Heresies

Heresies by John Gray (not the same one who writes about gender relations) makes interesting reading. It was written just at the time when the U.S. lead coalition decided to go to war with Iraq. Gray predicts insurgency and a civil war. His arguments are convincing. Didn't anyone in the U.S. administration read the book?

The main point of Heresies is naturally that we should not be naive about "progress": technological and scientific progress does not entail values of humanity/enlightenment etc. That's very true of course, but I think Gray ignores (at least in this book) a rather simple connection between values and technological progress: this far, mobile communications and the Internet have been extremely effective in speading western style popular culture. Now, does this automatically mean that western style thinking is promoted among pop affinados in, say, Islamic countries? I actually think so. There are lots of role models in TV series, films and among pop stars.

Maybe for his next book Gray would like to debunk the idea of western values altogether. I do not anyone who actually behaves according to Weber's protestant ethics, though that sort of morality certainly contributed a lot to popular opinions in industrialised societies.