John Gray's Enlightenment's Wake
Scialabba, George
ENLIGHTENMENT'S WAKE: POLITICS AND CULTURE AT THE CLOSE OF THE MODERN AGE, by John Gray. Routledge, 1996. 203 pp., $29.95. rom time immemorial the prime agency of individual and social...
...His principle is that those who have fallen out of the market economy or never been part of it should be helped to enter it, and that such assistance should, whenever feasible, be provided through the market (though funded publicly, for example, with vouchers...
...Why not retain liberal values but abandon the hope of giving them a philosophical justification...
...The dissolution of communities weakens, where it does not entirely destroy, the informal social monitoring of behavior which is the most effective preventive measure against crime...
...What's heartening about this proclaimed subordination of abstract economic efficiency to actual human well-being is that he means it...
...The stability of communities and families—the highest conservative value, one would have thought—has been sacrificed to "microeconomic flexibility, productivity, and low labour costs...
...He proposes an "enabling welfare state"—a happy phrase, which strikes exactly the right note...
...Reason cannot resolve fundamental conflicts among values...
...So far we may imagine Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving Kristol nodding approvingly, perhaps with a murmured reservation or two...
...Trenchantly and (for the most part) lucidly, Gray canvasses our alternatives...
...I wish that Gray had, at the crucial juncture, not ascended into philosophical mysticism but instead descended into social criticism...
...Gray disagrees and argues cogently that modernity represents not the abandonment but the consummation of classical and Christian thought...
...The moral foundations of Western culture have been hollowed out...
...In Enlightenment's Wake and in even more detail in Beyond the New Right, Gray argues that although competition, risk, and inequality are inevitable and in fact desirable, many people will nonetheless be entitled to public help...
...Each of these beliefs or hopes is, he argues, an illusion...
...Moreover, "enablement" (a decided terminological advance over "empowerment") mandates not only individual entitlements but also public goods (again, provided to the extent feasible through a market): clean streets, parks, urban transport, the arts, noncommercial scientific research, and so on...
...The institutions of bourgeois liberal democracy are no exception, and the culture they express is, Gray repeats, ephemeral and exhausted...
...rom time immemorial the prime agency of individual and social reproduction has been inertia, the biological form of which is instinct and the cultural form, tradition...
...It is true that self-reliance, self-restraint, and the other virtues fostered by market relations are indispensable...
...I would have liked to see Gray's]: singing in harmony at least once a week...
...Gertrude Himmelfarb, please note.] . . . The incessant change promoted and demanded by market processes nullifies the significance of precedent and destroys the authority of the past...
...That makes good sense to me, as Gray allows that Rorty's is "perhaps the most powerful attempt we are likely to see to reformulate liberalism in explicitly post-Enlightenment terms...
...He finds some saving intimations in the later Heidegger, particularly the notion of Gelassenheit or "releasement," derived from Meister Eckhart and other German mystics...
...Nevertheless, he rejects it as parochial and excessively sanguine...
...Philosophy as practiced by Gray and Rorty can lead us out of the modern wilderness...
...The market should not command automatic legitimacy...
...and that 132 • DISSENT Books markets are far superior epistemically to any alternative yet proposed...
...It is not, of course, everyone's tradition...
...The name of this condition is nihilism...
...The celebration of consumer choice, as the only undisputed value in market societies, devalues commitment and stability in personal relationships and encourages the view of marriage and the family as vehicles of self-realization...
...what...
...Peaceableness and humility are not, however, the same thing as a refusal to make moral judgments...
...The dynamism of market processes dissolves social hierarchies and overturns established expectations...
...I wish he had gotten down to cases, had said to his readers, humbly and prosaically, citizen to citizen: "Look, we can't all— all human beings, that is—have air conditioning, safari vacations, automatic dishwashers, cars that go faster than forty or fifty miles an hour, meat every day (or every week), high-definition television with scores of channels, and bulgeless, odorless, wrinkle-free bodies...
...They promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it...
...It is not that Gray underrates the merits of the free market...
...All such controversies should be resolved through debate, negotiation, compromise— in short, politics—rather than by defining new and presumably unalterable constitutional rights...
...Status is ephemeral, trust frail and contract sovereign...
...Our identities are inherited rather than created, the product of contingency and circumstance rather than choice...
...universalism, or the supercession of fundamental cultural differences, which will eventually dwindle and disappear...
...and above all, having useful and (at least part of the time) stimulating work...
...and that all these things are threatened by the spread of market relations...
...The resulting feverish pursuit of growth has, predictably, generated social instability...
...Political institutions are the expression of a culture and a cosmology...
...humanism, or the technological subjugation of nature for human purposes...
...Now, Gray writes, "the dystopian prospect— not so far, perhaps, from the present reality— is of a highly dynamic but low-growth economy in which a permanent revolution in FALL • 1996 • 133 Books technologies and productive arrangements yields large-scale structural unemployment and pervasive job insecurity...
...knowing many poems and prose passages by heart...
...and scientism, the neglect or disparagement of informal, tacit knowledge...
...In opposition to "market fundamentalism," which countenances levels of unemployment, forced mobility, deskilling, urban real-estate speculation, and so on, that are destructive of stable, healthy communities, Gray proposes a "social market" perspective...
...What's more, everyone could have all these things without spoiling the planet...
...Why not, as Richard Rorty has suggested, affirm "Enlightenment humanism without Enlightenment rationalism...
...But subsequent developments have not been altogether satisfactory, notably environmental spoliation, advanced weaponry, totalitarian social organization, the destruction of peasant societies and folk cultures, widespread anomie, and an altered rhythm of daily life that has arguably produced toxic levels of stress and epidemic psychopathology...
...Public and private cannot be kept separate, as Rorty recom134 • DISSENT Books mends...
...He hopes fervently that they never do Westernize, lest they suffer our nihilist fate...
...Even more likely, and no less tragic, we may deplete and disfigure the nonhuman world beyond recovery...
...and besides, those things are not all that important...
...With gratifying impatience Gray waves aside objections from the doctrinaire libertarian right...
...In any case, as Gray recognizes, Western liberal societies can no more import the Confucian ethos than they can recreate the Christian one...
...Together they form one tradition, which is now exhausted...
...Where tradition was, there shall reason be...
...Gray defines the Enlightenment project as a combination of rationalism, or the criticism and reconstruction of morality and politics by means of reason alone...
...But Gray understands, as many British and American conservatives do not, that the market is merely a means of promoting human welfare, one that must be adapted and modified by each community, not an immutable ordinance of suprahistorical Reason...
...In the classical account, science, democracy, market relations, and ethical individualism were born and grew up together, the offspring of modernity...
...That is to say, things were done because they had been done before— an efficient, though not infallible, way to achieve organismic and societal stability...
...Unless . . . . Here Gray's accustomed lucidity fails him, or at any rate fails me...
...Education, health care, day care, job training are all on the table and must, he insists, be funded not grudgingly but generously...
...Many writers, from Pascal to Lasch, have rehearsed these ills and proposed that modernity be reconsidered...
...and his essay in Enlightenment's Wake on "Post-Communist Societies in Transition" is withering in its depiction of the legacy of central planning...
...Enlightenment's Wake," the book's last and longest essay, is a masterly attempt to think through the problem of modernity...
...The Enlightenment, according to MacIntyre, was not merely a misfortune but a mistake: about moral theory, Aristotle and Aquinas were right all along...
...Gray's summary indictment should be tattooed on Newt Gingrich's forehead: The social and cultural effects of market liberalism are, virtually without exception, inimical to the values that traditional conservatives hold dear...
...They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way...
...It is also true that humans flourish only in the shelter of families, neighborhoods, tribes, traditions, and wellknown and -loved places, and only with a minimum of economic security...
...In the essay "Toleration: A Post-Liberal Perspective," Gray argues persuasively that the core proposition of rights-based liberalism—that the state should be neutral among all ways of life or ideas of the good—is incoherent...
...Indeed it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that market liberal policy delivers the coup de grace to practices of authority and of subscription to tradition already severely weakened during the modern period...
...I don't deny it...
...This pluralism, powerfully and insistently stated, frames Gray's historical and political arguments...
...In Heidegger's words: "Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery belong together...
...Out of respect for Gray, I will suppress my usual shallow, logocentric exasperation with Heidegger and merely observe that I don't find the above very helpful...
...To paraphrase Freud: the voice of appetite is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing...
...Enlightenment's Wake, a collection of recent writings by English political philosopher John Gray, takes its place in this antimodernist tradition...
...One course, advocated uncritically by religious fundamentalists and with great subtlety and rigor by Alasdair Maclntyre, is to return to premodernity...
...the eventual result may be spiritual paralysis or, worse, a war of all against all and of all against nature...
...To the question "why be good...
...Much of our knowledge is embedded in traditions, in whole ways of life, and cannot be judged or even understood apart from them...
...There's something to "releasement...
...there is now no philosophically compelling answer, even if most people don't know it yet...
...The proper goal of policy is to preserve healthy—according to our admittedly fallible and changeable contemporary judgment— communities, not to maximize economic freedom and economic growth, abstractly conceived...
...It cannot define a universal human identity, or specify a universally valid set of rights, or formalize all local knowledge...
...What's important is [my FALL • 1996 • 135 Books own list follows...
...taking part in frequent and lively political (or aesthetic or metaphysical) argument...
...to attend calmly "to beings, to the things of the earth, in all their contingency and mortality...
...but only imagination and social criticism can lead us (if anything can) into the postmodern promised land...
...The right attitude for the majority in a morally divided community is tolerance, which is a solicitude for social peace arising in equal measure from self-confidence and self-doubt...
...Communities are scattered to the winds by the gale of creative destruction...
...To hold these discordant truths in tension, as Gray does, is an uncommon and valuable achievement...
...We'll spoil the planet if we try...
...Faced with stagflation in the late 1970s, conservative parties scrapped the social compact but retained the assumption that political legitimacy depends on economic growth...
...to embrace "the groundless contingency that makes and unmakes the world...
...Well then...
...In particular, it motivates his rejection of contemporary liberalism, especially the Rawlsian, rights-based variety predominant in the United States: Because political philosophy in the Anglo-American mode remains for the most part animated by the hopes of the Enlightenment, above all by the hope that human beings will shed their traditional allegiances and their local identities and unite in a universal civilization grounded in generic humanity and a rational morality, it cannot even begin to grapple with the political dilemmas of an age in which political life is dominated by renascent particularisms, militant religions and resurgent ethnicities...
...What lifts Gray's work far above neoconservatism in intellectual and moral seriousness is his forthright acknowledgment that unregulated market relations may ultimately be destructive of everything worth conserving...
...Following Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin, Gray maintains that rights and values are frequently incompatible, even incommensurable...
...First elaborated in post-World War II Germany, social market theory views the market not as an ideal type that each society should strive to approximate but as one element in a society's ensemble of institutions and folkways, which it is policy's job to harmonize...
...GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and global free trade are pernicious policies, likely to entail "costs in human suffering that may come to rival those of twentieth-century experiments in central economic planning...
...On the contrary, his previous book, Beyond the New Right, contained a strongly affirmative account of the moral foundations of market institutions...
...The first modern generations looked upon what these phenomena had wrought, pronounced them good, and called for their indefinite continuation and extension...
...Gray's reply is unflinching and not in the least melodramatic: the human race, he concludes, may very well destroy itself or suffer increasing, and finally irreversible, cultural entropy...
...no return is possible...
...On similar grounds Gray waves aside objections from the doctrinaire libertarian left to state action in defense of traditional morality...
...136 • DISSENT...
...having wilderness nearby or at a moderate distance...
...The problem is that critical rationality, as propagated by the Enlightenment and modeled on the natural sciences, has (along with market rationality) undermined the cultural authority of virtually all moral values, norms, customs, and beliefs in virtually all modern societies...
...Gray alludes frequently to the East Asian industrial nations, especially Japan, who appear to have achieved economic modernization without undergoing cultural Westernization...
...The post-World War II social compact in Britain and America provided for full employment and a welfare state financed by the proceeds of economic growth...
...having a body practiced in graceful movement...
...Modernity is, in one of its numerous definitions, the progressive attenuation of inertia by consciousness...
...Endless "downsizing" and "flattening" of enterprises fosters ubiquitous insecurity and makes loyalty to the company a cruel joke...
...I think he underestimates the vulnerability of East Asian cultural traditions to the inroads of individualism and the blandishments of consumer culture...
...But I suspect we'll get a better sense of it by hearkening to Wallace Stegner, Wendell Berry, or Seamus Heaney than to Heidegger...
...Although a self-described "ultra-liberal" in this area, he is scathing about the invention of "fundamental rights" by defenders of abortion, homosexuality, and pornography...
...In "The Undoing of Conservatism" Gray mounts a harsh critique of free-market extremism— from the right...
...Releasement," according to Gray, is a disposition to "wean ourselves from willing and open ourselves to letting things be...
...Instead, as Gray puts it in a formulation that discloses vast common ground with democratic socialists: "In all those cultures where democratic institutions are themselves elements in the common conception of legitimacy, market institutions will be stable and flourishing only in so far as their forms and workings are acceptable, ethically, culturally and economically, to the underlying population...
...Burke, thou should'st be living at this hour...
...Perhaps we can muddle through...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
