Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern

Citation

Grey, C. (2005), "Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern", Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 68-70. https://doi.org/10.1108/17422040510577915

This is a very short book that covers an enormous range of issues – historical, philosophical, economic, political, religious – with the aim of making sense of the present and possible future of the world. All of its virtues and defects flow from this fact. On the one hand, such a breadth of concerns seems to need a much longer treatment, and one could fill many pages simply recording the queries and qualifications that almost every sentence provokes. On the other hand, the shortness, allied to a lucidity and clarity of expression, represents a highly worthwhile attempt to speak to and be heard by a wide, general audience. There is a passion and an urgency about this book which makes it a refreshing and engaging exercise in public intellectual responsibility.

At its core are two propositions. First, that Al Qaeda (hereafter AQ), and in particular the Twin Towers attack, have destroyed the central myth of modernity. Second, that AQ is itself a modern phenomenon (rather than being a throwback to medievalism). On the first issue, what is more precisely at stake is the positivist conception of modernity, which Gray examines and critiques with some elegance, in which science and social science are understood as leading to a unitary set of values and thereby undercutting ethical, political and institutional diversity. On this view, modern society is in a process of becoming better and of coalescing around a single model and belief system. On the second issue, AQ is modern in its use of destructive methods in pursuit of a new world, in the modes of technology and organization it deploys and in its inseparability from the Cold War and statist politics from which it emerged and within which it operates.

There is much else in this book besides, including a scathing attack on the institutions and politics of neo‐liberalism; a withering assessment of the prospects of a Pax Americana; and a deeply pessimistic but depressingly convincing projection of crises and wars over energy and water in the coming decades. All of these will be of interest to scholars and students of international business and the analysis will have a particular appeal to those with a “critical” orientation. But for this review I want to concentrate on the core propositions I just summarised, and which in many respects I remained unconvinced by.

On the first proposition, I simply doubt whether the Twin Towers attack has anything like the significance Gray claims for it. There have been any number of fissures in the positivist version of the modern myth (Somme, Hiroshima, etc). Gray records (p. 2), as if it were a startling observation, that the death camps were an emblem of modernity, but that analysis won't astound those who have read Bauman (1989), surprisingly unreferenced. And it isn't just that there have been many such events but that somehow, no matter how discredited is the myth of positivism it manages to revive. I think that there is a great danger in buying into what seems to have become the unchallenged, unchallengeable common sense of the moment: that the Twin Towers attack represents a defining, epochal moment. Certainly, given the earlier, failed attempt to destroy them the intent existed prior to 2001, so one might say that the only thing that changed was the success of the operation or the failure of counter‐intelligence. What's epochal about that? It is difficult to know what the longer historical view will be, but in the meantime reproducing the Twin Towers myth carries the danger of an inadvertent collusion with the way that myth is used to justify the “War on Terror” – a “war” about which, I should record, Gray is deeply sceptical. And, in part, that myth requires that relatively small numbers of, predominantly, American lives be given a value far higher than much greater, indeed uncounted, numbers of other lives, other buildings and other symbols in other events and other conflicts.

At least in his first proposition, Gray identifies and discusses a definable set of doctrines under the rubric of modernity. In his second proposition, the meaning becomes much more diffuse. I have no difficulty with his rejection of AQ as a medieval throwback (although I don't think that this is as common a view as he seems to believe), but beyond that I found his thesis confusing because of the swirl of different and contradictory ways in which it is advanced. For example, we are invited (p. 2) to see AQ as “nothing new” because of its affinities to nineteenth century revolutionary anarchism and its status as a by‐product of western radical thought (p. 117), but we are also told (p. 81) that September 11th was not “ordinary terrorism” because of its globality and that (p. 84) it has produced a new kind of unlimited war. We are told (p. 79) that the Taliban regime was a glimpse of AQ in action and that it was a modern form of action but then (p. 111) that the Taliban failed the central test (the capacity to generate new knowledge) for being genuinely modern. It is not that each of these insights is lacking in plausibility but that they are not well‐served by being thought of in terms of great, clunking categories like modernity (any more than one would be persuaded by the fatuous argument sometimes made, though not by Gray, that AQ exemplifies a post‐modern mode of organization and ideology). A different way of looking at it is to see modernity not as monolithic but as “polylithic” (a reading which in many ways this book supports) and AQ as similarly polylithic. Then this slightly spurious debate about whether AQ is medieval or modern becomes pretty irrelevant. It is both new and not‐new, an argument which should have some appeal to Gray who draws heavily upon a brilliant but much neglected writer, Carl Becker (1932), for his analysis of the Enlightenment as a form of secularised Augustinianism.

Despite my reservations, this is a book that is eminently worth reading. Indeed, it is precisely its capacity to make one want to think and argue that makes it worthwhile. It represents something that is almost absent in contemporary academic life, at least in the UK, which has largely bifurcated to two almost equally unsatisfactory poles. Either we have weighty, worthy, unreadable tomes to be savoured by a few initiates or we have the bright, breathless and brassy accessibility of the eye‐catching survey and the think‐tank polemic. Gray isn't afraid to use big ideas to tackle important issues in a way that can be understood by the intelligent general reader. He puts forward big, bold arguments which can be understood and, because they can be understood, can be engaged with and sometimes disagreed with. It's a pity there aren't more books of which the same could be said, for if there is anything new about the political and intellectual landscape post‐September 11th it is the profusion of words saying little that isn't either obvious or obviously untrue.