11 - Postmodern Europe

Summary

In a powerful critique of where the West stands today, John Gray avers that the Enlightenment project has ended, and has been replaced by a sense of value-pluralism that frees non-Western societies from being accountable to the Western telos. He diverges sharply from John Rawls's original position, a thought-experiment that eliminates from the legal order all references to individual conceptions of the good — and hence all potential for human division and conflict — so as to produce a society in which “no question can arise that does not have a solution acceptable to everyone”. Gray rejects the premise that such a solution is achievable and argues instead that the “post-modern condition of fractured perspectives and groundless practices” is an “historical fate”. Contrary to the Panglossian claims of the Enlightenment project — “the ruling project of the modern period” that was also “self-destroying” — the period has closed with “a renaissance of particularisms, ethnic and religious”.

The immediate source of Gray's deep discomfort is the downfall of the Soviet Union, which unleashed convulsions comparable to those attending the fall of the Roman Empire. The collapse of “the Enlightenment ideology of Marxism” did not result in a globalization of Western civil society, but led instead to “a recurrence to pre-communist traditions, with all their historic enmities, and in varieties of anarchy and tyranny”. His wider point is that the “humanist emancipatory project” of the Enlightenment has collapsed into nihilism, which is perhaps the only legacy that the Western movement will bequeath to a world where the West once had “humiliated” other forms of knowledge. In the Counter-Enlightenment that is upon the West, its new missionaries — the nuns and novices training in the academic cathedrals of Western postmodernism — seek to translate nihilism into a universal condition.