Review of John Gray's book "Heresies"

Seems like an interesting book. Here are some excerpts, from the Guardian's review of it:

[Gray] is richly dismissive of the Bush administration's neo-conservatives - "Washington's new Jacobins", he calls them - who believe that it is possible to eradicate evil from the world. "The danger of American foreign policy," he writes, "is not that it is obsessed with evil but that it is based on the belief that evil can be abolished." Such foolishness, he points out, is far removed from the wisdom of America's founding fathers, for whom "the purpose of government was not to conduct us to the Promised Land but to stave off the recurrent evils to which human life is naturally prone".
...
Gray sees our faith in progress - "the Prozac of the thinking classes" - as the illusion that underlies the most egregiously mistaken political and social policies of the present day. Certainly there is such a thing as progress, but it is a fact only in the realm of science, while "in ethics and politics it is a superstition". Throughout his work Gray hammers relentlessly against the notion, first advanced in the Renaissance and reified in the Enlightenment, that history moves inexorably in a straight line, and that human nature will necessarily improve as our knowledge accumulates. He grants that in some areas things do get better: we have abolished judicial torture, for example, and modern dentistry is a great boon. The mistake, he contends, the wilful, foolish and tragic mistake, is to imagine that more dental implants and fewer thumbscrews will make us into better beings. "Human knowledge grows, but the human animal stays much the same."

Clear thinking is always a bracer, but does Gray as Cassandra have anything to offer other than an injunction to look all gift horses in the mouth? He is a stoic and, on occasion, even a meliorist, though a highly cautious one. All we can do, he declares, is to try to curb the wilder hungers of Homo rapiens and work away piecemeal at containing the forces that seek to destroy us. The so-called war on terror, in which "Dr Strangelove has joined forces with Dr Billy Graham", he takes as one of our more dangerously deluded enterprises. Granted, al-Qaida is a threat to the very continuance of our liberal values in the west, but it is the height of foolishness to pretend that we can defeat it by force of arms. Instead of invading Iraq and making threatening noises against Syria and Iran, the sensible policy would be to address regional conflicts, such as the Israeli-Palestinian blood feud, and separate them from the activities of al-Qaida with the aim of returning terrorism to "more historically normal levels". The new crusaders in the White House and the Pentagon, of course, would be contemptuous of such a gradualist approach.

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