I rarely turn to the work of British philosopher John Gray for anything approaching good cheer, and in this piece in the New Statesman he is true to form. The article begins with a story about the French writer, Julien Benda, the author of The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs), a book published in 1927 in which, as Gray puts it, Benda “denounced the intelligentsia of his day for betraying the truth for political ends.”

“Our century,” wrote Benda, “will properly be called the century of the intellectual organization of political hatred,” something that, as we are reminded by the events on some college campuses — events that have not come out of the blue — could become the case in this century too.

Benda swung a long way to the left in the 1930s, and in the late 1940s, he visited communist-run Hungary to witness the show trial of László Rajk, a former senior minister in the regime (he had been both foreign and interior minister). Rajk, who had also set up the secret police, is not worth much or any sympathy, but that doesn’t change the fact that the trial was a sham.

Benda, however, was convinced (or allowed himself to be convinced, not quite the same thing) that the trial was fair, in no small part because he believed (or chose to believe) what he’d been told by “respectable” figures in Budapest, unaware, supposedly, of the pressure they were under to sell him the party line. “In Hungary,” writes Gray, “as in other communist countries, complicity in untruth was how intellectuals survived.”

And then Gray turns his attention to our own time:

The situation is not altogether different in the post-liberal societies of the West. Anyone who openly deviates from progressive ideology risks being erased from their professions. Leading figures can withstand the pressure, and the families of dissidents are not routinely threatened. But if the penalties for dissent are less severe, the resulting conformity is impressive. Nearly everyone practices self-censorship, not least in the company of their colleagues. Here there is an echo of life in communist societies, which will become louder if dissent is criminalised, as occurred in Scotland on 1 April, when the Hate Crime and Public Order Act became law.

Or check out the enthusiasm with which, in our highly politicized age, censors or would-be censors in the West are eyeing “disinformation” or “misinformation” on social media. Both are real enough phenomena, but who, for the purposes of any enforcement action, will decide whether either has occurred, and how will they decide it? With, all too often, the subjectivity of “fact-checkers” an unfortunate fact, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes remains as good a question as it always has been.

In the old Soviet bloc, people at least understood that there was a difference between the party’s depiction of the truth and the real thing, a difference emphasized to them by, in Gray’s words, “the absurdities everyone was forced to repeat.”

However, in today’s West, argues Gray,

the collective solipsism of the campus has spread throughout much of the culture. Any notion of objective reality is dismissed as a reactionary prejudice and facts regarded as malleable social constructions. But if you have no idea of truth, you have no use for doubt or free enquiry. Relativism and repression go together. Truth is what you and people like you believe, and can compel others to accept.

And so here we are.