Prospect Book Club - John Gray

yes well if you want to go right back to the start Christians were called atheists in the ancient royal world the term atheist actually goes back to the greco-roman world in which someone who denied the gods of the pantheon was called an atheist so that term occurs within the history of the emergence of Western monotheism and my general argument about atheism is that the type of atheism which is familiar to most of you the so called New Atheism the atheism of Dawkins and Dennett and others is actually a type of thinking which proceeds by denying certain propositions or beliefs that have been central to monotheism but retains the general framework of thought the category of categories of thinking of Monistat monotheism but the main point of my book mentioned is to say that atheism the the dispute the so-called God debate but I should mention that when I decided to write the book I taught for a while with having a subtitle why the god debate is dead but I decided not to in the end and I also toyed with the idea of not even mentioning the New Atheists at all I think Dawkins appears once but I thought I just ignore them and so dismiss them really in an early well one of my editors said that's fantastically chic John why don't you do it but I then thought well reasonably that most of us nowadays so interested in these topics have heard of when we think of atheism or here the word atheist and we think of these writers so it's reasonable for the reader a potential reader to know what I think of them and how I assess them so I devoted the first of the seven types of atheism I discuss in the book to the so-called new atheism or this although there's almost nothing new in it and nothing I think at all interesting it's essentially a recycling of not certain 19th century atheist arguments which are arguments against Christian monotheism so the reason I wrote the book was to argue that on the basis of history really the history of ideas is that there be many types of atheism historically even in modern times and there are many types of religion and the idea that there is a binary choice between atheism religion is a parochial idea it's a parochial in that it really only makes sense within a certain type of Western monotheism but it's also historically parochial because most of the atheism today is framed in terms of a 19th century contest between science and religion the idea was that much better expressed I think in the 19th century them than now was that religions were primitive theories of everything that religions were theories but ill developed theories and that now that we've got science we don't need this earlier corpus of thought but that too is historical so for example if you read what Augustine or earlier Jewish thinkers said of the the Genesis story the Genesis myth they're completely explicit that it shouldn't be read literally they're completely explicit that it's not an account of actual literal events so if you only had a sort of smattering of the history of Judaism and Christianity you would know that at least some thinkers in these traditions have always resisted the idea that religion for them is a type of type of science but that was fought out in some quite interesting ways that debate in the Victorian period in the 19th century and there were very popular books presented by thinkers who held to this view of religions if you go into a discount book shop now you find JG phrase as the Golden Bough does that you know it's selling for about two pounds now but anyway it's still there and he took the view collected lots of what he called the myths of so-called primitive people's that human thought goes through several stages that moves from magic and religion to what he called metaphysics or philosophy and then it reaches the heights of science and by the time we reached the heights of science you don't need religion anymore that was the view which lots of people held in the 19th century and lots of people defended in the 19th century and the savage mind for for for Frazer was the pre scientific mind of the religious mind I mean I've held to what frickin Stein later said in the 20th century about fur so he said phrases account of religion is more savage than the savages he writes about because it assumes that his dealing was a primitive theory to primitive form sighs so what if religion is actually all religions cuz have always been many and always will be many in my view what if there's something quite different from that what if there what if there no more like science than artists like science and I that's the view that I I present in the book so really what the books as I say it's not intended to convert anyone to or from anything it's not in particular intended to convert or persuade anyone to adopt or not to adopt any of the seven types of atheism I discuss although I make my own position clear I'm an atheist myself and I like the last two types and I find the first five types should we go through what the the types of atheism yeah if I can't remember what they are now because some of them are so boring that I can hardly yeah but the first is the so-called New Atheism I've mentioned already Dawkins in Dennett and so forth and my objection to that is really well in one of tenets books he says of course he says I write as an American philosopher and I'm familiar with American Christian fundamentalism but readers constantly generalize now for me that was a sort of red flag so you think religion is a generalization of 20th century American fundamental Christian fundamentalism that's your view religion is it it's astonishingly parochial I mean if you'd only behave if he'd only bother to read the greatest book ever written on religion by a modern philosopher William James the brother of the novelist varieties of religious experience or if we'd read about something about Eastern Orthodox Christianity or Buddhism or Taoism or Shinto or mysticism in the ancient world the cults of Orpheus and Mithras and so on it's a vastly inexhaustibly more complex and rich set of human phenomena and practices than 20th century Christian America American Christian fundamentalism so you can't just generalize but so that was one of my reasons for rejecting the year the first of the seven the second was secular humanism and that's actually sort of more interesting because I was we were talking earlier on about John Stuart Mill he's had been he's having a bit of a comeback now you know back to Mill that'll solve it everything don't have to worry about Russia or China just let's get back to me everything will be all right he's being brought back partly I noticed just recently in the last few days by thing called the heterodox Academy ever heard of it any of you it's it's comes it's called the intellectual dark web sounds very similar in if there's an article about them in the New York Times yeah and this one also in it had been there one one or two articles here about it recently as well these are a group of thinkers including Jordan Peterson and one or two of the eight is Sam Harris who's a big American atheist who think that the ideas ideas are so heavily policed now they want something really radical hints mill no radical Miller's but Mill is interesting here for the second type of atheism which is secular humanism because I think in many ways he is the almost perfect embodiment of the liberal strand in secular humanism I mean one of the points I make in the book is that most atheists nowadays are liberals of one kind in another but that's not always been the case historically speaking there's no close connection between atheism and liberal values I mean it's a good question where do a theist get their values from well historically that they've been a very wide range of atheist moralities Marx was a socialist as we know so it was bakunin some kind of idea of cooperative human labor and human solidarity that was the key thing but Nietzsche hated Christianity because it embodied what he called the the slave virtues in terms of book sales the most influential 20th century atheist is a in Rand no doubt about it it's also the only one that even in the 21st century continues to have a political influence a significant political influence in pain rather extreme individualist capitalist yeah I mean I guess you've all heard of you've heard of a one way or another I wanted to disciples and American Cup in the present British government but I won't mention their names but in Rand thought that an atheist morality was about selfishness she wrote a book called the virtue of selfishness auguste comte the French early 19th century French thinker who invented what's now what he called the religion of humanity were she coming humanity rather than God as the Supreme Being and a tremendous influence in Britain George Eliot the novelist John Stuart Mill many others were deeply influenced by this thought the key of a key element of a of an atheist murad he was altruism which was the word he invented he invented that very word so some think it's altruism something plagerism in the late 19th century was racism and early 20th century because pretty well many most of the secular humanists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century up to and including the early Julian Huxley in this country thought there was a hierarchy of racial types in the world and you don't have to ask yourself where we figured on that do you we meaning in this context why in colonial American Excel we were of course on the top didn't have to think very deeply to to find that he retreated from that when Hitler came along and showed what happens when you apply these theories but that was in the late nineteenth century many prominent atheist HG Wells a writer I think it's a really profound writer in many ways was an out-and-out racist in some of his non fictional books including one written in published rather in nineteen nineteen 1902 called anticipations when he says well what will happen to all these brown and other colored people says well they're backward this the world isn't a charitable institution they'll have to go now you can't get much more and that was published by the rationals Press Association so broadly speaking atheism has in modern atheism has gone with many different varieties modern humanists secular humanists usually absorb the the the morality of their circle in their time and take it for granted but there's no necessary connection between atheism this in mill middle is sort of really interesting here I just make one kind of digression here it seems like it a good aggression for a number of reasons first of all he was brought up in a secular environment his father didn't teach him Christianity he was brought up to assume that that was all rubbish of course he lived in a Victorian culture so which was saturated with Christianity couldn't escape that but he was brought up in a secular environment and one of the reasons Mill is interesting to me as a former mill scholar who spent 25 years of his life moving away at Mill in an earlier life of my own is that he gives us one of the first recorded histories of a secular crisis of faith a bit like the secular crises of faith which happened in the 20th century to communists like Arthur Koestler and others I mean there's a whole group of twentieth-century writers who treated communism as a religion were explicit about this and then went to various dark nights of the soul when it turned out to be different from they expected Mills earlier and for him the wasn't of course communism at that time it was a form of meteor ISM that say the caliber belief in the gradual improvement of the human law by human effort and and human reason which it inherited from his from his father the belief as he puts it himself in man I'm using the Victorian term because he used that as a progressive species humans are a progressive species now if you read the Autobiography ii fascinating document he says that in his early life i think it was about eighteen he had what would now think i was a catastrophic depressive breakdown he couldn't he couldn't sort of right he couldn't do anything much but he went through the motions who went around sort of doing things but he was inwardly submerged in depression and the reason he gives for this is to me very interesting it's charming but it's deeply interesting he says that he was plagued by the thought of the of the exaust ability of melodies now what does he mean by that he was plagued by the thought a nightmare if you like if determinism that all the tunes that could ever be invented one day be used up so you'd have a world in which there be no new tunes this was kind of high end neurosis but it's also that if anyone doesn't have any pop music reason why do you see it might just be repetition of previous students that would be his nightmare now this is kind of very very interesting in many ways because it connects with an element mill brought into liberalism country to Pinker country to all these people romanticism and liberalism have been closely associated radisson isn't necessarily counter enlightenment in this sense and especially in mill in that mill who pot got himself out of the depression partly by reading poetry Wordsworth Coleridge and German European poetry for mill he came to believe that life wasn't really authentic or valuable unless it had something original in it each life you had originally been bringing into the world something that hadn't been there before and I think this has been a very powerful element in liberalism especially now I mean the ideas are each of lives their own lives as we get better we don't kind of assimilate to a common pattern of good of life as you might have believed in the days of Aristotle I mean if all the people in the world got better and better and better because they'd only be women and they would only be Greek except then they'd only be people who owned property so there might not be that many of them but if they all got together and got better and better and better they become more alike I think whereas Mel didn't think that at all although he'd read Aristotle in the Greek when he was under ten years old because his father had forced him to learn Greek when he was only three or four or five years old he thought that a good life meant a life which was unique and original in certain key respects which is a new element which he took from romanticism because the romantic artists and painters and poets thought they were bringing something new into the world anyway he has this nightmare there won't be anything new and then he asked the question which is a wonderful question he see yeah of our progress he doesn't ask in the way that people now do about the existence of progress it's very like asking it has the same psychological meaning in my rest of the existence of God if you say no then the meaning collapses from lots of people lives it's exactly the same it isn't a skirt too intelligent already he just didn't didn't occur to him what he asks is he says if all of the reforms and forms of progress that I want are achieved if they're all achieved and although he thought there were periods of regress he thought it might be in one at that time he thought progress would continues never really doubted progress in that sense but he said if all of the forms of progress that I want are achieved will I be happy he said a resounding no arose in my breast this so this is interesting so in although the world progresses just the way he wants it to and and he thinks of man human to human animal as a progressive animal even though all still he won't be happy fascinating he got out of the depression he says and I believed him because he was a very honest writer when he read a French North French memoir by a French writer called Marmont el and he got out of depression in when he read the chapter describing the death of mom and tells father it's suddenly I began to feel again suddenly I began to have now since he'd been subject by his father to this terrible educational experiment forced to learn Latin and Greek when he was over 3 not but didn't go to a school he sat next to his father for years on end while his father was working it was instructed by him I don't think you have to be Freud to see that there might be it might be but the key thing is it's a description of a loss of secular faith say in fact he was he's the liberal second he's a liberal secular you talk about in terms of crisis of faith and one of the arguments of the book is that although a secular humanist who doesn't believe in God like Jace mill had abandoned Christianity or never even had it in the first place still the same sort of ideas of yeah humans being the center of things yeah progress of humanity are still yeah very much part of that so they would so what it mean what have you got you've got an idea of history I mean an idea of history and mill and other secular humanists liberal or not liberal which is that other animals have no history we do in other words this human exceptionalism which is distinctively not just religious but what a theistic it's not actually found in the same way in other religions other religions I mean supposing Darwin's theory had been discovered in China or Tibet or India I think it were or Japan it would have made less of a noise who'd be less extraordinary to them because it would have what what why it was so what one of the reasons it was so controversial in the 19th century in Britain was that it suggested that the difference between humans and other animals other animals was much less than it'd been assumed there was a categorical difference between humans and other animals according to monotheism we have immortal souls they don't we have freewill they don't and we have a universal history which they don't in which we put in which we advanced in which we progress as a species now I pointed out that not all cultures have had that view of history the ancient Greeks the Romans the ancient historians do could at least notice they don't write that way the write about history almost in the way that they write about the natural world civilizations begin they grow up they have a spring they have a summer which they flower there's a lot of advance in the civilization this heart this progress the science knowledge trade and peace they get up to about August and then they begin to decline they begin to do an autumn rich mellow autumn followed by winter and then death the civilization dies and some later civilization comes some time they say very common view and in the ancient world now found intolerable but I think true but that wasn't the view that that mill had he had the view which he took as you say chamois from monotheism which was that there was a universal history of the species in which the species itself because the species was supposed to be progressive in a way that no other animal is or was the species was advancing and what was gained was not lost you see in the ancient world view there were plenty of periods of progress or let's say improvement of advance but what was gained was they thought inevitably lost you could it he said whatever is gained is lost why is it lost because the human animal doesn't change very much it gets more knowledgeable gains more technological power so you would call it it's essentially the same so it loses what it's gained what what has been gained it's not that there's no improvement or that one can't tell you what a good society or better society from a worse society the ancients for that and I do too actually it's that what has gained is is inevitably Mill didn't didn't think that mill thought that there would be again just irrelevant to live just relevant to the present edition of prospect in his on Liberty published in 1859 the same years Darwin's Origin of Species although male makes no mention of it in any as far as I know in any of his writings it didn't penetrate to him the revolution of thought like that but not entailed he wrote without that with that in mind but in his in his on Liberty in 1859 the influential text now these new heterodox thinkers bring it back is the kind of biblical text almost of secular humanism he says he's afraid that the progress of his own day the advance of his own day will slow down and we'll end up he said with Chinese station airiness interesting Friedman term today in other words we'll end up stuck like the Chinese were he thought in it at that time you wouldn't sort of now not many of you would think of Europe is being convulsed by dynamism while the China is locked in the stationers yes I thought he was afraid and a current issue of prospect is all about talk about that about China and it's not only its economic growth but also it's sort of cultural intellectual sort of influence and maybe as a sort of model for a different way of doing things that may well be the case in the future you talked a little bit about sort of technology and you have faith in technology and then just moving on to the sort of another kind of atheism the sort of faith in transhumanism or a techno utopianism the idea that machines are going to solve all our problems and we don't need ideas of God at all but even those seem to be invested with metaphysical faith then well even with religious language I mean if you read Ray Kurzweil who is one of the prophets of transhumanism in in the United States and is now director of engineering at Google so he's not a marginal figure he has large resources at his disposal to realize his projects if you read his writings you find talk of a singularity and if you come across that phrase it means a point in history which he he's dated now I think it's 940 sorry mm 42 or 2043 I can't remember cuz it gets steadily closer as he gets older but at at at that point all the advances of knowledge that are going on in different fields and disciplines he thinks will come together and create an opportunity for human humor humankind or at least some human beings to become godlike in particular to escape death not just to live longer as most of us do now than in previous generations of human beings but to escape death altogether not by having themselves frozen as an earlier generation of Californian and motorists who I met in the 1980s did but by uploading their minds into cyberspace where they will be somehow immune from mortality he really thinks that this is possible I guess are a number of things you can say about it one is if it is a very religious vision I mean when he talks about a singularity it's very like the apocalyptic events that occur in monotheistic religions a kind of Second Coming type of event but it also has the type of thinking offers some of the same benefits that monotheistic religions have offered monotheistic religions have offered immortality at least to immortality in paradise at least if you're enough of a believer in maternal mortality in hell if you're if your sinful [ __ ] or not earlier but immortality not all religions by the way were so keen on immortality it's interesting that the Greek gods are represented sometimes as envying humans for their mortality they were bored up there on on Mount Olympus they found the boredom of immortality intolerable and when they intervened in the world it was to relieve their boredom let's stir up a few wars down here not much has happened for the last 10,000 years let's stir up some catastrophic events down there which is a very different vision of course from monotheistic visions in which a benign God intervenes somehow or other to produce it in a benign result but the offer is of of immortality through technology now my objection to that is not that technologies can never produce these extra in produce extraordinary results I mean we just don't know what I'm old enough to remember the world without photocopy photocopies after all think let alone the Internet or virtual reality they're all advancing enormously the reason is different the reason the reason I think it's nonsense for this vision is that they're twofold first of all the the the the the structures that create the virtual world in which a mind could be uploaded are all depended on physical a physical basis of computers and networks and that kind of thing and they can be damaged or destroyed in wars economic collapses great depressions terrorist incidents and so on so you could be sort of snuffed out you're floating about in your infinite world with maybe half a dozen or four or five hundred different bodies if you've been uploaded and suddenly it's all switched off because the network's been blown up or by the other reason it's not what projected up there is at least for me it's not obvious that it is a human mind it's just a kind of spectral app that floats about is it really as it were kurtzweil or some virtual shadow of Kurtz while up there it's a poignant question because Kurtz while himself has said has been interviewed as saying one of the reasons he's into this is that he he wants to create an app of his father his dead father so that he can communicate with his father and he thinks if he puts enough information in the app his father can tell him things that he's never told him before which is possible if the information can be algorithm din such a way that it produces new results but my response to that is it's very like 19th century an early 20th century spiritualism except that it's not clear that there's anything there in the sense of an unconscious this is what's called the Turing problem some of you may know about that Ridge it's not clear what they consist a kind of shadow is just a kind of virtual shadow floating about but it appeals to the same same some of the scene same needs that motivate religious religion among us which is the shock of bereavement the shock of loss which comes with bereavement which for many people is worse than the shock of knowing they're going to die soon there are many people who say Mohammed don't really care whether I said I'm not even welcome it but a horrified by the loss I think this so I think this the loss of a loved one if I through death so I think this it's the same so that it's saturated not only by religious concepts like the singularity which is a bit like the rapture in American fundamentalist Christianity a materialist version of the rapture but it's also saturated with the same needs that Western monotheism suffers so but they don't see this partly because they're deeply attached to these projects but partly because they like pretty well most people who write on religions and atheism or technology now they haven't read the history of religion or the history of film atheism and the worst thing of course is that Facebook will actually be able to then read your mind completely and then just sell you ads based on that maybe sell you posthumous ads I mean you might be up there floating about and suddenly find ads sort of come down for half an hour and we'll sell you this well he's working for Google that must be the longtime plan I mean well there's also the question that if if lesser technologies of immortality I mean ones which don't if if other technologies of the firm deliver maybe not the immortality but an indefinite lifespan indefinitely long nice but unless they're very cheap and Esther she was aspirin are now they're going to have to be rationed who do the rationing and this I mean already in London I think the the difference between bars can be nine years of life so expected life span between poorer and richer richer boroughs I'm not an expert at something like that in the future we could imagine it could be 90 you'd be the Silicon Valley elites living you know four or five hundred years most of it in full health but I sort of vast science fiction like in the land of people struggle along till the ninety with the last thirty years with poverty and illness quite easily imaginable could even happen I think he's quite quite feasible but there's a final point about transhumanism witches that if these new technologies are used to create or fashion a human being superior to act the actual normal run of human beings so that's the purpose of them which are some of them is who decides what's better I mean for example Trotsky who's a very cultivated man in many respects who were well-read he wrote pamphlet on this in the 20s and he says we need to apply new psychophysical methods he meant he meant something like Californian transhumanism then new to produce a higher species said the whole of humor humankind can eventually be like Marx Shakespeare or Aristotle kind of just couldn't have noticing they're all men but anyway put that aside and they're all Western Europeans so you know who decides what's better are you better if you're thinner quicker more beautiful what's the standard of beauty are you better if you have a higher IQ whatever that means how do you I mean how do you measure any of these things and who gets to choose well in practice maybe it'll be resolved by different groups developing different superior species I mean if it ever comes to that if cloning works and if robotics can generate to various kinds of Android type cybernetic quasi humans presumably that technology will be adopted the way video technology or Internet technology been adopted to be adopted by governments big corporations cults terrorist organizations and criminal organization purposes so lots of different types of human beings will be developed and there's some historical power over evidence for this as its it's been reported that Stalin was interested in developing a superior type of soldier which for him meant one that needed less food less sleep and was less compassionate even in Holland normal human soldiers were so he commissioned a man who in the Czarist period had been a horse a horse race develop in horse breeder to look into this and this man collected according to the stories I think it's substantially true the collected our gangs and various eighths from Africa and also used what were describes as volunteers from the gulag and try to make them and produce because didn't work because they didn't even have the technology didn't know enough about it about about genetics but it's interesting because what he wanted what he wanted was a higher type of soldier so in fact if this knowledge comes into the world if these technologies really work they'll be used by the human groups that's called them in the world for their various purposes whatever their purposes are we profit domination war war war like purposes beauty let's make some of the my tour and it but also they also probably used for what most of us would think would be benign purposes like reducing or removing inheritable disabilities so that people even suffer for them and so that people will have longer lives but what is the what authority has any particular understanding over of a superior human being God and who and how is it to be implemented it requires the use of power in other words power over other human beings so it seems to me that as you go through the burgh and you're not only assertive critique and both rocks religions or what we would think of a sort of monotheism monastic religions but also other kinds of belief systems which are a sort of pseudo religions yes pretending that they're not really religions at all but I wonder whether the persistence of the idea of religion or pseudo religion is actually something that's quite important in human history in that we're always trying to let's think of it in terms of stories you know we are telling ourselves stories about the way the world works and there's a certain narrative and that gives us an away of organizing this chaotic world so in a way if we were to take away all sense of there being a narrative story beginning and middle and end what will we have to hold on to well I tend to think that religion is like sex as it was for Freud I mean Freud's innovation if you like was to say sex is ubiquitous it permeates all of human life even the parts or maybe especially the part it's not supposed to and I think religions like that not monotheism monotheism is a particular local cult or group of cults the prehistory of humankind the the only universal religion has really been was animism I mean all human cultures at one point were practice types of animism which was the belief that the natural world as we would call it it's full of spirits in other words they didn't divide the call they didn't divide the universe or the cosmos or all that existed into two parts natural and supernatural they thought there was just the world nature as we call it and it contained spirits various entities that flitted about camera etc etc and fought among themselves that was a version of that was found in ancient pre-christian European as I mentioned early in Greek and Roman policy ISM but it was pretty well a universal belief formulate your question again so you know so we're just saying that if we see the persistence of these religious beliefs it's about narrative telling we tell stories about the world so how can we do without I don't think we can any more than we can do without sex I was in a event one time in America Christian fundamentalist came up to me and said you know if we could only bring up children properly none of them would want to have sex before they got married so I said one bit skeptical about that now I mean if you think as we all do I think correctly following Freud that sexuality is there from day one that human beings are born sexual beings I mean and that respect from many other animals then that's impossible but there's a similar sort of atheist view which I've heard expressed by already expressed by some of the atheists with some of the communities which is that a children didn't go through a religious education they wouldn't be declined to religion but I think what you've said is closer to the truth which is that if we think of religions in terms of myths not meaning by myths errors but meaning by myths complex structures of imagery and narrative which give meaning to the lives of those who I won't say believe in them but participate in them we live their lives according to them then I think that is an pretty well upon human we're all like that in fact one of the signs that a human being is sort of breaking down is when they can't tell a coherent story their lives I mean there are some people who say well we should give up the idea of trying to tell it queer and sterilizers just see our lives as a kind of group of short stories my friend JG Ballard when I knew him towards the novelist towards the end of his life sometimes used to say that he used to say I remember there are many perfect short stories but no perfect novels and I think that was it I mean his own life was had many extreme in conjunctures and then he was in he was he was a little boy growing up in Shanghai he ended up in a prison camp for a while he survived that he went to Cambridge studied to be a doctor gave that up became a writer and so on and so forth but I think that the the need to tell some sort of story or stories of our lives is not any of our own individualized but even of the lives of people around this is very deep-seated but of course it and if you try and repress it it comes back the way religion the way sex came back among societies that repress sexuality it comes back in bizarre and weird forms so you know when I meet people who say you know religion a thei ISM had nothing to do with Soviet Communism or Chinese Mao is and that wasn't the atheism that was just something completely different in one sense what they say is true because in and of itself atheism is a small thing it's negative anyone is an atheist I would say in this sense I'm an atheist certainly who doesn't need the idea of God as a crater God a crater God created the world fashioned be a kind of divine mind you're an atheist you just don't need it notice I don't say believing I'm trying to avoid the language of belief because I think most religions apart from bits of Christianity and bits of other monotheism's have not been religions of belief in the sense that there are propositions there all articles as the Anglican Church the 2999 when I was 29 or 39 I think it's 29 so you can believe me so I can I can really subscribe to 15 but not 29 that was why the great Victorian moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick by the way resigned his fellowship in Cambridge he said I forget how I don't if you ever said which are the ones he couldn't believe in he said I can't believe them all concept can't sign up to the more some resigning he was taught don't be silly none of us believes them have another port but even he was a very he was a very he was a very conscious man so he most religions most religions aren't like that but an atheist is just so one sense of atheism is a very kind of small thing but another sense it's a very big thing because if what you think you've gotten rid of theism in your mind by giving up belief in giving up any idea or rejecting any idea of a Creator God the rest of your thinking is still shaped by monotheism and even if it's not shaped by monotheism you have this in this need which may be a pan human need may be a generic or human need to tell your life in terms of some overriding story not necessarily a story of all humankind but a story which others can participate can participate in and that will that will emerge one way or the other so it will emerge as it has done repeatedly in the 20th century when atheism has assumed the form of an organized movement and that movement or a version of that movement is seized power in a state it'll emerge in the stories told by bye-bye that that's dick by the way I was once I generally don't debate atheists and so on but I was once at a public meeting where there were some atheists and one atheist got up and said it's actually nothing to do with so in totalitarian US and the Soviet Union absolute nonsense not a lady at the back of the got up and said well my mother I'm Ukrainian she said spent 40 years of her life working in the Institute of scientific atheism it definitely did have something to do with the Soviet Union and if you look by the way on on the Nightbeat of the cathedral despair you look at the on the on youtube on the web you can find a video of the soviet union blowing up the blowing up the cathedral or odessa as they did over many parts of the soviet union so for they may be certainly they wanted to clear the ground as before them the French Revolution is a Jack Russell and the jackman's did they wrecked churches and and graveyards and so on in order that they could get rid of this religion but in the jacobins had what they had a religion of reason they had an empress of reason the soviet union had eventually dialectical materialism and various other forms of quasi religious thinking which then collapsed and now there's been a massive resurgence of Orthodox Christian Christianity there so I agree with you there is a very deep-seated fact I would almost say that the perennial human problem is to satisfy this need without including other people in your stories because none of us wants to be included in the someone else's story performing a role that we haven't adopted and we particularly don't want if you figure in their story as some demonic figure that has to be removed so that the in a way the trick of toleration what toleration the old-fashioned liberal practice was was to somehow live with other people whose stories were very different from your own and who didn't impose their story on you and that you didn't impose their story on them but that's a very unfashionable view nowadays though I won't say any more about it just at the end of the book you talk about kind of atheism Oh God I fear stinkers who you feel more of an affinity with and who you feel like have more to say to you what I found so interesting was that it almost comes full circle because um for example Spinoza is one of the ones he talked about and his idea of a sort of deity in nature which he proves by mathematical principles is you know could could could quite easily be described as being quite religious and so many but he's been described as a God intoxicated atheist because the term he uses his God or nature and even thought he could demonstrate by the use of pure reason that there couldn't be a Creator God so by my original I wouldn't say definition but elucidation of water an atheist was he was nicest all there was was whatever there was which was one vast eternal infinite substance of which he was part and I have great admiration for the way he lived his life according to that and and for his courage but I'm not a spin assist in that sense because I don't think one can find out what the world is like by the use of pure reason I mean he was he was part of his time in that many thinkers at the time thought that the key of to understanding the universe was mathematics they inherited not so much from Christianity or from Judaism but from Plato if you like you go back far enough the idea that the structure of the world was eternal and so the closest you could get to it was through truths that were eternal which are mathematics a modern thinker by the way spent the first 40 odd years of his life struggling to do that was Bertrand Russell you see described himself as a mathematical Platonism I spent the early part of my life by John Stuart Mill's godson the early part of my life searching for God through the through mathematics and then he gave it up because he found that he thought in the end these mathematical truths which is tautologies they didn't actually necessarily describe anything in the world so I admire I admire him very much Spinoza but I don't kind of share his view other thing as I discussed the two other atheist if you like one is a Spanish American philosopher who died in 1950s George Santayana nobody reads him nowadays but he's a wonderful stylist but also I think a rather profound philosopher he was educated in in Harvard he William James I mentioned earlier was teaching in the same Department they hated each other James described something as philosophy is the perfection of rottenness because santiana didn't think there was any overall purpose of things as soon as santiana could afford he left America never came back never took any in academic post for the rest of his life lived as long as he gave most of his money away became richest by writing a best-seller but give most of it away and then lived up lived in expensive hotels and then when he got older went into a nunnery spent the last never believed never subscribed to any belief in Christianity at all two days before he died he was asked whether there was in pain he said yes sir physical pain but no moral pain at all just to make sure that he wasn't converted that the last minute died he's a great philosopher he describes an atheist immaterial tremendous admirer of Spinoza as I am but didn't share his mainly because he thought Spinoza took for granted that the world had a rational structure no logic in a way captured a structure in the world he said that might not be true there might just be a byssus SERDES in a sense of absurd I think that true just an act of faith to assume that's not true he lived there and died the other person very different is not a philosopher but for a while close friend of Bertrand Russell's in a correspondent of his Joseph Conrad the writer completely different personality had a very adventurous life who's a gunrunner at the age of eighteen took part in a attempt to topple the Spanish government of the time spent 20 years as a seaman and his view of his atheism was an atheism without progress and without the idea that humanity should be worshipped or even revered he thought there were many admirable features in human beings and he found the most admirable maybe it had something to do with this life is a seaman when human beings are up against odds they know they can't overcome a seaman who's in a tremendous storm knows the storm can't be controlled knows the sea is infinitely greater than anything from the seaman can can muscle muscle up but there are brave and courageous ways of dealing that with that and the things that the kind of vert the kind of goodness or that you or human virtue that Conrad admired I think was one in which you means assert themselves against fate even if they know they can't overcome it they assert themselves not just individually because but even in work working communities and other other communities and I I share that view and if you want to find - look at how many expresses it's mostly in correspondence with Bertrand Russell and fascinating letters back and forwards between the two Russell's sort of in his own description fell in love with Conrad named his son Conrad Russell the next Lord Russell the historian after Joseph Conrad with Conrad's agreement Conrad didn't reciprocate the love I don't think he was a rather austere figure in many ways but they did have they did have exchanges from which Russell developed the kind of liberal humanism as a service day he was in China he said the solution for China is international socialism that's a solution Kahn right Conrad writes back I don't think anything like that really amounts to very much anywhere there'll be all kinds of convulsions and chaos and will be brave human beings and courageous human beings but there won't be anything like international socialism as you describe it Russell and it was never resolved between them but I think Conrad is another one so there are and there and the other final type of atheist made my the seventh is what I call the atheism of silence which is a type of atheism which is maybe not so far from certain types of negative theology what's called apophatic theology which is common in the more calm more commonly its present you know many Christian traditions but it's quite strong and even orthodoxy which is a God is not only incomprehensible there is something but also ineffable language doesn't work with that and if you go back into the 20th century in 19th century you find philosophers who are definitely atheist shaman how is one another was someone called Fritz Mountain er who appears in the history of philosophy only in a dismissive sentence in picking Stein's track TARDIS this is what I think but not in the way of mountain er that's much for any additional he's God I've been trying to bring him back for years get a bit more recognition for him Samuel Beckett though hat mounters books at his bedside for 20 or 30 years so some another non-believer obsessed with religion certainly a non-believer certainly a non-believer the Sun shone down it had no alternative you know that's the nothing the Becket Ian the baquette Ian expression well there's there's exchange minutes you know between a ham and clovers emit the bastard he doesn't exist oh yeah not yet there's also the one I like the best which I use knowing yet when Fukuyama when I grew up my first piece against rookie Armour and the autumn of 1989 from Beckett and Becket has the phrase as the good the end again it's a rather powerful criticism of Fukuyama but so there is this final type of atheism which which is a very radical skeptical atheist which says that really actually the world itself is ineffable we can use language to get a kind of handle on it a pragmatic handle on it science and so on and even religion still cannot handle essentially we've we don't know anything of all over the world and that may be not so different from certain types of negative theology although there is a difference of course which is that at least in some of its traditions most of them actually Christianity has the idea of God as being involved in human struggles kind of almost that God can suffer our sorrows and enjoy our try of triumph but actually many types of deity haven't had those characteristics and quite a few have been impersonal I mean a modern one which is expressed I mean much of the best most imaginative thinking of this has not incurred among philosophers or theologians but in among artists recent one which I've always found very haunting maybe worth any gone but some of you is seen I don't know how many of you seen the original Russian version of the film Solaris do you know that film yeah now you remember what that's about it's about a whole planet covered by water and the water seems to be intelligent and that can enter into human the human mind that can kind of play with it the trouble is it seems completely playful inhumanly playful it doesn't try and sort of guide people on to a better life it toys with them in the most horrific ways if it feels like it and because that's it and actually when you look at many types of deity that have been developed in the history of religion some of them have that feature so if you go back one of the great books of on this subject is a book by the Oxford classicist died in the late 70s from I knew briefly in the late 70s er Dodds you wrote a book fascinating man psychic research a classicist supporter of the Irish revolutionaries very unpopular in Oxford because of that and a fascinating man and he wrote a book called pagans and Christians in the age of anxiety based on lectures looks kind of dry and Scully but isn't it's which it's wonderful and energy says if you go back to the ancient world you'll find that Christianity emotions come mains males males strong this kind of turmoil of people finding looking for some meaning in their lives realizing that maybe their civilization was beginning to kind of crumble a bit though it took centuries before it collapsed and looking for some kind of way out of this and Christianity emerged from all this budget almost by chance could have been could never have emerged we might have had Mithra is more autism instead or if it had a mo might have emerged in a different form it could have been a form of Gnostic Christianity could a form of Christianity which that would shown the God that rules the world is not the real God but what's called a Demiurge I've got the real God has lost interest or as David Hume put it in one of his essays the real God might be a child or a sin out human being like us in our mind creates the world never forgets about it or positively mischievous or positively playful so there are many possibilities and that's what the book is really intended to do not to carry on the dull boring in stultifying god debate but to open it up too many wider possibilities thanks very much John I want to open it up now to all of you and so anyone who wants to ask a question just put your hand up and we will bring the microphone to you so lady go hello and big global movement for sustainability certainly I work in the in a bank I won't say the name cuz they won't find out but where there's a really big focus on sustainable finance and it almost feels a bit like him bit like a bit cultish but I don't know where would that fit into what you're saying should I into one by one or should we take several let's take a few here Alan so that but we take take a say first among young there um I just want to make a couple of quick comments um one aspect of your um thinking that I don't think you mentioned too much in this book but elsewhere definitely is the incurable nature of this kind of millon millenarian thing and the tendency towards universal projects um as reminded of this recently when I was reading an interview with someone who was a self-described IRA nest quietest pragmatist Richard Rorty not long before he died during the Iraq war in fact where he says an interview somewhere um if the lifestyle of the Democratic West could be replicated on a global scale the destruction of local cultures would be a small price to pay I thought that was fascinating from someone who is no kind of utopian or a Universalist the other one I might actually have dreamed this I hope not but it was Kurt's file I think he was recently asked does God exist and he said not yet I think he did say that there you go yes and we've got sustainable thinking and should I answer those I'll get yeah let's do those let's do those two and then we'll come sustainability I mean I've always been sympathetic to various aspects of green thinking but you know one of the key problems that it faces is that of any other Universal project which is who's going to implement it it's an agency problem I mean one of the features of but it's a deeper problem than that because one of the features we inherit here in the post Christian West from monotheism is the idea that the human species is a collective acting agent the human species does things and even someone like you Volare I mean we might have read his books some of you home odious and sapiens I very much like the early I mean I appeared an event with him and I'm admire that particularly the first book the second book I don't admire as much because it contains things like humanity sets itself big projects and then it realizes them and having realized it goes on to other ones well you know it's there's some committee meets somewhere and what you do now we've reinvented the wheel surely there's more to it than that we've mastered fire we've got a twist we've got got the internet now humankind the human animal doesn't do anything any more than any other biological species does the only empirical reality the only observable reality is multis the multitudinous human are human animal which has many groups many ways of life and even within each individual contains many conflicting tendencies and values every single one of us is a theater of conflict like that so you can't doesn't do anything so when I hear grain sing well we will do this you know we will do that it's always good well who's we people in the room if you can get agreement in the room you probably won't is it a group of countries but what if one of them then opts out the way Trump is opted out I mean then they might well we've gone without them well if it's a really big country with a big effect on the climate it's not gonna happen it's like you me who does this as a way so this tremendous problem I think it's actually a very profound problem what I think will happen will be and depends on your view of the science of this and I'm not a scientist so I can't comment although I've been much influenced by my friend who is a great scientist Jim Lovelock James Lovelock the science has various kind of possibilities of what can happen over the next couple of centuries under different scenarios in most of them all but the most cataclysmic I think human animal which will do what it's done before and will adapt that's what will really happen because what's missed out from the idea that there can be a global human response is war geopolitics the struggle for resources I mean one of the tip offices what happens to the poles especially where there are masses of deposits of if you want to know what's going to happen watch the emerging geopolitical struggle over sub-sub aqueous oil and the struggle for various rare minerals which are found there I mean my prediction is kind of rather bleak but it's that the good guys will turn out to be not so good that's the sake countries like Canada and Denmark you know kind of gleaming but wait till there's a struggle close to them what will happen they'll compete just like the rest so will adapt and you can see that as a glue meeting or you can see it as I to do as the human arm is very sturdy if the worst scientific prognosis are correct I actually don't think we know Lovelock told me he says we actually don't really know we're relying on models that can tell us something but aren't really fully accurate I mean you're not respect they're like economic models they can't predict it it's a very nonlinear process climate change is that if the worst then it was very difficult to adapt but we will I don't expect the human species to become extinct is there a bright side well maybe the polar bears will have brown bears instead I think that is that is no it's not but that is what will happen if you know if of course they won't all perish immediately if the process goes on for a while so I think in one sense to be sustainability's an illusion and another sense it's what you know what happens anyway because we adapt Rorty well I had a public exchange with royalty about 15 years or so ago charming man very generous spirited but with a religious sensibility were very strong one of the points where we disagreed it was a public discussion here in London was he said isn't press freedom sacred no it's very important sacred sacred why do you have to make it sacred and the source of the point that his version of improvement you don't have to be a utopian or a revolutionary did is to accept the destruction of many of things you could just be a progressive melius that says they're someone who believes in incremental improvement so he thought that it was possible if you told just someone told the story of liberal humanism liberal democracy compellingly enough then the rest of the humankind would take it up he actually mentioned this at the seminar I was taking part in and at the end of it someone got up in the back and said well we aren't persuaded so I thought and I think one of the problems of Rorty it's like most liberal academics at least is they haven't met an intelligent on liberal I mean the liberal the non liberals they talk about our is sort of what they see is unwashed Trump supporters than ignorant creationists and and so on but if you if you go back in 20th century history and look at writers and thinkers who led a more dangerous life than most academics do nowadays one of my favorites not that it was in all respects a wonderful human being he wasn't but one of my favorites is Arthur Koestler he traveled all over Europe when he was working underground for the Comintern he talked to Nazi intellectuals he wrote a book which he fictionalized these experiences called arrival and departure still in print and these were extremely intelligent people but early horrifying there were people who were soaked in European culture they'd read Nietzsche they'd they read the science of the day they they knew a lot of history there were super intelligent people but they were also completely monstrous now I don't say that I don't say well be better off if we've met a lot of people like that oh we don't have to would be better we met a few because you then won't believe that by telling a wonderful story a rosy eight story of liberalism to about you you'd persuade people you won't persuade lots of people and also there are a lot of people who won't give you time to tell the story they'll blow you over kill you beforehand before you get the chance or take your glasses off glasses on and stamp on them which plenty of times in in interwar Europe and then during the period which nearly all of Europe was occupied by the Nazi so my criticism of him and I liked him a lot was that he had a kind of vague humanistic religiosity which he thought just by being described would be very infectious unfortunately maybe that kind of religiosity isn't very infectious hate is more infectious and spreads and consolidates itself much more easily but the bottom line of that was that having lived his entire life in a an American academic community he'd never met a highly intelligent not liberal or anti-liberal I think that's a terrible weakness because I think they're quite a few in the world now should we just take a couple two maybe two questions together and then we'll have to go to that lady there and that gentleman there so we'll get both of you thank you you mentioned him early on and how would you account for the popularity of entered him this psychologist Jordan Peterson oh yes yes yes or you who's a he was very keen on young and also Christian morality but yet calls himself an agnostic and my question is up based on you know the seven types of atheism that you've mentioned and I know you one of your heroes is a shop Noah mmm and and um see I can do you think that if you go by your world Harry's book and a bit of history about you know human beings it's in the last seventy thousand years for example with the cognitive revolution that we started with the fiction that we started creating stories yeah yeah and that's the development of the brain yeah to an extent and and and from there to the development of mind from there yeah which we don't physically see but there is so going by what you've said in ten to seven and going into Schopenhauer for example which he says that as material objects we are manifestation of the Norman or as phenomenon we are manifestation of the nominal and and he calls it energy or will not as in gold but as you as you know it's it energy don't you think each of us are different and we have different energies I'm not talking about energy as the metaphysically energy he mentions in terms of motion but in terms of the will as in nature will tomorrow as in the goal achieving so each of our minds our brains is due to chemical combinations has a different variety different reasoning and different desires so don't you think for example Hitchens for example Christopher Hitchens who I you know like very much died as an atheist for whatever reasoning he had said only thing there are multiple levels of such reasonings and and what's I'm not saying you're saying that is there is any problem with it but why not have those kinds of aspects so why why why are you criticizing these seven different types and don't you think that you like the but last two types because your inherent inclination its toward such energies thank you I'll answer that first I mean because in a sense you're repeating or rephrasing one of the arguments of the book which is that you know reason can take one a certain way reason may be able to eliminate some possible atheism and some possible religions but it'll leave I think a range in the field a large range more than seven and at that point I think the personal inclination does come into it personal experience personal inclination your if you you want to call your personal nature or your personal energy and some people say well you're not telling us what to do or which to adopt you're not giving us a positive message and so on not that's the last thing I want to do it's rather just to illuminate some of the possibilities and then I wouldn't say one chooses a particular one because that implies something which may not be true which is that you make a kind of rational assessment when when the when the crunch comes is when you have a range of options before you and you adopt one maybe because you've got to adopt one and I think that follows usually not from reasonings but from some aspect of your nature so that to that extent I think it's true but just mention one kind of brief thing though which I think you've not touched on the most readers of the book might might might might miss when I say that for example Christianity emerged as I think not being a Christian almost by chance as the dominant religion of the Western world in other words it had been a variety of different chance events a particular Empress hadn't converted if a different Jewish prophet part from Jesus or Yeshua had been dominant or if early types of Christianity which were agnostic in which for example are much more of a role for women than later types did or Saint Paul hadn't demonized sexuality the way he did the religious history of the rest of the West would be completely different from the one it was now that has an interesting consequence which is that religions are chance constructions and that the choices you actually have at any one time any human being assume it's a matter of chance so I have a rational you are the Loney so to speak be some options on the table you might be able to tweak them and generate a new option but your most fundamental beliefs or the beliefs among which you find yourself wavering the different worldviews that actually is a matter of chance in other words our most fundamental convictions are highly contingent the did depend it on on on history on cognitive I just want reef comment on storytelling you know I'm I mean trying to think this very profound feature of human beings but as I mentioned earlier it's kind of a because in a certain way I'm in shock you when I tell you that my next book will be about cats I've already got kind of I've got to do it now I've got a couple of contracts on it one of the features of the new feature pictures that's the most important well absolutely but one of the features of cats as of other animals but particular of cats is I think is that they don't represent their lives or stories it's not true that many people write cats live in an eternal present can't have really lived with many cats they believe that because they always know when 6:30 comes and it's time for their breakfast and they meow loudly until they get it what it is I think it's meant animals are apart from the human animal don't actually tell their lives as stories so they don't need they don't break down so to speak when the stories break down now you might say that's because they have human only humans have had the cognitive evolution that you described over the last 70,000 or 700,000 years though these are how other animals haven't but I wonder I mean might there not be other intelligent beings in the universe that have got our intellectual capacities but not or even much higher than humans are even the highest human beings are and don't tell their lives in terms of stories I mean the grave I mean that's a bit it's all human beings pretty well I think have this need for meaning which they identify with a coherent story or succession of stories but of cause it can also be a weakness because you're exposed to the breakdown of your stories and it also can be a danger because there's a strong temptation as I mentioned earlier to include us in your story even though they don't want to be say what are you you're X are not X I haven't lived by that story well you do from now on I mean that was the history of the 20th century innocence what are you what are you I'm German no you're not you're Jewish so you fit into a different different category which is then demonize a terrible terrible danger and that's the nature I mean if one could say one thing about where humans differ from other animals I think it's it's not in having languages it's not in having culture other animals do that it's not using technologies other animals do that it might not even be though this might come closest in having a consciousness of death or mortality maybe other animals do as well and we don't know anymore than they do if there is anything after death for the conscious human mind it might be that humans alone among the animals are divided against themselves in the sense that they can have desires and wants that they wish they didn't have and that in a sense I think it is the general the universal religious predicament how to make sense of one's life even though humans even though we all to some extent I don't mean sexual it might be anything we might be fearful but want to be courageous we might animals either are courageous or not courageous they don't do they're about it they don't sit back and say I must come up with a principle here what do I do next I must come up with some principle they just do whatever they you know and they're not afraid to be what we would call cowardly so that's my attempt to answer you and just Sophie sure wasn't Jordan Peterson well he's a phenomenon and I'm less dismissive of him than some are because what he's sort of trying to do is to bring back if you like a a type of personal responsibility I mean it's a kind of nearest stoicism I mean it's not right I know he's not a Christian he's not a theist he's an agnostic he says so he's not actually arguing that we can solve everything by bringing back a particular religion or any religion he's trying to rehabilitate type of stoicism but to me the greatest stoic of recent times was Freud and the reason why he's closer to us than I think anything Peterson was said is that Freud is modern in the sense that the ancient Stokes weren't the ancient Stoics thought that humans could and doer their position in the universe and live it honorably if they identified themselves with a logos was a kind of logic in the nature of things which then got absorbed into Christianity in other words there was a kind of met of ordering things so if you ended up a slave Epictetus the stoic philosopher did or if you ended up an emperor as did Marcus really or really is the most gloomy set of encouraging reflections you'll ever find but a great book then you do what fate the universal cosmos the system of things has laid down for you it's given you a portion it's given you something to do in in the world that's stoicism I think one of the problems of bringing back a kind of stoic ethics though I'm attracted to still get sixth in many ways and I think if you're interested in what it is what it was in detail you should read the letters of Seneca where he writes to a young you know wonderful wonderful writes to a young disciple of his on a variety of ethical and moral practical issues including time management by the way you've got a wonderful thing on the shortness of humor which is about time management he has basically time management I agree with this don't fully practice it but his time military it's deciding what's important what isn't important if you suffer from time scarcity because you're doing things you don't you know you think it's not important cut them out that's what he says so it's a wonderful kind of thing but they have an advantage which are modern human being a modern manner wound doesn't have and to which Freud addressed which is that unless you're a Christian or a mystic of some kind we don't believe that there is such a cosmic order not one which is in some sense moral or which by which identifying ourselves with will relieve ourselves of any spiritual suffering or he'll heal ourselves if you if you're a monster there is no such order the last word is chaos and Freud tried to reconcile them trying to develop any because he put it so he put it in everything could it was a humorous writer in a way that some people haven't noticed he said he wanted to replace hysterical misery by everyday unhappiness I'm not maybe a tremendously and I think one could be a bit more positive than that but I I don't find the Peterson recipe completely compelling but I think he's a very interesting phenomenon and one we have to take quite seriously because he's had a tremendous impact speaking of time management and Seneca we have gone a bit over but I'm sure that you'll agree that it was incredibly invigorating an interesting discussion we can carry it on John will be signing copies of the book upstairs as you go up the stairs he'd turn right he'll be just the big des of their signing book so you can carry on chat to him then if you go up the stairs and turn left you can go towards our Garden Room where there's a small drinks reception please do join us for a drink the next two book club events very quickly to say next month we have Henry Marsh talking about the brain brain searching for many years and a lovely brilliant writer as well and then the month after that in July we have Jesse Norman the government minister talking about his new book on Adam Smith and what we can do to save capitalism that should be very interesting as well but finally please express your appreciation to John [Applause]

Channel: Prospect Magazine

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Keywords: John Gray, Atheism, Religion, Prospect, Book Club

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Length: 85min 1sec (5101 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018