Page 54 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Arts&Letters
Who Pulls John Gray’s Strings?
by GENE CALLAHAN
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom, John Gray,
JFarrar, Straus, and Giroux, 192 pages
ohn Gray, emeritus professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, is an enigma. He began his intellectual life on the
left but moved right in the late 1970s, becoming a fan of Nobel Prize-winning free-market economist F.A. Hayek. Gray’s libertarianism was tempered, however, by studying British philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s critique of “rational- ism in politics.” During the 1990s, Gray was associated with New Labour—the center-left ideology that brought Tony Blair to power in Westminster—and he became a prominent critic of global capi- talism with his 1998 book False Dawn.
Recently he appears to have em- braced something of a nihilistic sto- icism, whose spirit suffuses The Soul of the Marionette. In these pages he under- takes a sort of jazz improvisation on the theme of human freedom, surveying an omnium-gatherum of earlier writers’ and cultures’ thoughts on the topic from the point of view of a “freedom-skeptic.”
Gray sees the modern, supposedly secular belief in human freedom as a creed that will not admit its character: “Throughout much of the world ... the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom that no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion.” Gray finds the Gnostic frame of mind even among “hard-headed” scientists:
The crystallographer J. D. Bernal ... envisioned ‘an erasure of indi- viduality and mortality’ in which human beings would cease to be distinct physical entities ... ‘con- sciousness itself might end or vanish ... becoming masses of at-
oms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light.’
In another vignette of a thinker he finds relevant to his inquiry, Gray dis- cusses the philosophy of the 19th-centu- ry Italian writer Giacomo Leopardi, most famous for penning the classic poem “L’Infinito.” Leopardi was a staunch ma- terialist who nevertheless found religion to be a necessary illusion. He understood Christianity as an essential response to the rise of skepticism in Greco-Roman culture; in Leopardi’s view, “What was destroying the [ancient] world was the lack of illusion.” Christianity had now gone into decline, but this was not to be celebrated; as Gray quotes Leopardi, “There is no doubt that the progress of reason and the extinction of illusions produce barbarism.” What was arising from the “secular creeds” of his time was only “the militant evangelism of Christi- anity in a more dangerous form.”
Gray finds Edgar Allan Poe’s vision of a world where “human reason could never grasp the nature of things” con- genial and devotes several pages to the American poet. He also takes up the trope of the golem as evinced in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, declaring “Hu- mans have too little self-knowledge to be able to fashion a higher version of themselves”—a view on the surface at odds with his later proclamations about the coming age of artificial intelligence.
Continuing his odyssey, Gray arrives at the isle—or rather, planet—of Stanislav Lem’s novel Solaris (which was made into a 2002 movie starring George Clooney). It features a water-covered world involved in “ontological auto-metamorphosis.” According to the “heretical” scientific theories its discovery spawned, the planet has a “sentient ocean”: Lem was prefigur- ing something like the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock that Gray has invoked favorably here and in earlier works.
Gray also takes interest in the work of renowned American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote a series of novels that advanced one of the most
compelling paranoid metaphysics of our time. Gray notes that Dick is an arche- typal Gnostic, as shown by lines like “Be- hind the counterfeit universe lies God ... it is not man who is estranged from God; it is God who is estranged from God.” For Dick, it is unlikely that anyone can ever penetrate to a “true” reality through the veil of illusion: “were we to penetrate [that veil] for any reason, this strange, veil-like dream would reinstate itself ret- roactively, in terms of our perceptions and in terms of our memory. The mutual dreaming would resume as before...”
Dick ultimately concluded that the flawed world he lived in was just a cos- tume concealing the good world that is the true reality. But if this is so, Gray asks, how did this veil come into being? If an all-powerful God created it, then He must have wanted the veil to exist. But if it is the creation of some sub- deity, a Demiurge, then the “top” God is not all-powerful since he could not prevent the veil from coming into being. Of course, this is the ancient problem of theodicy restated in different terms, but it is to Gray’s credit that he recognizes it at play in Dick’s oeuvre.
And as Gray notes, Dick was a very modern Gnostic in that he incorpo- rated into his philosophy the idea of an evolution towards higher states of being taking place over time. In fact, it is “not least when it is intensely hostile to religion” that modern thought most embraces tales of the historical redemp- tion of humanity. Gray argues that “All modern philosophies in which history is seen as a process of human emanci- pation ... are garbled versions of [the] Christian narrative.”
The next section of the book, called “In the puppet theatre,” begins with a look at the Aztec penchant for mass ritual killing. He quotes anthropologist Inga Clendinnen at length on the grue- some nature of the practice, including descriptions like: “On high occasions warriors carrying gourds of human blood or wearing the dripping skins of their captives ran through the streets ... the flesh of their victims seethed
54 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015