Holiday Reading 2 – Black Mass - January 17th, 2008 [ « ] [ » ]

OK, This started out being very long but I think I’ll cut it right down and maybe come back to some bits and pieces later.


Short version: Utopian projects, born out of a teleological world view are a bad idea, humans are inextricably a part of nature and attempting to set us apart from the flux and uncertainty which that entails will cause all sorts of problems.

Yeah I pretty much agree with that. Over the course of the book Gray argues, with varying degrees of success, that many of the ills of the world come ignoring these two facts.

Fine but I had some problems too.

Thing is I’m not particularly used to reading this kind of thing and I found it quite hard going, pages and pages of x said this, which contradicts y saying this and so on, the task of dredging the logic of the argument from a morass of detail often got the better of me. Important sounding people are quoted but their arguments are often only given the barest outline if they are discussed at all. This is fine if you’ve read these guys but it was lost me. Often I found my self mentally shouting “your just saying this stuff, where’s your evidence of causal relationships? Where’s your evidence of anything?”

A good example is when he mentions Daniel Dennet “who has spent much of his career labouring to show how scientific materialism can be reconciled with a form of free will – a project that would scarcely occur to a culture not molded by Christianity”. Really, why would that scarcely occur to someone outside the Christian tradition? I mean (a) scientific materialism has been extremely successful in explaining vast swathes of the natural world and (b) most people feel like they have free will, so might it not be sensible to try and investigate the interaction between these two phenomena? Or is Gray suggesting that the impression of free will is not something that belongs in the natural world? I don’t get it and a bit more explanation would be handy but the quoted sentence is all we get. Given that a good 4 pages at the beginning of each chapter are devoted to retreading earlier arguments (the literary equivalent of “previously, on the West Wing”) it seems odd that Gray should suddenly become so parsimonious.

The book also doesn’t make much attempt to guess or determine how Christian teleological thinking was able to gain such a strong foothold in the ‘western’ psyche nor does it look much into where the original thoughts might have come from. The birth of the Christian church is almost a year zero for apocalyptic thinking as far as Black Mass is concerned.

Ultimately it’s a tiring and frustrating book. It doesn’t go much beyond Straw Dogs, his previous work, in terms of putting forward Gray’s world view and it does it a great deal less entertainingly.

Extras:

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Richard Dawkins comes in for a bit of criticism in the book under the “attempting to set us apart from nature” part of the argument. But Gray only really attacks his rhetorical flourishes, unfortunately prevalent in his recent work, rather than the meat of his philosophy. At this point, whilst I get pretty irritated with Dawkins God bashing stuff (I think he’s right it just seems unnecessary, and I don’t buy his arguments for why it’s not, but that’s a whole other post), I just though well at least he explains himself clearly enough that you can argue against him. You can see how the argument is built up from logic and so you can attack the argument with logic, John Gray’s arguments often seem largely based on calls to the authority of others or arguments presented elsewhere and which aren’t reiterated for people like me who haven’t read that much.

For an excellent example of Dawkins at his best you should check out his Twelve Misunderstandings of Kin Selection which came to my attention recently thanks to his debate with E.O. Wilson about Wilson’s latest attempt to rehabilitate group selection. It’s a technical paper but highly accessible to the layman and written in brilliantly clear and exact language.

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One of the areas that is particularly close to my heart that Gray doesn’t really go into much is the utopian thinking in the technology community (as opposed to the science community) I’m thinking specifically of Aubrey De Grey who I find very worrying. his arguments for prolonging indefinitely the lifespan of humans has that missionary zeal we’ve come to associate with neo-cons and Muslim fundamentalists. In the afore-linked article his calculus of human well being is severly fucked up with it’s appeal to “a rising tide rais[ing] all boats” and his bizarre appeals to some kind of undisclosed moral imperative. shudder.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that he counts amongst his fans such individuals as Facebook’s Peter Thiel who seems to have been developed as some kind of grotesque parody of all that John Gray attacks in Black Mass. He’s all about the transcendent power of unrestrained capital.

[B]y his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls “nature”, and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies.

Reading that article had some part in my decision to finally quit the site.

Whilst Thiel may be an extreme example, the idea that the world will be transformed into a libertarian heaven by information technology and free markets is not his alone, once you’re on the look out you’ll see it everywhere, good signs are appeals to the neutrality of technology and complaints about the overarching power (and contradictory claims about their irrelevance) of the state and law makers. Code is law as Lawrence Lessig puts it but this has often been interpreted as code is the only law, which is a bit like saying the laws of nature are the only valid law because inside a computer the code that runs is the entire environment. This philosophy underlies the co-option of free software, under the nutty libertarian shepherding of Eric S Raymond*, into business friendly open-source formulation.

the ideology and, indeed, the politics of Open Source slip through unexamined and unchallenged — like the capitalist ideologies whose key strategy has historically been to accuse any political opponents of ethical commitments, while insisting on their own “pragmatism” and on the purely technical aspect of “just getting things done”.

Anyway, I’m ranting now. Put it this way I wouldn’t be surprised if a large number of Etech attendees had Ayan Rand’s books in pride of place on their shelves.

*If your unfamiliar with ESR and want to find out about the man then you could do worse than to check out his blog. If you’re anything like me it won’t take long for you to get pretty angry. My all time favourite ESR quotation is :

Perhaps it is too much to hope that we will respond to [the world trade center attacks, sept 11, 2001] by encouraging … civilians to carry concealed weapons and to shoot back at criminals and terrorists.

[from here] Ah, gotta love that ideological neutrality.