New Humanist carries a nice deflating review by A.C. Grayling of John Gray's latest book. I don't agree with all that Grayling writes. In particular here, to define the legacy of the Enlightenment in such a way that it narrows down to (roughly) pluralist liberalism, and therefore Stalinist totalitarianism isn't meaningfully connected to it, doesn't strike me as persuasive. That social disaster was a version, albeit a horribly distorted one, of the idea that the world could be remade in the light of transparent and rational norms.
Still, there is much in Grayling's criticism that hits the mark. First of all this, identifying a standard obfuscating move in arguments against secularism:
In order to establish that secular Whiggish Enlightenment-derived aspirations are the child of Christianity, Gray begins by calling any view or outlook a "religion". Everything is a religion: Torquemada's Catholicism, the pluralism and empiricism of 18th-century philosophers, liberalism, Stalinism. He speaks of "secular religion" and "political religion". This empties the word "religion" of any meaning, making it a neutral portmanteau expression like "view" or "outlook".Second, Grayling exposes a confusion in Gray's understanding of every type of attachment to progress as a form of maximalist utopianism:
... as if everyone simplistically thought that making things better (in dentistry, in the rule of law, in child health, in international mechanisms for reducing conflict, and so forth for many things) absolutely had to be aimed at realising an ideal golden age to have any meaning. But it does not: trying to make things better is not the same as believing that they can be made perfect. That is a point Gray completely fails to grasp, and it vitiates his case. Since that is so, the point bears repeating: meliorism is not perfectibilism.Grayling also has some good remarks on the practical implications of Gray's pessimism, speculating that his aim might be 'to keep us informed of the true state of affairs, so that we have a reason to feel depressed if depressed we feel'. It's well worth a read.