This is a punchy book, and its punches are meant for people like me: people who long to live in a society where lives are cherished, truth is revered, and everyone can speak their mind. John Gray calls us “liberals”, and relishes the fact that we once applauded faraway acts of resistance – from the Arab spring to the umbrella revolution in Hong Kong – which have turned out not too well. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, he says: it is time to drop our “liberalism” and abandon hope.
Gray has been pushing this kind of argument for more than 40 years. His signature theme – which can be traced back to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) – is that when a belief in rational progress makes contact with reality it is liable to flare into delirium and terror. Gray’s variations on Burke’s theme have become more and more frenzied as time goes by, and he now tags all “liberals” with the conviction – demented indeed – that “humans can escape dependency on the natural world”.
