Becoming an angry, fragmented writer

John’s Gray’s 1998 False Dawn was a nuanced, insightful dissection of capitalism. It avoided easy target, acknowledging positives and negatives in different ways that capitalism can be embedded in society. In comparison, The New Leviathans is a bitter disappointment.

Gray’s latest book draws broadly from Hobbes seventeenth-century classic. Like Hobbes, he wants to warn us that contemporary society is fractured, deluded and in need of … Well, I’m not sure what. Sterner government? Less idealism? Fewer diversity and inclusion statements?

It combines single paragraph criticisms of modern day ills (the opioid crisis, inequality) with detailed investigations of obscure 19th-century Russian literary figures, and tyrannies faced by 20th-century dissidents. Contemporary China pops up as well.  He also likes to skewer any lingering optimism about the inevitable triumph post-cold war liberal capitalism. But we all realised that quite a time ago; Fukuyama championing The End of History and the Last Man was a terrible party with everyone in blindfolds?

Gray’s animus is ( I think, it’s difficult to tell) idealised thinking about human nature. In particular, the belief that human nature can be shaped by grand philosophical ideas (eg communism) to create a better society. This line of thinking is not new. Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies helped kill off totalitarian thinking many decades ago. But Gray wants to take this further. He seems to imply that we are now living in an era of totalitarian thought, and still repeating delusions about our ability to mould society according to certain lines of thinking. There’s a bizarre implication that our current liberal society is on the verge of repeating the horrors of communism (show trials, forced migration, famine, death).

When the attacks on ‘woke culture’ (also labelled under ‘hyper-liberalism’) arrive they are incredibly dreary. Don’t get me wrong, an investigation on this phenomenon and its successes and excesses is much needed. But it needs to be done with clear vision and understanding of dynamics of today’s society, not as grumpy asides tossed but not by a grumpy man inebriated on his own sense of alienated anger. Who is behind ‘woke culture’, how it evolved and what it actually means are never explored.

Gray doesn’t have the right intellectual tools for this particular job. His real delight is the aforementioned analysis of writers and thinkers, particularly who have been gently erased by history. When it comes to analysing ‘woke culture’ he splashes around with high-level generalities without any structured argument, or sustained evidence. He doesn’t know where to look, or how to understand it, so just gets angry. 

In his acknowledgements, Gray lists 15 names who have enriched his thinking. Guess how many are women?