New Voice

This week’s effort is a long one, think of it as a double week, following last week’s absence, due to the logistical difficulty of managing a couple of weekend trips to Kerry, the first of which led to a chance encounter with a book, to which I will return.
Firstly, since the autumn I have been wondering how John Gray has not been jumping up and down screaming I told you so, from the rooftops. John Banville, in a review of Gray’s recently published selection of essays, also wondered about this. Gray, no doubt is too busy being appalled and shocked by the stubborn insistence of some to persist with the concept of the free market and global Amercian democracy, to gloat.
Gray is a thinker who has been proved correct – his analysis of the trends of contemporary governments, pre and post September 11 is very accurate, as is his dispassionate, detached analysis of contemporary thought. Fukuyama, for one, must surely have squirmed if and when he read Gray’s incredulous dismantling of his ‘end of history’ pronouncement. His assessment of the likely consequences of the various forms of utopian evangelicism – be it religious, humanistic or scientific and especially economic evangelicism (though all combine to form Gray’s overarching theory) has been almost eerily prophetic. Apologies for the cliché here, but read False Dawn, or Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern – I promise that you will find his predicitions, though they are not presented as such, they are presented as clear, obvious inevitable facts, prophetic, eerily so. (continue reading…)