Gray's anatomy of human nature

I have been reading Bryan Appleyard's review, in the Sunday Times, of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, by professor John Gray. It's so interesting - so full of things that I've been thinking, and thinking I was the only one thinking them - and also of things I'd never have thought of, that now look like things I was waiting to realiser - that I have lifted some snippets out of it for your, dear reader, delectation. By all means go and read the whole article. Or read Appleyard's blog post about it. Or even buy the book.

By the way, I'm not framing it all as quotes. Unquoted statements below are Appleyard's; quoted statements are Gray's. The analysis of liberalism is largely Isaiah Berlin's.

.....

Antiutopianism is the deep consistency in all [Gray's] thought. It led him to support Thatcher in her efforts to save the British economy from the near-anarchy of the late 1970s, but mostly in her resistance to communism, that supremely lethal utopian project. Yet he also observed the agonies of liberalism in her deluded attempt to impose free-market reforms and intense social conservatism, nostalgic for the bourgeois discipline of the 1950s. “It was an impossible task. She produced a society that was almost the opposite of the one she intended. The free market dissolved the very values she espoused."

Man, he asserts, is a tribal carnivore possessed of reason. His reason may give him science, a progressive, cumulative enterprise, but it cannot give him the wisdom to transcend his nature.

Uncovering the faith base of seemingly rational opinions is a Gray speciality. He finds the apparent rationalism of militant atheists such as Daniel Dennett, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens particularly funny.

He regards atheism as a late Christian cult, based on the supremely Christian (and Marxist) idea that by changing people’s beliefs, you change their behaviour. He also sees an irony here. “They attack something congenitally and categorically human as an intellectual error, yet call themselves humanists.”

...With the threat of religious-linked terrorism, the lesson of that secular fanaticism that had cost tens of millions of lives in Russia and China – and continues to do so in Sri Lanka and Nepal – seemed to be completely forgotten.

The liberal state’s job is to hold different world-views in balance, but it cannot resolve conflicts between them. It cannot, for example, say to Muslims “You are wrong” and to Christians “You are right”, because it then ceases to be liberal. At its most effective, it holds back the instinct of humanity to form itself into competing tribes. But the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe. True liberalism is, therefore, necessarily a tragic view, sceptical of all notions of progress.

“Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”

...Many of the neocon prophets were originally Trotskyists, a clear sign of the utopian linkage between Marxism and the neocons.

...The roots of modern terror lie in the western Enlightenment. Before the 18th century, he argues, wars and terrorist campaigns were not conducted as if they were mechanisms of general improvement. It was the French revolution that introduced the idea of terror as a tool of progress