John Gray - a post liberal realist for the mainstream market

While there are quite a few realist intellectuals roaming around the wild west of the Internet, Britain's John Gray is arguably the only one who gets a fair hearing in the mainstream media.

Last weekends Press for example, has a prominent, and sympathetic portrait of Gray, and a review of his latest book, the provocatively titled Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia.

I haven't had a chance to read his latest work, but I like his previous books Straw Dogs, and Al Qaeda: what it means to be Modern, which attack utopian ideologies such as Marxism, and the anthropologic nature of western liberalism and environmentalism.

In regard to modern environmentalism, for example, Gray echoes realist demographer Thomas Malthus in saying:

"Green thinking has many utopian, and even apocalyptic features...Greens are hardly ever violent but they share the apocalyptic view that the world is doomed unless vast changes occur in human institutions and human society.

I have some problems with that - it's a very anthropocentric view. It puts humanity at the centre of things, which it isn't. Whatever happens to humans, humans won't kill the planet. We won't end life on Earth - humanity simply hasn't got that much significance. The planet is much more powerful than humans and will kick back, and that's happening."

He sides with mainstream scientific opinion on global warming, but unfashionably believes there is little humans can do about it other than prepare for the worst. Gray isn't afraid to attack liberals on the economic front either, getting stuck in to both Marxists thinkers such as Terry Eagleton and pro- free market organisations such as the IMF, saying the reality of peak oil contradicts one of the free market's founding myths - that where there is supply there is demand.

His latest book, apparently takes off from where he left off in his Guardian essay The Atheist Delusion, where he gets stuck into the "evangelical atheism" of right liberal aetheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who consider aggressively imposing liberalism on the Muslim world.

Admitedly, taking the piss out of Francis Funkayama's The End of History, or Richard Dawkins, human-biology-free The God Delusion, is pretty much standard fair on your average nationalist or paleoconservative weblog, but Gray is about the only mainstream print media public intellectual allowed to aggressively critique utopian aspects of liberal ideology.

There are of course caveats though- he's conspicuously fuzzy about topics like multiculturalism and immigration, and you get the suspicion that some of his ideas come from the European Right, but he's too afraid to say so. For example, on the topic of non-western immigration in Europe, Gray advocates "cultural pluralism," and envisages nation's states modeled on modernized versions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (It could be my over-active imagination and hazy memory, but isn't that an idea of an an earlier thinker, new right luminary Alain de Benoist, who is pretty much shunned by the mainstream media?).

Anyway, despite these shortcomings, he remains one of the more interesting intellectuals writing for mainstream newspapers, and reading his articles and books has certainly opened my eyes to a lot of views that aren't usually expressed in the mainstream press.