Edinburgh International Book Festival: John Gray

Review by Bram E. Gieben | 06 Sep 2013

Political philosopher John Gray enjoys a reputation as something of an intellectual curmudgeon – he's a man everyone loves to disagree with, often portrayed as a doom-saying, nihilistic prophet of apocalypse. His writing, particularly the polemical volumes Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, have a ruthless sceptical force, slaughtering sacred cows and demolishing the adversarial arguments of everyone from Richard Dawkins to George Bush. Broadly viewed as attacks on humanism, these challenging and unarguably bleak, iconoclastic deconstructions of the west's most cherished ideological assumptions might lead you to assume Gray is a firebrand; a smasher of false idols. In person however, he is both modest and unassuming, contextualising his often drastic conclusions with heartfelt statements of belief in "the good life." But as he enters the Baillie Gifford tent, he confesses with a smile that he enjoys confronting opposing points of view. "I expect a lot of sparks to fly," he says, before reading from his new book, The Silence of Animals, a thematic sequel to Straw Dogs.

He goes for Dawkins and his ilk first, stating that although he is an atheist, he is "not like those atheists who go around the world getting people to accept their system of unbelief." In Black Mass, he rails passionately against eschatological religion, but also argues for the significance of myth and storytelling in understanding human consciousness. His main thesis however is to do with what he calls "the myth of progress," the idea that ethics and morality can be measured as a gradual and cumulative advance towards utopia. Rather, he is "interested in how people can live well without the expectation of progress." To illustrate this, he tells the stories of two people who spent their entire lifespan dealing with terminal illness, but still managed to live full and fulfilling lives. He references Montaigne, Shakespeare and the Greek epics as examples of the fact that the modern belief in progress has few historical antecedents – for most of human existence, our greatest minds have seen history as cyclical, and the values of civilisation as inherently transitory; easily lost or abandoned. He cites the UK and US use of "torture warrants" in the fight against terrorism as just one example of the instances of moral slippage with which history, and so-called 'civilised' societies, are riddled.

Gray has a dry, satirical wit, and although his arguments are inherently clear and logical, he acknowledges that they run contrary to what most people want to believe. Perhaps destined to play the Cassandra role, his book False Dawn predicted the collapse of the venture capitalist system, but was published during the economic boom of the 90s. Perhaps his reasoned, careful disassembly of our treasured ideas about morality and consciousness will one day come to be seen as equally prophetic. An advocate for what Fritz Mauthner called "Godless mysticism," his conclusions may seem severe, but they are utterly compelling. "There is more commonality in human suffering than in human happiness," he says, but "each of us can live many different kinds of good life." His non-interventionist stance on Syria, his calm refusal to be blinded by hope, seem both reasoned and free of rhetoric, in a time of ideological chaos and manipulative, grandiose speech-making from the political elite.

 

John Gray appeared at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 23 Aug http://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/john-gray-1