Faith pure and simple?
David Pryce-Jones
AL-QAEDA AND WHAT IT MEANS TO BE MODERN by John Gray Faber, £10.99, pp. 145 ISBN 0571219802 September 11 certainly caught the world by surprise. Who were Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and what was their objective? By way of an immediate answer, the United States eliminated the Al-Qaeda base in Taleban-controlled Afghanistan, neutralised if not killed bin Laden, continues to pick up his lieutenants, and overthrew Saddam Hussein to be on the safe side. It is possible that we have heard the last of bin Laden. Perhaps he and his crowd are in the well-established mould of Muslim usurpers from the Fatimids and the Assassins and the Mamelukes to the Mahdi with his dervishes and the Mad Mullah of Berbera, all of whose ambitions were also stopped by some superior power. And perhaps September 11 was in the nature of an accident, due to an unrepeatable combination of American unpreparedness and a series of lucky breaks for Al-Qaeda.
This will never do for John Gray. He is not one to be caught by surprise. Indeed not. For him, this event brings out what he has been emphasising in print for a long time, that he is uniquely able to interpret politics, intellectual and military history, economics, science and much else. Like the great Dr Jowett, there is no knowledge but he knows it. To give an impressive example of the way he calls spirits from the vasty deep, in just a couple of paragraphs he touches on Comte and the influence of Positivism, Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann and their books, Woodrow Wilson, Hegel, Bismarck's Prussia, and the Vienna Circle and its influence.
Someone so universal of course stands above argument. He speaks ex cathedra. The September 11 suicide bombers 'destroyed the West's ruling myth'. So that was what they did. 'In the longer sweep of history the Cold War was an anomaly.' Really? 'The intellectual roots of radical Islam are in the European CounterEnlightenment.' Try to think of them reading Fichte and de Maistre in the Taleban caves. The belief that terror can remake the world is 'faith, pure and simple. No less incontrovertibly, the faith is uniquely western.' Do these terrorists believe they are remaking the world? Mightn't they be pursuing limited aims logically, if nastily? What's western' doing in this context? Or again, 'Fear is more potent in politics than hope of gain.' What, even in democracies?
The emotional impulse behind this essay is Gray's anti-Americanism. From its inception, but especially since the end of the Cold War, as he sees it, the United States has been imposing its values on everyone else, throwing its weight around while deceiving itself that it is doing good. Preposterously, in the American view science and technology will put an end to human unhappiness. In an idealised version of American capitalism, free-market globalisation will likewise generate prosperity for all. None of this actually works. An American institution like the International Monetary Fund 'blunders and bungles its way across the world.. The Americans thought they'd constructed a financial empire, but `Al-Qaeda's actions demonstrated that a paper empire is no
protection against resolute foes'. Roots in the European Counter-Enlightenment obviously came in useful there.
In a unique admission of uncertainty, Gray writes, 'Less may be known about the character of bin Laden than is commonly believed.' What if the man like others before him has hit upon an ideology whose sole function is to advance his career by mobilising a lot of poor and not very well educated people? Ah no, that would make Al-Qaeda Islamic and mediaeval, whereas on the contrary 'its ideology is a typical modern hybrid'. It has to be part of the internet age, and even free-market globalisation. And 'what seems clear is that it has a formidable capacity for self-renewal'. Why is that clear?
Everything is new in Gray's world-view, but nothing changes. Al-Qaeda fits nicely into this circularity, modern and not really modern. In fact, he seems to think that modernity is undefinable, perhaps illusory. The United States, Al-Qaeda, science, happiness, almost everything, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Only blind, stupid faith lasts, and this will bring wars for oil and water and other resources, and Aids, and weapons of mass destruction and all the other creatures that slither daily through the columns of leader writers. Short as it is, this essay confirms Gray's unchallengeable title of Pontificator Maxim us.
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