John Gray, The New Leviathans

 

-This new book by celebrated British political philosopher John Gray is highly provocative and challenging. It's a critique of contemporary liberalism in the West, and also of Russia's and China's global ambitions. 

- He bases his analysis on philosopher Thomas Hobbes's treatise Leviathan which was published in 1651. It was condemned and attacked then as a defence of atheism and heresy. Copies were publicly burnt by Oxford University and calls for Hobbes's execution for blasphemy were made. Today Leviathan is universally regarded as a classic work that continues to inspire and explain much of today's decaying world.    

- One thing I liked about Gray's book is that, although he frequently references other scholars and thinkers in an academic style, he never shies away from confidently expressing his own opinions: Western elites are renouncing tolerance in much the same way pagan elites abandoned their old gods. If the process continues, liberal freedoms will soon be forgotten, along with the world in which they were practised.

- He explores in detail the contrasts between Russia and China and the West, their history and ambitions, and his opinions are often confronting: 

The European Union is not an emerging super-state but a crypto-state lacking any military capacity to defend itself. Once the American security guarantee is withdrawn, the EU will be seen for what it is: a geo-strategic vacuum.  

The resurgence of geopolitics has been accompanied by the return of the planet as a deciding force in human events. Climate change and pandemic diseases destroyed [former empires]...wiped out by overpopulation, drought and resource wars. The belief that humans can escape dependency on the natural world is a modern conceit. 

Conceivably, global warming may occur at a rate that makes adaptation impossible...the Anthropocene is coming to an end. Humankind is ceasing to be central in the life of the planet, so that life itself may go on.  

- His stance on wokeness is controversial. He diagnoses it as hyper-liberalism, which rejects the necessary compromises. It is not enough for avowed enemies to be defeated. Hidden heretics must be hunted out, tormented and destroyed. The opportunity for persecution is one of the attractions of hyper-liberalism....The inquisitions staged on Western campuses are a mark of advancing barbarism...If it does not blunder into a global war to restore its lost hegemony, the US may drift on, a florid hybrid of fundamentalist sects, woke cults and techno-futurist oligarchs.

- Gray's book is certainly worth reading. It offers a wider scope on current disruptions and wars that we're immersed in on a daily basis, and challenges us deeply.