Two years ago, I interviewed John Gray for The Philosophers' Magazine just after the publication of his short book, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. Our conversation was wide-ranging and, since some of it touches on the distinctive nature of Islamist ideology, it seemed a good idea to post the transcript here.
Now, I don't agree with Gray about everything (notably his account of the war in Iraq and his assertion of fundamental affinities between Islamism and "neo-liberalism"). However, I do think he was, along with Paul Berman, one of the first commentators properly to grasp what's distinctive about the ideology of Bin Ladenism. And, as the conversation reproduced here shows, Gray is very critical of those on the Left who are incapable of seeing political Islamism for what it is because they are incapable of accepting that human motives are complex, that religion really counts as a motive and that theology is more than the temporary expression of legitimate rage.
LSE, 6 May 2003
JD: Perhaps you could say something about the way the book is written. It seems to me to have something of the flavour of a pamphlet.
JG: I wanted the book to accessible to anyone who reads a daily newspaper. And I also wanted to be received by them as a challenge to the way lots of people have been accustomed to thinking about what has been going on. The book is designed to challenge and subvert several key assumptions about what it means to be modern. In other words, it is not a treatise. It’s intended as a brief, sharp, subversive take on ordinary ways of thinking about what it means to be modern. And that seems to me to be a topic of great practical and political interest.
JD: It’s not a treatise, but nevertheless it does draw on the systematic critique of liberalism in which you’ve been engaged for many years.
JG: In saying that it’s not a treatise I don’t mean to say that it’s not systematic. I think there’s a fully coherent framework of thought behind it. But what I didn’t want to do was to proceed by saying ‘this is what I mean modernity’, ‘these are the discussions that have gone about modernity’. So although it certainly does draw on a lot of thinking I’ve done before and could have been written, without changing any of the substantive arguments, as a treatise, that wasn’t my goal. My goal was to present an alternative reading of what it means to be modern by way of an understanding of what Al Qaeda is, and of related modern movements including Nazism and Communism, but also, and this is something I’ve written a lot about, of neo-liberalism. I wanted to bring out the paradoxical, or paradoxical-seeming to some people, and important points that there are affinities between Al Qaeda and such radically opposed modern, Western movements such as Nazism and neo-liberalism. What they all have in common is a revolutionary re-making of the world in which many of the characteristic and recurrent conflicts that have plagued humanity in the past are transcended. Although they are very different –and Nazism, of course, proposed to end conflict by genocide- they all involve what seems to me to be the central modern myth. The reality of the modern world, as I understand it, is simply the quickening of scientific knowledge and therefore technological progress. That’s the basic reality. But there are distinctive modern myths, and the most distinctive, I think, is the idea that the world can be remade by a combination of human will, terror and the use of the different products of science, that is, modern technology.
JD: It seems that your contention is that Al Qaeda is prototpyically modern in the way you’ve just described. Now a further contention is that there are at least two ways in which we moderns misunderstand what it would be to defend liberal societies against apocalyptic terrorism. The first misunderstanding would be the neo-conservative one. Which, as I understand you, is the idea that pre-emptive self-defence could extirpate human conflict and deliver the world into safety under the umbrella of ‘pax Americana
JG: I think the liberal errors in responding to Al Qaeda are much more interesting than the neo-conservative ones, but the neo-conservative ones are of course more influential.
JD: It struck me that you don’t say too much about the liberal errors in your book.
JG: It’s implicit. But let’s say a bit more about the liberal one. I think the liberal response embodies two distinct, apparently conflicting but in fact mutually enforcing, mistakes. The first is that the liberal insistence on religious toleration is, I think, largely based on the belief that, as modernization proceeds, religion becomes less important. In other words, it’s connected with the thesis, which liberals accepted from J.S. Mill in the nineteenth century, that with intellectual progress all societies would become secular. Liberals generally have accepted this view and so they are, whatever they may say, shaken and left in a situation of acute cognitive dissonance when they’re confronted by the persistent intensity of religious belief and practice, not just in the Middle East America
JD: But that’s exactly what politics is, the trading off and reconciliation of competing goods.
JG: Absolutely. Politics comes in when theory or philosophy or law or economics or any of these sciences fails. So that’s when politics comes in, when you have irreconcilable ideals or irreconcilable interests which nonetheless have to be reconciled – you have to live with each other. Now modern liberal thought is characterised by the goal of keeping religion at bay. Partly because religion, like all other greater goods, love, art, is dangerous and carries great evils with it. That’s just in the nature of greater goods. But it’s also partly because have been adamant, to the extent that they subscribe to some version of the Enlightenment project, that religion either would become a kind of mild deism, as Voltaire thought, or that it would die out altogether. So it’s only that politics is about competing goods, though you’re absolutely right to say that, it’s that early modern politics, just like the politics we’re now experiencing much later on the modern period, was to do with reconciling the goods of civil order and civil freedom with religion. Now, in that regard, none of the early liberals thought of religious freedom as a completely unencumbered good. They thought of freedom of [religious] practice as being necessarily circumscribed by the conditions of peace. And I think that crucial Hobbesian and Spinozistic insight (a) has been lost, and (b) is highly relevant. Let’s take an example. The Americans have destroyed a Western-style secular state in Iraq Iraq Iraq
JD: There’s an implicit defence of that early-modern version of liberalism in the book. Early in the book you appeal to the “checks and balances of traditional ways of government” as ways of coping with conflict, and you appeal there to Hobbes, and also, slightly later, to Tocqueville.
JG: More Hobbes and Spinoza. I think the deepest insight into the conditions of peace and freedom is that of the early moderns. The early modern period is when religious conflicts were going on. Secondly, the seeming circumvention or by-passing of religion by secular ideology hadn’t happened yet. And one of the huge illusions of the last fourteenyears, and one I wrote about immediately after November 1989,was that the world would in fact be conquered by a single secular ideology. What I wrote then,what I confidently, almost dogmatically, anticipated, was what conventional theories of modernity would call a retrogression to practical forms of religious, ethnic, territorial and resource-based conflict. I was completely confident that would happen. In other words, once that anomalous, frozen period was gone, what I didn’t anticipate was the triumph of an extraordinarily banal and shallow form of liberal ideology. What would happen rather would be a reawakening, in many ways destructive, of religious, and ethnic and resource-based conflict. To go back and gloss what I was saying earlier, the conventional liberal view now misses two things out: one is the continuing strength, the political strength, of religion. The second is that it hasn’t confronted the Hobbesian conditions for religious toleration – which is that you’ve got to have a strong state.
JD: What you say there implies a distinction or difference between toleration on the Hobbesian model and liberal neutrality. Is that right?
JG: Absolutely. I’ll mention an anecdote here. I gave a talk about ten years or so ago in an American university. I asked a group that was composed of professional philosophers when they thought the term ‘neutrality’ had entered political philosophy. One said with Mill, another said with Locke. What that shows is how completely cut off from the history of ideas professional philosophers can be. No-one is more non-neutral than Locke! And Mill certainly never claimed to be neutral; he was proposing a comprehensive conception of the good life. So toleration, as I use the term, refers to a set of practices and institutions whereby beliefs which are different or even rivalrous, that is not just different but opposing, can be contained in ways which make coexistence peaceful or even possible. And that’s always difficult and will remain difficult. Just because a few countries in north-western Europe Holland , England- America
JD: A further point you make is that political philosophy has failed to take account of the phenomenon of failed states. And failed states are central to your account of what’s happened recently. There’s a hint, towards the end of the book, that you endorse the model of humanitarian intervention, and what Michael Ignatieff has called “Empire Lite”, the protectorates that exist in Bosnia Afghanistan
JG: Historically, I did support, and indeed do still support, the initiatives that took place in the Balkans and in Afghanistan
JD: So these moral minima have different thick instantiations?
JG: Absolutely. One difference between my support for the ventures in Kosovo and Afghanistan Iraq
JD: Is that a prudential objection?
JG: No, I wouldn’t say it’s prudential. It’s partly consequential, as all moral reasoning is partly consequential. It’s that the mix of evils is such is that you’re very likely to leave the situation worse than you found it. And of course another difference between my view and that of liberal imperialists is that what they’re imperialist about is projecting distinctively liberal values such as autonomy. Unlike liberal imperialists, I’m not a missionary; I’m strongly opposed to the missionary project in politics, to proselytising regimes. So if there’s a proselytising Islamist regime, we have to defend ourselves against it. I’m also strongly opposed to proselytising liberal regimes. It’s a delusion to think that any Western society has the will for the long commitment. What would liberal imperialism really mean? We can already see in the case of the US Afghanistan Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq
JD: Could we turn now to the deeper myth of which that fantasy is just the latest expression? I’m interested in the relationship between the account you give of ‘positivism’ and what I take to be the naturalistic position you developed in your previous book (Straw Dogs). It seems to me that you’re committed to some species of naturalism about us and that drives your critique of positivism. Could you say something about that?
JG: I’d accept that characterisation. I say in Straw Dogs that naturalism, as I understand it, and humanism are actually rival philosophies. They’re often thought to be the same of course, or that one supports the other. But what I hold is that if you’re a consistent naturalist –like Lucretius, or in modern times, someone like Santyana- then you would see humans as one type of animal with certain features that no other animals have: they have philosophies, they develop science, they commit genocide. I think the spirit of naturalism goes against secular theories of progress and hope. Yes, knowledge grows, technology develops. But the key insight of naturalism is that the analogy or metaphor, the undoubted fact of progress in science is extended by the positivists to ethics and politcs, the insight of naturalism is that that metaphor or analogy is misguided. The analogy between scientific progress and ethics and politics whereby there is a convergence on values just as, in science, there is convergence on a true picture of the world, is a myth we inherit from the positivists. If you drop that myth, the naturalistic picture you have of human beings will be a kind of modern Lucreatian picture. Can I say something here, which I think might be important, about the use I make of Darwinism. I’m not an evangelical Darwinist.
JD: Would a Dawkins-type evangelical Darwinist count as a positivist under your definition? So you’re claiming that yes, there’s progress, but that no metaphysical conclusions follow from that.
JG: Progress in certain realms. And that’s it. The reason there isn’t in other areas is because of human nature. So I’m completely opposed to the Rortyesque view that there’s no human nature. But evangelical Darwinism is the view that once we accept the scientific view of ourselves, everything will be changed. It’s very like the positivists’ view that the moment you adopt a truly scientific view of the world moral conflict goes away. So once we get real knowledge of what we are, we won’t dispute about these things. But we do. There’s a kernel of truth in positivism: the dominant feature of the modern period is the quickening of scientific knowledge and technology. What is false in positivism is the idea that by imbibing a scientific view of the world we somehow drop the disruptive and competing beliefs we had and converge on similar ways of living. It’s only if you have this neo-Christian belief that by applying scientific knowledge, humanity, whatever that is, can bring about a condition for itself that’s better than any there’s been before. But human beings remain the same. So it’s, so to speak, common sense to suppose that the human future will be like the past in central respects. Where it will be different is that there will be new knowledge, new techniques etc. And the conflicts of belief and religion may be fought out beneath the skies of Bladerunner by replicants, but they’ll be the same conflicts. I think, and this is my analysis of where we are now, that a lot of the conflicts that are going on now are conflicts of religion. I take the Dawkins-Dennett view to be just a rather historically uninformed replay of 19th century secularism. They’re trying to use Darwinism to propagate a particular humanist view. When I use Darwin Darwin
JD: I’m interested in the way that your twin critique of positivism and humanism. Against the positivists, you want to insist on the distinctiveness of what some of us might call ‘humane understanding’, the domain of ethics and politics. I’m reminded here of Oakeshott: your account of positivism sounds a lot like “rationalism in politics”.
JG: Yes, there is something in common, but there’s a difference, which is that Oakeshott, rather like Winch and others, thought that you could set up a priori, anti-naturalistic explanations. So where I differ from Oakeshott is that I don’t think that the demarcation of how we understand what goes on in the human world can be done a priori. But in another respect, I certainly do want to insist, as Oakeshott did, on a variety of voices, ways of talking and thinking. There is science; there’s also poetry; there’s also ethics and politics, religion. One of the key things I’ve argued, for many years, about contemporary political philosophy is that it has taken the voice of the law. And what that means of course is that you can empty what used to be called “politics” of ninety percent of its content. Now distribution becomes a matter of applying a basic theory. You’ve all got your basic liberties. Now that’s completely different from my view. My more general view is –and this is like the later Wittgenstein, you’re quite right, or even the earlier Wittgenstein, what runs through his thought is that there may be much that can’t be said, but what I don’t think is that there’s a sort of vast realm of the ineffable. What I think is that how you say things depends upon what it is you’re talking about. I’m particularly opposed to the idea that politics or economics should attempt to ape natural science. There’s enough regularity in human affairs that enable you to come up with generalisations.
JD: But that view –that the so-called human sciences should ape the natural sciences- is sometimes called “naturalism”. Now naturalism, it seems to me, is a fascinatingly protean term in contemporary philosophy …
JG: Absolutely. But I’m also a bit of a naturalist in ethics. So there are a variety of goods and bads which just come with the territory of being human. Now in this respect Hume is a very important thinker for me – both in his strengths and his weaknesses. His strengths are his insight that belief belongs to the senses, not to the cognitive part of the mind.
JD: Would it also be fair to say that you admire Hume’s temperament?
JG: Partly, yes. I admire his sobriety. He was a naturalist, not a humanist. Where do I think his limitations are? He certainly had a monocultural view of civilisation.