Though he would dispute the title, the philosopher John Gray is contemporary Britain’s arch-pessimist – that is, if we set him against the standards of the winsome, optimistic humanism de rigueur found in most of the great thinkers alive today.
A former professor at Oxford and then LSE, Gray thinks that almost all of our beliefs about ourselves are total fictions. The most widely held and detestable of modern fictions are philosophical humanism and (liberal and illiberal) progressivism, which Gray sees as the petulant, bastard children of a debased Christianity. Most of the principles that Christianity bequeathed to the Enlightenment and modern humanism – that we are free, conscious and rational beings endowed with inalienable rights etc – wither and fade when the Deity is removed from the picture.
Gray argues that humanists can’t go on about inalienable human rights when there is no reasonable metaphysical basis for them. They can’t say that we are innately gifted with supreme Reason when the lesson of modern evolutionary biology is that our minds evolved at the behest of natural forces whose purposes were anything but the pursuit of truth and reason.
Because of this, he sees all attempts to ameliorate or improve our benighted condition as the hopelessly flawed spasms of a demented species. The notion that irreversible ethical advances can exist in human history is to Gray a lie. This is not to say that he therefore opposes all attempts to improve the conditions of people whose lives were once blighted by intolerance and oppression.
Rather, he opposes the sanctimonious rhetoric of progressives who see all history up to the present enlightened moment as an aberration. “The good life,” he writes, “is not found in dreams of progress, but in coping with tragic contingencies… it means seeking peace – without just hoping for a world without war. It means cherishing freedom – in the knowledge that it is an interval between anarchy and tyranny.”
Gray’s gift for the frigid aphorism is second-to-none. At the end of Straw Dogs, his most famous book, he writes with dark and bracing assurance, “Nearly all philosophies, most of religion and much of science testify to the desperate, unwearying concern for the salvation of mankind… other animals do not need a purpose in life.”
It would do much, in my opinion, for our happiness and our sanity, to think on these words.
