John Gray in Conversation

John Gray in Conversation

I have written before about John Gray in a blog about liberalism and toleration (Feb 2016). To recap: Gray is a genial pessimist about human societies, but a staunch upholder of human decencies. He rebuts any notion of a benevolent Progress, or History, always moving humankind towards a better future.

More specifically, Gray denies that “Western liberal values” will necessarily shape the future. Rather societies embodying such values are highly contingent, and other, less liberal, values will always flourish and contest for primacy. (And who, at the present time, could deny that Gray has strong empirical support?)

Gray, personally, is a pessimist “contingent liberal”, who thinks that liberal values of tolerance are worth defending, and that there are some basic human evils – slavery, racism, sexual discrimination – that should be resisted. Otherwise, he suggests, within and between societies, the aim should be a modus vivendi between competing values – a way of rubbing along.

One evening in May , in Milton Court, a newish neighbour to the Barbican housing concert auditoriums for the Guildhall School of Music, Gray was the guest at a Guardian newspaper event to discuss his latest book, Seven Types of Atheism.

Giles Fraser, an Anglican Priest, Guardian columnist and occasional academic was the interlocutor.

I’ve been to one or two similar events. The set up is standard. There’s a stage, soberly arranged with a table, two chairs, two empty glasses and a chaste carafe of water. There’s a lectern (or pulpit) to one side, should either personage wish to give a pitch before the talking heads bit. The audience is mostly middle aged, or upwards, respectful, and (so one supposes) earnest.

At the appointed time, stage lights went up, and on came guest and Fraser. Protocol was somewhat flouted: Fraser marched out clutching a bottle of wine and two wine glasses. Was this to be the symposium from Cana (where, according to the New Testament, Jesus changed water into wine)?...

I haven’t yet read Gray’s book (preferring in the main to wait for paperbacks) but he gave a presentation of its arguments.

As in his political philosophy, his theme was that a lot of ideas which have been put in place of “God” are just religions in another guise – whether of Humanity, History, Political Necessity or Science. Sceptical scorn is due, according to Gray.

I was much more interested in the last “two types” of atheism that Gray says he is sympathetic to. One is deeply individualistic; the other, dare one say it, a little mystical.

On a personal level, Gray admires the great Anglo-Polish novelist, Joseph Conrad, who he characterises as a thinker and writer that believed, not in a divine mind, not in Progress, but in the capacities of individuals to show solidarity and assert the value of their lives even as fate conspires against them.

I was reminded by this of two other writers: Samuel Beckett, whose oft – quoted words seem apt for Gray/Conrad:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.

But also, and perhaps more philosophically pertinent, of Albert Camus, proponent of the Absurd human condition, and his arresting essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The premise is that there is no meaning in the Universe, and hence no ultimate or transcendental meaning to human life, and (cue Existentialism) humans must choose their paths, even if their situations, and choices, are finally without meaning (hence the Absurd).

Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to an eternity of pushing a rock up a hill – a rock that escapes him just before the hill’s summit and rolls back to the bottom. Down Sisyphus must trudge, and start again. Camus suggests that Sisyphus both accepts this fate and is also defiant of the Gods (because of his acceptance) – and that, in some sense, we must suppose Sisyphus “happy”.

This may seem a bit of a stretch – but I can see the appeal to Gray’s sort of cheerful pessimism.

Then we come to something that is difficult to assess. Gray thinks, after all, that there is a need for spirituality – spirituality without the idea of God.  He doesn’t attempt to define precisely what he means – the whole point is that there is a dimension to experience which is “beyond words” and perhaps beyond understanding.

Gray says that the poet Keats caught it best with his phrase “negative capability”:

..Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable searching after fact and reason..

Terry Eagleton, another highly entertaining and highly erudite intellectual gadfly, writes a perceptive review of Gray’s book in The Guardian. Eagleton is both a Marxist and a Roman Catholic (an unlikely tribe once more fashionable than now). He is strongly critical of this aspect of Gray:

Gray belongs to that group of contemporary thinkers…who disdain the secular but can’t quite drag themselves to the church or synagogue. They turn, instead, to a kind of transcendence without content, of which there is no finer example that what might call Hollywood spirituality. Those celebrities who dabble in Kabbalah or Scientology…

This is unfair. Keats’s words seem to me to describe something genuine and important – an Agnosticism (Atheism, if you will) which leads to doubt, wonder and creativity.

Giles Fraser, the bottle bearing compere, was on the whole a sympathetic and intelligent interlocutor. He was perhaps a little too eager to parade his own credentials. We learned about his conversion to Christianity, his PhD, his familiarity with Oxford High Tables, including one frequented by arch-atheist Richard Dawkins. This perhaps reflected a little lack of confidence. Afterwards, I found myself seated near him in a nearby winebar. As I left, I congratulated him on the evening. He was pleased; even a bit relieved to get a good report. He warmly shook my hand.

May 2018