← Philosophy For Our Times
Philosophy For Our Times
Why liberalism has failed | John Gray on civilisation, morality, and the illusion of progress
00:36:18
Loading summary
Transcript23 lines
- [00:00]
John Gray
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Ed
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's just Ed here today and I'm introducing the episode why Liberalism Has Failed. And this is an interview with John Gray, who is one of Britain's most provocative thinkers. John is a political philosopher known for dismantling liberalism and exposing the illusions of human progress. And in this talk he really does go for liberalism and attempts to find the reason for our current political woes, the rise of fascism and the decline of left leaning parties. And he's being interviewed by Andy Owen. So without further ado, I'll hand over to Andy.
- [00:57]
Andy Owen
Thank you. John Gray is one of the most eminent and sometimes most controversial philosophers in Britain. After an academic career that took him from Oxford to Yale, Harvard and LSE in 2008, he dedicated himself full time to writing, producing a series of fascinating, thought provoking and highly accessible books, from Straw Dogs to Feline Philosophy and his latest book, New Leviathans. Known for his critiques of liberalism and the Enlightenment, John forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about politics, morality and the illusion of progress. John, welcome.
- [01:34]
John Gray
Thank you very much, Andy. Thank you for all coming.
- [01:40]
Andy Owen
To start off with John, you're widely regarded as the leading critic of the liberal belief in progress. The quasi religious faith that has scientific and technological knowledge increases over time. Morality or culture will also progress and will do so irreversibly. Your work spans everything from political theory to religion to human nature and to the limits of reason. If you have to distill a central thread running through your work, what would it be? And were there any sort of early experiences, especially growing up in the Northeast at the end of the 50s and the early 60s that inform this thread.
- [02:16]
John Gray
It's a very good and a very large question. I'll answer it as best I can, but I just came across a quote from General de Gaulle, who I, someone I admire very much, who, when he was walking through the university area of Paris during the student upheavals of 1968, came across a graffiti which said, roughly translated, kill all the fools. And he turned to a reporter and said, a vast project. So I'm not attempting to kill all the fools. I don't want to kill anybody, actually. But it's true that I have spent a large part of my work, especially since I left academic life in 2008, criticizing the idea, or as I would call it, the myth of progress. And I think the essence of that myth, or one of its central elements, is that a fact. The growth of knowledge in science is a fact. Whatever you think about the way the COVID epidemic was administered, Vaccines pretty much work. They may have more side effects that are allowed, but they work. There are just over 8 billion human beings alive on the planet because of intensive farming, refrigerators, global transport systems and so on. I don't share the view that science is just a tissue of cultural constructions with no connections at all with an external reality. We can never be sure what that reality is. We can never be sure that our theories and hypotheses are latching on to that reality. But there must be some fit or otherwise there would not have been the huge transformation, the huge growth of human power that there has been Where I think the Enlightenment went wrong, and not only the enlightened, but even the Socratic Greek philosophy which it renewed in early modern times, is in thinking that something like that was possible in ethics and politics, or if you like, the way we live. And I think that's what I have always rejected, or at least wanted to pour to subject to critical doubt. Because I think what this supposes is that humans can learn from their mistakes and improve themselves over time, over the generations, in a kind of continuous, cumulative fashion. So that in one generation, I mean, this is the way people think of progress, as a kind of escalator. In one generation you might deal with slavery or cruel punishments in penal systems. The next generation you can expand democracy. As further generation you can have more humane treatment of non human animals and so on and so forth. But actually history isn't like that. Acumen, events aren't like that in my writings. I say if anybody doubts progress, think of anesthetic dentistry. Not much downside to anesthetic dentistry. I had a cataract operation. That's progress. So there are some areas where there's a real improvement in human life which doesn't have a shadow, but they're rare. Nearly all big advances in science and technology can be used for destructive as well as constructive purposes. And what this relates to is the fact that the transmission of moral knowledge, moral sentiment, moral judgment is very easily disrupted. Hardly ever do you get a high level of freedom and peace and concord in society for more than two or three generations. Even when improvement is real, there's normally a shadow and it's almost always, I would say, always reversed. And what is gained, sometimes there are real gains, is lost. And that's a hard, hard thing for people in our generation who've been raised on the idea that the next generation will be not just materially better off than the existing one, which by the way is now doubtful, very doubtful, but somehow morally even better off then.
- [06:49]
Andy Owen
And John, you were mentioning growing up in Shields and early on you saw an example of this idea that even often progress has a shadow to it as well.
- [07:00]
John Gray
Well, I grew up in one of these streets which now many people say it's an urban legend. It wasn't. It was true. There were streets which were multi generational. Whole families lived in them, grandparents, parents. The doors were never locked at night. That is true. There was very little or any street crime, bit of violence at the pub in the night, in the rough behavior. That's about it. People were safe. They had flaws, these societies that were quite patriarchal. If you had strong individual ambitions, you usually had to leave. But they were in many ways, although life was hard and short for many people there, I think the lives that many people lived there were good. And I actually experienced what happened when they were leveled because the decision was taken for good reasons. Wasn't corruption for good reasons or what was seen to be good reason to get rid of all of these old houses because they didn't have mod cons, they didn't have internal baths, they didn't have central heating, they didn't have any of these things. So there were levels. So the street I spent some of my early years in now only has one house standing in it now. We moved out, my family, to an orbital estate, a new estate which embodied all the good intentions. All the streets were named after famous authors, Hardy, Wordsworth, poets and so on. But within about six months of being there, first of all, the families were segregated by age, which they hadn't been before. They were shaken up like marbles and deposited there. There wasn't much of an infrastructure. Graffiti appeared. There'd never been graffiti then vandalism, because the assumption was you could put people in better, did have central heating, did have internal loose. Materially it was much better off, but socially, co, culturally, as a way of a human form of life, it was worse off, as I actually experienced. Now what did I learn from that? Well, what I learned was later when I read the philosopher Karl Popper, great liberal philosopher George Soresh, who I used to know quite well, takes him as his mentor, as a mentor, talked about piecemeal social engineering. He said, you shouldn't try and have revolutions like they had in Russia. What you should do is you should get the piecemeal social engineers to gradually solve problems in society. Well, that's an idea I've always abhorred. First of all, who Are these piecemere social engineers? How do they decide? What are the problems in society? What if one value conflicts with another value? But the basic reason is human societies are not machines. They're more like spiders, webs, they're more like cobwebs. If you blunder in and start move people suddenly to a new housing estate you've created in fields, which is what they were before. You can't expect the good features of their life before to go with them. And they didn't. So that bred in me a deep suspicion, not actually of revolution. Revolutions are inevitable. I benefited from a revolution. There was a revolutionary government in the British sense. Came out of the first, out of the Second World War. I still honor and admire the labor government of 1945-50 and the war itself, terrible as it was in many ways reduced. For example, dietary diseases fell because of rationing. There was full employment, which there hadn't been before. Women entered the workforce in a huge way into the factories. True, there were armed factories, but they went into the workforce after the war. They didn't go back to becoming domestic servants. Didn't want to. Why should they? So actually, the Second World War in Britain was a sort of revolutionary process, and a good one in many of its respects. But it didn't last forever. That lab settlement, the labor settlement of 1945-1950, by the 1970s was beginning to run out of steam. It was beginning to disintegrate, which is when I first got involved in politics in the early 70s, before Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party, that I met her before and then later when she was leader and even when she. After she was toppled as leader, I met her occasionally. By the mid-70s, it was beginning to fall apart. And that illustrates another aspect in which I reject what might be called the story of progress. The one thing we learn from experience is that human beings throughout history never learned anything for long and then they forget what it is they've learned. An example now, throughout much of history, including 20th century history, violence has been used as a way of settling debates or stopping debates. Never thought that would come back. Well, it has the Charlie Kirk. I'm not using this in a political sense because it's been weaponized by both sides. But once somebody has been killed in the way he was killed, you can't go back to what is before. So we're moving in, I think, in that respect into a very dark way. But what I was going to talk about next was in the mid-70s, I became convinced that this labor settlement, which I'D benefited so much from, which was in many ways very humane, but which had these strange examples of social engineering that had malignant effects, that that was over. So what was needed was something completely new. And that's why I'm often criticized as being politically inconsistent or changing as politics change. Politics is not, for me, a universal project of human emancipation. Politics is a succession of partial and temporary expedients for dealing with recurring human evils. And they're different to some extent. They're recurring over history, but they're somewhat different in each generation. So these big experiments, even when they're partly successful, as I think the labor experiment of 1945 was, don't last for long.
- [12:45]
Andy Owen
Thanks, John. Just going back a little bit from when you left South Shields. You went to Oxford, and at Oxford you met one of your key influences, Uzziah Berlin. I just wondered if you could talk for a few minutes just about how what attracted you to Isaiah, and then also what you took from his thinking into your own thinking.
- [13:05]
John Gray
One of the things that attracted me is that as a little boy, he'd witnessed both Russian revolutions. He was a little boy in Riga to begin with, and then in Russia. But it was all part of the Romanov empire at that time. And he'd seen the first revolution in March or February, depending which calendar you use. And he said it was a wonderful experience. People went around kissing each other, embracing each other. There was a feeling of having gotten rid of a terrible tyranny. The Roman ops that lasted a few months. And then by the second revolution, he said fear was the dominant feeling, together with the love of power. And people began to appear in crowds dressed in leather jackets who were representative of the secret police who'd been created Cheka by Lenin. And fear began to seep in. He stayed there for a few years, and then he and his family migrated to the west, where he had a different life. So one thing that interested me about him is that he was speaking from a position of experience which went on throughout his life. In the Second World War, he ended up in Washington, working at the British Embassy in Washington. And his job was to find out, examine the shape of opinion in America as to going into the war with Britain, which they basically most Americans and most politicians and Ian Roosevelt himself did not want to do. But he believed, as others believed, as Churchill, who he then came to know, believed, that unless the Americans came in, we were probably sunk. I mean, the war was won. The largest casualties were not American. They were Russian. Actually about 25 million when they entered the war. But if the Americans hadn't come in when they did, after the attack on Pearl harbor and the Russians hadn't been attacked by the Nazis, we would have either defeated or to my mind, even worse, had to accept a shameful peace. Anyway, he was there. So he wasn't speaking in an intra academic way. When he talked to me about tragic choices. When he talked about choices in which whatever you do there is some irreparable loss or harm, he meant it. I'll briefly tell you one story he told me in the Second World War which illustrates this. He knew a case where a senior civil servant appeared in his typing pool of, let's say 20 people and told them, I'm now going to do something which is very wrong. I'm going to sack every person in this typing pool because one of you has been leaking information to the enemy. And as a result of that leak, brave men and women who are being dropped behind enemy lines are being tortured to death and revealing information. So it's terrible for them, obviously, but also bad for the war effort. But what I'm doing is wrong. Because none of you will ever get a job in any legitimate employment again because you'll have a black security. So it'll be an irreparable wrong. Your lives will be ruined. But I'm going to do it anyway. Now, Berlin told me this story because it represented his view of ethics and it represents mine too, which is that if you were what's called a utilitarian, you'd say, do the best thing with the best consequences, then there's nothing to regret. You just, you've done the best, the most rational thing. He thought there was something to regret. You've ruined these 19 of those people's lives irreparably for no good reason, because they're innocent. Or you might do what someone who wanted to keep their hands clean might do. They might say, I won't take the decision, I'll resign. He regarded that as I regard that as bleeding cowardice. It's your job to take. I would have taken the same decision as he would. So what he illustrated to me, he taught me this. A basic truth, I think, which that human values are not coherent. They don't form into, into a single coherent set. They conflict with, with each other all the time. And that's why trying to impose a pattern on a human life, trying to engineer a better society always goes wrong. And the ultimate reason is an anthropological reason. Humans are highly contradictory animals. They have needs that can never be, not just impulses or wants, but needs that can never be fully realized, never be fully recognized. Reconciled with. Reconciled with each other. So that's what I learned from him. He was also, of course, a fountainhead of stories about life in Russia and in Europe and in America. He knew everybody in America. Just as a slightly salacious side note, when he was in America, he was at Washington. He worked with Roald Dahl, a short story. They hated each other for reasons I didn't go into. But Dal was there also as part of the war effort to try and drag the Americans in. His job. Dahl's job, you can read about this now, was to sleep with the wives of important American senators and compromise them. And in an unverified story where he was asked how he was feeling at one point and he said, I'm completely effed out. So that was his job there. And although they didn't get on, Dahl was a bit of an anti Semite, remained one actually. They did work together. They even overlapped in an apartment. So Berlin knew what history, human events are really like. When he talked about this, it wasn't an intra academic discourse. He knew what it meant to take to either witness or take choices in which whatever you did there was a terrible cost.
- [18:55]
Andy Owen
There's a lot of that ethics that you capture in your book Straw Dogs talking about causing a stir. Straw Dogs caused a philosophical stir. Did you expect the reactions that Straw Dogs got? And why do you think some of them were so strong?
- [19:10]
John Gray
Well, I expected it to be ignored by philosophers, but that was very gratifying. It was. It just proved that I'd gone mad or had never been a proper philosopher in the first place. But I expected that. So that was quite pleasant. I hadn't expected it to take on. And there was no PR campaign. There was. It was all a complete surprise. People ask me why I wrote it then. It was really because I could write it then. I mean, I'm my. I was. I'd done my last sort of. I'd done a lot of intra academic work on ethics and politics and so on. I was in a position to do this and I wanted to write in a different way that would communicate a different way of looking at the world to people who are not academics or not solely academics. That was my reason for doing it. And it voiced thoughts I'd had always, at least since I was a child or a young teenager growing up in the Northeast. So it voiced these thoughts. And that was my only goal. My only goal initially was to get it published, actually. And a publisher did publish it. And then a few weeks later, there was no pr. I said, he rang up, he said, people are seeing other people reading your book on the tube. So I, I thought, well, that's good. It had some effect, by the way, someone I got to know very well later in his Life, the novelist J.G. ballard, still a name for you, I think, the Spielberg film and so on. He read it, he told me right through twice in one sitting. And he gave me the best comment I've ever said. He said, every damn sentence packs a punch. That was the way. So I was very pleased. But I wrote it in order to give, not necessarily to convert anyone to my view of the world. I wrote it for those people. And there are many who are discontented with the ruling view of the world in progressive terms. And so they're open to a different view. And I wrote it for them to be encouraged to think more freely. And a wide range of people, but they don't all come to the same view. Some who were Christians become deeper Christians, more Christians. Some who were conservatives have become more conservatives. Not many liberals have become more liberal, I have to say, but it has a wide variety of different impacts on different people. People who've served in wars and a number of war photographers have written to be a number of poets and so on. And as I say, not philosophers very much. But that reflects what philosophy has become, an intra academic conversation. Sadly, the saddest fact about philosophy today is that its philosophers are mostly professors.
- [21:56]
Andy Owen
And a lot of what you focus on is philosophy, obviously, but it crosses over into politics, very engaged in politics. And I think that your quote from earlier that politics is the search for partial remedies, for recurring human.
- [22:10]
John Gray
Partial and temporary.
- [22:11]
Andy Owen
And temporary. And you've said also that responsibility of someone who takes politics seriously is to look at these evils that are predominant at any given time, as they changes over time, and point to partial remedies. Looking at the situation now we have in the world, looking at Trump's second presidency and the populist attack on liberalism in the U.S. what are the partial remedies that you would look to now and maybe talking a little bit about, I think if it's influenced your last book, New Leviathans, Thomas Hobbes, what he can contribute to that conversation?
- [22:43]
John Gray
Well, I'll begin by saying we can't expect to improve or even the present situation or even to prevent it becoming worse unless we understand something of why it came about. And I think I learned an enormous amount from an extraordinarily and characteristically stupid observation by David Cameron when he was asked, you know, what about this? He said, oh, that's populism. As if it had absolutely nothing to do with anything he'd ever done or failed to do. It's just a completely inexplicable upheaval of wickedness, demagoguery, ignorance, et cetera. That's populism. Well, populism, as I understand it, is a word liberals use to describe the political backlash against the social disruption produced by their own policies. They don't understand. They don't understand. I genuinely don't understand that what they have done or failed to do has produced or helped to produce these morbid phenomena that we now see. It's nothing to do with them. The only thing they ever admit to when I talk to them is that they weren't liberal enough. Well, we were tremendously liberal, of course, and rational. No one would deny that I would. But anyway. But maybe we should have gone further on that. Maybe we should have. I suggest, I say, you mean when Hillary Clinton described 40% of the nation as the American nation as deplorables, what she should have really done is kept on saying it louder and louder. That would have converted them, telling them that they're deplorables, that their feelings are atavistic, that they're invariably racist, that the reduction in their life, life, their income and their wealth, which had been going on in America, or at least stagnation in their income and wealth for 30 years, it's irrelevant. What they should do is shut up and be. I think she actually went to a mining town and told them that they should all mining or that they should all be glad that they were going to become unemployed. Now, it might be that coal is a bad thing and it might be that fossil fue should be phased out, but you don't go to it. And if they resist, they're deplorables. So the first is to understand why this has come out. I believed in. In a talk I gave on the radio, I said in August of 2016 that I thought Trump would win and that the main reason, or one of the main reasons he would win it was actually wasn't doing very well up to that point, was. This description of voters, or 40% of American voters by Hillary Clinton as the plurals. I thought he would win again, as he did win again. And I think he's now going to use the power that he does have to produce an irreversible change in American government. He's basically neutered the courts either by Putting his own people in, on, in them, in the Supreme Court or ignoring them. He's got the National Guard at his disposal. I can't tell you what will happen, but I can tell you what to look for. The next thing to look for is how does he respond when he loses the midterms? Does he say, well, fair dues? I don't think so. I don't think so. What he will say is it's a hoax. This is what I expect. Now if he does that, if he really tries to resist the democratic pushback against some of his policies, then we're in a different ball game. We're really in a different world because then we're in a. People call it fascist, but in a way it's worse than that because fascism was time bound, fashion was primarily into war. It came about as a result largely of the disruption of life because of after the First World War and after Nazism was defeated, fascism went on in some European countries, Portugal, Spain. But after Nazism was defeated, basically you could take out the fascist elites, you could inflict military defeat and then what had survived even to some extent in Nazi Germany, of a civil society could kind of reemerge. What's happening in America now is different. First of all, America is much more polarized and this is very relevant to ideas of progress. People say progress is always possible. Not when there's no agreement on what progress means. If society, we are less polarized, I think in this country than America is. But there can't now be, I think, a reversion to the pre Trump, pre Charlie Kirk, pre Tomb. You've gone beyond that. Whatever happens will be different. If you want me to speculate about what will happen, my speculation will be that Trump will be the godfather of populisms, if I can call them that, more radical and more disruptive than any he either intended or imagined. Actually, what will come after Trump? Because there will be an after Trump. He's mortal. Will be more radical still, either via JD Vance, who is more radical, more consistent and less easily flattered. He'll not be. He'll not be swayed by being driven around Windsor Castle. He'll do what he wants to do. And that's for another reason, which is unlike Trump, he believes in it. Trump is a real estate operator on a reality TV showman who's moved into politics by reading the American unconscious correctly on a lot of issues. But now a lot of his policies are proving not as popular as they expected. There's a danger of a crisis of the dollar. There's inflation, the cost of living is getting worse, disillusionment will set in and then the question is what does he do? You've only got a year to wait. You'll find out if he backs off. Wouldn't be characteristic, would it? Because he still says the last election, the mon before the one he won was hope, was a hoax. He didn't. I mean he even said, as you know, that he never met Peter Mandelson. Did you see that? You saw the pictures of him with Mandelson stand? Well, maybe I, I've heard someone say, well he had his clothes on then, so maybe he didn't recognize it but, but, but he'll simply deny it and then what will he do? What will he do with his.
- [29:16]
Andy Owen
And that maybe gives us the chance to widen the lens as well mentioned Peter Manelston and Windsor Castle. What are the partial remedies from a UK point of view? If that is the America that is going to develop over the next couple of years or so.
- [29:32]
John Gray
What it means here. I think the difficulty is that the underlying disenchantment with mainstream politics has reached a point where it can't really be expressed without some sort of crisis. And if you asked what was the trigger of the crisis, I would say, and this sounds a little dull because it's not in the realm of ideas but of economic realities. I think a kind of super Liz Truss crisis on the foreign exchanges might do it. What would happen if. That's why I don't believe, I mean I'm confident in saying this. There's practically zero chance of the present government led by Keir Starmer going into an election in 2029. You won't be there that long. The government won't be there that long. It's too systemically weak and basically no one has any ideas hardly about what to do. And I think connected with this is that the live players in British politics are so to speak, outside most of them of the major parties and so they adopt non standard positions. If you've been watching, don't say you should, but if you've been watching Farage, what you might have noticed lately is a left turn in his economic policies. Partial nationalization of utilities, water to start with and so on. Nobody ever thought he would do it. I was sure he would do it. People will say he's just a Thatcherite. It's a Thatcherite tribute act. No, he's more like Giorgio Meloni, one of the most successful European politicians. He's got a tremendous sense of what the. There's a Problem, of course, about Farage's switch, which is that it's not deliverable. The problem is that if he does come to power, he won't be able to do it. Not because the civil servants stop him, though they might try, but because it's extremely difficult to impose massive cuts on fiscal spending when they become a norm. Even if you heard of Milei in Argentina with his chainsaw, he says he takes his economic policies by consulting a medium who is in touch with one of his dogs. But actually, up till now, he's been moderately successful. But now that there's rebellion going on, because there's been an enormous amount of sudden suffering for lots of people who don't have access to hospitals and other public services and so on. So it's very, very difficult. So I think what this means is a period of sometime, some, somewhere over the next year, two years, whatever, maybe sooner, there'll be some sort of economic shock which will destabilize politics and may ultimately then result in an early general election. And you can't be absolutely certain about what will happen then. I mean, I remember when the Social Democratic Party, this 1980s, they emerged as challengers to the two main parties, and at one point they were commanding over 25% of the vote. Some people now say it'd be the same with reform. I don't think so. I don't think so. The depth of disillusionment now is much more profound. And the problem is now we got used to getting poorer because it was slow. As long as we could borrow more and have services, however difficult they might be, national health, long waiting lists, so on and so forth, trains that don't work very well. We got used to that. And perhaps if it could go on like that forever, just bumping along, we could remain used to it. But unfortunately, a lot of the money from that comes from global markets, comes from global bond market. If that's pulled out suddenly, then there's a big shock. So that sort of connects with. The one thing I can sort of say with reasonable confidence is that the political world in this country and other countries will be very different by 2030.
- [33:44]
Andy Owen
I want to leave some time for some questions. I'm just going to ask one more question to you, John, and also don't want to end on a complete downer. So one to you. You have been accused of being a political pessimist, sometimes even a nihilist. I don't know why, but I find much that's hopeful in your work as well. I wondered if you could Just explain the subtle difference between optimism and hope.
- [34:10]
John Gray
Well, optimism is the belief that if you apply certain types of thinking, rational thinking, informed by knowledge, you get a better result. Almost certainly. I think that's an exploded view. I mean, you could almost say, I mean, if, if the belief in human rationality was a scientific theory, it would have been long ago abandoned because there's really not very much evidence for it. But hope is a different thing. And I think the main reason one should be hopeful and always can be hopeful is that human beings means each of us can live well without believing the problems in their lives or their societies are soluble. You can live well in your own life. Things happen to us that we can't change. You have bereavements, you have good things too. Falling in love. All sorts of things happen to us that we can't really control and shouldn't really try and control. I think in some cases, let them happen and then go with them as long as you can. But I think actually the optimistic, sorry, the hopeful attitude is to say we don't need a life which is steadily progressing to some goal we've set for ourselves, either as a person, individual or a society. To live well, to live in a fulfilling way, to have a life which is full of meaning, which you can look back on and say, that was well lived. That's my main idea. I think the idea of progress in this sense, and even worse, of perfection, is a burden we should really shake off. Try it. You might enjoy it.
- [35:51]
Andy Owen
Thank you, John, for that hopeful answer.
- [35:55]
Ed
Thank you for listening to Philosophy for Our times. If you enjoyed the episode, don't forget to like, share. Subscribe and if you have any thoughts on what John had to say, please find our email in the show notes and shoot us a message. But yeah, until next time, take care. See ya.
- [36:19]
VRBO Announcer
Get a jump on next summer with vrbo's early Booking Deals. Don't wait to claim your dream summer spot, whether that includes a good porch swing or a poolside lounger. When you book early, you get the best places at the best prices. Is but back to the poolside loungers with verbo. You don't have to reserve any loungers. They're all yours. In fact, the whole private home is yours. Book with early booking deals and you can lounge around all summer long however you please at vervo. Com.