Some thoughts on John Gray's "Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern"

In Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern John Gray makes some excellent points about the naivety of the liberal right in believing that the world can be re-made in a western image.

However, while he acknowledges the cultural distinctiveness of the West he denies westerners the opportunity to protect themselves by limiting immigration.

Gray succinctly states that globalisation is not making the world more uniform:

"As societies throughout the world become more modern, they do not thereby become more similar. Often they move further apart. In these circumstances, we need to think afresh about how regimes and ways of life that will always be different can come to coexist in peace."

This is sort of thinking that traditional U.S conservatives have been promoting for the last one hundred years but is a message that Liberals, from Woodrow Wilson to Tony Blair, have been consistently ignoring. Most of the World is not like the West and doesn’t want to be like the West.

In military affairs Gray takes the traditional conservative view that enemies can never be eliminated, only contained:

"There cannot be tolerance so long as terrorism is unchecked. Dealing with it is a precondition of any kind of civilised existence and requires courage, skill and - at times – ruthlessness. Yet in the new kind of conventional war that is now being fought there is no prospect of victory."

The neo-conservative idea that threats like terrorism and drugs can defeated in all out, short-term offensives is another utopian idea with a very short shelf life. Another vital point that Gray makes is the importance of overpopulation in global problems:

"The human prospect is shaped by rising human numbers, mounting competition for natural resources and the spread of weapons of mass destruction …Interacting with historic ethnic and religious enmities, they argur conflicts as destructive as any in the twentieth century."

Unfortunately, on the topic of immigration Gray backs down from his post liberal position and criticises ‘far right’ political parties that seek to promote limited immigration. Surely, if western culture is unique, and is threatened by global overpopulation and terrorism, then the West is perfectly entitled to try and limit immigration from non-western countries.

The eminent scientist Gareth Hardin has made a very strong argument that countries need to be made responsible for their own overpopulation problems and that lack of border controls will set up a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation where countries pass their overpopulation problems onto their neighbours.

If Gray expects to be taken seriously by conservatives then he needs to address Hardin’s hard-headed argument. Furthermore, contrary to what Gray suggests, political parties don’t have to play on ‘racist fears’ of voters to win support for limited immigration policies.

Opinion poles indicate that most people already support limited immigration. The reason we don’t have limited immigration policies in place already is because political parties are deliberately putting big business interests ahead of majority interests.

Gray himself acknowledges that western businesses are a key factor in driving immigration:

"Remember Voltaire’s quip: ‘The comfort of the rich depends on abundant supply of the poor."

In type-casting limited immigration advocates as ignorant populists, Gray alienates the kind of people that are most likely to take his other, more hard-headed, arguments seriously. Its high time self-styled iconoclasts like John Gray stopped squirming around politically sensitive issues like immigration and reveal what they actually think.