Thomas More Lezing 2004

The Thomas More Lecture, Amsterdam, 2004

Enlightenment and Terror

John Gray

In times of conflict and uncertainty it is normal to seek a simple creed to which we can revert for guidance,
and we see this today in a widespread attempt to recapture the fading certainties of the Enlightenment. At
the start of the twenty-first century the faith that has been lost is not Christianity. It is faith in humanity—the
faith that by using the growing knowledge given by science humankind can create a future for itself better
than anything in the past. This was the faith—for it is a faith, not a conclusion of rational inquiry—that
inspired the thinkers of the Enlightenment, that animated Marxism and liberalism, that somehow survived the
great wars and tyrannies of the twentieth century and that is now at last beginning to falter.

No Enlightenment thinker anticipated the world in which we find ourselves today. All of them expected that
as human life came ever more under the power of science religion would disappear, or mutate into a secular
surrogate such as Comte’s Religion of Humanity. History has demonstrated what some suspected from the
start: these secular creeds are far more irrational than any religion. Now they are everywhere in retreat, as
new types of fundamentalism have sprung up in many of parts of the world.

In these circumstances it is inevitable that the Enlightenment should engender a fundamentalist movement
of its own. Fundamentalists seek to revivify lost faith by an act of will; but belief is not an artefact of the will,
and the attempt to recapture it when it has gone is—to borrow a metaphor of Wittgenstein’s—like trying to
mend a broken spider’s web with one’s bare hands.  Fundamentalism arises only when traditional systems
of belief have broken down. Like their Christian and Islamic counterparts, Enlightenment fundamentalists
seek to recover a faith that history has destroyed.

The faith that has been lost today is a faith in progress. By no means all Enlightenment thinkers have
believed that progress is inevitable, or that once it has been achieved it is irreversible. Spinoza and Freud
expected only a slight and fragile improvement in the human condition, and for that reason they are among
the Enlightenment thinkers from whom we still have something to learn. Even Enlightenment thinkers who
believed the immemorial evils of human life could be abolished believed that such a transformation was in
no sense inevitable. Karl Marx looked forward to a time when war and poverty had been overcome and the
organised power of the state had withered away, but this communist utopia could only come into being if
science and technology continued to advance. John Stuart Mill looked forward to a liberal utopia in which
science and technology would be used to enhance the quality of human life, but accepted that if the growth
of knowledge faltered or stopped so would improvement in society.

What no Enlightenment thinker has ever doubted is that the growth of knowledge is the engine of human
advance. The core of the idea of progress is faith in the liberating power of knowledge. It is an old faith that
goes all the way back to the founder of European philosophy. Socrates believed that knowledge and virtue
go together; the good life is the examined life. For Socrates—at least as Plato represents him—the
knowledge that ensures the good life was self-knowledge, an understanding of one’s true nature. Today it is
science, the systematic increase of our understanding of natural processes and of human society. Yet the
faith is the same: faith in the saving power of knowledge.

To cast doubt on this faith, or to reject it, must seem heretical. It is the core of Hellenistic philosophy and a
major strand in European civilisation. Yet it is denied in Greek myth and in the biblical myth of the Fall. The
myth of Prometheus suggests that knowledge can be dangerous: humankind will be punished for stealing
fire from the gods. The Genesis myth teaches a similar lesson. When humans ate from the tree of life they
wanted knowledge and power. Instead they were punished with slavery and death.

 These ancient sources of European civilisation contain a forbidden truth. Knowledge is one thing, the good
life another. Knowledge magnifies human power. It cannot make humans more reasonable, or spare them
the tragedies of history.  It simply enables them better to achieve their goals, whatever they may be.

This seems to be me an undeniable feature of the human condition, but it is deeply repressed and
indefatigably resisted. Liberal humanists deny it when they insist against all evidence that scientific progress
and ethical advance go together. This was not the case in the twentieth century, and there is there is no sign
that it will be true in the twenty-first. Growing knowledge has been used to increase the destructive intensity
of war; it has enabled tyranny to be more complete than ever before, and genocide to be committed on an
unprecedented scale. Europe has long been disfigured by pogroms; but the Holocaust could only have been
perpetrated by a state equipped with modern technologies of surveillance, communication and transport.
There have always been tyrants; but it is only in modern times that they have had the means to create the
vast gulags of Bolshevik Russia and Maoist China. Scientific progress and ethical collapse have gone hand
in hand.

The collapse has not been confined to totalitarian regimes. It was manifest in the behaviour of liberal
democracies—in the use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
saturation bombing in Dresden and Hamburg, the fire-bombing Tokyo and the even more intensive bombing
and hideous defoliation of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. At the start of the twenty-first century, torture has
been reintroduced as an integral part of war and the judicial process—not by one of the world’s remaining
tyrannies, but under the auspices of its most powerful liberal regime. Progress in science is a fact, but so is
regress in ethics and politics.

The belief that the accelerating advance of knowledge produces a better world is a myth. Now I am far from
thinking that humankind can do without myths, and the myth of progress may once have been useful. It may
be that some of the genuine advances of recent times—such as the prohibition of torture--could not have
been achieved without it. Yet the myth of progress has long since become harmful. It suggests that by
remoulding human beings the evils of human life can be eliminated—an idea that is one of the main sources
of terror in the late modern world.

The Jacobins believed through the use of terror they could reshape human nature on a more virtuous model.
Lenin followed them in this belief and used terror on a much larger scale. At the same time he gave state
terror a theoretical foundation. Communism was not just an ethical ideal. It was the only possible result of a
scientific understanding of history. In using terror Lenin believed he was advancing the progressive forces of
history.

For Lenin, as for Trotsky, Stalin and Mao, terror was an application of scientific knowledge. Historical
materialism showed that feudalism and capitalism were merely stages of the way to communism. The social
groups that had been shaped by these obsolete economic systems were residues of the past. They had no
future. Already condemned by history, they could be “liquidated” to speed the progress of the species.

             The belief that terror is a means to a better world defines the mass killings of the late modern era. It
is not just the scale of the killings that is new but also the goals they served. The French ancien regime
imprisoned and sometimes killed its opponents, and so did the Russian Tsars. They did not imagine that in
doing so they were making a new world. The Jacobins and the Bolsheviks killed on a far larger scale—and
believed they were perfecting the species. Even the Inquisition, which tortured and killed in the service of
what it believed to be truth, did so on a smaller scale than modern revolutionary regimes—and without
claiming it was building heaven on earth.

 The worst crimes committed against humanity in the twentieth century were committed by regimes wholly or
partly shaped by Enlightenment ideas. The Nazis may seem an exception to this generalisation, and it is
true that they made use of the dark side of European traditions. The Holocaust was made possible by the
poisonous inheritance of Christian anti-Semitism. It is also true that the Nazis used ideas derived from
Counter-Enlightenment thinkers. The persecution of minorities was justified by theories of integral
nationalism derived—and no doubt perverted--from J.G. Herder. The Nazis despised the strand within
Enlightenment thought that embraced liberal ideals of personal freedom and human equality. Yet they were
far from rejecting the Enlightenment outright.

The Nazis drew heavily on Enlightenment theories of “ scientific racism”. The idea of race as a central
category in the understanding of human society was first systematically developed by Enlightenment
thinkers, and many of them believed that the racial inequalities that developed in the European colonial era
were grounded in biology. Voltaire spoke of black people as being innately inferior to white, and
Enlightenment thinkers were in the vanguard of eugenic movements right up to the Second World War. In
embracing racist theories the Nazis were not alone. There were many on the Left who accepted them, some
arguing explicitly in favour of genocide of primitive peoples. (H.G. Wells maintained that peoples that could
not live according to modern standards of efficiency “ will have to go”—in other words, they had to be
exterminated.)

Nowadays it is fashionable to speak of “ the liberal Enlightenment”—as if the Enlightenment was an

essentially liberal movement. The fact is that most Enlightenment thinkers have not subscribed to liberal
values and many have been convinced enemies of liberalism. Certainly liberalism is one strand in
Enlightenment thinking, but it always contained anti-liberal elements, which Nazism continued.

The French Positivists viewed liberal civilisation as a passing stage in human development and looked
forward to a time when liberal values would be redundant—a vision that was shared by Marx. Nietzsche
rejected liberal values altogether. Yet he was a lifelong admirer of Voltaire and always thought of himself as
completing the Enlightenment’s work. Nietzsche shared the Enlightenment belief that humanity (or a small
section of it) could construct a new world-- a world where some human groups would be enslaved and
others exterminated, but which would still somehow be better than anything in the past. The Nazis may have
vulgarised Nietzsche’s ideas by linking them with racism, but they were faithful to his vision of progress.

The core of the Enlightenment faith in progress is not the belief that humans are innately good, or any theory
of historical inevitability. It is the belief that by using scientific knowledge humanity can shape a new future—
and even reshape itself. At their most radical Enlightenment thinkers believed that science could be used to
breed a new humanity without any of the defects of the old.  It is here more than anywhere else that the
Enlightenment diverges from Christianity, and it is at this point that we find the intellectual root of the worst
forms of modern terror.

The vision of human possibilities that is expressed by H.G. Wells, by Lenin and Trotsky and also by
Nietzsche and the Nazis could not have been conceived in pre-Enlightenment Europe. In mediaeval
Christendom humans were recognised as being intrinsically flawed—a perception expressed in the wise
doctrine of Original Sin. No transformation in human institutions could overcome the inherent defects of
human nature.

It is true that late mediaeval Europe contained millenarian movements whose members expected a new
dispensation in human affairs. These late medieval millenarians had much in common with the totalitarian
movements of the twentieth century. They believed the existing world was doomed and a new one could
come about only by violence. Yet they did not imagine that humanity could bring about the new world—that
could only be done by God—and they did not see violence as an instrument for remoulding human nature.
Because it viewed human nature as fixed and flawed the mediaeval world was protected from these
delusions. Mediaeval Christendom was the scene of much violence, but it lacked the view of the world from
which modern terror springs.

The belief that science has given humanity the means to remake the world did not disappear with the
totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. It lives on in neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism—political
movements that continue the Enlightenment project of remodelling human society on a foundation of
supposed scientific knowledge. Today it is not “ scientific socialism” or “ scientific racism” that provides the
foundation. It is a putative science of economics resting on an Enlightenment interpretation of history.

Of course the scientific pretensions of these movements are spurious. There is no more reason to give
credence to Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement of the end of history than there was to accept Sidney and
Beatrice Webb’s declaration that a new civilisation had been born in the Soviet Union. The knowledge these
secular seers claim of the future development of the species is not knowledge at all. Their visions of the
future are eschatological fantasies, hollowed-out versions of the Christian belief that human salvation is an
historical event.

Comte and Marx, Hayek and Fukuyama never doubt that scientific and technological development could
only have one result. Yet they differ radically on what it would be. For Comte it is a technocratic society
organised on hierarchical lines. For Marx it could only be egalitarian communism For Hayek it could be none
other than a universal free market. For Fukuyama it is “ global democratic capitalism”.  Despite their
differences, these visions have something in common. In each case the basis of the expectation of a new
world was supposed to be a science of society. In fact it was a secular version of a Christian interpretation of
history.

Christianity differs from other religions in seeing history as the site of human salvation. In Hinduism and
Buddhism and in the philosophies and mystery cults of ancient Europe, history has no meaning; salvation
means liberation from time. In Christianity history is a narrative of sin and redemption that ends in salvation.
The political religions of the Enlightenment—Marxism, Positivism and liberalism-- are secular avatars of the
Christian narrative of salvation.

The political faiths of the Enlightenment all claim to be based in science, but actually they are split religion,
degenerate forms of the Christian expectation of the end of history. As could have been predicted, they have
all been falsified. History has not ended, but simply continued.

The communist experiment is in ruins. The construction of a global free market has been halted by war.
Secularisation-- which Enlightenment thinkers of all varieties imagined to be a universal consequence of the
rise of modern science—has proved to be a local phenomenon confined to some parts of Europe. At a
global level, science has not generated any consensus on beliefs or values. It has simply enhanced the
power of humans to project their conflicting values and beliefs into the world.

The peace expected by neo-liberals has not arrived. The short-lived neo-liberal period was a time of war--in
the Gulf, the Balkans, and many other parts of the world. It has been followed by a neo-conservative era of
blood and iron, which promises to be longer lasting.

The war in Iraq was launched for a number of reasons. In part it is a resource war aiming to gain control of
Iraq’s oil; but ideology played a pivotal role. The neo-conservative faction in the Bush administration was
decisive in triggering the invasion, and the horrific fiasco that has followed flows directly from the flaws of
neo-conservative ideology. 

Before a single shot was fired it could be foreseen that the US invasion would create a failed state. It was
clear that an initial swift victory over Saddam’s conventional military forces would be followed by an
intractable guerrilla insurgency, in many ways akin to that which has raged for over a decade in Chechnya. It
was also apparent that the long-term effect of the war would be to empower radical Islam as the single most
important force in the country.

Neo-conservatives believed that by forcing regime change in Iraq they would modernise the country, and
thereby create a model for other countries in the region. They failed to understand that Iraq was already a
modern state—a secular despotism modelled partly on the former Soviet Union and partly on National
Socialist Germany.

 For neo-conservatives, as for Comte, Marx and Lenin, modernity is everywhere the same, and it is always
good.  History suggests a different view in which terror is an integral part of the modern world. Nazi
Germany was a modernist state, not an attempt to revert to any previous period in history. Soviet and Maoist
Communism were not embodiments of Russian or Chinese traditions, but radical westernising regimes,
whose origins are in the heart of the European Enlightenment.

Radical Islamists see themselves as enemies of western modernity, and are seen as such in “the West”. Yet
radical Islam is a system of ideas very largely composed from modern western ideologies such as Leninism
and National Socialism. The belief that the world can be regenerated by spectacular acts of violence has no
precedent in Islamic traditions, and Al Qaeda has more in common with the Baader-Meinhof gang than with
the mediaeval Assassins. When radical Islamists speak of remaking the world by the use of terror they
speak in a modern western voice.

The rise of neo-conservatism illustrates one of the ironies of intellectual history in the late twentieth century
— the capture of the Right by revolutionary ideology. When communism collapsed there were many who
supposed that revolutionary ideology was dead. Instead it found a new lease of life—first in the neo-liberal
fantasy of a global free market, then in the neo-conservative project of exporting liberal democracy by
military force into the Middle East and throughout the world.
Despite its name, neo-conservatism has more in common with Jacobinism and Leninism than with
conservatism as that is understood in Europe. Ironically, given their obsessive hostility to all things
European, neo-conservatives promote a rightwing variant of a defunct European radical ideology-- Trotsky’s
theory of permanent revolution. Now this European export is being re-imported back into Europe, as
disillusioned European intellectuals seek a new secular faith. But neo-conservatism will never have the
power in Europe that it has achieved in America.   

One reason is the difference in historical experience. Because of their twentieth century history Europeans
have come to understand the risks of revolution, and faith in progress has become a cautious cult of
piecemeal reform. America has yet to suffer catastrophes on the scale suffered by Europe in the twentieth
century of Europe, and belief in progress continues to be militant and evangelical. It is against this
background that neo-conservatives have managed to transplant European revolutionary ideology into
American political culture.

Another reason is the difference in religious traditions. In Europe Christianity still preserves the Augustinian
insight into human imperfection. For Augustine there can be no triumph of good in history. Sin is found in
every human heart, and the human world will always be riddled with evil. In contrast, Christianity in America
has long had a strong apocalyptic strand, which is expressed today in fundamentalism. Like the mediaeval
European millenarians, American Christian fundamentalists live in expectation of Armegeddon—a vast
conflict that will finally rid the world of evil.

In a curious symbiosis, these latter-day Christian millenarians have entered into a strategic alliance with
neo-conservatives who anticipate an equally apocalyptic secular transformation of human affairs. Christian
fundamentalism has joined forces with Enlightenment fundamentalism, and American power is now the
vehicle for yet another attempt to remake the world. Like the revolutionaries of the twentieth century, the
armed missionaries of the Bush administration will suffer the mockery of history, as their apocalyptic
fantasies collide with the intractable realities of human nature; but not before the world has endured another
era of conflict.

There is a venerable academic cliché that says American politics is haunted by a Manichean view of the
world, and many have argued that the Bush administration is driven by the Manichean vision of a cosmic
struggle between good and evil. I think this does a disservice to the Manicheans. The disciples of Mani were
subtle and realistic thinkers, who recognised that the upshot of the cosmic struggle was uncertain: however
resolute we may be in defending the good, evil may still prevail. In contrast, for Bush and his faithful disciple
Blair, evil triumphs only because good people let it. These neo-conservative leaders subscribe to a modern
version of the Pelagian heresy in which evil is a by-product of error and ignorance. If they talk incessantly of
evil it is because they do not really believe in it.

It is the same faith that fuelled revolutionary movements of the twentieth century. Lenin, Stalin and Mao
believed they knew the necessary course of history, and they were ready to use terror to accelerate it. They
were defended by generations of western intellectuals, for whom the human wreckage of terror was an
unavoidable cost of progress. Western intellectual support for communism was greatest when terror was at
its height, and declined as the communist regimes became milder.  Now the readiness to endorse terror in
the service of progress has re-emerged in the neo-conservative project of exporting democracy by force
throughout the Middle East.

 As in Russia and China in the past so in Iraq today, Enlightenment and terror walk hand in hand. The
attempt to build liberal democracy by the use of torture and the bombing of civilians is an exercise in terror
as futile as any in the past, and its results will be no different.  Countless lives will be lost or ruined for
nothing. Iraq will suffer war and anarchy for generations, with the only beneficiary being radical Islam.

 It is at this point in my argument that you may expect me to come forward with proposals to avert this
unhappy prospect, and it is here that I must disappoint you. The mistakes that have been made are too large
and the damage that has been done too deep for there to be any way of avoiding great upheaval. The most
that can be done is to reorient our thinking, so that we can cope with the challenges of the present time with
a clear head. In order to do this, I believe we must be ready to relinquish the modern faith in progress.

 At bottom, the idea of progress is the belief that what has been achieved in science can be replicated in
ethics and politics. Just as in science there is a gradual approximation to truth, so in ethics and politics there
can be progress towards a better world. Human advance may be slow, piecemeal and never secure—an
inch-by-inch crawl rather than a sudden dash to glory. Even so--Enlightenment thinkers believe--we can live
our lives in the reasonable hope that the future of the species will be better than the past.

To abandon this hope may seem a drastic or impossible step, and certainly it demands a sobriety of which
there are few signs in contemporary culture. Yet the belief in progress it expresses is a very recent faith, not
to be found anywhere before the eighteenth century, and absent or denied in all the world’s great religions. If
we give up this modern faith we are only rejoining a human orthodoxy.  

Relinquishing the modern faith in progress does not mean becoming a post-modern relativist. Pascal and
Montaigne are two very different thinkers, but they share an approach to ethics from which we still have
much to learn. They knew that human customs vary greatly, but they never doubted that peace is better than
war, or slavery worse than freedom. Human nature is not a cultural construction but something that is fairly
constant. It is humankind’s permanent needs and flaws that form the basis of ethics.

With all the variety of human ideals, there are some evils that stand in the way of any kind of good life for
humans. The threat of violent death is such an obstacle, as is the systematic humiliation that goes with
religious persecution. There is nothing peculiarly western, modern or liberal in the idea that a good society is
one that lacks these evils. Peace and toleration were achieved in the Moorish kingdoms of mediaeval Spain,
in Buddhist India and Confucian China and in some periods during the Ottoman and Roman empires. The
good life was realised better in these pre-modern regimes than in many modern societies.

History contains numerous such examples, but they are never maintained for long. War and tyranny disrupt
the fragile artifices of civilisation. History as a whole is a story of recurring gain and loss. It is only in science
that there has been continuing advance.

The growth of knowledge is real, and it is shown in the fact of increased human power. There are more
humans than ever before, and they are making an unprecedented impact on the planet. Humans have
destroyed much of the biosphere, and colonised most of what remains. To be sure, human hegemony of this
kind is hardly sustainable-- most likely it will be cut short, perhaps quite soon, by humanly caused climate
change. Even so, it is a brute fact that renders scepticism about the grounds of scientific knowledge
irrelevant and pointless.

            Contrary to post-modern relativism, there is such a thing as truth, and ethics is not just a matter of
opinion. However, as pre-modern thinkers understood, human knowledge may grow, but the human animal
remains much the same.  As a consequence, there cannot be progress in ethics or politics of the kind that
occurs in science.

In science, each generation builds on what has gone before, and there is no limit to what can be discovered.
The idea of progress suggests that there can be a similar improvement in society—that, however slow and
faltering the advance, each generation can extend the achievements of the last; but ethics and politics are
not cumulative activities. They are more like art, where what is achieved in one period is often lost entirely in
another. The growth of knowledge is irreversible-- short of a global catastrophe it is impossible that the
scientific knowledge we possess now should be lost. In contrast, no ethical or political advance is
irreversible. Even the most seemingly well entrenched—such as the prohibition of torture—can vanish in the
blink of an eye.

 The evils of human life do not diminish. They simply recur, and their roots are not in ignorance. They are in
human nature itself. The task of ethics and politics is to cope with these recurring evils without imagining
they can ever be banished from the world.

In science progress is a fact, in ethics and politics it is a myth. Useful as it may have been in the past, it is a
myth that blinds those who believe in it to the danger we now face. Civilisation is threatened by the increase
in human power that flows from the growth of knowledge. Some may think I am going too far in proposing
that we must give up the idea of progress altogether. It would be wiser to reform it, they will say, so as to
make it more modest. I have myself attempted in the past to suggest an alternative conception that is
respectful of ecological and human constraints, but I have come to doubt that any revision of our
understanding of progress can rid it of its flaws. In all of its forms the idea of progress conceals the central
fact of our present condition. It embodies the illusion that we are free to use our growing knowledge as we
chose, whereas the reality is that we must struggle to cope with its consequences.

The accelerating advance of science cannot be stopped. Nor is it clearly desirable that it should be stopped,
since it lies behind many improvements in human life such as the increase in longevity. At the same time,
the accelerating growth of knowledge is the ultimate source of the chief threats humanity now faces. Insofar
as it is humanly caused, global climate change is a consequence of worldwide industrialisation. So is the
intensifying competition for natural resources. Worldwide industrialisation is itself a by-product of the growth
of knowledge, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction a consequence of the diffusion of knowledge.

Contrary to the Enlightenment faith in progress, the advance of knowledge does not augur the birth of a new
world—still less of a new humanity. It merely continues and enlarges the conflicts of the old. This is the truth
preserved in the Christian doctrine of Original Sin and affirmed in many of the world’s great religions, which
the thinkers of the Enlightenment have always denied.

 The idea of progress has become encrypted in the modern soul as a formula for salvation for those who
lack any deeper belief. Perhaps late modern culture is too coarse and feeble to do without it. In any event a
sudden collapse in this secular faith would surely be harmful. Yet the times are too dangerous for us to avert
our eyes from its flaws. We would do better to follow the advice of the Enlightenment thinkers themselves,
and learn to live without the spurious consolations of an irrational faith.

See my book, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions(2004), which includes essays written
before the war in which these forecasts were made.