Book Reviews - Review 232

John Gray constructs a free-form polemic against liberal humanism: the idea that the the story of humanity is - or will be - one of perpetual progess and ever-increasing happiness for ever-increasing numbers of people.

As Gray sees it, humanism is effectively an extension of, or a replacement for, Christianity, with its consolations of eternal life and relief from suffering. It is, he argues, no more rational than religion, its appeal to technology as a panacea just as deluded as Christianity's appeal to the idea of Heaven and ultimate redemption through divine intercession in worldly affairs. Technology, he argues, brings as much evil as good, destroying our environment and unleashing the power to cause suffering on a scale unprecedented in history.

Gray has been deeply influenced by James Lovelock's idea of the Earth as "Gaia", a self-regulating super-organism that sooner or later will shake off its human parasites. Lovelock's theory is science filtered through romanticism, and many of Gray's statements, pithy as they are, are similarly informed as much by emotion (and an apparently naturally pessimistic temperament) as by science. Many of his cynical, doom-laden pronouncements are rather facile, and his shallow dismissal of most of the consolations people seek for harsh reality seem informed by misanthropy more than by evidence or experience. Check out this daft assertion:

For Gray, there is no higher reality to which we can gain access: the only consolation for our meaningless, hopeless existence is the contemplative life and the acknowledgement that we are animals like any other, fundamentally motivated by basic, immediately self-preserving but ultimately self-destructive drives into which our reason and technology are co-opted, accelerating the process of our species' decline.

I agree with Gray's essential thesis - that humanity in its current form is probably doomed - and it is refreshing to read a book not only sceptical about modern ideas of progress, but wholeheartedly rejecting them. But though Gray can be pithy, he often overreaches himself, merely sounding facile and pretentious. This is particularly true when he contemplates the idea of human machines taking over the world and destroying their creators; and when he persistently ignores the very obvious neurological differences between human beings and other animals.

This is a provocative book, whose negative tone is informed, one suspects, less by a desire to shake up the reader than by simple bile. By turns silly and penetrating, it's certainly a stimulating read; but it's not a book whose assertions are to be swallowed uncritically.