N° 3368
Creative genius can at times be connected to crisis. Some of the most pathfinding literature and philosophy of the 20th century emerged from disaster. The most insightful work of Achebe, Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn would not exist were it not for the debris of massacres. No one reading this new book about "apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia" can be under any illusion but that this is also a time of crisis. Indeed, one of John Gray's supreme qualities as a thinker is that he is bereft of illusions.
Stripping away the meaningless verbiage which swaddles so much
analysis, Gray discerns an underlying structure of thought (or lack
of thought) in the political landscape. This is the refuge in
fantasies which derive either from apocalyptic religion or from
secularist utopianism. Such fantasies, he shows, drive the
neo-conservative agenda and are the true origins of the crisis
faced today.
(Toby Green, The Independent, 29 June 2007)
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