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.
Gray's intellectual project is thus far-reaching and in his destructive mode he can be thought-provoking and illuminating. Straightforward faith in man's uniqueness, rationality and in the inevitability of progress is systematically demolished in a philosophical tour de force, which, while not wholly original-drawing heavily on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche-is presented with novel subtleties, reflecting insights from cognitive science unavailable to those earlier anti-Enlightenment writers. But Gray's pessimistic end point-his denial not only of the inevitability but of the possibility of optimism-is as arbitrary and unfounded as the deterministic Enlightenment optimism he rejects. His total dismissal of man's claim to distinctiveness is a triumph of categorisation over common sense. His economics reflect an acceptance of myths propagated by his right-wing enemies. And his insistence that Enlightenment values are inherently determinist and teleological is polemically biased, ignoring the strand of Enlightenment thinking which stresses the unknowability of absolute truth and the non-inevitability of history, while still asserting that man may be capable of something meaningfully described as progress.
Christianity promises man uniqueness through the story of a creating God. Socrates, Plato, Descartes and Kant all in different ways posit man's uniqueness on his ability to reason, his use of language and his capacity for self-conscious thought and thus self-chosen action not shared by merely instinctive animals. But to Gray this is a myth created to serve emotional needs, with Kantian metaphysics (as Schopenhauer argued) simply an unsuccessful attempt to reconstruct through reason the lost certainty of Christian faith. Instead, to Gray human thought processes are no more self-chosen than those of whales or wolves. Much of our brain activity is spontaneous and unplanned; only a small part of it is self-conscious, and self-consciousness in turn may not be unique to humans but present, although fleetingly, in other animals. Nor is language unique to human beings, since "the calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the songs of humans."
To many people educated within the post-Darwinian intellectual consensus, much of this is both intuitively reasonable and unsurprising. And yet also, as the final quote in the last paragraph demonstrates, it is ludicrously overstated because focused entirely on distinctions of category, ignoring distinctions of degree. The calls of birds may be a "form" of language and thus, in some sense, in the same category as human language, but bird language is hugely less complex than human because birds' brains are far smaller and so perform massively less complex mental processes. Ants may indulge in activities which are "forms" of agriculture, but they are forms enormously less complex than those performed by human beings. We do not know to what extent different animals feel the sensation which we call self-consciousness, but it is reasonable to infer from observation that while humans are in the category "animals," their brain processes are so much more complex than those of other animals as to make them distinctive, although not in an absolute sense unique. Man is not an animal "like any other," because man has mental attributes distinctive in degree from all other known species. You do not need to believe in a Christian God, or in a Kantian transcendental reality, to arrive at that commonsense conclusion.
To Gray the very concept of human progress is hubristic-the product of Enlightenment philosophers driven by the psychological need to replace the Christian promise of salvation with a secular promise of perfection on earth. But a recognition of man's distinctive capacity for progress requires neither a teleological sense of pre-ordained purpose, nor a belief in inevitably favourable outcomes. It derives simply from the observation that a sparrow in Hampshire in 2002 lives almost exactly the same life that its ancestors lived in 1002, while humans in Hampshire live radically different lives. Over tens of thousands of years, other species' lives have changed only as a result of Darwinian gene selection, but human life has changed because humans have developed technologies, scientific understanding, and complex modes of social organisation.
The initial accidents which set in motion this chain of events may have been random: mankind's development of larger brains several hundred thousand years ago was a product of natural selection, pure and simple. But once the accident occurred, man was blessed or cursed with a brain large enough to change the conditions of his life in ways different from those available to other species. And in this important respect man is not only different in degree but unique among the species of which we are currently aware. The assumption of uniqueness is therefore not a construct of Athenian or German philosophers, but a commonsense conclusion which it is entertaining but ultimately rather fruitless to deny. The issue is not whether man is distinctive from other animals, but in which ways distinct, and with what consequences.
In part, of course, Gray must and does accept this, for he does not deny man's distinctive ability to create new technologies, arguing against Luddite notions on the grounds that the spread of technology is unstoppable. But for Gray the implications of this technological progress are dire, since man's distinctive ability to create new technologies is unmatched by any distinctive ability to develop social structures and rules which might encourage the favourable rather than the destructive use of technology. To Gray we are savages with nuclear bombs; therefore we are doomed.
It is obvious that man's prospects depend on a balance between technological advance and the ability to regulate social relationships, and it may be that the former tends to progress faster and more certainly than the latter. But to assert, as Gray does, an absolute distinction between man's limitless ability to develop new machines and his total inability to design and agree better social contracts is simplistic. Mankind's automobiles and nuclear weapons are much more complex, although no different in category, than the individual "technologies" some animals utilise. But equally, mankind's parliaments, treaties and market economies-while in the same category as the social organisation of bees which Mandeville observed-are also much more complex. There are differences between processes of technological and political development, but they derive not from man's utter inability to reason his self-interest, but from the problems of complexity, unknowable consequences and conflicting aims which afflict social and political science. We cannot isolate social and political problems one by one and observe cause and effect in laboratory conditions before applying solutions on the societal scale. We cannot perfectly understand how individual humans would react to changed circumstances, nor model the almost infinite complexity of how one person's reaction will affect others. For this reason, utopian social engineering, as Karl Popper warned us, is almost bound to end in tears. But Popper's rejection of such engineering is quite different from Gray's all-encompassing pessimism about our ability to engineer any beneficial change. The former rests on a pragmatic observation of the complexity of social problems: the latter asserts that even if social problems were simpler, man is incapable of approaching them in a rationally self-interested fashion.
Complexity and unknowable consequences, not inherent irrationality, limit our ability to achieve social and political progress. But the limitation is not absolute. Humans can and do construct effective solutions to the problems of living together. And evidence suggests that their ability to do so is made easier by material prosperity. Today's western European societies are imperfect because human life will always be imperfect, but they are reasonably successful social systems through which large numbers of people live in dense proximity, and in the possession of hugely destructive technologies. The pros-pect of war within Europe is more distant than in any previous century, and levels of interpersonal violence probably lower than at any time prior to the 20th century.
The issue is not whether humans have any capacity for solving social problems in a purposeful fashion, but whether that capacity is sufficient to balance a growing technological capability and whether it can be applied successfully on a global scale. Man could be the rational, self-conscious figure of Kantian philosophy; but, if determined to breed and consume limitlessly, could still be condemned to perpetual conflict on the basis of the rational self-interest of the strong. The issue is, therefore, whether mankind's breeding, consumption and production technologies have these unavoidable consequences. The answer, contrary to Gray, is no: such consequences are not inevitable, they are arguably not likely, and they can be made less likely through policies which mankind might well be capable of defining and agreeing.
Gray is convinced that the world faces demographic disaster, but is strangely ambivalent as to the direction in which disaster lies. His primary argument is that the world is suffering from a "plague of people," with a population of 8bn or more inevitable, which could "only be maintained by desolating the earth." Noting, however, the falling birth rates in rich countries-which may be a natural reaction to high population density once income rises above a certain level-he then switches to the other nightmare, with population falling as a result to between 500m to 1bn. This result he considers "the most likely" alternative to ever-more destructive overpopulation.
But this insistence on two extremes, excluding the possibility of an intermediate trajectory, is without foundation. We do not know how the world population will develop, but it is a close to universal rule that wherever there is reasonable prosperity, high female literacy, and access to contraception free from moral stigma, birth rates tend to fall towards replacement levels-a rule that works in societies as diverse as Argentina, Korea and Thailand. But we also know that this rule is not at work in societies where material prosperity is not increasing-such as Pakistan or much of Africa. We know that in some rich countries, such as Italy, birth rates have fallen and stayed well below replacement levels, while in others, such as France, they have first fallen below replacement and then risen slightly. Given these uncertainties, a wide range of world population projections can be made. But within that range the perpetual growth scenario is not the most likely, and the sudden collapse scenario about the least probable.
The most likely scenario does however see the world population exceeding the 8bn which Gray believes will usher in "a new geological era, the era of solitude, in which little remains on the Earth but humans themselves and the prosthetic environment which keeps them alive." Again Gray's judgement is far too extreme. For if the world population did stabilise at something like 8 or 10bn, rather than 15, 20bn or more, most serious environmentalists would breathe a sigh of relief. A human population of that size could be compatible with a stable global climate, with the preservation of significant tracts of wild countryside, with clean rivers and clean air for all.
Environmental sustainability will, however, require not only population stabilisation, but a stabilisation of the per capita demand which humans place on the world's natural resources, and to Gray such stabilisation is also quite impossible. Man's nature drives an insatiable demand for further consumption; the global capitalist system, while promising prosperity for all, leads to ever more intense competition for raw materials whose inherent scarcity makes prosperity for all unattainable. Oil supplies are present in disastrously specific quantities: limited enough to make wars over their control close to inevitable; extensive enough to make catastrophic global warming inevitable as well.
But, as elsewhere when Gray strays from political philosophy to economics, his logic degenerates from insightful, although debatable, to confused and wrong. He notes in Al Qaeda the argument that higher oil prices will stimulate alternative energy sources, but then evades the issue of whether and when oil price rises will stimulate energy supplies from wave, wind and sun. The energy reaching Earth from the sun is 10,000 times that required to sustain current human lifestyles and population levels. Even in unsunny Britain, the technological means exist to cut emissions in 2050 by at least the 60 per cent envisaged in current British policy, and the cost to prosperity of that policy would be about 1 per cent of GDP, the economy reaching in summer 2050 the prosperity level it would otherwise attain in January. The idea that "rich countries need stable or falling oil prices if they are to continue to prosper" is a myth which John Gray shares with the head of Exxon. And Gray's all-encompassing pessimism on global climate change-his belief that nothing can be done-is as false as Bj?rn Lomborg's belief that the problem will magically solve itself.
More generally indeed, Gray's economics involves swallowing whole the misunderstandings propagated by some business lobbyists. For the idea that the world economy is a zero-sum game in which national economies have to compete for prosperity is a myth which serves a specific polemic purpose, justifying lower taxes and lower environmental standards as the only route to economic success. In fact, the long-term prosperity of, for instance, western Europe is minimally dependent either on its success in competing in export markets outside Europe or on the price at which it can buy raw materials from overseas. Instead it is almost entirely dependent on the policy choices which Europe itself makes on education, labour market arrangements, transport infrastructure, health service design and other domestic challenges. European imports of manufactured goods from low cost developing countries amount to about 1 to 3 per cent of GDP and are not the key cause of Europe's unemployment. European imports of raw materials account for a lower percentage of GDP than 20 or 50 years ago and that percentage will continue to shrink. Increasingly, prosperity means better health services and better urban and rural environments in which tourism and other services can flourish, not more steel production or more cars; and there is nothing about the pursuit of that greater prosperity which creates inherent competition for raw materials or for markets.
So the possibility of optimism remains. Man is not just an animal like any other but is a highly distinctive one whose greater capacity for rational thought may enable the evolution of political arrangements which balance technological advance. Population growth is not bound to oscillate between unsustainable increase and catastrophic collapse-the world's population may stabilise at levels which are environmentally sustainable. Increased prosperity, even if measured in conventional GDP terms, does not require the success of one national economy at the expense of others. None of Gray's philosophical arguments is conclusive and his economics are just plain wrong. Pessimistic outcomes are not inevitable.
But equally optimistic outcomes are not inevitable, merely possible. Greater material prosperity may help stabilise world population, but if material prosperity is not achieved in Africa or Pakistan, those populations will continue to soar. Global warming can be solved without huge economic cost, but the dynamics of American politics may undermine progress for many years. Conflicts for raw materials do not make war inevitable, but war, including nuclear wars, may occur because of conflicts over land, over inherited beliefs, and over inherited and present grievances.
Because rational outcomes are possible but not inevitable, it is worth seeking, however imperfectly, to increase the probability of such outcomes. Since global warming is potentially solvable, it is not a waste of time to join lobby groups and argue for a solution, or for governments to agree to Kyoto-style arrangements. Because nuclear catastrophe may (but may not) be avoided, it is worth diplomats arguing over peace processes which may pull back belligerents from war.
It is worthwhile attempting to make the world a marginally better place, even while accepting the philosophical doubt which is the inherent condition of a post-Enlightenment and post-Darwinian world. We can live with uncertainty and yet still recognise the possibility of optimism. Gray cannot, and from that inability flows his all-pervading pessimism, a pessimism whose effect must be to encourage retreat from progressive political engagement, increasing the likelihood of the pessimistic outcomes. He sees his pessimism as a rejection of Enlightenment determinism, contrasting his realism with the naive optimism of communism, fascism and neoliberalism. But paradoxically Gray is as deterministic as the creeds he rejects.
The term "Enlightenment" is so vague as to allow multiple accounts of its core values. But what is clear is that amid the decline of absolute religious faith, two categories of response to the Enlightenment are possible. Both can claim to be rational and humanist, accepting that a better world is possible on earth, rather than solely in an afterlife. One strand of response-that of communism, fascism, and the most extreme forms of neoliberalism-attempts to reconcile a rational approach with the psychological need for absolute certainty, seeking to reclaim the lost certainties of religious faith in secular creeds which provide complete answers and in political ideologies which promise certain, permanent and, in the most extreme variants, perfect results. The other strand, by contrast, sees such secular religions as a perversion of Enlightenment values, a "revolt against reason," as Popper put it. It recognises that we cannot have absolute answers to philosophical questions, nor construct perfect societies, but it still believes that we can use reason to infer probabilities and make workable hypotheses, and that people are capable of agreeing piecemeal social and political improvements which make the world a better place for at least some humans.
To Gray, the former strand is so much the essential Enlightenment that Nazism can be described as an Enlightenment project, despite its intolerance and mystical romanticism. To others, communism and fascism were the definitive anti-Enlightenment projects because they sought to close down that spirit of open intellectual inquiry which was the very essence of the Enlightenment approach. There is little value in debating which definition is correct; like most definitional arguments. this one is incapable of resolution. But Gray's philosophy, while presented as a counterblast to the determinist post-Enlightenment projects, actually shares their psychological desire for certainty, their belief that results are inevitable and their love of argument by absolute category, excluding considerations of degree or probability. The EU free market model is "a project whose failure is preordained by European history." Competition for scarce resources is "bound" to intensify, geopolitical upheaval is "unavoidable," and it is "certain" that new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes. Man is not the utterly unique being of Kant's metaphysics, in fact he is "no different" from a mollusc. Gray rejects the optimism of simplistic modernist creeds. But he shares their need for answers definitively known.
