Al Qaeda and how to be a modernist

The man cannot let it lie. It's disturbing to see an esteemed thinker like John Gray feel it necessary to engage in personal attacks on Comte who he seemingly credits (if that's what it is) with the disasterous malaise of englitenment hegemony. His analysis veers wildly from the sweeping statement to the minutae of the most passing detail. I hope this isn't some Hitchens-like bluster to cover for poor intellectual rigour. He seems to present his anti-rationalism stance as some great revelation. His opening thoughts on the phony war that was the cold war were interesting but offered little by way of exclusivity and ran to some pretty staid platitudes. Yes, the project of impostional order to a rational ideal was common ground but the material differences have to count for something. He runs roughshod over too many details here where it suits him. The crass dismissal of Nietzsche here was pretty staggering. I had the darkening sense that this was but one baby to be thrown out with the bathwater in the pages to come. Once we get to August Comte however no headstone is left unturned. He accuses him of mental illness at one point. What kind of low ad hominem set up is that? You can't set up a pluralist opposition to categoric rationality and determinsim and then go and call the man a nutter. The main thrust of the book is a statement (which he thinks is brand new but isn't) that the enlightenment project suffers from the inhumanity of its impostion, the forging of men to tasks (maybe he never read Grundrisse either?) is an evil dystopic nightmare of the west; mainly Comte's fault for making both a religion and 'science' of economics which was, in his view, the most speculative of metaphysics at best and barely deserving of the pages of harry potter at base, only to hash out a very loaded thesis on Globalisation. From that lofty crag he underscores his main point: Al Quaeda are not an anomaly or an anachronism of the dark ages come to haunt us like some operatic ghost - they are the inevitable (dare one say immanent?) bi-product of the enlightenment, the remainder in the equation of rationality after Kant. The Pure Critical Unreason, if you will. The accused in the quid juris. It's a fair point. Just so badly made and so well made in frankfurt before the war. Anyway before I'm dragged off to Houghton Street WC2 for a tongue lashing and am handed a bus ticket to the old bailey for slander, maybe read it for yourself. tell me what you think.