Blair is in thrall to the myth of a monolithic modernity
From public services to Iraq, we are told the American way is the only way
John Gray
Saturday April 19, 2003
Tony Blair's unswerving support for the US attack on Iraq may not seem to have anything much to do with his determination to remould Britain's public services, but they are both applications of a single big idea. Like the neo-conservatives in Washington, Mr Blair believes there is only one way of being modern and it is American.
The prime minister's incessant mantra of modernisation is sometimes seen as an alibi for unprincipled pragmatism. In fact it is testimony to a deep conviction. He believes that modernisation is a process that can have only one result, the universal spread of American-style market states - and that anyone who resists this happy outcome is struggling against the irresistible forces of history.
The belief that modernisation is a unilinear historical process is not new. The neo-conservatives are only the latest in a long line of thinkers. Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill had very different visions of what it means to be modern, but they were at one in believing that it would be the same everywhere. They absorbed this belief from the Positivists - an early 19th-century intellectual movement founded in France by Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte that is almost forgotten today, but which was enormously influential.
The Positivists believed the motor of historical change is the growth of scientific knowledge. As science advances and new technologies are invented, the religions and moralities of the past are cast off. Humanity is free to use science to achieve unprecedented levels of prosperity in a new kind of civilisation based on reason and secular values.
The Positivists were an exotic bunch, who saw themselves as creating not only a new kind of science but also a new religion, complete with its own liturgy. Followers were instructed to cross themselves several times a day by touching their foreheads at the points where the pseudo-science of phrenology located the impulses of benevolence, progress and order. New costumes were invented, including some with buttons up the back. If people had to seek the help of others in putting on their clothes and taking them off, the Positivists believed, humanity would become more cooperative and altruistic.
In these and other ways Positivism had a good deal in common with the cranky cults so common in the late 19th and 20th centuries. At the same time it had a profound influence on politics and social science, shaping the prevailing faith in modernisation. For the Positivists - as for Mr Blair - modernity can only mean one thing: and it is always good.
In fact there are many ways of being modern, some of them monstrous. Hitler was an uncompromising modernist who used new technologies to commit genocide. Stalin created a terrorist state in Russia in a desperate attempt to turn it into a modern industrial society. Al-Qaida is commonly described as a throwback to pre-modern times, but actually it has more in common with the Baader-Meinhof Gang than it does with the mediaeval Assassins. The idea that the world can be remade by terror is not peculiarly Islamic. If anything it is distinctively western.
All this may seem an exercise in intellectual history remote from current events, but it is not. The war in Iraq was masterminded by neo-conservative ideologues who believe that global terrorism is the result of the failure of Arab societies to modernise. Paul Wolfowitz's grandiose scheme for remaking the Middle East embodies the dangerous myth that the only way to peace in the region is to emulate America - in the American deputy defence secretary's eyes, as in Mr Blair's, the very paradigm of modernity.
By seeking to impose a monolithic modernisation on Arab countries, the US is preventing them from finding their own paths to development. As can already be seen, the result can only be to boost fundamentalism. Far from fostering secularism and liberal values, the destruction of Saddam's Ba'athist regime is strengthening radical Islam. As things stand it looks as if postwar Iraq may suffer the fate of Lebanon and become a chronically weak, fragmented state. But if it does hold together it will not be a democracy on the Washington or Westminster model. It could well be more like Iran after the fall of the Shah.
If the neo-conservatives' vision of modernisation in the Middle East is based on a misreading of conditions in the region it also embodies a bizarre view of America. They never tire of repeating that a combination of free markets with democracy is the only sustainable model of modern development. They seem not to have noticed that the US became what it is today behind a wall of tariffs.
Protectionism is a venerable American tradition that is fully honoured by President Bush, whose administration is implementing a version of Reaganite military Keynesianism. Moreover, it came to power as a result of electoral processes that can hardly be described as a model of democracy.
Most seriously, the neo-conservatives have a blind spot regarding the singularities of American development. This paradigm of modernity is like no other advanced industrial society. Nowhere else is religion so pervasive or so politically powerful. In which other country has the head of state felt it necessary to declare himself neutral in the quarrel between Darwinism and creationism?
In the monocular neoconservative view of modernisation, every society in the world will eventually follow America in becoming a secular democracy. In reality,
the US is a less secular regime than Turkey. If America is at the cutting edge of modernity, so is fundamentalism.
By embracing the neo-conservatives' distorted view of the world, Mr Blair has implicated Britain in a dangerous military adventure whose end is nowhere in sight. At the same time he has impoverished politics. We can all see that public services have collapsed and are in need of urgent reform. But why must that mean injecting market forces and private capital into practically every corner of health and education?
The crisis in the public services is partly the result of just such policies. Again, contrary to some liberal commentators, rising crime is a real problem. But does this mean that - unlike any other European country - Britain must follow the US in banging up ever-increasing numbers of people behind prison bars?
The advance of science and technology is an unstoppable process, but it has no built-in end or purpose. In every area of policy there are collective choices to be made. Thinking of modernisation as a single unidirectional process has the effect of narrowing these choices.
When Mr Blair came to power he promised an end to ideology. In the event, by embracing the neo-conservative view of modernisation he has renewed it. History has not come to an end, but serious politics very nearly has. It is not only in the Middle East that a monolithic view of modernity is dangerous.
· John Gray is the author of Al-qaida and What It Means to Be Modern (Faber and Faber)
j.gray@lse.ac.uk
