The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray review – bleak, bracing and highly entertaining

A short enquiry into human freedom exposes the follies, delusions and prevailing Gnosticism of our smugly arrogant times

In these times the west, or what we used quaintly to call the civilised world, is threatened by two opposing perils, one actual and near, the other notional though becoming a reality at an ever-increasing pace. At one pole, there is the outright, unrelenting and often violent rejection of western modernity by fundamentalist movements, Islamic, Christian, Jewish; at the other is the seemingly limitless development of computer technology, which, as some highly intelligent people, Stephen Hawking among them, have been warning of late, may well end in producing machines much cleverer and even more destructive than we are. The future will be another country.

John Gray, in his bleak yet bracing new book, once again addresses himself to the follies, delusions and willed blindness of our smugly arrogant times, in which, despite our arrogance, we cower before the twin menaces of old and new barbarisms. He is a stoic Cassandra, who, if he did not find them so tragic, would be shaking his head and chuckling at the idiocies of modern life.

Continue reading...