The Thin Veneer of Civilization

As was pointed out in the comments to my post "Going wobbly on Modernity and the West" I don't exude a lot of confidence for the continuation of the civilization we like to call the West, or Modernity. I'm neither an outright pessimist nor an unabashed optimist regarding its future prospects. Call me a realist. Today Bryan Appleyard profiles another person who shares that view, the writer John Gray:

What Berlin repeatedly described was a central problem of liberalism. The liberal state’s job is to hold different world-views in balance, but it cannot resolve conflicts between them. It cannot, for example, say to Muslims “You are wrong” and to Christians “You are right”, because it then ceases to be liberal. At its most effective, it holds back the instinct of humanity to form itself into competing tribes. But the liberal state is perpetually threatened by – and will, over time, surely be overthrown by – an unusually aggressive tribe. True liberalism is, therefore, necessarily a tragic view, sceptical of all notions of progress. Gray calls it “agonistic liberalism”. He believes in the liberal state, and believes it is worth defending, but does not do so with empty optimism or with any belief that it should attempt to impose its ways on others.

Gray transforms Berlin’s basic insight into a refutation of all notions of progress or perfection and of the special destiny of humanity. Man, he asserts, is a tribal carnivore possessed of reason. His reason may give him science, a progressive, cumulative enterprise, but it cannot give him the wisdom to transcend his nature. Science, like everything else in the human world, will be used for evil as often as good. Conflict is eternal and all utopian thinking is fantasy. The best we can hope to do is protect, for a time, our cherished ways of life.
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The collapse of communism in 1989, and the publication of an academic paper and subsequent worldwide bestseller, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, signalled the start of Gray’s next campaign against utopianism. This involved a more radical assessment of the prevailing mythologies of the West. Fukuyama’s argument that liberal democracy was the final political state, the end point of history, reeked of precisely the belief that history was a story with an ending that Gray so loathed in his colleagues.

“That phrase ‘the end of history’ was like a red rag to a bull. It was an apocalyptic notion, and it was to me a sign that when the Soviet Union collapsed, we would not have a move towards prudence and realism, we’d have a politics of faith. I was adamantly opposed to that – it was what I had been opposed to in communism.”

Well stated. We can't put our way of life on autopilot. From our disputes on "Wobbly" I'm not sure that we even agree on what our civilizational values are. I have an idea of what the West means, but not everyone shares all aspects of my definition. That is just another reason to keep a realistic frame of mind.