Greatly entertaining, but very much a “container” book of the kind Kluge would recognise. I note here Gray’s own note on the Russian writer Rozanov:
He did not pretend to any system of ideas. His four main books – Solitaria, two volumes of Fallen Leaves and The Apocalypse of Our Time – were ‘baskets’ of random thoughts, recorded in the course of cleaning his pipe, examining his coin collection and other daily activities.
Baskets/containers.
It’s a furious railing against many things. Honestly, I stopped wanting to hear the word woke in the early 10s, when I saw someone post a photo of their lunch on Twitter with the caption “this sandwich is so woke.” It appears here entirely too much for me, even when he swaps it with the nonsense term “hyper-liberal.”
Woke hyper-liberalism is Puritan moral frenzy unrestrained by divine mercy or forgiveness of sin.
The opportunity for persecution is one of the attractions of hyper-liberalism. ‘A scapegoat is named, a festival is declared, the laws are suspended: who would not flock to see the entertainment?’
Given that he is not describing anything defined by “liberalism,” he could have done better than a scare-word.
The whole middle section is pen-portraits of intellectuals murdered by either the Soviets or the Germans, both of whom, in Gray’s conception, stand for the corruption of early-modern philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ conception of the “leviathan” state:
As he portrayed it in his masterpiece Leviathan, a state of nature was not in the distant past before the emergence of society but the breakdown of society into anarchy, which could happen at any time. It did not matter whether the sovereign was a king or a president, a parliament or a tyrant. Only a state whose power was unfettered could secure a condition of ‘commodious living’ in which industry, science and the arts could flourish in peace.
Hobbes seems to be Gray’s lodestar, and the reader’s sympathy towards the author’s arguments will in part balance on whether or not you think someone from the 1600s has much to say about the present condition. “Warnings from history” are often good fun to read, but eventually strain their welcome. His structure, such as it is, bends in all kinds of ways as he struggles to connect Hobbes to 20th century criminal states and then 21st century “liberalism,” trying to nail the shadow of Stalin to “woke” and railing at any discussion of racism being underpinned by 21st century American-specific theory. While raising quiet approval of Christian societies – though he does posit an interesting notion here that I don’t think I’ve seen before:
For Christians, plagues were sent by God to test their faith. Believers were enjoined to help one another to live through the trial while preparing for life everlasting. … When disasters struck, the Christians were better able to cope, and this resulted in substantially higher rates of survival. This meant that in the aftermath of each epidemic, Christians made up a larger percentage of the population even without new converts …
Gray strays as he enjoys his portraiture: there’s a sketch of Lovecraft, Freud wanders in, Samuel Beckett shows up a couple of times. (Mostly men, but in part that’s a function of the times he’s looking at.) And he manages to connect them all to Hobbes in one way or another. It’s all very readable. Also, I cannot not quote any piece that mentions cosmism:
A movement whose members described themselves as God-builders appeared in the early twentieth century as a heterodox faction of the Bolsheviks and their sympathizers, including the Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933),35 and the novelist Maxim Gorky (1868–1936). They were inspired by the Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Federov (1829–1903), who believed technology would enable the physical resurrection of every human being that had ever lived, and, in Lunacharsky’s case, by Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch, a higher type of human that could be willed into being. The God-building movement was not encouraged by Lenin or Stalin, and by the 1930s no longer existed.
His vocabulary is only occasionally eccentric: he loves the word “antinomian.” His fascination with Hobbes doesn’t force him to cleave to Hobbes’ weirder assertions, such as Hobbes’ plain statement that humans are the property of God and do not own themselves.
Depending on where you sit, this book will careen between “not wrong,” “wrong” and “not even wrong,” but it is full of interesting historical material and the annals of thinking. I had a lot of fun with it and it’s given me twenty new things to research.
THE NEW LEVIATHANS, John Gray (UK) (US+)
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