THOUGHTS ON CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

John Gray, English professor at Oxford, London, Harvard and Yale and the author of more than twenty books on politics and philosophy has written a thought provoking book on contemporary culture entitled The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism, reflecting on Thomas Hobbes seventeenth century book, Leviathan. He writes,

“In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased. This repression is not the work of governments. The ruling catechisms are formulated and enforced by civil society. Libraries, galleries and museums exclude viewpoints that are condemned as reactionary. Powers of censorship are exercised by big hi-tech corporations. Illiberal institutions are policing society and themselves.” (p.5)

He describes the horrific decline of Russia and China into totalitarianism through communism and despotism. The human cost of these regimes over the years is appalling. Climate change ideology comes under his scrutiny.

“Societies that treat climate change as a morality tale in which they are the villains will disappear, or be absorbed by others that are more pragmatic and resilient. This that survive will understand that climate change is a shift that humans have caused but are unable to arrest. The only practical response is to adjust to it.” (p.55)

Although an atheist himself he sees the hubris is atheism. “Atheism was the deification of the human subject.” Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov has the Devil say:

“Man will be lifted up with the spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. From hour to hour extending his conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour in doing it that it will make up for his old realms of heaven. Everyone will know he is mortal and will accept his death proudly and serenely like a God…since there is no God and no immortality….There is no law for God…and ‘all things are lawful’, and that’s the end of it.”

The history of communism vindicated Dostoevsky’s prophecies. Tens of millions of human beings died in an attempt to create a new humanity. Twenty-first-century liberals have a similar utopian goal that is an illusion.

“Within Western societies, the hyper-liberal goal is to enable human beings to define their own identities. From one point of view this is the logical endpoint of individualism: each human being is sovereign in deciding who or what they want to be…Human beings can never be wholly self-defined. If their identity is to be more than a private fantasy, they must somehow induce others to accept it. Hyper-liberals aim to achieve this by capturing institutions that divide people into distinct categories, which then become competing groups….The origins of what has come to be called the woke movement are in the decay of liberalism. The movement is most powerful in English-speaking countries…Beyond the Anglosphere, in China, the Middle East, India, Africa and most of continental Europe, it is regarded with indifference, bemusement or contempt. While its apostles regard it as a universal movement of human emancipation, it is recognized in much of the world as a symptom of Western decline….Psychologically, it provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity. Woke is a career as much as a cult.” (p.112)

He goes to list how the American universities require applicants for positions to demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Woke thinking represent itself as a global movement but in practice it is highly parochial. Racism is not confined as a white problem, or an American issue. The genocides in other countries and amongst other races or religions gives the lie to that. Carving up society into ethnic group identities perpetuates and intensifies racial divisions. Woke discourse on race is a symptom of the disease it pretends to cure.

He quotes E.R. Dodds, a great classical scholar in identifying the advantages of Christianity over paganism. It was open to all and made no social distinctions. It held out to the disinherited the promise of a better inheritance in the world to come. It provided the essentials of social security in caring for the poor, the disabled and the sick. Socratism is the true faith of the modern West: science can redeem humankind from evil and tragedy. In reality, science serves whatever impulses drive the human animal, including a passion for destruction.

The only hope for humanity is the teaching of Jesus on the kingdom of God.