When John Gray recently reviewed a book of mine he noted that “Turner takes for granted that the world will be spared large-scale war.” It was an odd observation. My book was about political economy and major war was one among many issues not discussed. Nor was there anything in the book from which to infer my views on its likelihood. As it happens, I think the chances depressingly high that nuclear weapons will be used somewhere in the world in the 21st century. But to Gray my omission defined my naive optimism, for major war is so close to inevitable that failure to mention it is a sign of utopian delusion.
Against such utopianism, Gray has developed in numerous articles and in two recent books-Straw Dogs and Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern-a philosophy of deterministic pessimism. Destructive war is inevitable because nations are locked in a struggle for diminishing scarce resources. New technologies are bound to be used for destructive purposes. Environmental degradation will be relentless, as the plague of humans continues to propagate at an unsustainable rate. One of Gray’s recent New Statesman articles was appropriately entitled “Panic.”
Neither Straw Dogs nor Al Qaeda, however, are solely or primarily focused on these political and environmental predictions. Rather they aim to root pessimistic prediction in a far-reaching assault on Christian and Enlightenment philosophy, illustrating how optimistic attitudes to political and environmental developments rely on a very particular-and in Gray’s view, quite mistaken-philosophical base. Man is neither a God-made creature destined for salvation, nor is he blessed with unique powers of reason and self-consciousness, but rather he is an animal “like any other,” bound to act in the same instinctive fashion that characterises all animal behaviour. And any idea of human progress is a nonsense-an intellectual construct which we have imposed on the random actions of mankind, actions which have no more purpose than those of a gorilla, a mouse or even a mollusc. Man is distinctive only in technological development; therefore he will despoil his world and fight incessantly. Fukuyama’s dream of a peaceful “end of history,” or green lobby group dreams of sustainable development, are absurdities built on an Enlightenment faith in human rationality as arbitrary and deluded as the Christian beliefs it supplanted but also absorbed.
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