The English philosopher John Gray has released a new book, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism that is disappointingly brief. This is actually a compliment: Gray is such a penetrating thinker that one finishes this slim volume wanting more. Nevertheless, let us be grateful for what Gray has given us: a powerful portrait of the world as it is, and as it is likely to become in the tumultuous time into which we have all been thrown by history.
New Leviathans is based on the relevance of the pitiless early modern philosopher Thomas Hobbes to our own era. The gist of his best-known work, Leviathan (1651), is that the chief purpose of the state is to protect the commonwealth against the evils of anarchy and war. This requires an all-powerful sovereign who has the right to rule without restraint. The emergence of political liberalism ran counter to Hobbes’ authoritarianism. Now that liberalism is fading away, says Gray, the ‘New Leviathans’ emerging are authoritarians, even totalitarians, of the Left and Right. We are going to have to get used to it.
In the West, the new Leviathans are of the postliberal Left, who are creating a new form of totalitarianism (something I wrote about in my 2020 book Live Not By Lies ). “Like the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century,” Gray writes, “the new Leviathans are engineers of souls.”
Within Western societies, rival groups seek to capture the power of the state in a new war of all against all between self-defined collective identities. There is an unrelenting struggle for the control of thought and language. Enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history.
In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender, and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased. This repression is not the work of governments. The ruling catechisms are formulated and enforced by civil society. Libraries, galleries, and museums exclude viewpoints that are condemned as reactionary. Powers of censorship are exercised by big hi-tech corporations. Illiberal institutions are policing society and themselves.
Although the Left thinks of itself as progressive, even liberal, it is anything but. This totalitarianism is a “hyperbolic form of liberalism” because it exists to achieve the liberal ideal of the radically empowered individual. We can now see crystallizing in Western countries an instantiation of the paradoxical logic of Shigalyov, the ideologue of Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons: “Starting with unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.”
As Gray discerns, the new totalitarianism is not a top-down program imposed by the State, but is emerging from the ideological capture of nearly all of the postliberal West’s institutions. People whose idea of totalitarianism derives from Nazism and Communism miss what’s happening in front of their eyes. Gray accurately distinguishes authoritarianism, which we have always had with us, from totalitarianism, which is a creation of late modernity.
Throughout much of the 20th century unlimited government was the chief enemy of human wellbeing. Totalitarian states were not traditional despotisms. Old-fashioned tyrannies are like clouded leopards, a vanishing breed that kills only to feed itself. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Maoist China killed in order to perfect humanity, or the part of it they judged fit to survive. Neo-totalitarian states today aim to deliver their subjects from the burdens of freedom.
This is why the best guide to the new totalitarianism is not George Orwell’s 1984, but Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which technology and hedonism offer people liberty from their anxieties and their suffering, in exchange for their humanity.
Gray discusses the new Leviathans of Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, but it’s the Western Leviathan that concerns him most. Last week, the leading establishment liberal Cass Sunstein published a manifesto in The New York Times, liberalism’s Pravda, listing the reasons why he identifies as a liberal. It arrives encased in amber. The ideals espoused by Sunstein belong, sadly, to another era.
It’s a creed that many of us would like to sign up for, but in reality, it amounts to the triumph of hope over the experience of the last twenty years. The Sunsteins of our world have proved no match for what Gray calls “woke hyper-liberalism,” defined as “Puritan moral frenzy unrestrained by divine mercy or forgiveness of sin. There is no tolerance for those who refuse to be saved.”
In one of his deepest insights, Gray says that Arthur Koestler’s gripping novel about communist repression, Darkness At Noon, is a guide not only to the Stalinist age, but our own.
The psychology of the political believer is not confined to interwar communists and fellow travellers. The same mixture of self-deception and adamant certainty can be observed in post-Cold War liberals. They too cannot admit the demise of the faith that has given meaning to their lives.
Living in Hungary as an American makes this vividly clear. Western liberals, both in Washington and in European capitals, evince no clue that they can read the signs of the times. They make a cartoon devil of Viktor Orbán, while presiding over the destruction of their own civilizations. The litany of condemnation against wokeness in power is a familiar one on the Right, and hardly worth rehashing here. But since the unspeakable Hamas atrocities of October 7th, the West has had its collective faced shoved into the barbarism it has imported thanks to Left-liberals, with their fetishization of diversity and the Other, and to Right-liberals, who conceive of society as one big marketplace, one that needs to be serviced by cheap labor. (The book for Anglophones to read right now about this is the newly translated collection of Renaud Camus’s essays, titled Enemy Of The Disaster.)
The past few weeks have witnessed mass demonstrations of Muslims and left-wing fellow travelers, all extolling the glories of Hamas, whose militants savagely raped, murdered, and kidnapped Israeli civilians in a rampage of bloodlust. In Britain especially, the police have proven themselves to be abject in the face of this primitive radicalism.
This bristling new barbarism is the rotten fruit of postwar liberalism. It did not arise in spite of liberalism, but because of it. And if you think the Cass Sunsteins of the transatlantic class have either the ideas or the backbone to stand up to it, you are hopelessly deluded.
Look at these statistics from Sweden:
This is what naïve liberalism created. The Swedes have ruined their country. And yet, Pope Francis, apparently unwilling to let go of a sentimental religious progressivism that has all but obliterated Christianity in Europe, urges Europeans to open the doors to migrants even wider. It falls to Viktor Orbán to stand athwart liberalism yelling, “No, no, never!”
Both woke hyperliberalism and its overripe transatlantic establishment version can only see Hungary’s opposition to mass migration as racist and illiberal. Yes, it is illiberal, insofar as liberalism defines itself by the mindless embrace of the Other, and free trade over all. But liberal values like tolerance, free speech, and freedom of religion are far more likely to survive in historically Magyar Hungary than in European countries that have invited in the world. The Western liberal imagination cannot bear the truth that after October 7th, the safest European capital for Jews is not Emmanuel Macron’s Paris or Rishi Sunak’s London, but Viktor Orbán’s Budapest. There is meaning in that, for those with eyes to see.
A doleful French Catholic intellectual put it to me like this in an autumnal lunch in Paris recently: “This country is headed to civil war. It will come out of it either as an Islamic republic, or as a military dictatorship. I know which one I prefer.”
He means military dictatorship, of course, and who can blame him? This man is far from an admirer of military oligarchy. It’s just that he recognizes that liberalism, in both its Left and Right forms, has delivered France into this crisis, and is unlikely to lead the nation out of it. Why not? Because, as Gray avers, they cannot surrender the illusions that gave meaning to their lives. So they continue to “celebrate diversity” as Jew-hatred and other forms of barbarism rule the streets, and morally insane ideologues force ordinary people to accept their own dispossession, including separating children from their own bodies via the cult of transgenderism. This madness is fully supported by government, business, the media, and other institutions, who believe that there is no plague that cannot be cured by higher doses of liberalism.
Gray is an atheist, and no fan of Christianity. He is correct to point out that liberalism grew out of Christian convictions, especially Protestant Christian convictions. An underexplored implication of his thought in this book is the fact that liberalism is dying because Christianity has in most respects already expired in the West.
But what about the Asian liberal democracies? Israel? They have not known Christianity, but they seem robustly liberal, and robustly democratic. A fair point! But in Asia’s case, liberal democracy is built on the basis of homogeneous, high-conformity societies that are not nearly as individualistic as Western ones. Israeli culture has roots in Biblical values, and in any case, the secular liberalism traditionally embraced by contemporary Jews emerged from Christianity. Besides, surrounded as they are by implacable enemies, the Israelis have built a nationalist ethos far more robust than what exists in the post Cold War West. Finally, Turkey is an illiberal democracy, and as far as India goes, it remains to be seen if India can keep its democracy through Narendra Modi’s Hindutva movement. We may conclude, then, that among Western peoples, the loss of Christianity and its replacement by hedonistic, identity-politics individualism is rendering liberal democracy unworkable.
Perhaps that is unfair. Gray seems faintly to lament Christianity’s passing, calling woke hyperliberalism the cause of the coming “moral warfare, unrestrained by the Christian insight into human imperfection.” He also recognizes that liberalism is impossible without Christian convictions. “A bill of rights may be useful in codifying liberties and entitlements,” he writes, “but it will be viable only insofar as it expresses values that are widely shared in society.”
True enough—but now what? He doesn’t say. Maybe it’s not possible to say at this point. Many on the Right believe that wokeness cannot last, because it runs so counter to human nature. I wouldn’t be so sure. Soviet communism endured for seven grueling decades, despite enslaving and immiserating a nation. Wokeness in power in the West today has many more resources available to it.
For one, there is the technology to implement a social credit system, which stands to control a restive population by doling out rewards and punishments based on their servility. For another, it controls the education and entertainment idea factories, which are churning out generations who only know history in one sense: that it is nothing but darkness and bigotry, and must be repudiated. And wokeness controls much social media, which is so powerful that it turned the youngest adult generation into pro-Hamas zombies, with thousands even declaring that 9/11 was a very good thing.
Orbán famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) said in 2014 that he believes in “illiberal democracy”—a statement that, read in context, means that the prime minister grounds his idea of statecraft not in the destructive forms that liberal democracy has taken in the post-communist era, but in democracy grounded in a historically Christian framework. This was the unspoken assumption of nearly all the West until seemingly the day before yesterday. The fact that the Hungarian leader has to articulate it, and is vilified as a tyrant for having done so, only goes to show the weakness of both Western Christian leaders and classical liberalism.
Can we be liberal and democratic without the God of the Bible? No, I don’t think so. The brilliant atheist John Gray doesn’t think so either. On that, at least, we agree. I wish I knew what Gray thinks might be a solution amid these quickening birth pangs of the postliberal age. Then again, liberalism has so profoundly defined the borders of political thought in the West for so long that beyond its boundaries, there is only terra incognita. There dwells Leviathan, a rough beast who may be slouching ever closer to us to be born.
