A Gray World

Brink Lindsey from the July 1999 issue

The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel identifies Gray as a leading voice of what she calls "reactionary stasis.")

Indeed, at the bottom of Gray's hostility to the world economy is its supposed Enlightenment pedigree. "A single global market," he writes, "is the Enlightenment's project of a universal civilization in what is likely to be its final form." In an invidious and oft-repeated comparison, he portrays global capitalism and the now-defunct ideal of collectivism as two sides of the same rationalist coin: "Even though a global free market cannot be reconciled with any kind of planned economy, what these Utopias have in common is more fundamental than their differences. In their cult of reason and efficiency, their ignorance of history and their contempt for the ways of life they consign to poverty or extinction, they embody the same rationalist hubris and cultural imperialism that have marked the central traditions of Enlightenment thinking throughout its history."

Gray does not dispute (at least not consistently) that, unlike socialism, free markets deliver the goods. "The argument against unrestricted global freedom in trade and capital movements," he concedes, "is not primarily an economic one. It is, rather, that the economy should serve the needs of society, not society the imperatives of the market." In particular, Gray argues that free markets undermine the "needs of society" by fomenting incessant and unsettling change. "The permanent revolution of the free market denies any authority to the past," he writes. "It nullifies precedent, it snaps the threads of memory and scatters local knowledge. By privileging individual choice over any common good it tends to make relationships revocable and provisional."

At this point Gray sounds like a full-fledged neo-Luddite, rejecting the rat race of economic and technological progress in favor of some lost bucolic wonderland of cheerful, ruddy peasants and a wise and kindly nobility. But Gray's views are more complicated, and less coherent, than they first appear. Gray distinguishes between the "global free market," a utopian fantasy he harshly condemns, and globalization more generally, whose inevitability he recognizes and accepts.

"A global single market is very much a late-twentieth-century political project," he argues. "It is good to remind ourselves of this, and to make an important distinction. This political project is far more transient than the globalization of economic and cultural life that began in Europe in the early modern period from the fifteenth century onwards, and is set to advance for centuries. For humankind at the close of the modern period globalization is an historical fate. Its basic mechanism is the swift and inexorable spawning of new technologies throughout the world. That technology-driven modernization of the world's economic life will go ahead regardless of the fate of a worldwide free market."

It appears, then, that John Gray is highly selective in his railings against the "Enlightenment project." The "universal civilization" of science and technology, after all, has its own "cult of reason and efficiency," heaps "contempt" on traditional superstitions and folkways, and spreads its own "cultural imperialism." Even more so than do free markets, the "permanent revolution" of scientific and technological advance "denies any authority to the past," "nullifies precedent," and "snaps the threads of memory." Yet while free markets are dismissed as a dangerous pipe dream, technological progress is a "historical fate."

The muddle gets deeper. Gray explicitly acknowledges that free markets and technological developments are pushing the world in the same direction. In fact, he actually argues that technology's push is the ultimately stronger and decisive one, writing, "The dislocations of social and economic life today are not caused solely by free markets. Ultimately they arise from the banalization of technology. Technological innovations made in advanced western countries are soon copied everywhere. Even without free-market policies the managed economies of the post-war period could not have survived--technological advance would have made them unsustainable."

Here, then, is Gray's argument so far: The current worldwide displacement of state control by markets is driven by the same kind of Enlightenment-inspired rationalist monomania that gave us the Soviet Union. This ideological campaign should be condemned. Yet this condemnation should not extend to the worldwide displacement of state control by markets that is driven by another bit of Enlightenment-inspired rationalism--namely, the global triumph of Western science and technology. And by the way, this latter technology-driven phenomenon is much more potent than the former ideology-driven one, and indeed is so powerful that statism would be giving way to markets even if free market ideology did not exist.

Got that?

It's the incredible shrinking thesis. It poses as a radical, Enlightenment-bashing jeremiad--but it's just a pose. Gray shrinks from the full implications of his argument, and then proceeds to cut the legs out from under it with understated but devastating qualifications. In the end, there's not much left.

This kind of self-contradiction occurs again and again in Gray's book. For example, Gray blasts the Thatcherite deregulation of the British labor market, attributing to it the following baleful consequences (among others): "The bourgeois institution of the career or vocation ceased to be a viable option for an increasing number of workers. Many low-skill workers earned less than the minimum needed to support a family. The diseases of poverty--TB, rickets, and others--returned."

Yet then Gray turns around and admits: "Margaret Thatcher understood that British corporatism--the triangular coordination of economic policy by government, employers, and trade unions--had become an engine of industrial conflict and strife over the distribution of the national income rather than an instrument of wealth creation or a guarantor of social cohesion."

Likewise, Gray condemns New Zealand's neoliberal reforms for undermining "social cohesion," but then concedes, "By the early 1980s a major shift in policy may have been unavoidable. It was not unreasonable to fear that New Zealand might slip from its status as a First World economy." For both Britain and New Zealand, Gray simultaneously trashes liberalization and the mess that preceded it. What should have been done? On that crucial point Gray is silent.

Meanwhile, Gray argues, in familiar globalphobic fashion, that the world economy today follows a kind of "Gresham's Law," in which "bad" capitalism drives out "good." "Sovereign states are waging a war of competitive deregulation, forced on them by the global free market," he writes. "A mechanism of downwards harmonization is already in operation." With equal vigor, though, Gray argues the exact opposite: "A global free market presupposes that economic modernization means the same thing everywhere....The real history of our time is nearer the opposite. Economic modernization does not replicate the American free market system throughout the world. It works against the free market. It spawns indigenous types of capitalism that owe little to any western model."

To cite a final example, consider Gray's analysis of East Asian capitalism. It is clear that he regards it as far superior to the American alternative, asserting, "In the contest between the American free market and the guided capitalisms of East Asia it is the free market that belongs to the past." Oops--no doubt this passage was written before the full dimensions of the Asian economic collapse had become apparent (the book was originally published in Britain in the spring of 1998). But Gray doesn't wait for events to refute him; he blithely refutes himself.

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