended as a denial of universal human rights, but only of the single universal regime which liberalism has generally associated with them (Gray 2000: 21). ‘Liberal universalists are right’, he remarks, in holding ‘that some values are universal. They are [only] wrong in identifying universal values with their own particular ideals’ (Gray 2000: 21–22). The question remains, however: what grounds these universal values? Gray’s view is that they can be derived from the needs of human flourishing, since ‘there is a minimum content to morality that is universal, albeit negative in spelling out certain evils which prevent or prohibit a worthwhile human life’ (Gray 1993a: 303). The problem is that this minimum content would be unlikely to provide a significant check on power. It is also so indeterminate that it can be interpreted to mean practically anything at all. Two problems remain to be noticed. One concerns the coherence of the neoHobbesian theory of legitimacy in terms of which Gray attempts to theorize modus vivendi politics. On the one hand, he maintains, all ‘reasonably legitimate’ contemporary regimes possess their legitimacy only if they possess what is, in effect, a form of civil association based on ‘a rule of law and the capacity to maintain peace, effective representative institutions, and a government that is removable by its citizens without recourse to violence’. On the other hand, Gray immediately adds that legitimate regimes also require ‘the capacity to assure the satisfaction of basic needs to all and to protect minorities from disadvantage’, and that they also need ‘to reflect the ways of life and common identities of their citizens’ (Gray 2000: 107). The difficulty is that the latter requirements may prove to be satisfied more effectively by a paternalist regime which relies upon discretionary power than by a civil society based on the rule of law. Although it may be possible to reconcile the two different sets of requirements for legitimacy, the failure of Gray’s neo-Hobbesian model to provide clear guidance on how the potential conflict between them is to be avoided leaves the coherence of the model, as was just remarked, in doubt. The other problem concerns the faith Gray places in modus vivendi politics as a way of integrating the highly diverse kind of society sanctioned by value-pluralism.
188 N. O’Sullivan As a thoughtful American critic of modus vivendi politics has observed, the sort of civic identity forged by modus vivendi is simply too thin and fragile to provide a very effective bond for holding together deeply pluralist societies. Putting the same thing slightly differently, the problem is that there is nothing to suggest that modus vivendi politics can create kind of public culture that Gray desiderates, in order to undo the fragmentation wrought by an unreconstructed liberalism. As Thomas Bridges writes, Modus vivendi liberalism appeals only to the local self-interest of citizens as members of particularistic cultural communities. Modus vivendi liberalism argues for the support of liberal democracy only as part of a cultural and political compromise aimed at securing civil peace. What makes this compromise desirable is nothing beyond its promise to provide the conditions under which particular ethnic, class, and religious communities may continue to pursue their diverse concepts of the good life without the threat of interference from others. (Bridges 1994: 203). These, then, are some of the difficulties presented by Gray’s attempt to find in what he terms the concrete historical tradition of civil association a viable alternative to the abstract doctrines of rationalist liberalism. The outcome of that attempt is not so much a unified theory - a concept which Gray himself would reject as just another rationalist construction - as a series of insights about the difficulty of revising the classical ideal of civil association in a way which can accommodate the concerns facing contemporary liberal democracies. Amongst those insights the most tenable are perhaps the six considerations on civil society just considered. More problematic, but always suggestive, is his discussion of the extended state interventionism which may be necessary to promote the civil ideal itself through the creation of a common culture which arrests social fragmentation. At once most original and most problematic of all is his attempt to underpin that model with the antirationalist foundation of the tragic vision (in the form of value-pluralism), complemented by a related theory of modus vivendi. What must now be considered, however, is a direction of thought in Gray’s recent work which is wholly incompatible with the ideal of civil association in any form. Since this is characterized by an alienation from contemporary western culture so profound that it threatens to lead Gray to follow Heidegger’s complete retreat from politics of any kind, the reasons that lie behind it must be carefully considered. In the Shadow of Heidegger: Gray’s Vision of a Coming Nihilism The most dramatic expression of Gray’s deepening alienation is Straw Dogs (2002a). Before turning to that work, however, it is instructive to note that his alienation was already evident in Enlightenment’s Wake, which Gray published in the mid 1990s (Gray 1995a). There, he ended with an extended meditation on Heidegger which concluded - as Heidegger himself had - that the only hope for the west lay in
The Political Theory of John Gray 189 the abandonment of what Gray termed the dominant ‘calculative and representational mode of thinking’. In its place, he wrote, men must find what he described, somewhat vaguely, as ‘another mode of thinking – found in some varieties of poetry and mysticism, for example’ (Gray 1995a: 184). This was, in effect, nothing less than a call for a spiritual revolution in the Western world. The main interest of Straw Dogs (2002a), which appeared seven years later, is that in it Gray’s cultural alienation seemed, per impossible, to have gone even further. In it he analysed the putative western malaise from two points of view. In the first place, he focused on the fact that the west has now completely forgotten the truth to which Darwin pointed, which is that human beings are like other animals (Gray 2002a: 4). Secondly, he elaborated on his earlier pessimism in an ecodoom analysis inspired by concern about overpopulation, the environment, misuse of diminishing resources and global warming. There is, in addition, the spread of technologies of mass destruction, the growth of rogue or failed states, and the prospect of new epidemics. Not surprisingly, Gray’s relentless development of the alienation theme has left him open to the charge of becoming a fully paid up member of the modern romantic movement, echoing in this respect Rousseau’s sustained lament in the Reveries of a Solitary Walker. As one notable philosopher has brutally put it, Gray appears in his recent work to have ended as a sophisticated drop out who has thrown in his lot with ‘an assortment of vaguely religious or new-age types’ (Blackburn 2002). What mainly matters at present, however, is the fundamental difficulty Gray’s romantic departure has created for his political project of reworking the ideal of civil association. The full extent of this incompatibility becomes evident as soon as one reflects on the fact that Rousseau and, more recently, Heidegger could offer no other remedy for comprehensive cultural alienation than a wholesale flight from politics. In Gray’s case, it might seem, this flight is checked by his observation that: ‘By preparatory thought, and by well-judged action, including political action, we can open a path to the renewal of the “earth” – of the cultural ground on which we stand.’ He immediately adds, however, that ‘we can no more bring about such a renewal by willing it than we can subject language to our purposes’ (Gray 1995a: 183). Political impotence, in a word, seems inevitable. Even more disturbing, however, is Gray’s tendency to seek an antidote to nihilism by occasionally flirting with it. Such at least appears to be the case when, for example, he expresses interest in the Gaia movement, partly on the ground that its members sympathize with catastrophe as the only way of bringing human beings to their senses. As Gray puts it, it is now possible ‘that life on the earth may be preserved only by the expedient of a catastrophe for the human species’ (Gray 1995a: 183). This, of course, is all too reminiscent of the way in which de Maistre, at the height of his reactionary despair, found comfort in embracing the bloodshed of the French Revolution on the ground that it was part of a divinely inspired purification programme. Critics, it needed hardly be said, have responded harshly, arguing that Gray has indulged apocalyptic tendencies that have led him greatly to exaggerate the adverse impact of capitalism on mankind. With this in mind Terry
190 N. O’Sullivan Eagleton, for example, dismissed Straw Dogs as ‘crankish’ and ‘unbalanced’ (Eagelton 2002). Without denying the truth of some at least of what the critics have said, I want to end on a more positive note by pointing out that at the heart of Straw Dogs an important theme is discernible. This is an appeal for a philosophy of modesty, in the face of anthropocentric attitudes which it is impossible to deny do mark Western culture. What is unfortunate about Straw Dogs is that in it Gray turns in the wrong direction when he seeks to ground such a philosophy in Darwinian naturalism. This, as critics have noted, creates more philosophical problems than it solves, leaving such issues as personal identity, free will and the mind-body relationship in a chaotic intellectual condition (Blackburn 2002). What is particularly unfortunate about this false start is that there is another, far more plausible direction in which Gray might have turned in order to construct a philosophy of modesty, which is the path charted by George Santayana – a philosopher on whom Gray himself has in fact written an illuminating study (Gray 1989c). To be precise, Santayana’s contention is that reason, whether in its rationalist or anti-rationalist forms, can never penetrate the dense mixture of egotism and moralism which characterizes the human psyche and inspires anthropocentric humanism. The only means of doing this is a philosophical humour, which alone can demolish the most powerful of all human vices, which is the tendency to take ourselves too seriously – at the expense, of course, of other human beings, as well as non-human ones. It may be, however, that Gray’s own admirable moral idealism remains so powerful that the place of philosophic humour in a sane view of life has not yet been fully considered by him, despite his own excellent study of Santayana. Conclusion I want to conclude by asking whether Gray’s highly diversified revisionist project has yielded any constructive results, despite the difficulties that were highlighted above. The answer is that it has. At the political level, those results include, in particular, the six insights into the nature of civil association mentioned above. At a more general philosophical level, Gray’s critique of the rationalist idiom of political philosophy which now dominates Anglo-American thought is eloquent and often compelling, especially in its rejection of rationalist moralism, by which Gray means the tendency to identify morality and politics by ‘[applying] to the constitution of the state … the moral point of view, where this is conceived as the impartial or impersonal point of view’ (Gray 1992). What totally subverts Gray’s exploration of the civil ideal, however, is his desire to save the planet from a putative nihilism. If this is what rescuing liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism means, then the cure may well be worse than the disease, since to task civil association with bringing about the spiritual revolution required to rescue the world would involve governmental powers wholly incompatible with liberalism of any kind, and would in any case certainly fail, even if they were granted.
The Political Theory of John Gray 191 It would therefore seem that Gray now faces a difficult choice: either he must pull in his romantic horns and resume his project of restating the conditions for civil association and modus vivendi politics, or he must follow Rousseau, Heidegger and the Old Testament prophets before them into the political wilderness. To end on a personal note, I myself hope he will choose the former course, and am encouraged in that hope by some words of great wisdom he wrote in Al Qaeda and what it Means to be Modern. Those words are worth quoting in full. ‘The conflicts that wrack the world today’, Gray observed, would not have surprised the pagans of classical antiquity … In the plays of Euripides, the most that humans can do is to be brave and resourceful, and expect to achieve little. Very likely we cannot revive this pagan view of things; but perhaps we can learn from it how to limit our hopes. (Gray 2003: 115) There, I think, Gray himself points to the way out of alienation and nihilism, which is to learn from Euripides to limit his hopes and thereby end his cultural despair. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Quoted by Simms (2004). For Gray’s interpretation of Berlin, see Gray (1995b). For an extensive discussion of value-pluralism, see Crowder (2002). The Introduction from which this quotation is taken was written jointly by the editors. Gray had previously written a full length study of Mill: see Gray (1983a). See Holdheim (196l). See, for example, Gray (1989b). Gray is referring in particular to an article by Huntington (1996). See O’Sullivan (2003). On fate see, for example, Gray (1995a: 181); also Gray (1993a: 288) (‘civil society … is for us an historical fate’). On human needs as the justificatory reference point for all human rights see also (Gray (2000: 17). Gray (2000: 8) (human well-being) and 21 (human flourishing).
References Blackburn, S. (2002) The Sunday Times Books section, 22 September. Bridges, T. (1994) The Culture of Citizenship: Inventing Postmodern Civic Culture (Albany, NY: State University of NY Press). Corrigan, S. (2002) The Mail on Sunday, 8 December. Crowder, G. (2002) Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London: Continuum). Eagleton, T. (2002) The Guardian, 7 September. Gray, J. (1983a) Mill on Liberty: a Defence (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul). Gray J. (1983b) Hayek as a conservative thinker, Salisbury Review, 1(4), pp. 43–46. Gray, J. (1984) Hayek on Liberty (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1988) Hayek, in: R. Scruton (Ed.), Conservative Thinkers: Essays from The Salisbury Review, pp. 249–259, (London: The Claridge Press). Gray, J. (1989a) Limited Government: A Positive Agenda (London: IEA). Gray J. (1989b) Review of Kukathas 1989, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 18, 10 November.
192 N. O’Sullivan Gray, J. (1989c) George Santayana and the critique of liberalism, The World and I, February, pp. 592–607. Gray, J. & Smith G.W (Eds) (1991) J. S. Mill on Liberty in Focus (London: Routledge) Gray, J. (1992) Times Literary Supplement, 13, 3 July. Gray, J. (1993a) Post-Liberalism. Studies in Political Thought (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1993b) Beyond the New Right (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1993c) The Guardian, 6 December. Gray, J. (1994) The Guardian, 2 February. Gray, J. (1995a) Enlightenment’s Wake. Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge). Gray, J. (1995b) Berlin (London: Fontana). Gray, J. (1997) After Social Democracy, in: G. Mulgan (Ed.) Life after Politics (London: Fontana Press). Gray, J. (1998a) False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London: Granta). Gray, J. (1998b) Grand utopias and clashing civilizations: misunderstanding the present, International Affairs, 74(1), pp. 149–164. Gray, J. (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press). Gray, J. (2002a) Straw Dogs. Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books). Gray, J. (2002b) The Sunday Times, 15 September. Gray, J. (2002c) The Independent Review, 3 September. Gray, J. (2003) Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Faber and Faber). Holdheim, W. H. (196l) Benjamin Constant (London and New York). Huntington, S. (1996) The West v. the rest. The Guardian, 23 November. Kukathas C. (1989) Hayek and Modern Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Macleod-Cullinane, B. (1995) John Gray and the contradictions of conservative communitarianism, Political Notes No. 101. (London: Libertarian Alliance). O’Sullivan, N. (1998) The tragic vision in the political philosophy of Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), History of Political Thought, 19(1), pp. 79–100. O’Sullivan, N. (2003) Power, legitimacy and authority, in: R. Axtmann (Ed.), Understanding Democratic Politics: Concepts, Institutions, Movements (London: Sage). Self, W. (2002) The Independent Review, 3 September. Simms, B. (2004) The Times Higher Education Review, 16, 16 July. Skidelsky, R. (1998) What’s wrong with global capitalism?, Times Literary Supplement, 27 March.
Is John Gray a Nihilist? GEORGE KATEB Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA GeorgeKateb 0 2
[email protected] 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600655099 FCRI_A_165483.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 9 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
The first time I read Straw Dogs, I found the thesis of the book elusive. Although the style is rambunctiously clear and the book’s tendency apparently unmistakable, I could not quite fit the pieces together. Certainly Gray is, and says he is, anti-humanist, anti-Enlightenment and scornful of human pride and of confidence in the march of inevitable progress. Nonetheless, I had the nagging feeling that I was missing something, or that Gray was withholding something. Shortly afterwards, I read the book a second time, thought more about it, and decided to consult the Tao Te Ching, the writing traditionally attributed to Lao Tzu (sixth century BC, roughly a contemporary of Confucius), which provides the title and the epigraph to the whole book. Gray also offers some occasional interpretations of the key passage from which the title and epigraph are taken. I then discovered what I thought and still think is the actual aim of the book. It is anti-humanist and anti-Enlightenment, and so on, but it is far more radical than these phrases would indicate. One begins to make better
194 G. Kateb sense of Straw Dogs when one reads the entirety of the Taoist passage that figures so importantly in the book. The passage in question occurs early in Tao Te Ching, in the first section of chapter 5. In D.C. Lau’s translation, which Gray uses, the words read: ‘Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs’ (Lao Tzu 1963: 61). In Lin Yutang’s translation, the words read: ‘Nature is unkind: It treats the creation like sacrificial straw dogs. The Sage is unkind: He treats the people like sacrificial straw dogs’ (Lin Yutang 1948: 63). The odd, striking fact is that Gray omits the second part of the section. He omits the clause ‘the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs’ from the epigraph and never refers to it in the text. Now, the omitted words are brutal: they assimilate the attitude of the sage to the ruthless tendency of ‘heaven and earth’ or ‘nature’. The sage, the teacher of the Way, is himself ruthless (or more mildly, unkind). In his thinking, he not only characterizes the nature of things, but endorses it by wishing to imitate it. He makes prescriptive the way of nature. He seems to urge wise men to look upon humanity as straw dogs and treat them accordingly. The ‘myriad creatures’ that nature treats like straw dogs probably include human beings, but the sage appears to concentrate his ruthlessness on human beings. I think that we can read Straw Dogs as a kind of plea to follow Gray in looking upon human beings as straw dogs and to promote their fate as straw dogs, as he interprets that fate. It turns out, however, that as Gray interprets that fate, it is not the fate of straw dogs as Taoism envisages it. Gray is not really a Taoist or even a neo-Taoist sage, no matter how ruthless towards human beings that sage can be. Whatever the role that Taoist imagery and sentiment play in Straw Dogs, Gray is a different sort of sage. Perhaps in an earlier life, Gray would have been a Taoist; doubtless he now feels admiration for the sense of life that Taoism imparts. But even if his book is not Taoist, the full text of the Taoist passage is nonetheless valuable for sparking curiosity about Gray’s real aims, and supplementing, indeed framing, our interest in Gray’s hostility towards humanism and the Enlightenment. If the passage does not give us sufficient instruction in Gray’s radicalism, it still helps to direct our attention to the heart of the matter. In order therefore to see Gray’s radicalism more clearly, we should first ask, what does it mean in Tao Te Ching that heaven and earth (or nature) treat myriad creatures, including human beings, like straw dogs? The meaning of the concept of straw dogs is not transparent, but it would seem to suggest that all creatures exist only to serve a purpose higher than any of their own, and do serve it necessarily; that except for sages, they serve that purpose without knowing they do so; and that once they serve it, they are destroyed without compunction. Unlike all animals and most human beings, the sage perceives the purpose of nature. What is that purpose? Perhaps, it is only to keep things going, to keep the cycle of birth and death in motion. The cycle is the sacred rite for which all things, human beings included, are merely straw dogs, sacrificial objects that are indispensable to the sacred rite but of no intrinsic value. No heroic dignity is conferred by participation in the rite. All life is to be perpetuated by creatures who take turns in perishing.
The Political Theory of John Gray 195 Human life, specifically, is to be perpetuated by maintenance of the immemorial customary roles that society provides. The sage as one special human being takes pains to survive by following nature in its most subtle movements and to advise others in the spirit of nature. The greatest success, which is normal survival rather premature death, comes to self or society from attention to and imitation of these subtle movements, which reveal the superior efficacy of the feminine, the passive, the indirect, the patient, the not quite active – the superiority of undermining to overwhelming. In the course of things, there is no progress, only adaptability. Everything on earth is temporary, but heaven and earth are lasting. Where, then, is the ruthlessness in this process? I suppose it is in the heartless fact of death or temporariness. From a Taoist perspective, the heartlessness consists in the complete instrumentalization of all life for a purely sacrificial purpose. It almost looks as if each creature or thing existed in order to pass away, ‘to be trampled on and tossed aside’ as Gray says (2002: 34), adapting the formulation of the translator (Lao Tzu 1963: 61). But what does it mean for the sage to look upon the people as straw dogs? In Tao Te Ching, it seems to mean that a sage refuses to mourn, refuses to lament the fact of human mortality. To die is the way of nature. I assume that human mortality has a special significance because only human beings have an almost lifelong awareness that they will die. The sage permits himself no sadness or regret, either for himself or the people, or, I would assume, for the other creatures and things. According to the canonical commentator, however, the sage takes a step or two further: Chuang Tzu fourth century BC) says: ‘And so it is that when the Sage wages war, he can destroy a kingdom and yet does not lose the affection of its people’ (Lin Yutang 1948: 66). But Gray is not much interested in the destruction of one polity or another. His ruthlessness is greatly in excess of the Taoist sage’s. To anticipate my conclusion: I believe that Gray’s book as a whole is a sometimes rapturous and sometimes calmer contemplation of the earth as a place where there are no human beings any more or many fewer than now exist. Gray does not hide this definitive sentiment, but he does not underline it or say from the start what it is; and he does not alert the reader by retaining the omitted words in the epigraph or referring to them thereafter. It is more likely that a second reading will yield that sense more readily than only one reading, especially when the full text of the salient passage from Tao Te Ching is taken into account. So much is going on in Gray’s book – much of it enlisted in the long traditions of both anti-humanism and counterEnlightenment – that one is almost carried past what I take to be the book’s principal ambition. Practically every point in the book aims to build up and justify the conclusion that if humanity were no longer to exist, or if the human population were to be only a small fraction of what it is now, then any sage, any thoughtful person, would exult. But the climactic conclusion of all these points is only briefly indicated and not earlier than 50 pages from the end (Gray 2002: 151). Let us look at the passage from Tao Te Ching more closely. Do I understand it? I cannot claim any expertise whatever; I am helplessly dependent on a couple of translations and a skimpy acquaintance with commentary, whether ancient or
196 G. Kateb modern. In translation, the whole of Tao Te Ching is delicate, elusive, fascinating. It is more than any message. Yet the statement that the attitude of the sage should be an imitation of nature at its most sacrificially ruthless is shocking, and not only to the sensibilities of humanists and lumières. Lin Yutang tries to muffle the shock first by describing the way of nature as ‘entirely impersonal and impartial’ and then by quoting Chuang tzu: ‘Perfect kindness has no regard for particular relations’ (1948: 66–67). But that seems like a cover-up. D.C. Lau is more candid: ‘In the Tien yun chapter in the Chuang tzu it is said that straw dogs were treated with the greatest deference before they were used as an offering, only to be discarded and trampled upon as soon as they had served their purpose’ (Lao Tzu 1963: 61). Gray adopts Lau’s reading of the meaning of the concept of straw dogs, and paraphrases it (Gray 2002: 33). But then Gray carries the meaning into the present age of environmental ruin. Thinking of himself as an adherent of the Gaia hypothesis, Gray distills what he considers its Taoist message: ‘If humans disturb the balance of the Earth, they will be trampled on and tossed aside’ (Gray 2002: 34). But Gray’s contention throughout his book is that humanity has already disturbed the balance and damaged nature atrociously, and will make things even worse, the greater the human population becomes. Nature in the form of ‘earth’s self-regulation’ will eventually right itself by making the earth less habitable for human beings: a population of eight billion ‘can be maintained only by desolating the earth’; or at the least, ‘the side-effects of their own activities will cut short the current growth in their numbers’ (Gray 2002: 8). Most likely, the plague that is humanity will be ‘cured by a large-scale decline in human numbers’ (Gray 2002: 12). Gray’s utopia would be a world population of half a billion to a billion (Gray 2002: 11). But how could humanity ever bring about such a result by rational effort? They ‘will never initiate a symbiosis with the Earth’ (Gray 2002: 8). The dynamism of increased numbers – ‘History is a treadmill turned by rising human numbers’ (Gray 2002: 158) – can be stopped only by forces external to itself. Humanity cannot check itself except by using the otherwise irrational weapons of mass destruction and thus incur ‘the side effects of war’ (Gray 2002: 11). Gray says, ‘The upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans cannot be other than irrational’ (Gray 2002: 8). If humanity were reduced and checked, life would then be what ‘Earthlovers’ dream of: a condition in which ‘humans have ceased to matter’ (Gray 2002: 17). But the dying off of the great majority of the population in, say, a hundred and fifty years (Gray 2002: 11) and the ensuing environmental insignificance of humanity do not comprise the limit of Gray’s radicalism. At his most extreme, Gray holds that humanity should perish. That sentiment is the greatest shock of the book, and, as I have said, comes rather late in the book (Gray 2002: 151). When it comes, it is not exactly a surprise, but it is still a shock – as shocking as the difference between massive amounts of death and total annihilation, between a world with people in it and a world without people. Gray’s radicalism thus is almost the opposite of the ruthlessness of the sage in Tao Te Ching because it actually overturns the most important Taoist teaching, which is that the sacred rite of human birth and death will
The Political Theory of John Gray 197 and should go on indefinitely. ‘Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone the Earth will recover … The earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on’ (Gray 2002: 151). Presumably, the Taoist sage would feel sorry for humanity or for any species if it appeared on the verge of becoming extinct, even if he shows no lamentation over the way of nature, which proceeds by the endless sacrificial mortality of individual human beings and other individual creatures and things. Gray expresses no regret at such a prospect of human extinction, though he is quite content to speculate that species now threatened with extinction by human aggrandizement will outlast humanity (Gray 2002: 151). In his eyes, humanity treats nature as if it existed only for human purposes, and thus sacrifices it, but not in a religious spirit and entirely without – in Lau’s paraphrase – ‘the greatest deference before they [straw dogs] were used as an offering’ (Lao Tzu 1963: 61). Human rapacity shows no deference before it converts nature to its use; it thus parodies the way of nature, as Taoism conceives it: humanity is ruthless towards individuals, as nature’s process is, but ruthless without nature’s intention of preserving species and types, and the whole. Gray of course allows that human beings destroy one another: their brutality and rapacity are not confined to the rest of nature. He devotes a small part of chapter 3, ‘The Vices of Morality’, to the ‘unquenchable fondness for killing’ that human beings display at one another’s expense, and on the ‘human taste for genocide’ (Gray 2002: 91). But how could he denounce genocide with a full heart, when he can imagine human extinction or depopulation with such equanimity? His own imagination is not actively genocidal, but passively so, if one may put it that way. Appropriately enough, the note of pity for human beings is not often heard in Straw Dogs, and is sounded in such a way as to blame all humanity for genocide. Indeed, the note of pity is no sooner sounded than abandoned. The chapter quickly moves away from human wickedness towards human beings and turns to the more or less morally skeptical idea of the incommensurability of plural moral (and other) values, a notion prominent in a good deal of Gray’s work for at least a decade. He says that ‘the idea of [moral] laws that apply to everyone’ is ‘just an ugly superstition’ (Gray 2002: 90). But how can genocide be condemned except on the basis of moral laws that applied to everyone? At least earlier, in Two Faces of Liberalism, he allows parsimoniously that there are ‘universal human values’ and that there should be ‘universal human rights’ (Gray 2000: 21). In any case, genocide becomes a generic human characteristic that has shown itself and is now showing itself here or there, and will surely do so in the future. The distinction between victimizers and victims becomes much less important than the discreditable difference between humanity and other animals. Indeed it would be inconsistent if Gray were to make much of the difference between victimizers and victims; after all, he is out to indict all humanity and he would have us believe that he would see it out of the picture. All are guilty – to use a word Gray himself does not use – by being human. Although human atrocities towards human beings should contribute to eroding humanity’s love of itself – one of Gray’s major projects – and
198 G. Kateb perhaps figure briefly in the book for such a tactical reason, they might impede his intention of manifesting an attitude towards humanity that he says humanity has always manifested towards the rest of nature. (It is fitting that he quotes respectfully from the American poet of the non-human or inhuman, Robinson Jeffers.) Gray wishes to stand against humanity without feeling sorry for it, even when it is victimized by its own. He does not really want to be a Taoist sage, but rather the prophet of an outraged nature, happy or at least undisturbed at the prospect of human doom. Or, should we say instead that Gray is engaging in a thought-experiment, trying to work from a non-human perspective in order to make appealing the prospect of an earth without human beings or a severely diminished number of them? But such an as it were playful attribution to him would result in not taking Gray’s book literally; in the case of Straw Dogs, whatever might be true of other works of political theory, that attribution would mean not taking it seriously enough. I Gray contemplates with equanimity, perhaps with eagerness, not merely massive human depopulation, but human extinction. We have to try to understand his reasons. The manner of the book is not systematic and seems to resist any straightforward response. It does create strong impressions, but leaves much to the reader to fill in. Can we say why Gray is anti-human – not just anti-humanist? The most obvious answer is that Homo rapiens is not Homo sapiens. Humanity is extraordinarily destructive of natural creatures and things. The obvious answer is not wrong, but it is not the whole story. If taken as the whole story, it turns us away from another part that is integral to the story. Gray wants to utter the claims of nature, but there is alongside this passion another one – the urge to deflate humanity and not only because it is so harmful to nature. To be sure, deflation of humanity serves the cause of defending nature, but it also serves a cause that perhaps would matter even if humanity per impossibile were wiser, more humane, less rapacious, in its treatment of nature. This latter cause is to force on human beings the philosophical truth about themselves. The curiosity is that Gray’s book does not contain passages in which he displays a love of nature or even an aesthetic appreciation of it. His hatred of what humanity has done to nature is not entwined with a readiness to articulate a rapturous or even a calm contemplation of the spectacle of nature, or wonder at nature’s marvelous profligacy of numerous species of animals and plants and materials. He does not particularize his observation of nature; he does not worry about the loss, say, of the species of tigers or whales. The book has no natural affection. (I do not say that the damage done to nature is only a pretext for hating humanity.) It is also noteworthy that Gray does not express wonder at the mere fact that there is a world. The reader has to assume that Gray feels a passion to preserve the beauty and sublimity of nature to the fullest extent possible, that he feels a shock of awe and perhaps gratitude towards being that may help to account for his denunciation of humanity’s destructiveness. The reader has to assume furthermore that Straw Dogs holds more
The Political Theory of John Gray 199 than the one passion of hatred of humanity, that Gray does not hate life itself. Or does he? Or, rather, does he hate human life more than he loves non-human natural life? Admiring the Tao Te Ching, he asserts that it is understood best not as ‘a manual for mystics and anarchists’, but rather as ‘an amoral manual … of statecraft and personal survival in troubled times’ (Gray 2002: 79–80). That interpretation is narrow and downcast. It deprives the text of all its magic. Another curiosity is that Gray writes as if by insisting on calling humanity an animal species, just one among many (and different from the others only in ways that discredit it), he is not insulting the other animals. Gray has what Nietzsche calls a nihilistic ‘will to the end’ (Nietzsche 1888a: 747; Nietzsche 1888b: 611), or a ‘desire [Wunsch] for the ‘end’’ (Nietzsche 1887: 556). Nietzsche says that a will to the end is a symptom of decline and decadence, brought on by an over-estimation of morality (1888b) or by weariness or disgust with life and a consequent will to nothingness, a will to have nothing human remain (1887). Perhaps Nietzsche thought that the will to the end is sometimes only the darkest mood or a seductive thought-experiment. But the most dangerous form of the will to the end is an active combination of pity for and nausea at humanity felt by those in whose hands human destiny ultimately lies – thinkers who are able to influence a multitude, directly or indirectly. Let us call them sages. Such a will is no mere misanthropy. Nietzsche himself was susceptible to both pity and nausea. In Nietzsche’s analysis, the philosophical thinker observes humanity as from a height and from a distance, and apprehends a mass of resentful, suffering and inadequate humanity. It may not be possible to say whether pity or nausea is the first emotion, but they are allied at the deepest level and might (but perhaps need not) stimulate each other. Perhaps where one feels pity, one must feel nausea also, but surely it is possible to feel nausea without feeling pity. In any case, Nietzsche’s mission is to fight these feelings in himself and dissuade others from succumbing nihilistically to them. Gray does discuss the theme of pity in Nietzsche’s work and life (Gray 2002: 45– 46), but he does not refer to Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism and the deep conjoined feelings of pity and nausea that can provoke it among thinkers and half-thinkers. I cannot help surmising that Gray’s will to the end stems from pity and nausea, but, in regard to humanity, from nausea far more than pity. Gray’s nausea comes in part from the spectacle of human destructiveness at nature’s expense, not as in the case of Nietzsche’s nihilist, from the apprehension of the squalor of humanity and the bitterness of the human, all too human. Gray can contemplate the extinction (or massive depopulation) of humanity with some eagerness, not primarily because people suffer so much they would be better off never having been born or because the great mass of people are unattractive, but mostly because they are in themselves a terrible animal species – that is, they are terrible as animals, and they are only animals at that. They are terrible at being animals because they think they are not animals or are not only animals. Let us say that Gray is incensed by what humanity has done to nature and that, apart from human devastation of nature, he is also incensed by the falseness of
200 G. Kateb human pride in itself as a species. Such falseness is tremendous self-deception and would be condemnable even if it did not play such a major role in the devastation. On the one hand, he sides with environmental radicals; on the other, he continues, with extravagance, a radically satirical tradition that includes Montaigne and Swift. Each commitment would be sufficient by itself to provoke a savage denunciation of humanity. But when combined, they can reinforce and inflame each other to such an intense degree that they create nihilism, a will to the end in a literal sense. I doubt that Nietzsche imagined total human extinction as the telos or profoundest desire of nihilism. The will to the end is a vague longing, despite its ferocity, and perhaps sufficiently tortured as to hold a dream of a reversible apocalypse. But whether or not Nietzsche has literal human extinction in mind when he speaks of the will to nothingness or the will to the end, he does not speculate about a nihilism that wills human extinction because of outrage at human pride, including the arrogance behind its destructiveness towards nature. To the contrary, Nietzsche wants more pride, more assertiveness, more exploitation, more virtù. He equates these attributes with life – that is, life when it is energetic and vibrant, creative and, if need be, destructive. Despite all differences, however, Nietzsche’s analysis offers some help in thinking about Gray’s nihilism. If nothing else, Gray expounds a fascinating variant of nihilism and an instructive contrast to other sorts. I think that in general the combination of pity and nausea helps to account for a good deal of extremism, nihilistic or not, whether revolutionary zeal or monkish withdrawal, religious fanaticism or environmental radicalism. I attribute to John Gray – at least as the literary persona speaking the lines of Straw Dogs – a nihilism of literal human extinction, an environmental radicalism that crosses over to nihilism. (I grant that there is an immense ontological, not merely qualitative, difference between literal extinction and massive depopulation, but there is inconceivable murderousness in both.) Behind this nihilism lie pity and nausea. But Gray redistributes the elements of nihilism. Most of the pity he feels is for everything in nature except humanity, and he feels nausea only because of humanity. Humanity causes him nausea because of what it has done to nature but also because of what it is in itself. Because of what it is in itself, it has treated and will always treat nature destructively and rapaciously: that is the nature of the beast. What humanity is in itself, what defines it, is its sense of entitlement, of distinctiveness, of superiority to other species and things. This self-conception is inherently disgusting, not only an indispensable instrument and accompaniment to the work of exploitation and destruction. It is disgusting because it is false, and intolerable because it is disgusting. It will fittingly recoil on humanity and lead to humanity’s end or to ruin with an immeasurable human cost. II Before turning to Gray’s nihilistic nausea as expressed in his refusal to mourn, before the event, the extinction or massive depopulation of humanity, and the strategy he uses to persuade his readers to share his sangfroid, I would like to mention,
The Political Theory of John Gray 201 for the sake of doing justice to the complexity of Gray’s book, those moments in the text when he shows a passing pity towards humanity. I have said that most of his pity is bestowed on everything in nature except humanity. Yet now and then he lets appear some pity for the human condition. These moments almost disappear before one can notice them, but this does not make them less deep. Such pity, far from aggravating his nausea, offers some slight resistance to it. Of course the resistance is powerless before Gray’s onslaught on humanity and its place in nature. But the reader may take some solace from Gray’s whispered humanitarianism. Gray makes a summary judgment that, if not stunningly original, has considerable force when perceived with the whole book in mind. The context is his biting criticism of the ‘war on drugs’ – a phrase that he himself rightly puts in quotation marks. He says: Drug use is a tacit admission of a forbidden truth. For most people happiness is beyond reach. Fulfilment is found not in daily life but in escaping from it. Since happiness is unavailable, the mass of mankind seeks pleasure … Societies founded on a faith in progress cannot admit the normal unhappiness of human life. As a result, they are bound to wage war on those who seek an artificial happiness in drugs. (Gray 2002: 141–142) He is obviously not delighted at the thought that the normal human condition is unhappiness. He does not exempt himself from the normal condition. I doubt that he would ever say that the normal condition of other animals and things in nature is unhappiness. If Aristotle (1980: 1099b) is correct when he says that only human beings can be happy, it follows that only human beings can be unhappy. To be sure, other animals can feel pain, and, correspondingly they can be content or tranquil or free of pain; but it would seem that we cannot properly speak of their happiness or unhappiness. They cannot be called happy because their traits are not virtues; their activities are not actions; their consciousness is not intellect. Yet although human beings are capable of happiness, the normal human condition is unhappiness. Is this not cause for pity? Other responses besides pity are of course possible. One could say, for example, that human beings are so wicked that they do not deserve to be happy. But Gray is not sympathetic to the Kantian outlook. I assume that the summary judgement that I quoted above is rueful. Gray says a few other things that go with his summary judgement. Among them are these remarks that may be commonplaces but do not feel like commonplaces just because they appear in Straw Dogs. He refers to ‘the frailty of human nature’, and says that ‘that problem is insoluble’ (Gray 2002: 15). He claims that owing to the ‘primordial human error’ of believing in selfhood, ‘we pass our lives as in a dream’ (Gray 2002: 78). Yet ‘to see ourselves as figments is to awake, not to reality, but to a lucid dream, a false awakening that has no end’ (Gray 2002: 79). He also claims that ‘perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life’ (Gray 2002: 131). All these remarks have at least a tinge of sorrow.
202 G. Kateb There is also a moment when Gray expresses a special kind of pity. He is aware of how often the quest for meaning in life goes unanswered or answered too approximately or abstractly. He wisely says that ‘spiritual life is not [that is, should not be] a search for meaning but a release from it’ (Gray 2002: 197). The release from either the search for meaning or meaning itself is a blessed anomaly. However, frustration in the quest for meaning is a kind of suffering that many people experience and do not always manage to endure without appreciable psychological loss. This condition arouses a kind of pity in Gray for a kind of suffering. He even becomes in a rare instant a poignant bearer of individualistic sentiment when he says: If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself. (Gray 2002: 48) It does not matter that Gray completely assimilates humanity to other animals in this passage and perplexingly denies all plausibility to a history of humanity. As I said, when he looks at the record of the past, all he sees is ‘a treadmill turned by rising numbers’ (Gray 2002: 158). Is it only a treadmill, a Sisyphus-like labour (Gray 2002: 195–196)? Gray concedes that there is ‘progress in knowledge, but not in ethics’ (Gray 2002: 155). But what is the history of humanity if not the (progressive) history of its cumulative knowledge, whether applied or not? Add to that, a history of its art, a history that is cumulative, but not progressive. I grant Gray’s point that there is no net universal gain in either morality or political freedom. But only humanity among the animal species can have a history of knowledge and art. What matters is that Gray allows himself to pause in his driven indictment of humanity and pay tribute to the forlorn quality of the individual life. Each person is an unknowable singularity; hence the immense aggregation of individuals, past, present, and future is an unknowable sum. If I may draw out Gray’s meaning, the worth of an individual is incommensurable with the worth of another. The sum is unknowable because no sum is possible. Each person as a unit is unknowable: the way in which experience registers on any person is finally unknowable. It registers differently from person to person. Each person is a world. The moments of pity in Straw Dogs are not many. Gray does not dwell on them or permit them to revise his indictment of humanity or block the dominion of his nausea. We should notice, however, that every condition that induces in him the sentiment of pity towards humanity is defined by something that makes humanity distinctive among the animal species in nature. Yet the book is devoted to a radical deflation of humanity that proceeds mainly by the reiterated claim that humanity is only one more animal species. Gray’s nausea comes in part from witnessing the invincible human belief that humanity is not animal or is a superbly distinctive species among the animals. (The other part comes from the destructive effects of
The Political Theory of John Gray 203 humanity’s invincible self-praise on the rest of nature.) Very much pity for humanity, spoken passionately, would certainly challenge and impede the dominion of his nausea. Above all, it would impede his attempt to persuade us that we should not mourn when we imagine the prospect of human extinction or massive depopulation. We must now turn to Gray’s deflationary project and see what its elements are, and how he hopes that when we take them in, we would agree that the world would be much better off without us. If the world had a mind, it would not miss us. We should not lament our demise ahead of time. III Humanity’s destructiveness can be ended only by the extinction (or massive destruction) of humanity. To be sure, Gray has other fantasies than extinction. He speculates about a ‘world in which a greatly reduced human population lives in a partially restored paradise’ (Gray 2002: 183), but this ‘high-tech Green utopia’ in which new technologies are ‘friendlier to the Earth than the old technologies’, is ‘humanly unimaginable’, though ‘scientifically feasible’ (Gray 2002: 184). The end must come; it is irresistible; the point is to turn away from the human lot. Making it easier to turn away is Gray’s purpose. As far as I can tell, he is not engaged in the tactic of self-refuting prophecy or, in contrast, in anything as simple as wishful thinking. The essence of Gray’s strategy for refusing to mourn the end of humanity or its radical diminishment is, as I have mentioned, a naturalist reduction of humanity. Now, Gray never mourns the loss of any single animal species. He seems reconciled to the Darwinian struggle in nature. It is the human destruction of numerous species that arouses his indignation. Yet if humanity, as only an animal species, is capable of such destructiveness, there must be something special about it. To be sure, the uniqueness would be monstrous, but unique it would remain, and the uniqueness can coexist with a realization that the human species is an animal species. There is thus an internal tension in Gray’s strategy between placing humanity on a level with all other species, on the one hand, and making it unique, even though only repellently so, on the other. Two questions then arise. Would a naturalist reduction of humanity be correct, if consistently carried out? If, to the contrary, humanity is an animal species, but unlike all the others, and if therefore it is not merely one animal species among many, is its uniqueness or distinctiveness solely reprehensible? Gray of course does not present a detailed case for the naturalist reduction. NeoDarwinism is allowed to inform the book without being subjected to very much analysis. One does not have to know evolutionary biology to know that human beings are distinctive animals; indeed, their distinctiveness is so pronounced that even their animality is no mere animality. Distinctiveness need not be for the good only; indeed the bad can easily outweigh the good; but distinctiveness there is. It is so great that it cuts human beings off from all other species. Biological kinship between the human species and some or all other animal species can be remote or extremely close, but biology unadorned does not suffice in any account.
204 G. Kateb Gray chides Heidegger for believing that the ‘differences between [non-human] living creatures count for nothing in comparison with their difference from humans’ (Gray 2002: 50). That is, in this human-centred view, non-human animal species are more like one another than humanity is like any one of them. Gray is, I think, right to suggest that the differences between non-human animal species are tremendous; perhaps if we imagined human beings out of the picture, we human beings could appreciate more fully how unlike animal species are from one another, how various in appearance and habits animal species are. We would refuse to lump them together in one large inferior category. But we could still suggest that human beings are the only species that is in part not natural. The species is not in God’s image, but it is still different precisely by being in part not natural. It creates diverse cultures; it does not merely live in a natural environment. Its natural endowment is such that it can and must create a life for itself that is not a simple environmental niche. The human brain makes mind possible, and mind creates everything human. Humanity does not make the world, but it does re-make the world, as no other species can. The human species re-makes the world because of capacities that are unique to it. In his attempted naturalist reduction, Gray tries on occasion to build up his case against humanity by pointing out its distinctive monstrousness, while inconsistently denying, most of the time, its distinctiveness altogether. My difference with him is that I believe that humanity is distinct from all other species and that the difference is not confined to its capacity to be monstrous towards its own species and towards other species as well. All the while, the underlying question persists: If humanity were to become extinct (let us imagine the extreme case), should the thought make us glad or calm rather than horrified and mournful? Let us look more closely at the attempted naturalist reduction and turn first to those distinctively human attributes that Gray claims do not actually exist. These illusory attributes are main sources of humanity’s pride in itself and hence sources of its arrogant destructiveness towards the rest of nature. Their very illusoriness in Gray’s judgement also helps to account in part for his nihilistic nausea at humanity. He wants to pull down human pride by his naturalist reduction in order to make it easier for us to bid goodbye to humanity. Gray singles out by name such purported illusions as consciousness, personhood, free will, selfhood, autonomy, conscious direction of our lives, and individuality. Among his judgements are the following. Language is only ‘brute noises’ (Gray 2002: 54). ‘The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the songs of humans’ (Gray 2002: 56). No one authors his life through choices (Gray 2002: 58). ‘Selfhood is a side effect of consciousness’ (Gray 2002: 76), while ‘consciousness emerged as a side effect of language’ (Gray 2002: 171). ‘Our lives’, he says, ‘are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves’ (Gray 2002: 38). We are not ‘unitary, conscious subjects’ (Gray 2002: 70), but supposedly machines can be conscious (Gray 2002: 188). Gray’s generalizations about consciousness are polemical and so broad and quick as not even to be productively satirical. He is too impressed by Hume’s unduly celebrated dissolution of the mind into a ‘kind of theatre’ of ‘successive perceptions’;
The Political Theory of John Gray 205 the mind is only the scene of disconnected occurrences. The mind happens, but its possessor is not a self-reflective person. The mind happens but does not realize that it is only happening. I believe that Hume inconsistently maintains that there is no internal observer to whom the ‘several perceptions successively make their appearance’, on whom they register (Gray 2002: 75). How can there be a theatrical presentation to an audience if there is no audience? The performance would not exist without the audience; it is appearing to them. Who or what are they? In addition, most of Gray’s naturalist anti-humanist generalizations just do not satisfy. His generalizations about language simply ignore the fact that it is a notational system, like music or mathematics, and unlike the communication patterns of other animals. His generalizations about free will, personhood, selfhood, autonomy and direction of one’s life through choices are all useful as sobering reminders, but overshoot the mark. Only a crude behaviourist holds otherwise. It is nonetheless possible to mitigate humanist pride in human capacities. I wish to put forth the suggestion that wakeful capacities exist only episodically and imperfectly, and result only from a virtuous struggle with oneself and others, with society and government, with history and nature. Only now and then is someone, say, autonomous: fully there, fully active, fully self-possessed, fully aware or awake. But these moments are not spurious or wholly futile, and they last longer and have vastly greater importance than ‘the blink of an eye’. Gray’s attempted naturalist reduction takes a curious turn when we see that some of the time, he actually abandons the naturalist reduction and explicitly acknowledges that there are distinctive human capacities. On a number of occasions, he refers to human beings as different from all other species. The trouble is that even though he now and then allows that only human beings can be and do what no other species can, he fails to say that such human distinctiveness means that the naturalist reduction is untenable. He should, but does not, abandon or sufficiently qualify the naturalist reduction. To reject this reduction is not to insist that human beings are not animals, are not natural creatures; and it is not to deny the major findings of evolutionary theory. It is only to say that the mind is not the brain: the human brain makes possible, but only by way of the mind, the vast ensemble of human phenomena that are not the direct and unmediated result of instincts, impulses, and programmed behaviour. Only human beings have minds. It is not up to them whether or not to have minds. Consciousness, which animals have, is not exhaustively definitive of mind. The peculiarly human unconscious also contributes to the definition of mind. And the supreme achievement of mind is the creation of the human artifice, which is not a work of nature, even though it would be impossible without nature. In any case, Gray points out a number of human phenomena that differentiate human beings from all other animals. In just about every example, the difference does no credit to humanity in Gray’s eyes. Nonetheless his accumulation of examples certainly makes humanity an interesting species, more interesting than many humanists succeed in making it. Gray does not intend that any of these examples, or all of them together, should elevate humanity in our estimation, or reduce nausea
206 G. Kateb when we contemplate humanity, or incline us to dread the future extinction of humanity. But in making the human species so interesting, Gray contributes to all these humanist effects. Here is a sampling of the human differences that Gray mentions. He constantly, and rightly, describes human waking life as too often dream-like in its insubstantial and incoherent texture. The question arises as to whether it would make sense to say of any other animal species that it passes its life in a dream. Is not a conviction of the unreality of existence distinctively human? It may be a distinctively human failure, but it is a remarkable failure, and testimony to the perversity of the human condition. Everyone’s life passes into oblivion; what memory retains is often dream-like in its many kind of distortion. Still, dreaming cannot be the model for all active wakeful life, any more than dreaming can be the model for all mental life. Human beings have wakeful mental capacities. Experience is not only a hallucinated distortion of perception and response. Gray goes on with his own catalogue of the distinctively human. Only human beings have writing (Gray 2002: 56–58), though he claims with a straight face that ‘Europe owes much of its murderous history to errors of thinking engendered by the alphabet’ (Gray 2002: 58). Only human beings have self-awareness, ‘the sensation of selfhood’ (Gray 2002: 61). Only human beings can view themselves ‘from the outside’ (Gray 2002: 72). Only human beings can look back on their lives and call up ‘a virtual self’ (Gray 2002: 77). Only human beings have an ego, an I (Gray 2002: 78). Only human beings experience a ‘conflict of instincts’ (Gray 2002: 116). ‘Morality is a sickness peculiar to humans’ (Gray 2002: 116). Only human beings can be irrational (Gray 2002: 28). Only human beings have ‘perpetual unrest’ (Gray 2002: 130). Perhaps the most important human difference is that only human (‘natural’) languages ‘contain more meaning than their users can ever express’ (Gray 2002: 187). The plain truth is that the sum of human exceptions that Gray invokes makes humanity into the sick animal, to use Nietzsche’s concept. The sickness derives from complexity of mind, from the as it were unnatural cravings of the mind, which are not the instinctual body’s cravings. Sickness of mind by itself would distinguish humanity from all other animals. But mind in itself, to begin with, is the distinguishing mark. And the mind is more than sickness. If Gray does not make humanity thrilling, as Nietzsche does, he makes it, to repeat, more interesting than many humanists and lumières manage to do. Gray’s book, read against him, makes it possible to intensify dread at human extinction. He even makes it possible to entertain the thought, which he hates (Gray 2002: 4), that evolution is progressive, though not by intention or design, just because the human difference, concentrated in the capacities (and failures) of mind, makes humanity the highest species so far. Humanity is the most complex species, as Herbert Spencer said, in trying to demonstrate the progressive quality of evolution. Isn’t mind higher than non-mind? Should that thought be enough to absolve humanity of its destructiveness towards nature? No: no forgiveness is possible. But is that where analysis ends? Not quite. Unforgiving, can we still be impelled to try to do what after all may be impossible – to save humanity from extinction? Or, at least, be impelled in foro interno to will its preservation?
The Political Theory of John Gray 207 IV At the end, I can only suggest some paths of inquiry to pursue on the question of whether humanity’s distinctiveness is only to its discredit. One path is to locate the source of human destructiveness not mainly in human pride in itself, but in other more mundane, and human, all too human, tendencies. Another path, the more important one, is to sketch an answer to the question: Of what use is humanity to the rest of nature? If we are impelled to will its preservation, the energy could perhaps come from its use to the rest of nature. The sources of human destructiveness are many. Of course, hubris is permanent. Feeling superior to the rest of nature by allegedly being in touch with the supernatural and enjoying a special relation with it, humanity subjects nature to harshly exploitative use and does so without conscience. Joined to species hubris is existential hubris – the will to leave the human mark on nature and even substitute human creation for the original nature that is given. There is also the hubris of analysis. As Wordsworth puts it, ‘we murder to dissect’. There is in the numerous projects of inquiry an intense passion to know the secrets of nature and to kill it, if necessary (and even with surplus cruelty), to discover them. In all these kinds of hubris, humanity shows itself monstrous. In prospect there is monstrousness yet more terrible: the use of the science of genetics to achieve what may be insane transformations in various species, including the human species. These transformations would destroy nature in a new sense; they would destroy nature in human nature and other living creatures. Human alienation would be total, or nearly so. If there is any tendency that could stir in me sympathy for Gray’s will to the end of humanity, it is this prospect. When, however, we look at the human record of destructiveness, we find not only hubris in various forms, which are all analogous to tyrannical or aristocratic insolence, but, much of the time, motives that are unspectacular and even sordid. Gray refers to James Lovelock’s characterization of humanity as spreading over everything like a tumour or a plague (Gray 2002: 6). These are metaphors for the blindness of human growth in numbers and hence in its needs, real or fancied, real or false. Nature is hurt by a spectrum of drives, most of them not hubristic. The spectrum ranges from sheer survival to a decent adequacy, from comfort to insatiable consumerism, from affluence to indecent ostentation. Vanity, amour-propre, certainly figures in upward striving towards any level above sheer survival. But vanity is not hubris in the full tragic sense. Humanity is blind in its striving; or, it is the helpless prey of its imagination. To make room for ordinariness in one’s analysis of the source of human destructiveness of nature is not to exculpate it. It may only show that if humanity is the highest species, from one perspective (the capacities of mind), it is the lowest, from another. It is the lowest because it is least able to adapt without ruining or endangering everything around it. Nonetheless, does nature have a use for the human species in its distinctiveness? Does something good go along with distinctive human destructiveness, not to
208 G. Kateb balance or outweigh it, but only to be sufficiently great to allow us to say, human extinction would be an immeasurable loss to nature? Thomas Nagel celebrates human distinctiveness by appealing to the hypothesis that there is ‘some systematic aspect of the natural order that would make the appearance of minds in harmony with the universe something to be expected’ (1997: 132). He holds that humanity alone can attain knowledge of nature. His un-emphasized connotation is that the universe is better off for being known, even if the universe does not know it is known. I cannot say much about the issue of whether some other extra-terrestrial intelligence, with which humanity could communicate, would confirm the claim that humanity has knowledge of nature. Nagel thinks that ‘methods and arguments [that human beings employ] would have to be among the capacities of any species that had evolved to the level of thinking’ (1997: 140). Human knowledge would have to be other than just a species-wide perspective (my phrase, not his). Nagel may want the impossible. Gray thinks that scientists ‘would be better occupied trying to communicate with the dwindling numbers of their animal kin, rather than searching for extra-terrestrial life’ (Gray 2002: 188). Indeed, ‘a zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery’ (Gray 2002: 151). But, no, animals lack the notational system of language. They do not communicate in words and sentences. We would require some other-than-human mind in the full sense, an intellect, for purposes of comparison – an intellect as capacious as the human one, but different as only one intelligent species can be from another, when their respective concepts and categories are, to put it lamely, fundamentally different. Would we need an indefinite number of diverse species-intellects? If there are no things in themselves and therefore only perspectival knowing, the perspectival unit involved must be a whole species and not individuals or groups within it. The epistemological need is not for a Maker that can disclose the truth about the world it has made and therefore knows from the inside, but, instead the convergence between the human species-wide perspective (found, say, in science and mathematics) and the species-wide perspective of at least one other species that is not related to any earthly species (unless universal chemicals produce the same species on every planet). But could there be communication under conditions of different concepts and categories, incomparably more different than the differences in concepts and categories between two human cultures? Can there be communication when the very nature of communication between earthly and extra-terrestrial creatures cannot now be so much as conceptualized? If, to use a minimal example, extraterrestrials found our pictures and symbols, what would they really make of them? Suppose instead that the human mind is the only mind in the universe; suppose that humanity could not report to or be reported to by an intellect not its own, that it is permanently sealed within its own concepts and categories. Could it still claim universally valid knowledge? I do not know what to say, except to notice the ridiculously sublime incongruity between the inconceivably vast universe and the confinement of knowledge to one small planet. These matters are beyond me. I therefore put aside the use to nature that human knowledge of it may have. (Obviously I do not refer to medical or other scientific knowledge that may cure or
The Political Theory of John Gray 209 repair or save nature, here and there. Isn’t it real knowledge, not merely a specieswide perspective, if human beings can use it to cure or repair or save nature? What is the proof of any kind of knowledge if not its successful applied use? Or are these effects identifiable as such only from a human perspective?) I just wish to propose that only human beings can admire and appreciate nature, or can love it. That is their use to nature. Admiration, appreciation and love of nonhuman nature do not require extra-terrestrial confirmation, just as morality does not, but knowledge of nature may. The trouble of course is that aesthetic and affective responses mean nothing to nature as such, and only a little to some individual animals. The use to nature is not literally a use. Benign human responsiveness is not reciprocated, except by pets; it is not even felt, for the most part. Nonetheless to respond to nature is to engage in impersonal and altruistic relations. It is not human self-love in a disguised form. It is not love of an invented object that is more than human or altogether other. These impersonal and altruistic relations, coming from capacities of the mind as instructed by the feelings, may appear as nothing in comparison to human destructiveness. However, one truth remains, make of it what one will. In contemplation, many people would find distressing beyond words the fact that, without human beings, nature would be unappreciated, un-admired, and unloved, even though nature would not miss us. The love-worthy would go on forever without being loved. That is the woeful thought. The loss of humanity, the awful destroyer, would be from an aesthetic and affective point of view, the greatest loss the earth could sustain. Then add that the greatest losers, from the human view, would be the human unborn. Only humanity would know what beauty and sublimity it was losing when its end was in sight. At the close of his book, after disposing of what he calls ‘the consolations of action’ and of work that are on offer for our fragmentary and dream-like experience, he asks whether we can imagine a human life without those consolations. He answers with a rhetorical question, the very last words of the text: ‘Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?’ (Gray 2002: 199). These words are surprisingly Emersonian; they echo Anaxagoras’s answer, as reported in Aristotle (1984: 1216a), to the question of why it is better to be born than not. I find Gray’s words congenial. They are almost a cure for Gray’s kind of nausea and hence for nihilism. Despite human destructiveness, the earth is still worth looking at, and only human beings can look at it for its own sake and also for the sake of looking at it. In the end, Gray can be twisted into being kinder to humanity than the Taoist sage. His strange, haunting, invaluable book can provoke us to blurt out the sentiment that even if destructive humanity does not ‘deserve’ to survive, its extinction is not be desired.
References Aristotle (1984) Eudemian Ethics, translated by J. Solomon in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, Jonathan Barnes (Ed.), (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Aristotle (1980) Nicomachean Ethics, translated by D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
210 G. Kateb Gray, J. (2002) Straw Dogs (London: Granta). Gray, J. (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: New Press). Lao Tzu (1963) Tao Te Ching, translated by D.C. Lau (Baltimore, MD: Penguin). Lin Yutang (1948) The Wisdom of Laotse (New York: Modern Library). Nagel, T. (1997) The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press). Nietzsche, F. (1887) On the Genealogy of Morals, reprinted in: W. Kaufmann (trans.) (1968) Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library). Nietzsche, F. (1888a) Ecco Homo, reprinted in: W. Kaufmann (trans.) (1968) Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library). Nietzsche, F. (1888b) The Case of Wagner reprinted in: W. Kaufmann (trans.) (1968) Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library).
Reply to Critics JOHN GRAY Department of Government, London School of Economics, UK
[email protected] 0 2 JohnGray 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/13698230600655107 FCRI_A_165484.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 9 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
Many philosophers and politicians tell us that they already possess a priori an adequate knowledge of what human needs and capacities are, and that they are really identical in everybody. The contrasts and conflicts in society, and in each man, they attribute to the absence or perversity of education. All men, they say, must find the same moral political and scientific regimen, communism, or constitutional democracy, or the One True Religion, perfectly satisfying. If they hesitate or condemn all such regimens, it must be because they are ignorant of the facts and of their own true good. I think these philosophers and politicians have good knowledge of themselves. They are born dogmatists and congenitally militant. But this disposition of theirs, at once intolerant and uneasy, blinds them to the actual radical diversity among men. This they cannot admit, because, if admitted, it would prove them to be born tyrants. George Santayana (1951: 462) Introductory Remarks Much of contemporary political theory is an apology for liberal values. Beneath the rhetoric about respect for persons and the primacy of justice there is very little
212 J. Gray agreement, and in fact liberal theorists are deeply at odds. That does not prevent them asserting the universal authority of liberal values, for they take for granted that liberalism is the only alternative to relativism. The larger and longer history of political thought has been forgotten, and with it the fact that most thinkers who remain worth reading were neither liberals nor relativists. In the past political theorists had truth as their aim. Inevitably their reasoning was coloured by local beliefs, and their conclusions less universal in scope than they believed. Yet Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Hobbes and Hume never aimed merely to render local beliefs and values into a system. In their very different ways, they sought to subject them to a test of reality. Over the past generation this conception of the subject has been replaced by one in which the goal is the vindication of prevailing opinion. Theory is constructed not with a view to reflecting what we know of human beings but with the aim of entrenching liberal values, as they are currently understood. Liberalism is a default position in contemporary political theory rather than a well-defined outlook, but that does not make it any the less dogmatic. For many political theorists the fact that an argument points to conclusions that are inconsistent with liberalism is sufficient reason for rejecting the argument. It hardly occurs to them to ask whether liberalism might be at fault. This is a curious state of affairs, and it is interesting to speculate on how it may have arisen. Three factors suggest themselves. The first relates to the political developments of the last two decades. With the Soviet collapse the chief rival to democracy disappeared, and it seemed that liberalism was left as the only game in town. The fall of communism in no way diminished the force of Marx’s criticisms of liberal individualism – if anything they acquired a new relevance, as the reach of capitalism became global – but it was followed by a parallel collapse in western Marxism, and Marx’s critique of liberal society was consigned to the memory hole. At the same time another tradition of criticism of liberalism disappeared, when conservative parties were taken over by the New Right – an intellectual movement whose origins were in a doctrinaire version of liberalism – and the insights into the frailties of liberal society found in writers such as Disraeli were lost.1 By the end of the 1980s liberalism of one kind or another appeared to have triumphed on both the Left and the Right. There seemed to be no alternative to liberal society, or none that maintained a semblance of civilisation. This impression was reinforced by the events of 11 September – a challenge to global security incomparably less formidable than that posed by the former Soviet Union, but which left liberal societies feeling deeply threatened. In according liberalism the status of an orthodoxy political theorists followed the drift of events. Another reason for the privileged standing of liberalism may be found in the development of the discipline. Since the appearance of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice political philosophy and the historical study of political thought have developed in increasing isolation from one another. Rawls was himself an extremely erudite man, with a wide and deep knowledge of the history of political thought; but his adoption of the method of reflective equilibrium has made it seem that the only
The Political Theory of John Gray 213 kind of political philosophy worth doing is a defence of current liberal opinion. The possibility that there may be viable alternatives to liberalism is no longer seriously considered. A third factor is a continuing commitment to the Enlightenment ideal of a universal morality. Whether or not contemporary political theorists are ready to admit to pursuing anything that might be termed an Enlightenment project – and it is an amusing fact that those who are most resistant to talk of the Enlightenment project are commonly those who most ardently promote it today2 – most of them hold to the central Enlightenment ambition of formulating a universal morality grounded in reason. But whereas in the past the Enlightenment project of a universal morality came in several varieties, only one version of it survives today. In two of the most politically influential versions of Enlightenment thought – positivism and Marxism – liberal values were rejected, or had only a transitional role. Yet it is now taken as axiomatic that a universal morality is bound to make liberal values central. My work has attracted some illuminating criticism, and it is a pleasure to respond to the comments of contributors to this collection. One of my chief concerns has been with value-pluralism, which I have argued does not endorse liberal values but rather a moral minimum that can be met by a variety of regimes. The political theory suggested by value-pluralism is not liberalism – at least as liberalism is nowadays interpreted – but a theory of modus vivendi. Among my critics, some – not without reason – argue that value-pluralism is a highly controversial theory, and not always clearly formulated. Others – less convincingly, to my mind – maintain that whatever value-pluralism may be, it is not necessary to the theory of modus vivendi. Still others maintain that value-pluralism poses no challenge to the universal claims of liberalism – a view that is demonstrably mistaken. In order to assess these arguments I will try to make clear the main thrust of value-pluralism and its relations with relativism and liberalism. I will go on to defend modus vivendi as an alternative to current versions of liberal theory. Having done so I will consider how Enlightenment ideas of progress and modernity figure in contemporary defences of liberal values. I will then address a number of issues to do with humanism, nihilism and Green theory. I conclude with some observations on the purposes and methods of political theory. Value-pluralism, Relativism and Liberalism There is now a substantial literature on value-pluralism, and there have been some significant advances since Isaiah Berlin first made conflicts of value a central preoccupation of political theorists. Yet the subject remains beset by rudimentary errors. Chief among these is the conflation of value-pluralism with cultural relativism, which is found in Berlin himself and in George Crowder’s criticism of my own views. As I understand it, value-pluralism is a version of ethical naturalism. The basis of value-pluralism is not the diversity of moral opinion but the truth that humans can flourish in a variety of ways. The human good cannot be fully realized in any one
214 J. Gray individual or society, and when a choice must be made between ways of life none is bound to be best for everyone. As a version of ethical naturalism value-pluralism is a variant of moral realism, but it is not a complete theory of value. It applies only to life inter homines – on any other than the most introverted humanist view, only a small part of what has value in the world. Value-pluralism is a thesis in moral anthropology, and as such presupposes a view of human nature. In contrast, the key claim of moral relativism – as advanced by Richard Rorty, and suggested in the writings of Michael Oakeshott – is that values are cultural constructions: we cannot criticise ways of life on the ground that they fail to meet human needs, for human needs are indefinitely culturally malleable. Berlin rejects this version of relativism, and so do I. Liberal pluralists maintain that value-pluralism underpins the universal claims of liberal values. What these values are is an important question, but answering it – if it can be answered – is not necessary for the present argument. There is no consensus on the subject among liberals themselves. Some hold that the core liberal value is negative liberty, others that it is personal autonomy; some that liberalism is essentially about equality, others that liberalism precludes any concern with social justice. In Two Faces of Liberalism I argued that the liberal tradition contains two rival philosophies, one concerned with achieving a rational consensus on the best way to live, the other with peaceful coexistence among different ways of life. As the lack of a definite article in the book’s title indicates I did not mean to suggest that liberalism has only two faces. On any view liberal values will overlap with those of other theories, including modus vivendi; but which values may be distinctively or peculiarly liberal need not be settled here. However liberal values are defined, their universal claims are undermined by value-pluralism. In much of his work Berlin presents value-pluralism as a claim about human ideals. Rival ideals of life may be – to use a phrase he often employs – ‘equally valid’. Though they may claim to be binding on all, none has universal authority. Awkwardly for liberal pluralists, Berlin sometimes suggests that liberal ideals should be viewed in this way. In a well-known passage, he writes: It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognised, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. (Berlin 1997: 242) The interest of this passage is that freedom of choice is seen as one ideal among many, and no more valid than some others. This is certainly a kind of relativism, and one with far-reaching consequences. The implication is that liberalism – perhaps even the fact of pluralism – is a culture-specific condition, not any kind of universal truth. In later writings Berlin insisted that value-pluralism and moral relativism must be clearly distinguished. He was right to do so, but the account of ideals of life that runs
The Political Theory of John Gray 215 throughout his work remains relativistic. To say that rival ideals may have equal validity is a way of saying that truth-values do not apply to them. One ideal of life may clash with another in the sense that both cannot be fully realised in a single human life or society, and each may condemn the other; but they cannot be contradictory. In this view – which I share – relativism about ideals of life cannot be avoided. Even so, ideals are not beyond criticism. They depend on beliefs about the world and human nature that may be true or false. More subtly, ideals of life reflect differing readings of human experience, and they can be narrow or shallow in the range of experiences they draw upon. On a better reading of human life many ideals will be found wanting. George Santayana captures the natural variety of human ideals, when he writes: The naturalist in ethics should give his blessing impartially to all ideals, though, I should say, only on two conditions: that these ideals be radically sincere and adequate to the actual nature and capacities of the creatures that accept them (as most conventional and religious ideals are not); and, second, that, in natural philosophy, every one should admit the similarly vital status and internal authority of all the ideals in competition. (Santayana 1936: 69–70) Santayana’s impartial naturalism about human ideals seems to me to clearer than anything we can find in Berlin. In accepting that no ideal can claim universal authority it implies the same about liberal values – a view that Berlin seemed at one time happy to accept. When he abandoned it his error was not in maintaining that some values are universal. It was in arguing that these values mandate liberalism. John Horton poses an important objection to the claim that ideals may be assessed by an appeal to human experience. He notes: ‘what we experience is in part formed and shaped by our values’ (Horton 2006: 159). It is true that our experience is shaped by our moral beliefs; but it is never constituted by them. Many of our experiences are given us by our animal constitution, and can challenge our moral beliefs. As a long line of naturalistic thinking going back to Democritus and Lucretius has always understood, ethical reflection need not stop at the level of opinion or convention. It may appeal to nature, as disclosed in the normal responses of the human organism. Horton observes that it is not self-evident which ways of life have value. In this he is right,3 but it does not follow there can be ‘no way of effectively establishing whether in fact a particular way of is valuable or not. This is the dog that fails to bark in most versions of value-pluralism; and Gray’s is no exception’ (Horton 2006: 160). Arguments about the value of ways of living may be inconclusive, but they are not pointless. Take Horton’s example of the life of a couch potato. For an ethical naturalist this way of living normally has little value, for commonly it reflects a poverty of experience and a wider span of experience is likely to give the couch potato reason to change her wants. What has value in our lives is not transparent to us, and we are often ignorant or mistaken in our views on the subject. It is only if one takes a radically sceptical or subjectivist view of ethics that a person’s
216 J. Gray immediate experience can be an incorrigible guide to the value of her life. Horton seems committed to some such view, and this is the dog that fails to bark in his critique of value-pluralism. In order to preserve a distinction between value-pluralism and relativism we need to distinguish between ideals of life and universal values. The central thesis of value-pluralism is that such universal values can be identified and are often at odds. Contrary to moral relativists, there are generically human goods and evils; but such universal values do not amount to a universal morality, for there is no right way of settling their conflicts. Crowder argues that it is only if value-pluralism is conflated with cultural relativism that value-pluralism can threaten liberalism. Actually valuepluralism is bound to undermine liberalism, for it subverts all universal moralities. Those who cling to the moral safety of liberalism must face the fact that they cannot do so while accepting value-pluralism. Value-pluralism implies that there may be no way of comparing the overall value of different cultures, but this is not because cultures have intrinsic value: ‘The bottom line for value-pluralism is the diversity of goods and evils, not of ways of life’ (Gray 2000: 8–9). Cultures are not organic wholes that are so different from one another as to be incommensurable. They are different ways of settling universal conflicts, and when their worth cannot be compared it is because no one settlement is best or right. Nor are cultures hermetically sealed off from one another. Now as in the past they are intermingled with many people belonging to several at the same time. When different cultures come together to make conflicting demands in the life of a single individual the result is moral conflict, but it need not be a clash of rival cultural ideals. It may be a choice between different ways of combining universal values. Berlin never presented a systematic account of universal values – a major omission given the possibility that liberal values may not be among them. He tended to think of the universal content of ethics in terms of notions such as justice and welfare. Such ‘concepts and categories’ may or may not be species-wide, however, and it is unclear that anything substantive can be gleaned from them. A better way to explicate universal values is in terms of generically human interests. Universal values have to do with obstacles standing in the way of any kind of worthwhile human life, and they are best spelt out in terms of conditions that most directly threaten the prospect of such a life: There can be no definitive list of the conditions that endanger a worthwhile human life. Even so, to be tortured, or forced to witness the torture of loved ones or compatriots; to be separated from one’s friends, family or country; to be subjected to humiliation or persecution, or threatened with genocide; to be locked in poverty, or avoidable ill-health – these are great evils for all who suffer them. Insofar as a conception of the good does not encompass these experiences, it is defective, even delusive. (Gray 2000: 66) Crowder advances the absurd notion that in arguing that liberal values have no universal authority I cannot condemn Nazism or fascism – as if only someone
The Political Theory of John Gray 217 committed to liberal universalism could do so. He goes on to suggest that my account ‘sees central liberal criteria such as human rights as appropriate for some human beings and not others’ (Crowder 2006: 175) – as if rights cannot be universal in scope unless they are liberal in content. In fact most of those who reject liberal conceptions of human rights – Thomists and Marxists, Confucian and Islamic thinkers and others – affirm universal human values. The idea that that we must accept the universal claims of liberal values or else embrace unrestricted relativism is historical parochialism of the narrowest kind. A moral minimum of the sort I have sketched can be upheld by regimes that do not honour liberal values. At its best, the Ottoman Empire protected its subjects – Christians, Jews and Muslims – from religious persecution better than some liberal regimes have done. Equally, liberal regimes may engage in practices that systematically inflict universal evils. To take an example – one that is not entirely hypothetical – a regime may be militantly devoted to liberal values, and at the same time practise torture. Universal values set boundaries on what can count as a decent society, but they do not add up to liberalism. Rather, they embody the idea of a universal moral minimum, and this minimum can be used to ground a view of human rights. However, by themselves they do not yield human rights. Human rights reflect decisions about which human interests ought to be protected, and some universal evils – humiliation, for example – may be too multifarious to ground an enforceable right. Yet they remain universal evils, and inform our view of what can count as a decent society. Rights conflict with one another, and the same is true of the elements that make up a decent society. There can be better or worse solutions of these conflicts, but in some of them there is no solution reasonable people are bound to accept as best. This does not mean that judgements about human rights or a decent society are culture specific. They are rooted in enduring features of human nature that cannot be altered by changes in cultural values. In this respect the idea of a moral minimum is incompatible with moral relativism, but it does not support the universal claims of liberal values. A moral minimum cannot ground any universal morality – liberal or otherwise. It embodies values that transcend any particular culture, but it does not tell us what to do when these values cannot all be fully realised. In his interesting value-pluralist reconstruction of J.S. Mill’s utilitarian liberalism Jonathan Riley argues there is a ‘fatal contradiction’ in my account of the moral minimum. Human rights offer protection against universal evils, and without them a worthwhile life is not possible. Accordingly, any legitimate regime ‘must enforce some harmonious set of human rights, the same set which is respected by all other legitimate regimes’ (Riley 2006: 132). Here Riley confuses consistency with realism. The competing claims of basic rights are not an artefact of any theory. They are a fact of life. Overthrowing a tyrant may trigger civil war, while propping up tyranny as a defence against anarchy may worsen the abuse of power. Over longer stretches of history such conflicts are normal. Like many liberal theorists Riley seems to think this awkward fact can be dealt with by the simple expedient of ignoring it. In fact conflicts within the moral minimum are bound to occur so long as it
218 J. Gray involves protection against a number of distinct universal evils. These conflicts can be resolved in better or worse ways, but on any value-pluralist view that is realistic fully legitimate government is not always possible. This conclusion can be avoided by redefining the minimum in terms of an interlocking system of universal liberal rights, but the conflicts of human interests have not thereby been overcome, only suppressed. Consistency within the theory has been secured at the price of a large loss in realism. Liberal pluralists face a dilemma. Either they hold to value-pluralism, and accept that liberal values have no universal authority. Or else they affirm the universal reach of liberal values, and abandon value-pluralism. In an attempt to evade this dilemma liberal pluralists often point to the conflicts that exist within cultures and ways of life.4 No culture is a seamless whole, and there are always dissident movements. Over time every culture changes, and some that have not known liberal values in the past may come to embrace them in future. But these truisms give no special support to any morality, liberal or otherwise. All societies are sites of conflict between rival moralities. In China there are dissidents who reject the current regime. Some do so because it violates liberal conceptions of human rights they have absorbed from western sources, others because they believe the regime fails to live up to traditional Chinese standards of governance. Liberal societies also contain dissidents – Christian fundamentalists, radical feminists, Islamists, communitarians, Greens and many others. Some reject liberal values while others believe liberal values are being flouted, or not fully realized. Conflicts of this kind are universal. Liberal morality is a protagonist in them, not an umpire. To think otherwise is confusion, or else bad faith. So far I have considered the relations between value-pluralism and liberalism, and defended my view that they point in different directions. I have not considered objections to value-pluralism. For some of its critics, seemingly irresolvable moral dilemmas are merely dilemmas to which a rational solution has not yet been found – they are an epistemological default rather than a basic feature of ethical life. Paul Kelly develops a version of this objection when he argues that value-pluralism is defective because it reflects a ‘positivistic’, ‘billiard-ball’ theory of values as discrete entities with uncontested boundaries. In my own work, Kelly finds ‘a conception of values as fixed entities that are not subject to interpretation and revision in moral arguments’ (Kelly 2006: 146). Against this, Kelly suggests that values are complex and variable features of human experience that with proper interpretation can be welded into a coherent system. A hermeneutic approach of this kind can be used – as in Rawls – as a basis for liberalism. The point that values are not given to us as simple, uncontroversial units is one I have long stressed. A central feature of my early work on essentially contested concepts, it is also at the heart of agonistic pluralism: ‘when values clash, what is most at issue is often which values are in conflict. “Justice”, “liberty”, and “welfare” are not territories marked off from one another by impermeable conceptual walls, but sites of conflicting goods, whose boundaries are contested and shifting.’5 In an agonistic view, liberty is a complex good containing competing elements that
The Political Theory of John Gray 219 cannot all be fully realized. The same is true of other political concepts, such as equality. All harbour conflicts, and any settlement of them will be reached by invoking some understanding of the human good. That our values need interpretation is hardly controversial. It is implied by the fact that a person’s immediate experience is not an infallible guide to the worth of his life, which I noted when criticizing Horton’s value-subjectivism. In much the same way, the idea of a moral minimum presupposes that the universal content of ethics can be marked off from that which is local. Value-pluralism does not exclude a hermeneutic approach to moral experience, but rather requires it. What is at issue is whether a hermeneutic approach lends any support to liberalism. Kelly assumes that interpreting and revising our moral concepts is bound to result in an endorsement of liberal values because for him liberal values are exempt from fundamental criticism. In truth the impact of hermeneutic method on liberal values may be to deconstruct them. After due consideration we may come to see personal autonomy as only a local ideal, for example. Can it be denied that many human beings have led fulfilling lives – according to their own testimony and that of others – without being autonomous agents? It will be replied that such people suffer from false consciousness. However, the same could be said of those who think of themselves as autonomous agents. A hermeneutic method may well lead to a more universal moral perspective, but there is no reason why it must be liberal in content. It is not as if liberalism were the only alternative to ethnocentricity – the history of thought contains many kinds of universalism, most of them non-liberal. It is only where the hermeneutic method has been rigged to deliver liberal values that it can be relied upon to do so. As I have formulated it value-pluralism is the view that the human good can never be fully embodied in any human life, and in this regard it has some affinities with Augustinian thought – a point Kelly notes, when he describes some of my recent work as being animated by a secular Augustinian vision of human imperfection (Kelly 2006: 137). It would be idle to deny that my interpretation of value-pluralism reflects a certain moral pessimism – at least by the standards of many contemporary thinkers. From one angle, value-pluralism is a theory of moral scarcity, which says that one cannot have everything. This is the side of value-pluralism, often stressed by Berlin and prominent at times in my own work, which points to irreparable loss as a permanent feature of ethics and politics. It is nonetheless a mistake to identify value-pluralism with a ‘tragic vision’ as Noel O’Sullivan does (2006: 286), since from another angle it expresses an anti-tragic view. Choices between different ways of life are not tragic when – as may often happen – the ways of life are so different that their worth cannot be compared. In such cases there can be no loss, and if we have to make a choice it is a sign not of tragedy but of the fact that human life is rich in alternatives. It may be in its anti-tragic aspect that value-pluralism comes closest to relativism. Practitioners of different ways of life need have no disagreement. They may simply have opted for different alternatives. Of course in the rough and tumble of the world antagonism between ways of life is as much emotional as intellectual in origin, it
220 J. Gray concerns competing interests as well as rival ideals and it cannot be removed by any change of beliefs. Different ways of life would be at odds even if everyone converted to value-pluralism. Nor is universal conversion to value-pluralism necessarily desirable, since part of the value of ways of life is often bound up with illusion. John Horton find something paradoxical in the idea that a worthwhile life may be based on illusions. He describes as ‘very puzzling’ the idea that human lives can be worthwhile for reasons that those who are living them cannot accept. He writes that the idea that a worthwhile life may be based in illusion ‘seems to conflict not only with the beliefs of adherents to a universal religion, but also with those militant atheists who deny that the religious way of life has value precisely because of its being based on falsity and illusion’ (Horton 2006: 160). Here Horton is muddled. Adherents of universal religions and militant atheists are both mistaken if they believe that the value of a way of life depends on its being based on true beliefs. Many human lives have been based on illusions and many of them have been worthwhile. The truth of the beliefs that inform a life can only be one ingredient in its value. Consider free will. For many human beings the value they find in their lives seems to depend on the belief that they can act freely; but this may well be an illusion. If humans lost their illusions their lives might not be worth living. Happily, there is no risk of that.6 It remains the case that the universal claims of rival ways of life are unfounded. Talk of reasonable disagreement in these contexts obscures the fact that there is no right way for humans to live, only a variety of alternatives. Our choices reflect our beliefs about the kinds of experiences we will have in the life we chose to adopt. These beliefs may turn out to be erroneous, and our choice of a way of life may be mistaken. Yet there is no reason to think that one way of life is best for everyone. If humans differ from other animals it is in the fact that they can live well in a wide range of ways. The variety of ideals is congenitally human, and the belief that one way of life will be chosen by all who have experienced it is itself a mark of inexperience. Modus Vivendi versus Liberalism Is modus vivendi an anti-liberal theory? If the charge were one I was anxious to avoid I might point out that modus vivendi developed as a response to unresolved problems in liberal theory: ‘Modus vivendi is liberal toleration adapted to the historical fact of pluralism’ (Gray 2000: 6). Political liberalism also claims to be a response to the fact of pluralism, but it breaks down on conflicts of values of the kind it seeks to regulate. Political liberalism is modelled on American constitutional law, in which it is postulated that rights cannot conflict; but Rawls’s Kantianism in one country7 is at odds with the practice of most other liberal democracies, which accept that basic liberties can conflict with each other and with other political values. For example, freedom of expression is at odds with protection from hate speech, and many liberal democracies have curbed free expression for this reason. Political liberalism is bound to suppress such conflicts. Once they are admitted they
The Political Theory of John Gray 221 can be resolved only by making disputable judgements about human interests, and at that point the project of a pure philosophy of right unravels. Given its origin in problems arising in liberal theory it seems reasonable to describe modus vivendi as post-liberal rather than anti-liberal. At the same time the claim that it is anti-liberal cannot simply be dismissed. In the past I have described modus vivendi as a neo-Hobbesian theory, and this in itself raises the question whether it can count as a version of liberalism. Before turning to these issues, let me deal with one very obvious criticism. It has long been claimed that modus vivendi is a variety of monism that treats peace as the overriding value, and Crowder repeats this extremely familiar objection. In fact, as John Horton has noted (2006: 166), modus vivendi does not make peaceful coexistence into a super-value. Modus vivendi will be pursued only if it is seen as advancing human goals, and in this sense it can only be a contingent good. But so are all political goods. Political ideals are not a priori values, and they cannot avoid appealing to existing human interests. This is an inescapable feature of political life that affects liberal and non-liberal theories equally. Peter Lassman poses a more interesting question when he observes that Hobbes believed that the condition of war could not be entirely overcome, whereas I assume that ‘rational citizens would prefer compromise to conflict’ (Lassman 2006: 224). Noel O’Sullivan raises a related issue regarding the Hobbesian character of modus vivendi theory, when he notes that it can encompass two very different justifications of peaceful coexistence – one instrumental, the other what he calls ‘non-instrumental and ethical’ (O’Sullivan 2006: 299). In distinguishing between instrumental and ethical arguments O’Sullivan follows Oakeshott, but moral reasoning normally involves a mix of considerations, some to do with consequences and others right-based. As Peter Jones has correctly noted (Jones 2006: 205), if value-pluralism is true the right cannot simply be reduced to the good. The right has a definite content only by drawing on views of the good, but people with the same view of the good may make different judgements about what it is right to do. Pluralism of this kind is an integral feature of moral reasoning. Oakeshott’s belief that morality is essentially non-instrumental is silly, and can only be explained by his interest in promoting his view of civil association. Drawing on H.L.A. Hart’s account of enabling laws, Oakeshott advanced a view of law itself as an enabling institution, and thereby – he seems to have believed – non-coercive. In doing so he demonstrated that he had failed to understand Hart’s account, which was never meant as a general theory of law. Laws of inheritance and marriage may enable people to do things they could not otherwise do, but the criminal law consists largely in prohibitions. Even enabling laws may seriously restrict freedom. Marriage laws in South Africa during the apartheid period may not have coerced anyone into marrying, but they denied the option to anyone who wanted to marry someone belonging to a different racial group. Law curbs freedom even when it is enabling, and for that reason it is always open to criticism. In the same way all states are partly enterprise associations that impose burdens and confer benefits, and are rightly judged in terms of how well they perform this function.
222 J. Gray In neglecting these truths Oakeshott shows the influence on his thought of liberal theory at its most doctrinal. Oakeshott understood politics as an activity that arises as a response to the collisions of human interests and which is for that reason openended, but the idea of civil association runs against this perception. It is actually a version of the paleo-liberal doctrine of minimum government, which aims to restrict the scope of politics as much as possible and thinks of the state as a neutral umpire. Yet the state’s activities have never in practice been those of an umpire, and it is hard to envisage circumstances in which they could be. The idea of minimal government is a way of evading the pervasive fact of power, and I think now that political thought would benefit if the idea of civil association were quietly consigned to the dustbin. Modus vivendi is a means whereby human agents can achieve their goals, and it is at this point that its Hobbesian pedigree is clearest. A regime of peaceful coexistence will not come into being or last for long unless there are many who see politics as preferable to war. Normally human beings engage in politics in order to gain advantage or ward off threats. The struggle is not only over interests – serious and sometimes intractable as conflicts of interest may be – but also over ways of life and views of the world. The ends that are pursued are human goals in the broadest sense, but this does not make political activity any the less instrumental. No doubt there are some people who find politics an inherently attractive activity – more so than art or sex, contemplation or making money, say; but it is a mistake to construct a political theory on the basis of this curious preference (as civic republicans and communitarians do). To modify a celebrated formula of Clausewitz, politics is a continuation of war by other means. The theory of modus vivendi is Hobbesian in accepting the instrumental character of politics, but Hobbes was mistaken in thinking that politics could deliver humanity from the state of nature. As an Enlightenment thinker8 Hobbes believed that political order was an artefact of self-interest. Famously he failed to solve the problem of the first performer – why should anyone entrust herself to the protection of a sovereign that has yet to prove itself? More generally, he failed to recognise that there are many circumstances in which order is not possible. This is not because of the Prisoner’s Dilemmas explored by game theorists, which show how rational actors can fail to promote their self-interest. It is because human beings value other things more than self-interest. It is not always because of paradoxes of collective action that they fail to achieve peace. Sometimes it is because they do not want peace. They may seek the victory of the One True Faith – religious or secular; or they may be animated by hatred or revenge, and see in the destruction or ruin of other human beings an end in itself. When faced by these facets of human behaviour Hobbes’s thought is powerless. Hobbes’s thought is vitiated by a failure to follow through the implications of naturalism, and there is an instructive contrast here with Spinoza. Like Hobbes, Spinoza was an Enlightenment thinker.9 Unlike Hobbes Spinoza did not imagine that reason could alter the character of human life. This may sound a paradoxical claim. Spinoza held to a deeply implausible version of rationalism, and embraced
The Political Theory of John Gray 223 the geometrical method in ethical theory. Moreover, he believed that some individuals could – at least in patches of their lives – live according to the dictates of reason. Yet Spinoza never imagined that human society could be rational in this way, and he did not share Hobbes’s hope that government could deliver humanity from the state of nature. The differences between the two thinkers run deep. For all his atheism Hobbes’s thinking is shaped by a Christian tradition that viewed humans as standing outside nature, and this is reflected in his account of society and government as rational artefacts. In contrast Spinoza views humans as parts of the natural order, and for him civil society could never be more than a variation on the processes at work in the state of nature. Hobbes knew that peace could not endure forever. Leviathan was mortal. Yet so long as it lasted its subjects were released from the state of nature. Hobbes is commonly seen as a realist who expected little of politics, but the truth is he looked to it for a kind of salvation. Hobbes may have had no notion of individual salvation, but he had a conception of collective deliverance: he viewed government as a means of escaping from the evils of the natural human condition. For Spinoza no such deliverance is possible: government is a part of the natural human condition, and shares in its evils. Unlike Hobbes Spinoza did have a conception of individual salvation; but it had nothing to do with politics. He viewed politics as an incident in the natural history of humanity, and he had no great hopes of political life. I share Spinoza’s naturalism and the view of politics that follows from it. For that reason the theory of modus vivendi I defend may be best described not as neoHobbesian but as neo-Spinozan. The theory of modus vivendi cannot reconcile human beings to a life in common when they are bent on violent conflict. That is far from saying that humans have no interest in pursuing peaceful coxistence, and it is at this point that value-pluralism comes back into the picture. Many writers claim modus vivendi does not need the support of value-pluralism. Yet the two are not so easily separated, and it may be that value-pluralism can give peaceful coexistence a wider appeal than can be afforded by the Hobbesian appeal to self-interest. John Horton thinks it is a mistake to link the case for modus vivendi too closely with value-pluralism (Horton 2006: 159). Believing that political theory should not be too dependent on controversial ethical doctrines, Horton argues that modus vivendi would be better off if it were decoupled from value-pluralism. In this Horton joins many others who wish to follow the Rawlsian strategy of staying on the surface of things. However, it is far from clear that political theory can avoid controversy in this way. As we have seen, Horton’s argument depends on a type of moral scepticism or value-subjectivism; but these are also positions in ethical theory, and hardly less controversial than value-pluralism. Perhaps Horton thinks modus vivendi can be defended by appeal to disagreement in ethical issues. However, the fact of pluralism that is so often invoked by Rawls and his followers is not a reason that can justify adopting modus vivendi or any other political theory. Those who seek to embody a comprehensive vision of the good in politics will surely need to take the fact of disagreement into account – but only as a
224 J. Gray practical constraint on the realisation of their view of the good. Thomists and Benthamites are not unaware of the fact that many people disagree with them. But they see such disagreement as a symptom of error, not a reason for modus vivendi. Disagreement is an argument for modus vivendi only if reflects enduring features of ethical life. Some ethical questions may be so difficult that divergence in judgement is to be expected, and there may be some that have no right answer. Either way we are back on the terrain of ethical theory, and not far from value-pluralism. Modus vivendi rests on the belief that value-conflict is a natural feature of human life, and for that reason modus vivendi cannot be decoupled from value-pluralism. Of course the link between them is not one of strict entailment, for nothing follows from value-pluralism as a matter of logic. Instead the argument is that modus vivendi is a reasonable political project for one who sees the diversity of interests and ideals as the normal human condition. If human ideals are many, why should politics be given over to the domination of any one of them? If we accept conflicts of interests and values as an enduring feature of human life we may be inclined to view politics as a way of accommodating this fact. The theory of modus vivendi has been described as a type of pessimism, but if so it is not – as Glen Newey maintains in his richly imaginative account of the development my views – because it turns pessimism into a political project. Rather, it is in its understanding of politics itself. The goods achieved in politics are modest and instrumental, and their realization involves practices of bargaining and compromise that are often far removed from moral argument. It is this partial dissociation from ethics that makes politics an alternative to war. From the standpoint of Rawls and his followers, politics is a messy, unprincipled business and much inferior to the majestic certainty of law. From the standpoint of the theory of modus vivendi it is the very messiness of politics that makes it useful. Liberal legalists imagine that the compromises of politics can be avoided by principles of justice as interpreted by courts. In reality the legal process can never be entirely insulated from political influences, and on occasion it is nakedly political – as when the US Supreme Court found nothing amiss in the dubious electoral practices that allowed George W. Bush to win the presidency. (Bismarck’s remark that those who love law, like those who love sausage, should not inquire too closely into how it is made comes to mind here.) The idea that law can be divorced from politics is a liberal utopia. Conflicts between liberties reflect the conflicts of human interests, and reaching tolerable settlements of them is one of the purposes of politics. It will be objected that it is unclear what counts as a tolerable settlement, and Kelly advances this objection when he argues that modus vivendi is only contingently liberal (Kelly 2006: 138). However, as has already been argued contingency is something no political theory can avoid. Rawlsian theorists face it when they write their current moral intuitions into the fabric of the theory of justice. Political liberalism is a transcendental deduction of liberal opinion, and liberal opinion shifts with events. Twenty years ago most liberals favoured multiculturalism, nowadays few do. This is not because the argument about multiculturalism has been settled. It is because political developments have rendered it largely irrelevant. Again, a
The Political Theory of John Gray 225 generation ago no liberal was ready to defend torture. Predictably,10 some liberals now do and it cannot be long before this is reflected in theories of justice. In effect, political liberalism is doubly contingent – first on current moral intuitions, secondly on the political events that shape and alter these intuitions – but this contingency is concealed and denied. In contrast, modus vivendi accepts the contingencies of politics, and hopes thereby to be more generally applicable than a type of theorising that elevates the passing certainties of liberal opinion into eternal verities. Progress, Modernity and Liberal Values While recent liberal theorists maintain they do not depend on controversial claims, they rely at crucial points on an extremely controversial theory of history. Theorists who insist that value-pluralism supports the universal claims of liberalism point out that moral conflicts that may be intractable when considered as collisions of highly abstract values may be capable of rational resolution when they are viewed as dilemmas facing agents in particular situations. When an agent confronts such a choice she does so as a person with a definite history and goals, which often enable the dilemma to be resolved. This much is true. Yet it is only if one subscribes to a highly disputable theory of history that an appeal to context can be relied upon to prop up liberal values. Commendably, Crowder is clear is that liberal morality cannot be derived simply from an account of universal values. But as an apologist for liberalism it is unthinkable to him that the argument should end here – if one argument fails to deliver the desired result, another must somehow be found. To this end Crowder advances the amorphous proposition that liberal values can be justified by reference to ‘wider social, economic or civilizational circumstances’ (Crowder 2006: 177). Again, it is true that a full account of the historical context of an individual or society will encompass the future as well as the past; but this does not ensure a liberal result. Consider a second-generation Asian immigrant who must choose between an arranged marriage and western practices in which romantic love is presumed to be central. Her deliberations will refer to her goals and prospects as well as the traditions and histories – Asian and western – she inherits. That does not mean she will choose a western alternative. An appeal to the future will support liberal values only on the assumption that the best future for everyone cannot be other than liberal. Crowder cites Raz’s argument that personal autonomy may be ‘appropriate, even unavoidable’ in societies with fast-changing technologies and free movement of labour, and suggests that I have failed to notice that it opens up a broader contextual case for liberalism. In my view Raz’s work contains the most powerful contemporary defence of liberal pluralism. However, as I have noted on a number of occasions, there is ‘a fundamental objection to Raz’s argument. A contextual argument to the value of autonomy is inherently patchy and exception-ridden’ (Gray 1996: 149–156; see also Gray 2000: 98; 1995a: 140–142; 1993d: 306–308). Raz’s argument has two parts: a functional argument that autonomous choice is indispensable in rapidly changing societies, and a cultural argument that autonomy
226 J. Gray is necessary to the well-being of people belonging to a particular cultural tradition. The two arguments are linked by Raz’s belief that in liberal societies cultural minorities that do not value personal autonomy will find it beneficial to assimilate to the majority that does. However, as Parekh has pointed out (Parekh 1994), the claim that rapid economic development requires personal autonomy is undermined by the history of countries such as Singapore and by the experience of Asian immigrants in western countries. There is no systematic relationship between economic development and the spread of liberal values, and in liberal societies cultural groups that have not accepted the ideal of personal autonomy are amongst the most economically successful. Unless well-being is defined in terms of autonomous choice – an arbitrary move that is perennially tempting to liberal theorists – the claim that modern societies require personal autonomy is at best unproven. Liberal pluralism trades on an undefended theory of history, and in this as in other respects liberal theory today is markedly less self-critical than in the past. John Stuart Mill knew that any claim for the universal authority of liberal values depended on a prior claim about human progress. He understood that his argument for liberty relied on a conception of ‘man as a progressive being’ (Mill 1991: 15), and in the System of Logic, Comte and Positivism and other writings he was admirably clear about the theory of progress it required. In Mill’s view progress in ethics and politics followed on the growth of knowledge. It was inconceivable to him that intellectual progress would continue and accelerate, while the values to which he was committed went into retreat. The centrality of the idea of progress in liberal theory is a major part of my interpretation of Mill’s thought, and I am indebted to Glyn Morgan for noting this as one of the strands of continuity in my work. However, Morgan illustrates the dangers of the idea of progress in history when he notes that Singapore has been compelled to relax restrictions on ‘lap bars’ in order to attract visitors – a development which he seems to think is in some way linked with the spread of liberal values (Morgan 2006: 232). The Lap Bar Interpretation of History may be more colourful than the Whig interpretation, but it is no more reliable. In the past authoritarian regimes have often turned a blind eye to the sex industry, and there is no necessary link between tolerating it and support for liberal values. In fact liberalism has often marched hand in hand with puritanism. Just as they did in the past, liberal theorists today believe that the last few centuries have witnessed a process of progressive change that can in principle be replicated universally. Whatever its advocates may say this is a teleological view of history; but it is instructive and entertaining to recall how different are the endstates that theorists of progress have anticipated. For Mill the growth of knowledge could only result in the universal spread of liberal values; for Comte it would inaugurate a global technocracy in which liberal values were obsolete; for Marx it was bound to yield egalitarian communism; for Herbert Spencer and F.A. Hayek it eventuated in a global free market. Each of these end-states was announced as the inexorable result of continuing scientific and economic development; but history has passed all of them by.
The Political Theory of John Gray 227 Fukuyama’s thesis of the ‘end of history’ is another example. It was conceived near the end of the Cold War, which Fukuyama plainly believed would be the last global conflict. In fact, as I noted in a critique of Fukuyama’s views published in October 1989, the end of the Cold War meant the resumption of history on decidedly traditional lines, and suppressed ethnic and religious conflicts were sure to reemerge on a large scale (Gray 1989a). In later writings Fukuyama has claimed he never suggested there would be no more global conflicts – instead, he meant that ‘democratic capitalism’ was the only legitimate regime. As a more precise restatement of his early pronouncements this has at least the virtue of being clearly false. Regimes are legitimate to the extent that they realise universal goods and mitigate universal evils, and now as in the past this can be done in a variety of political systems. The closure of a parochial western dispute about the best economic system does not alter this fundamental fact. It is a comment on the state of intellectual life towards the end of the last century that the view that history was about to resume its normal course was seen as apocalyptic, while the belief that it had ended was viewed as realism. The penchant for teleology is prominent in discussion of globalization. There is nothing new in the phenomenon, which dates back to the last third of the nineteenth century, if not further. Globalization is simply the widening and deepening interconnection between political, economic and cultural events throughout the world produced by the spread of new technologies. Until the 11 September attacks it was widely assumed it meant the universal triumph of liberal capitalism. In fact, while it has the effect of making the world a smaller place, globalization does not make it more uniform, more liberal or more peaceful. As the history of the twentieth century illustrates, it transforms social relationships and overturns established regimes. Globalization has advanced through war and revolution, and there is nothing to suggest things will be any different in future (Gray 1998). Liberal theorists have inherited the Enlightenment faith that as societies come to be increasingly dependent on science they will have similar values, but the growth of human knowledge has no tendency to produce convergence in ethics or politics. It simply enhances the power of human beings to implement their values whatever they may be. At bottom modernity is nothing more than the accelerating growth of knowledge, and this is a process without any predetermined end-state. If anything can be predicted with confidence, it is that there will always be more than one way of being modern (Gray 2003a). The key element in theories of progress is the belief that the advance of knowledge enables humanity to remake the world on a new and better model – a belief that did not take hold before the eighteenth century. Pre-modern European thinkers understood history in a variety of ways, some of them following the Greeks and Romans in conceiving it in cyclical terms, others following JudaeoChristian traditions in thinking of it as a narrative of sin and redemption. Whatever their view they did not expect any secular transformation of human affairs, and in this pre-modern thinkers were closer to the truth than those who came after them.
228 J. Gray Humanism, Nihilism and Green Theory The chief feature of human nature in most pre-modern views is that it is fixed and flawed. This view is found in the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, Greek ideas of fate, Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of the ingrained tendency of the human mind to illusion, and in Taoist notions of humans as animals that have strayed from natural behaviour. In modern times the idea that humans are intrinsically flawed is prominent in the thought of Freud. Yet today the suggestion evokes charges of nihilism. A faith in progress is the working creed of the post-Christian West, and when it is exposed to sceptical doubt the result is a moral panic not unlike that which greeted scepticism about religion in Victorian times. Just as nineteenthcentury unbelievers were warned that the dissolution of monotheism would result in a plague of unmentionable vices, so critics of humanism today are told that a loss of faith in cherished ideals of moral progress and personal autonomy will plunge the world into nihilism. It is a response that illustrates the doctrinal secularism of the contemporary academy. For most philosophers and political theorists ignorance of religion is a point of professional honour, and they are unaware that many of their views are secular versions of religious beliefs. Theories of progress are relics of the Christian view of history as a redemptive moral narrative, and Enlightenment ideologies of universal emancipation are avatars of the Christian promise of universal salvation.11 Modern political ideologies are post-Christian theodicies, and could not have arisen in societies with other religious traditions. Modern humanism is a residue of faith, and so is the fear of nihilism. As I have noted elsewhere (Gray 2002: 128), nihilism is a post-Christian malady. The very idea of nihilism is lacking in pre-Christian Europe, and has arisen only with the decline of secular surrogates for western monotheism. Contrary to Heidegger, who imagined that the disorders of late modern Europe disclosed the logic of history, nihilism is far from becoming a universal condition. If Nietzsche prophesied it accurately it was because as a post-Christian thinker he himself suffered from it. He developed the idea of the Übermensch in an attempt to restore belief in the meaning of history – a project that Schopenhauer, who rejected Christianity far more completely and decisively than Nietzsche ever did, would rightly have found ridiculous. The perception that history is without meaning is threatening only to those who inherit from Christianity a need to find meaning in history, and this discloses a general truth about nihilism. Any view which denies to humans the special standing in the world they have in Christianity and its secular successor-creeds is bound to be seen as nihilistic, and it is unsurprising that my own critique of humanism should have been interpreted in these terms. In truth it is humanism that is nihilistic. Humanists are post-Christian thinkers who follow Christianity in viewing value as being created by personality. To be sure, in Christianity value emanates from a divine personality. Abandon Christianity, and the view that value is a creation of personality can mean only that it is a projection of human will. It is hard to imagine a more perfect specimen of
The Political Theory of John Gray 229 nihilism. In describing critiques of humanism as nihilistic humanists succeed only in revealing their own nihilism. George Kateb is one of those haunted by the spectre of nihilism. For him nihilism means any denial of the unique value of human beings, and in this he is at one with other post-Christian thinkers. To think of human beings as being uniquely valuable is entirely coherent in the context of monotheism. If all value emanates from God and humans alone among animals contain some element of the divine then it is reasonable to think of humans as having unique value. In a non-theist context this claim is impossible to justify, and hard even to state coherently. Kateb illustrates this difficulty, when writes obscurely that ‘human beings are the only species that is in part not natural’ (Kateb 2006: 316). By this he seems to mean that humans live in not only in the natural environment but also in cultures they themselves create. We may leave aside whether humans really are alone in this respect. It remains unclear why the capacity to create cultures should not itself be natural. After all, if it is not a product of some kind of divine intervention then it must have a natural origin. A part of naturalism is an attempt to find an explanation for the ways in which humans are different from other animals. Humanist thinkers have a different agenda. They seek an explanation of the emergence in humans of the unique powers attributed to them by Christians. They rarely ask themselves whether humans actually possess these powers, or why they should be considered so valuable. For example, Daniel Dennett has spent much of his career in an attempt to show that a version of free will can be explained in scientific terms (Dennett 2004). There is something comic in this heroic effort. While the sincerity of Dennett’s anti-Christian animus cannot be doubted, the project of demonstrating that free will is compatible with scientific materialism could scarcely occur to someone whose view of humans had not been shaped by Christianity. An interest in determinism can be found outside Christendom – in Epicurean theorizing about uncaused events, for example; but an anxious concern with free will is found only amongst post-Christian thinkers ignorant of the religious origins of their beliefs. Here as elsewhere naturalism is at odds with humanism, which in its contemporary varieties is merely spilt theology. Because he understands value in post-Christian terms Kateb views the prospect of human extinction with horror. From a naturalistic point of view such a response is exaggerated. Human life has value for whatever happiness it may contain. Happiness may be more variegated in humans than in other animals. Yet at bottom it is simply the way humans are when they flourish, and on any truly naturalistic ethical theory all forms of flourishing have value, not only the human. The disappearance of the human mode of flourishing would surely mean some loss, but it would hardly be the cosmic tragedy envisaged by Kateb. In terms of other forms of life and their prospects of flourishing it could be a boon. It is only if one subscribes to a post-Christian view in which value is created by persons that one can imagine that value will disappear from the world when humans are no longer around. Nihilism is one of many conditions politics is powerless to alter, and if it can be remedied it is not by political action. For Newey my recent views appear to be
230 J. Gray nihilistic because while they insist on the usefulness of politics they give a very modest account of what politics can achieve. Yet there is nothing nihilistic in an insistence on the limits of politics. The revolutionary movements of the last two centuries were vehicles of post-Christian millenarianism.12 In their different ways they offered remedies for nihilism, and they led to disaster on a vast scale. Contemporary politics contains a number of movements that promise a cure for nihilism – radical Islam and American neoconservatism, for example. Such movements illustrate the dangers of political remedies for cultural ills. Green movements also offer a cure for the cultural maladies of late modern life, and to my mind they are no less deluded. At its most interesting – in Deep Ecology and Gaia theory, for example – Green thought contains a powerful critique of anthropocentrism. As a political movement it is just one more version of humanism. While noting affinities between Green thinking and my own work, John Barry laments that I have not read much Green theory, and have neglected what he calls the ‘non-ecological progressive agenda of Green thinking’. In fact I have read a good deal of Green theory, and despite this – or because of it – I reject Green theory’s progressive agenda.13 Conventional Green theory rests on the view that there are no environmental problems that cannot be solved by a change in social institutions. It is a view shared by Marxists and free-marketeers, neoconservatives and many varieties of religious fundamentalism. Against it I have always maintained that that the constraints of the natural environment set insuperable limits on human hopes. In particular, the growth of human numbers is unsustainable and poses a threat to the environment that no alteration in economic or political systems can overcome. This is a view I share with J.S. Mill, and in a paper first published in 1976 I noted the continuing relevance of ‘Mill’s neo-Malthusian insistence on the finitude of the world’s resources and the constant danger of overpopulation’ (Gray 1976). Population stability is an integral feature of Mill’s ideal of the Stationary State – one of the few utopias that is not positively unattractive, and one of the least likely to be attempted. The perennially unpopular Reverend Malthus continues to be vitally relevant. Barry makes the valid point that the environmental impact of a population must be measured in part by its resource-intensity, and in these terms affluent industrial societies are the most overpopulated. He fails to mention that they are also the countries in which opposition to population control is strongest. As I have noted: ‘It is understandable that rich countries should reject the idea of overpopulation. In their uses of resources, they are themselves the most overpopulated’ (Gray 2004b). A reduction in population in the richest countries would benefit the whole world. Barry claims that no one advocates this, but here he is ill informed – organizations such as Negative Population Growth in the US have done so for decades. Throughout the world the most effective population policy consists in extending control of their fertility to women by making contraception and abortion easily available. But even assuming this could be implemented worldwide it would not stop human numbers rising greatly over the coming century. The fact remains that the Earth’s carrying capacity has an upper limit, which has very likely already been passed at present population levels – let alone those
The Political Theory of John Gray 231 anticipated in reliable projections. Overshoot in human numbers does not manifest itself as soon as carrying capacity has been exceeded – as with climate change, there is a time lag before the impact is felt. Even so, one way or another – whether by an unlikely exercise in self-restraint, or via the natural processes that apply to all other animal species – the present spike in human numbers is certain to come to an end. How the present and prospective human population can be supported ought to be of central concern to Green theorists, but their thinking on the subject is marked by a pervasive lack of realism. In part this comes from their attachment to humanist ideas of progress. The true lesson of ecology – and above all of Gaia theory – is the necessity of a large deflation of human ambitions, but it is a lesson that Green thinkers resist. They insist that human ambitions can be reconciled with environmental limits through a revolutionary transformation of human institutions. Yet in a world containing nearly two hundred sovereign states, many of them collapsed or locked in savage conflict, there is no realistic prospect of globally enforceable environmental policies. Alongside their childish political hopes Green thinkers are implacably hostile to technical fixes. While it would be an exaggeration to say they oppose all new technologies – they have been loud in their support for unsightly and inefficient wind farms, for example – they have consistently resisted high-tech solutions. If the world had a human population of a billion or less it might be feasible to sustain those numbers indefinitely by the use of organic farming, renewable energy and the like. It is not remotely possible to support a population of six or eight billion in this way. That requires high-tech solutions, as I noted in 1993 when I defended nuclear energy.14 Today I would add that it requires high-tech food production as well, for any attempt to feed such a population by traditional methods (including organic farming) will result in the conversion of much of the world’s remaining wilderness to agriculture – a disaster for other species, and soon for humans as well. Even these technologies will not allow current human numbers to be supported indefinitely. Nevertheless, if there is a way of managing the environmental crisis it is by using these and other technical fixes to the full. Curiously, Barry finds traces of Romanticism in my writings on Green issues. The Romantics disparaged science and technology while looking for a moral or political revolution. My view is the reverse. In ethics and politics progress is an illusion, but in science and technology it is a fact. Technology cannot abolish war or end poverty, diminish the conflicts of human needs or repeal the laws of thermodynamics. There is no technical fix for the human condition. Even so, technology can be extremely useful in coping with the large environmental changes we can expect in the fairly near future. Recent scientific evidence suggests climate change is already irreversible, and on current trends the point after which large-scale disruption is inevitable may be less than a decade away. In these circumstances ideas of sustainable development are redundant, and devices such as the Kyoto Treaty irrelevant. Green movements have been harmful in focussing on utopian political solutions and opposing technologies that could help cope with climate change. Insofar as it is
232 J. Gray humanly caused global warming is a by-product of worldwide industrialisation – a process no political authority can arrest or control. No doubt energy conservation and pollution control are useful, but they cannot offset the environmental impact of such an unprecedented transformation. The reality is that the environmental crisis is insoluble by political means, and the best hope of navigating it is by the intelligent use of technology. Concluding Observations on the Purposes and Methods of Political Theory The dominant school in contemporary political theory proceeds by a method of construction in which values that are taken as given are used to shape conceptions of justice and rights. The values that are used in this way are not themselves fixed – as I have noted they shift over time, sometimes quite radically, and at any one time there is much disagreement as to their content – but from the standpoint of the theory that results they are a priori. Practised in this way political theory is not much more than an exercise in finding bad reasons for what we currently believe by instinct. However stridently it may denounce relativism, the prevailing method of theorising is itself deeply relativistic. The appropriate method in political theory is not reflective equilibrium, which can only elevate the ephemera of current opinion to an illusory permanence, but naturalism. The goal should be to achieve the fullest and most accurate view of human nature and present circumstances, and see what follows. Of course this presupposes that human nature is independent of our opinions about it. Equally, it assumes that it is possible to ascertain the content and conditions of human flourishing with some degree of objectivity. Value-pluralism is a truth about human beings, not a construction the theorist adopts in order to secure pre-determined results. The political implications are left open. If there is a reasonable fit between value-pluralism and modus vivendi it is because modus vivendi also leaves many things open. Liberal theorists who dislike this feature of modus vivendi should renounce valuepluralism. If they do so, however, they will sacrifice a sense of the human realities with which political theory is properly concerned. The view that conflicts of human interests and ideals are natural tends to support a distinctive view of politics. Recent theory has veered between suspicion of politics as in Rawlsian liberalism, and valorizing politics as an intrinsically valuable activity in communitarian and republican critiques of liberalism. Modus vivendi differs from both. It views politics as indispensably useful, while noting that its place in human life is modest and instrumental. Much of the human good lies outside politics, and much that has value lies outside the human world. Politics is not a path to salvation, but a learnt practice of mutual accommodation that at its best allows humans to give their lives to other things. This view of politics may seem bereft of idealism. From my point of view this is a virtue. An excess of moral zeal is fatal in politics, and the hope of progress can take a terrible toll. In the twentieth century communist regimes committed to Enlightenment ideals of progress wrought human and environmental havoc on a
The Political Theory of John Gray 233 vast scale. Even the Nazis were driven by a perverse and hideous idea of progress in seeking to create a new type of human being. At the start of the twenty-first century a similar hubris exists in American neoconservatism. Despite its position in the political spectrum neoconservatism is a revolutionary project as far-reaching as any in the twentieth century, and in time its ill-conceived attempt to promote global democracy could produce casualties on a comparable scale. Much recent theory consists of edifying discourse masquerading as analysis or hermeneutics, and political liberalism proceeds by constructing a view of the person by reference to prevailing liberal intuitions. These are self-referential ways of proceeding, for they screen out truths – contemporary, historical or generically human – that subvert current beliefs. My work has moved in an opposite direction. It has sought to identify features of ethics and politics neglected or underestimated in contemporary orthodoxies. To this extent it has been a critique of liberalism. Yet as I understand it the task of the theorist is not in the end to support or undermine any political ideal, even liberalism. It is to seek out the truth of the matter, and let the consequences be what they will.15 Notes 1.
2.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
I examined the rise of the New Right and the dissolution of traditional conservatism in Gray 1993c. See also Gray 1994b and 1995b. I first presented the argument that the operation of the free market may undermine the conditions of its own legitimacy in Gray 1989a. I argued that we live in ‘an age distinguished by the collapse of the Enlightenment project on a world-historical scale … an age dominated by renascent particularisms, militant religions and resurgent ethnicities’ in Gray 1992. I discussed objections to the idea of an Enlightenment project in ‘After the new liberalism’, in Gray 1994a. Horton’s objection applies to John Kekes’s defence of value-pluralism, which assumes that the identification of basic values is unproblematic. See Kekes 1993. A forceful version of the argument from intercultural conflict to liberal pluralism can be found in Galston 2002: 55–57. Gray 2000: 95–96. In earlier writings on essentially contestable concepts I argued at length against the ‘billiard-ball’ view of values. See Gray 1978; 1983. For the view that free will is an unshakeable human illusion, see Strawson 1986, Smilansky 2000. For Rawls’s ‘Kantianism in one country’, see Gray 1995a: 3. For an interpretation of Hobbes as an early Enlightenment thinker, see Malcolm 2004. For a study of Spinoza as a pivotal Enlightenment thinker, see Israel 2001. See ‘Torture: a modest proposal’, in Gray 2004a, for a liberal argument in defence of torture. The Swiftian subtitle should make it clear what I think of such arguments. It may be worth noting that this essay was first published in the New Statesman on 17 February 2003, before the Iraq war and before the events at Abu Ghraib. For a more extended discussion of the debts of Enlightenment humanism to Christian monotheism, see Gray 2003b; Gifford et al. 2003. For an analysis of twentieth-century totalitarian movements in terms of their affinities with late mediaeval millenarianism, see the seminal study by Cohn 1970. See Barry 2006: 244. I set out my differences with conventional Green thinking programmatically in Gray 1997: 170–176. For my defence of nuclear power, see Gray 1993a. Conversations with John Horton and Paul Kelly have been extremely useful in writing this Reply. The views and arguments it contains remain mine.
234 J. Gray References Barry, J. (2006) Straw dogs, blind horses and post-humanism: the Greening of Gray? Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 243–262. Berlin, I. (1997) Two concepts of liberty, in: Berlin, I., The Proper Study of Mankind (London: Chatto and Windus), p. 242. Cohn, N. (1970) The Pursuit of the Millennium (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Crowder, G. (2006) Gray and the politics of pluralism. Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 171–188. Dennett, D. (2004) Freedom Evolves (London and New York: Penguin Books). Galston, W. (2002) Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value-Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gray, J. (1976) J.S. Mill and the future of liberalism. Contemporary Review,September 1976, reprinted in Gray 1989b: 1–9. Gray, J. (1978). On liberty, liberalism and essential contestability. British Journal of Political Science, 8(3), 385–402. Gray, J. (1983) Political power, social theory and essential contestability, in: Miller, D. and Siedentop, L., The Nature of Political Theor pp. 75–101 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gray, J. (1989a) The end of history – or of liberalism? National Review,27 October 1989, pp. 33–35, reprinted in Gray 1993d: 245–250. Gray, J. (1989b) Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge). Gray, J. (1989c) Limited Government: A Positive Agenda (London: Institute for Economic Affairs), reprinted in Gray 1993b: 1–45. Gray, J. (1992) Against the new liberalism, Times Literary Supplement,3 July 1992, reprinted in Gray 1995a: 1–10. Gray, J. (1993a) Agenda for Green conservatism, in: Gray 1993b: 154–156. Gray, J. (1993b) Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment (London and New York, Routledge). Gray, J. (1993c) Down and out in Blackpool, The Guardian,4 October 1993, reprinted in Gray 1997: 99–101. Gray, J. (1993d) Post-liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (London and New York: Routledge). Gray, J. (1994a) After the new liberalism. Social Research, 61, reprinted in Gray 1995a: 120–130. Gray, J. (1994b) The Undoing of Conservatism (London: Social Market Foundation), reprinted in Gray1995a: 87–119 and further reprinted with a new Conclusion in Gray et al.1997: 1–65, 145–163. Gray, J. (1995a) Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London and New York: Routledge). Gray, J. (1995b) The strange death of Tory England. Dissent,Fall, pp. 447–452, reprinted in Gray 1997: 1–10. Gray, J. (1996) Mill on Liberty: a Defence, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge). Gray, J. (1997) Endgames: Questions In Late Modern Thought (Cambridge: Polity Press). Gray, J. (1998) False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London and New York: Granta Books). Gray, J. (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press). Gray, J. (2002) Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London and New York: Granta Books). Gray, J. (2003a) Al Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern (London and New York: Faber and Faber and the New Press). Gray, J. (2003b) Enlightenment humanism as a relic of Christian monotheism, in: Gifford, P. et al., 2000 Years and Beyond: Faith, Identity and the ‘Common Era, pp. 33–50 (London and New York: Routledge). Gray, J. (2004a) Heresies: Against Progress and other Illusions (London: Granta) Gray, J. (2004b) Homo rapiens and mass extinction: an era of solitude, in: Gray 2004a. Horton, J. (2006) John Gray and the political theory of modus vivendi. Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 155–170.
The Political Theory of John Gray 235 Israel, J.I. (2001) Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Jones, P. (2006) Toleration, value-pluralism and the fact of pluralism. Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 189–210. Kateb, G. (2006) Is John Gray a nihilist? Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 305–322. Kekes, J. (1993) The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Kelly, P. (2006) The social theory of anti-liberalism. Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 137–154. Lassman, P. (2006) Pluralism and its discontents: John Gray’s counter-enlightenment. Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 211–226. Malcolm, N. (2004) Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Mill, J.S. (1991) On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Morgan, G. (2006) Gray’s elegy for progress. Newey, G. (2006) Gray’s blues: pessimism as a political project. Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 227–242. Newey, G. (2006) Gray’s blues: pessimism as a political project. Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 263–284. O’Sullivan, N. (2006) Liberalism, nihilism and modernity in the political thought of John Gray. Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 285–304. Parekh, B. (1994) Superior people: the narrowness of liberalism from Rawls to Mill. Times Literary Supplement, 25 February. Riley, J. (2006) Utilitarian liberalism: between Gray and Mill. Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, 9(2), pp. 117–136. Santayana, G. (1936) Plotinus and the nature of Evil. Obiter Scripta, pp. 69–70 (London and New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons). Santayana, G. (1951) Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society and Government (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons). Smilansky, S. (2000) Freedom and Illusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Strawson, G. (1986) Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
INDEX abortion: modus vivendi 53 Ackerman, B. 184 After Virtue (MacIntyre) 101 agape 33, 34 agonistic liberalism 63, 106, 107, 108, 109, 161–2 AIDS 139 Al Qaeda and what it Means to be Modern 182, 191 Al-Qaeda 103, 104, 182–3 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) 175 anti-humanism 196, 198–9, 202, 203, 205; consciousness 204, 205; language 204, 205; selfhood 204, 205 anti-liberalism: false neutrality 28–9; hubris 29–30; indeterminacy thesis 31–2; overview 27–32; value-pluralism 30–1, 33, 34, 35, 36 anti-perfectionism 160; and Enlightenment project 152–4 anti-politics: pessimism and naturalism 165–6, 169–70 Arendt, H. 102 arête 33, 34 Aristotle 168, 201 autonomy: value 225–6 Azzam, Dr A. 182 0 00000June 2006 Critical 10.1080/ FCRI_A_Gray.sgm 1369-8230 Original Taylor 2006 2 9 and & Review Article Francis (print)/1743-8772 Francis of International Ltd (online) Social and Political Philosophy
Barry, B. 34, 126, 131 Barry, J. 23, 230 Bentham, J. 28 Benton, T. 135 Berdyaev, N. 175 Berlin, I. 1, 27, 30–1, 35–6, 37, 59, 68, 69, 70, 73, 100, 102, 104, 105, 105–10, 111, 164, 175, 183, 213, 214–15, 216, 219; liberal pluralism 60–3, 64, 65, 67; liberalism and pluralism 107, 108, 109
Beyond the New Right 1, 131, 179 bin Laden, O. 127 biophilia hypothesis: Wilson 135, 139 Boulding, K. 138 Bridges, T. 188 Buddhism 143 Bush, G.H. 146 Bush, G.W. 146, 224 China: liberal democratic institutions 120 Chinese mysticism 143 Christianity 88, 126, 157; humanism 228–9 Cioran, E. 151, 158 civil association 183, 184 civil practice: cultural legitimation 185; historical inheritance 183–6; liberal democracy 184–5; modus vivendi 186; radical value-pluralism 185–6; tension with democracy 185; western culture 184 civil society: free market and social fragmentation 175–7 Clausewitz, C. 222 collective lifestyles 16 common culture: requirement 177–9, 183 communitarianism 178–9 consciousness 204, 205 conservatism: Oakeshottian 159–61 Constant, B. 175 contextualism: pluralism 64–5 Crowder, G. 54–5, 85, 213, 216, 217, 221, 225 cultural relativism 70, 71 de Maistre, J. 189 democracy myth: progress 127–8 Dennett, D. 229 depopulation 196, 197, 203 distributive justice 86
238 Index diversity: value 90–1 diversity of goods: liberal pluralism 71–2 diversity myth: progress 126 drugs: control policies 7, 8, 9, 14; regulation 17–18; war 201 Durkheim, E. 127; liberalism 117 Dworkin, R. 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 77, 184 Eagleton, T. 189–90 Earth First! 139 ecological crisis: misunderstanding 140–7 Ehrlich, P. 144, 145 enabling laws 221 Enlightenment project 88, 100, 107, 109–10, 111, 112, 148, 162, 175, 213, 232; anti-perfectionism 152–4; and modernity 101–5; neo-liberalism 159 Enlightenment’s Wake 188–9 European unification 176–7 False Dawn 138, 180, 182 false neutrality: anti-liberalism 28–9 free market 158, 159, 180; social fragmentation and civil society 175–7 free will 220 Freeden, M. 167 Freud, S. 156 Fukuyama, F. 123, 153, 173, 181, 184, 227 Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock) 2, 132, 134, 141, 145, 189, 196, 231 Galston, W. 74 generic evils 122, 128; political solution 123–5 Giddens, A. 136 global ecological crisis: Hardin 144; misunderstanding 140–7; population 141, 143, 144, 145–6 global terrorism: and neo-liberal globalization 179–83; September 11th 182, 183, 212 good: and right 92–4 government: role 160 Gramsci, A. 154 Green politics: AIDS 139; global ecological crisis 140–7; institutional prescriptions 142–3; misunderstanding 135–40; post-
humanism and naturalism 132–5; stewardship 137 Green theory: nihilism and humanism 228–32 Guardian 176 Habermas, J. 117 Hampshire, S. 35 Hardin, G. 140, 141, 144 Hare, R.M. 34, 84–5 harm: self-regarding conduct 6, 7–8, 10, 11, 12, 13 Hart, H.L.A. 32, 221 Hayek, F. 2, 77, 158, 159, 176, 226 Hayek on Liberty 158, 159 Hegel, G. 165 Heidegger, M. 101, 102, 188, 189, 191, 204, 228 Heilbroner, R. 141 Herder, J.G. 121–2, 124–5 Heresies 138 Hobbes, T. 106, 110, 183, 222, 223 Holocaust 103 homo rapiens 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 197, 198 Horton, J. 215, 219, 220, 221, 223 hubris: anti-liberalism 29–30 human destructiveness 207, 209 human extinction 196, 197, 198, 200, 203, 204, 206, 229 human pride 204 humanism: nihilism and Green theory 228–32 humanity: distinctive monstrousness 204; distinctiveness 206, 207, 208; uniqueness 204 Hume, I. 157, 204, 205 Huntington, S.: clash of civilizations 181–2 incommensurability: liberal pluralism 69–71 indeterminacy thesis: anti-liberalism 31–2 India: liberal democratic institutions 120 individual autonomy: liberal pluralism 73–5 Iraq war 143, 145 Isaiah Berlin 162 Islam 88, 104, 230 Jeffers, R. 198
Index 239 Jones, P. 221 Judaism 88 Kant, I. 110, 161 Kateb, G. 9, 229 Kelly, P. 218, 219, 224 Kymlicka, W. 126, 178 Kyoto Protocol 146 laissez-faire: social policy 15 language 204, 205, 208 Larmore, C. 49, 50, 79 Lassman, P. 221 Lau, D.C. 196, 197 liberal pluralism: diversity of goods 71–2; incommensurability 69–71; individual autonomy 73–5; reasonable disagreement 72–3; universal values 68–9 liberal political theory: and moral practice 38–41 liberalism: democratic institutions 120; Durkheimian 117, 119; instrumentalist 118; Mill 118; and progress 116–21; relativism and value-pluralism 213–20; Scottish Enlightenment 117–18, 119; Socratic 116–17, 119; versus modus vivendi 220–5 liberalism: privileged standing 212–13 liberty: self-regarding 8–14, 18; social conduct 14–18 Lifeboat Ethics (Hardin) 144 Lilla, M. 102 Limited Government: A Positive Agenda 177–8, 183 Locke, J. 19 Lovelock, J. 207; Gaia hypothesis 2, 132, 134, 140, 141, 145 MacIntyre, A. 29, 34, 101, 105 Madison, J. 19 Malthus, T. 146, 230 Marx, K. 154; liberal individualism 212 Mill, J.S. 5–23, 17, 19, 73, 126, 161, 174, 185, 217, 226; liberalism 118; progress 115; self-regarding liberty 8–14; Stationary State 230 Mill on Liberty: A Defence 5–6, 155
modernity: and Enlightenment project 101– 5; liberal values and progress 225–7; nature 106 modus vivendi 3, 60, 65–8, 80, 83, 87, 89, 100, 101, 106, 110–12, 122, 123, 186–8, 213, 214, 232; accommodation 163; defence 49–55; Gray’s understanding 44; indeterminateness 51–2; instability 49– 51; Munich Agreement (1938) 66, 67; pessimism 162–4; principal objections 49–55; privileged values 54–5, 67; universal principle 66, 67; unjustness and immoralism 52–4; and value-pluralism 44–7, 55; versus liberalism 220–5 modus vivendi: universal human rights 187 money creation: privatization 158 Moody-Adams, M. 36 moral minimum 217–18 moral monism: problems 60–1 moral practice: and liberal political theory 38–41 Morgan, G. 226 multiculturalism 37, 38, 157, 178, 224 Munich Agreement (1938): modus vivendi 66, 67 Nagel, T. 208 naturalism 164; anti-politics and pessimism 165–6, 169–70 naturalist reduction 203, 204, 205 neo-Darwinism 203 neo-liberal globalization: and global terrorism 179–83 neo-liberalism 176; pessimism 158–9 neoconservatism 230 neoliberalism 2 New Labour 2 New Right 175, 176, 177 Newey, G. 53, 224, 229–30 Nietzsche, F. 102, 157, 199, 200, 206, 228 nihilism 188–90, 199; and Gray 193–209; Green theory and humanism 228–32; pessimism 164; Straw Dogs 200 Nozick, R. 77 Oakeshott, M. 2, 100, 105, 106, 110, 178, 183, 214, 221, 222; Rationalism in Politics 160
240 Index Oakeshottian conservatism: pessimism 159–61 On Liberty (Mill) 6, 8 Ophuls, W. 141 Original Sin 228 Ostrom, E. 145 O’Sullivan, N. 219, 221 Parekh, B. 226 Pareto test 91 peace: toleration 89, 90 perfectionism 163; and Enlightenment project 152–4, 156 pessimism 224; agonistic liberalism 161–2; disappointment and politics 154–8; Gray’s phases 158–65; modus vivendi 162–4; naturalism and anti-politics 165–6, 169–70; neo-liberalism 158–9; nihilism 164; Oakeshottian conservatism 159–61 pity 199, 201, 202, 203 Plato 165 pluralism 33; contextualism 64–5; fact 79–80, 88–94; modus vivendi 65–8; subjectivism 64 political authority: justification 167–8 politics: disappointment and pessimism 154–8; naturalisation 166–70 polytheism 88 population control 230–1; ecological crisis 141, 144, 145–6 positivism 125 post-humanism: Green politics and naturalism 132–5 Post-liberalism 183 Postel, D. 142 Prisoner’s Dilemma 222 progress 115; democracy myth 127–8; diversity myth 126; liberal idea 116–21; modernity and liberal values 225–7; myth 125–8; spirituality myth 126–7; valuepluralism 121–3 radical choice 81–2, 108, 109 rationalism 183, 184 Rationalism in Politics: (Oakeshott) 160 Rawls, J. 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 40, 44, 49, 50, 51, 66, 77, 79, 87, 111, 184, 186, 212, 218, 220, 223
Raz, J. 65, 183, 184; liberal pluralism 225 reasonable disagreement: value-pluralism 85–8 reflective equilibrium 37, 40 relativism 61, 62, 162, 186; liberalism and value-pluralism 213–20 religion 88 Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Rousseau) 189 right: and good 92–4 Riley, J. 69, 217 Rorty, R. 214 Rousseau, J-J. 19, 189, 191 Russell, B. 165 Salisbury Review 176 Sandel, M. 26 Santayana, G. 190, 211, 215 Schopenhauer, A. 154, 228 scientific and ethical naturalism: posthumanism and Green politics 132–5 Scottish Enlightenment: liberalism 117–18 secularization 181 security: politics 169 Self, W. 173 self-regarding liberty: Mill 8–14 selfhood 204 Singapore 120, 226 Skidelsky, R. 180, 181 Smith, A. 117, 119, 122 social cohesion (Durkheim) 117 social conduct: liberty 14–18 social fragmentation: free market and civil society 175–7 social policy: laissez-faire 15 Socratic liberalism 116, 117 Spencer, H. 206, 226 Spinoza, B. 222, 223 spirituality myth: progress 126–7 state: contractualist model 27 state intervention 178, 188 Strauss, L. 101, 102 Straw Dogs 142, 155, 164, 165, 166, 173, 188, 189, 190, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 201; anti-humanism 196, 198–9, 202, 203; depopulation and extinction 196, 197, 198, 200, 203; nihilism 200; pity 201, 202–3
Index 241 subjectivism: pluralism 64 Tao Te Ching 193–6, 199 Taylor, M. 145 Thatcherism 175, 176 Theory of Justice (Rawls) 31–2, 212 therapy 155, 165 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx) 154 toleration 80–1, 110; appeal to peace 89, 90; competing traditions 77–8; value-pluralism 81–5, 87, 89, 90 Tong, G.C. 120 traditionalism 65, 66, 72, 73 Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin) 144–5 Two Concepts of Liberty (Berlin) 59 Two Faces of Liberalism 5, 27, 31, 77, 155, 163, 197, 214 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP): 1998 report 143 universal values: liberal pluralism 68–9 universalism 86, 88, 162, 163, 186, 219 Utalitarianism (Mill) 16 utilitarian liberalism 5–23
value-pluralism 1, 6, 18–21, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 59, 61, 63, 70, 78–9, 108, 109, 111, 112, 153, 154, 161, 162, 163, 174–5, 232; anti-liberalism 30–1, 33, 34, 35, 36; conflicts over values 47; and fact of pluralism 79–80, 88–94; good and right 92–4; Isaiah Berlin 105– 10; and modus vivendi 44–7, 55; progress 121–3; reasonable disagreement 85–8; relativism and liberalism 213–20; reservations 47–9; toleration 81–5, 87, 89, 90; ways of life 48 Voltaire 166 Walzer, M. 39, 40, 107, 179 War on Drugs 201 War on Terror 26 Westermarck, E. 35 Williams, B. 35, 36, 71, 107 Wilson, E.O.: biophilia hypothesis 135, 139 Wordsworth, W. 207 Yack, B. 101
