“Enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history.”

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the image of Job’s biblical sea monster as a metaphor for the sovereign that alone could bring peace. Hobbes’s Leviathan was a state with unchecked powers but a strict area of responsibility, which was to protect its subjects against enemies within and without. Absent this protection—as is famously quoted—mankind will “live in continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Gray has a bleak view of the world and our future. As to the West, he argues that liberal civilization is dead. Xi’s surveillance regime threatens the West through China’s technology exports and exploitation of the newly created navigation channels through the Arctic, among other things. Russia “oversees a society immemorially habituated to tyranny,” where removal of a despot or collapse of the oil economy would result in chaos, anarchy, and bloodshed. Indeed, Gray says that “The world of the future will be like that of the past, with disparate regimes interacting with one another in a condition of global anarchy.”

Gray holds no punches from Russia or China, but if they have progressed technologically or militarily, one gets the sense that Park is pointing some finger of blame to where the sun sets. The takeaway from the fatalistic read is a bleak sense of hopelessness for the future, one that Hobbes had suggested was possible to avoid—a future of continual fear, the ever-present danger of violent death, and a short, brutish life.

“However it may occur, the Anthropocene is coming to an end. Humankind is ceasing to be central in the life of the planet, so that life itself may go on.”

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus & Grioux and NetGalley for providing this eARC.