I don’t always agree with British philosopher John Gray, but even when I disagree, he makes me re-examine my own thinking, no bad thing.

The same is true of his new article in the New Statesman on Brexit, a project bedeviled both by the romanticism and sometimes willful delusion of some of its devotees and the smug technocratic disdain (the latter made worse by snobbery) of some of its opponents, a number of whom have also become detached from reason.

As Gray puts it:

For uber-Remainers, there has never been any question of compromise. For them the EU is a higher form of government, which it could never be rational to leave. They think of themselves as embodiments of reason, facing down the ignorant passions of the unwashed rabble. But their rationalism is a vehicle for a dangerous myth, in which the EU is a semi-sacred institution rather than a failing political experiment.

I have no firm view on how the forever shifting Brexit drama will unfold in the next week or so, but it’s worth remembering that if nothing is agreed (and agreed in a manner acceptable to the EU) then Britain will (unless an extension is agreed with the EU) crash out of the union on March 29. If it does, the British economy won’t collapse (although Gray is right to note the fragility of some of the foundations on which that assumption rests), but a sustained period of disruption will ensue. And, even if that’s all that happens, those disruptions—big and small— will enter British political memory in such a way as to ensure (in my view; Gray has an intriguingly different take) that Britain’s next government will be dominated by a Labour Party controlled by the hard left. And if Americans don’t think that matters, they should consider what that will mean for NATO.

Contrary to the jeers of centrists, the soft left and the irredeemably complacent Tories, Labour’s hard left (led nominally by Corbyn, a useful idol, but controlled by an infinitely smarter coterie) has played the Brexit mess to something close to perfection.

Gray:

The trouble with rationalism in politics is that it consistently misreads political realities. Consider the outrage that surrounds Jeremy Corbyn’s continuing equivocations on a second referendum. There is nothing surprising in his ambivalence. Aside from his well-known Eurosceptic leanings, Labour’s ambiguities have been highly effective as an electoral strategy. In 2017, the party pulled off the trick of standing on a manifesto promising to honour the referendum result that kept its working-class Leave supporters on side while encouraging legions of middle-class graduates to believe that the party endorsed Remain. Close observers have long recognised this as an exercise in what Russians call vranyo – the practice of telling lies that no one will believe. In this case, however, large numbers – citing a procedural motion passed at the last party conference – were eager to swallow the deception.

My guess is that this strategy will continue to work (Gray seems more skeptical).

Towards the end of Gray’s piece, in which I was pleased to see his recognition (however grudging) that a “Norway-style relationship…may, at this point, be the most reasonable way forward”, he returns to the topic of the “Uber-Remainers”:

[Those]who seek shelter in the imagined safety of the EU are not living in the real world. In this they are like the established political classes in every Western country. There is nothing singularly British in the failure to understand the present. Screening out the continuing disintegration of the post-Cold War order is the response of liberal elites everywhere. All of them act on the assumption that the turn to authoritarianism is an anomaly, which must eventually be followed by reversion to liberal normalcy. In fact, as John Maynard Keynes noted… it is a liberal order that is historically anomalous. Addressing a Bloomsbury audience in 1938, he mocked the faith in human rationality that he shared with much of his generation at Cambridge in the years before the First World War. “This pseudo-rational view of human nature,” Keynes declared “led to a thinness, a superficiality, not only of judgement, but also of feeling… The attribution of rationality to human nature, instead of enriching it, now seems to me to have impoverished it.”

There’s a reason that we are, as a species, so susceptible to illusion.

Gray:

Keynes renounced his youthful faith in reason after watching Europe’s slide into chaos and barbarism following the botched Versailles peace conference in 1919. Securing a decent modicum of civilisation today requires an unflinchingly realist view of the deciding forces of politics, not blind faith in floundering liberal utopias.

There is no right side of history.

Gray concludes by observing how Keynes compared his generation to “water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and reasonable as air, the surface of the stream without any contact at all with the eddies and currents beneath”. “Today”, writes Gray, “a new generation of water-spiders is skimming the surface, and it cannot be long before it is clear where the currents beneath are flowing.”