Uncertain Minds: What an agnostic can believe - John Gray (Part One)

good evening everybody welcome and if you're new to these events perhaps I ought to just say a little bit about what uncertain minds is intended to be all about this is the third or fourth third in a series of discussions that we're having with prominent people trying to model a different sort of conversation I guess about the relationship between belief and unbelief perhaps a conversation that's that's not caught up in those two binary boo harrah's of culture wars about this subject and we've had a distinguished number of people and we have another one tonight John Gray is well he used to be professor of European thought at the LSE that's right isn't it and in America and various other places but perhaps best known to people as an author of an extraordinary range of I say brilliant books I've benefited hugely from his work on Isaiah Berlin and liberalism and his black mass and straw dogs and recently the immortalization Commission which if you haven't read that you really ought to it's actually fantastic so it's so great to have a John Gray with us how this will work is John will talk for 15-20 minutes and then I'll have a little banter with him for five or ten minutes and then we'll throw it open to the floor and I'll try and moderate some questions well thank you very much Charles for that very generous introduction in one of the books he mentioned I speculated that in an age of secular dogmatism churches might become sanctuaries of doubt and I think this conversations that are being held here suggest that that wasn't an entirely wild speculation but in the spirit of what Giles said about the type of constant of conversations that are being held here I don't want to persuade anyone here of any of anything or persuade them from holding anything that the whole or they any idea they have altogether but rather just to suggest a few thoughts three in particular about the ways in which the categories of thinking we inherit from Christian monotheism shape secular thinking and make it more brittle and dogmatic and I would say also more shallow in many ways than the traditions it draws upon and fact I'll argue that what people talk about secular when people talk about secular thinking or secular humanism or any of these kind of arguments secularity as a more abstract notion is in fact a wholly post-christian way of thinking that unless they've been Christianity unless that been Christian monotheism one couldn't really even talk in these terms at all the notion of secularity means nothing in it seems to me in the Greece of policy ism and Plato and Socrates it doesn't mean anything much really outside monotheism itself and in fact that raises the question which I'll also talk a bit about what religion is at all because there is a view which says that there's no such thing as religion religion is just a sort of variety of different social practices and human engagements with with with nothing at the heart of them I think that's a sort of slightly hyperbolic way of saying something which is true which is that religion is extremely diverse the best book ever written at least by a philosopher on religion is one that so in print William James's varieties of religious experience that's a perfectly wonderful book and not only because most philosophers are obsessional ii secular and they're thinking and theologically illiterate to the last degree that's not the only reason it's an inherent it's a wonderful wonderful wonderful book I strongly recommend you to read it and one of the features of it is says that many different religious moods religion has various different many different or even competing uses and roles in in human life and it's not a kind of primitive version of science it doesn't consist of theories I tend to think myself that even the very ideas of belief and unbelief are ones we should probably discard because they carry with with them the notion that at the core of religion too sometimes a set of propositions or statements some kind of creedal framework which of course is true of some religions including at least in part of its history anglicanism but it's not true of many religions are not even true of large parts of christian traditions that tree is that creature of the heart and all that propositions or beliefs I'm not in general a tremendous reader of peih-gee Woodhouse but towards the end of his life he was into interviewed by someone from the BBC and he's selling one of them wisest things that could be said on these subjects that I've ever heard he was asked by the BBC interviewer a rather good question the question was not what are your religious beliefs mr. Woodhouse the question was do you have any religious beliefs mr. Woodhouse to which PG would have replied frightfully hard to say you know and I think that's terribly good because what it recognizes is the elusiveness of what we call belief what my belief might be or not be in fact it might be used to have a mistaken idea in these contexts produced I think that just my view by the defamation of the tradition which came from Judaism by Greek philosophy by the attempt to marry Greek philosophy in Christian Platonism endures to teen in Christianity in tourism which is of course is a large part of the Western project I think it was a mistake but that's a different story so I haven't had three thoughts to put before were you just thoughts as they are not trying to convince you of them just something which might be interesting to think about about the way in which religion taken as a kind of family resemblance way taken as a kind of network or extended family of practices and categories ways of thinking has shaped secular thinking in our time and I'll begin with reference the only one I'll make tonight to the book I've just published called the motorisation Commission which is about scientific attempts to use science to defeat death to cheat death to circumvent death looks into in particular one in Edwardian England and one impossible Russia and in the one in Victoria in Victorian Edwardian England went on until the 30s there is a sort of slightly fantastical but historically true project was attempted it's almost hard to describe it without making it sound even more absurd than it was the idea was cherished by a number of leading cycling researchers we included Arthur Balfour brother Jared Balfour leading conservative statesman who would be Secretary of State Northern Ireland would give up his political career to pursue the study of the paranormal the idea developed at some point that deceased scientists scientists in the afterlife were using eugenics the science as they thought of it as eugenics to design a messianic child who would appear in the world and bring peace and harmony to a troubled species and that was the idea a child was born the natural child of Balfour's brother and a woman who worked as an autumn autumn artist a medium under a pseudonym she was in fact friend of Lloyd George leading well the leading suffragists and British High Representative the League of Nations later on but her role in all this only came out in about fifty years later and why that interested me is that it's an example of a very specific transposition of categories from monotheism from Christian monotheism to science I mean not all religions have an idea of a messianic figure that's specifically Jewish and Christian idea not all religions have an idea of salvation in time very important point many religions Buddhism and many of its traditions Hinduism see salvation as involving and Platonism in Western traditions and mystical philosophies of platonism and Neoplatonism if they have an idea of salvation which I think they do it's an idea of escape from time or exit from time salvation isn't an event which happens in the history of species or it isn't even a kind of an end of time or an end of history or anything of that kind it's it's it's a an individual it's either it's it's something that can happen at an individual whereby that individual is somehow exempt it from the penalties of time but this idea of a messiah was given a specifically scientific reformulation in the context of this rather fantastic episode in Edwardian psychical research something which wasn't as it were cooked up by just a few crazy people but I mean the people involved in this broad thing they're not in this project specifically but in the broad project around it included Henry Sidgwick thirty years of his life spent on this kind of thing one of the greatest Victorian public intellectuals probably I think the best moral theories better than more interesting more profound than John Stuart Mill Arthur Balfour himself was heavily involved in various points of his life and so on after which Myers various leading scientists Freud for a while sympathetic to various aspects of it so this and the core of it I think was this was the idea that science could replicate some of the like salvific role Christene monotheism had in the past could deliver us from chaos and misery in the world could even produce be used to produce a messianic child and by the way the child who was born it since he had been told very much about his role in life until later on and probably never all he had an interesting life although not a messianic one he grew up went to Cambridge studied philosophy with seedy broad also psycho researcher metric in stein the war came when she did the war he joined the Secret Intelligence Service mi6 where he worked with Kim Philby for a while did it before that after the war part of it in Iraq then British Iraq and then converted to Catholicism he became a monk ins best spent his last decades has a monkey downside and I recently had the pleasant experience of someone walking up to me and said well I met the Messiah you know although I didn't know I was the Messiah when I met him he was teaching me a downside so since then I've met people who he knew nothing of it or not that's not true by then by the time he knew something of it but never all even attempted through mediums to contact his dead mother to find out more and there are some rather strange texts accident about that so the significance of all this is this is a kind of rather extreme example if you like a rather far-fetched nowadays it sounds of science replicating we're not just religious but specifically judeo-christian categories of thinking and particular idea of a messianic figure that can redeem or turn around in someone get transformed history it's not over by any means because if you actually look to 21st century thought there are people like Ray Kurzweil anyone heard of him here he's an American writer a kind of futurist who talks constantly I'm sure he knows no history of religion about something he calls the singularity which is about to happen quite soon within his lifetime by the way know that because he's he's on a special diet which will keep him alive long enough to to experience the singularity and the singularity means an explosive interaction of scientific knowledge as a result of which it will become possible he thinks for humans to achieve immortality by being uploaded into a virtual world of cyberspace and he's actually published a diet book if any of you were interested in living now long so that if one because he thinks it'll happen within the next 30 or 40 years or complete nonsense but we're quite influential we made a lot of money a lot and he's cited with reverence if you understand this by the by leading historians and archaeologists now there's a book called why the world rests why the world will say why the West rules until has ruled until now by an American archaeologist I'm at Stanford one of the leading archaeologists and buried the last 50 pages learn a lot about archaeology in the first 400 pages in the last 50 pages he says well that's all irrelevant now because there's no more geography there's no more biology there's no more East there's no more West we're all going to be here uploaded shortly and then that will all be irrelevant and he comes out with one of the best sentences I think it was kind of best absurdist sentences I couldn't have invented it myself come across he said and first we see he said he says we look back on the magnificent our our magnificent journey from the amoeba to the singularity so we started as a Libra but being discontented with being amoeba occurred to us you might want to be human being so we sort of got involved in the evolutionary competition and eventually emerged as we are but now we're fed up with being human beings because human beings die they have frail bodies they find each other they have wars and terrible conflicts so we're going to be uploaded into a condition where we don't have any of these things so on it's a completely absurd but the kind of exam kind of example of this this kind of thing will never go away in fact one of my theses are just ideas northeast of or my I would put forward for your consideration not that you necessarily need to accept it is this kind of the encrypting of Messianic and other religious ideas into secular thinking because Kurzweil like the psycho switches were loudly secular clinda love left religion in the past is the sort of disorder of our modern culture which is not curable which is not alterable in other words I'm not saying think about in a different way and we can get out of this difficulty it forms it's too deeply rooted in modern ways of thinking the the imprint of religion on secular thought is too profound really to to escape it we can't escape this with all of its absurdities the most that we can do some of us if we're interested is be aware of it and then try and think of more interesting alternatives but it's not something that can in fact be be relevant although I think it's a fundamental error the basic illusion terrible mistake it's not something that we can expect to change and that leads me to my so my first really kind of thought was about the way science and it's kind of course different embodiments in Russia and elsewhere in early Bolshevik Russia and elsewhere the way science its imagined that science can be used by humans too as it were rid the world of immemorial evils if not to bring about you top instead of affairs then at least to March to a better and better kind of state of affairs for the human species all of these kind of ideas seem to me to be trans positions of religious conceptions of of history among other things into secular thought and that leads me to my to my kind of second thought which is that most of many of the political doctrines and not just scientific theories and doctrines but political doctrines of the modern period involve a transposition of a redemptive notion of history now history is a process of moral redemption an idea that history involves that kind of in a sense progressive unfoldment of a moral drama and you'll find this in thinkers who are never exposed to religion for example one thing I spent many years of my life studying John Stuart Mill and they mentioned earlier was brought up in a non holy non religious nathie thought secular of environment bias by his father and yet he we find in Mill as in many liberal writers and also in of course in Marxist writers the idea of human history is a series of successive phases through which societies go starting as it were in unconsciousness terrible conflicts occur tremendous battles and forms of slavery and exploitation and then at some point in the future a higher form of human development arises in which the horrors of the past are left behind so no more wars in the war childrenís no more cruelty no more meaningless historical conflicts and the nature of this key loss in history the nature of this end point of history was differs according to the theorists it might be in Marx it might be communism and Emil it was some form of individualist liberal Society in Friedrich Hayek or Herbert Spencer was lazy fat capitalism later on and Fujiyama or was what he called democratic capitalism but in all of these theories history's conceived of as a a proposal process a process with a direction an endpoint of not necessarily inevitable there's no inevitability in it but if the kind of normal pattern of historical development is toward some moral goal now the interesting thing about that is you won't find that in ancient Greek and Roman historians nothing like that in ancient Greek and Roman historians history's seen as a series of particular episode linked together by chains of cause-and-effect or human action of chance plays a role and so on the the whim of the gods the idea that history sort of seriously sort of going anywhere well that has some overall meaning or that it's in any sense a redemptive process isn't there nor is it in Greek drama with tragic drama is there you have the idea that particular choices or decisions or even someone's character can trigger a whole series of fatal events or fateful events which once triggered can't be stopped and there may be nothing at all redemptive in that process nothing that's another different possibility well then again in in non historic religions which which don't see history is the kind of side of salvation certain types of Platonism of pre-christian mystery religions in the in ancient Europe and also some versions of Buddhism and Hinduism history just got in a sense of dream or succession of dreams and salvation involves waking up as an individual but not as the species and the dream simply repeats I mean that the dominant trope of historical understanding in the pre-christian and non Christian world has always been cycles which repeats themselves and that's a view which I find quite plausible myself so secular thinking I think is completely shaped by by these by what inherited from from monotheism but of course in a way the interesting bits are left out that's to say I mean the difference between say Augustine's view of history and in which there is an underlying providential pattern and these secular theories that Augustine says you can't know it there's a kind of veil between us and God knows of what we don't whereas in the in Marxism and certainly types of liberalism many types of liberalism the ideas that can be known and can even be formulated that the pattern of historical develops this is by the way it's so which I'm tremendously alive today it's not anything at all amiss it's not at all something left behind it is a myth of course is rather silly myths but it's not one that's been left behind I used to know in the 1980s and then some of the neoconservatives in America who were very bullish agitate for the Iraq war and one of their views was that knowing the only thing holding back Iraq from becoming a secular democracy like the United States not that the United States is that secular by the way but not that fundamentalism has no impact at all on public life either that the day I was the only thing I was holding back was a tyrant a tyrant it got rid of the tyrant then it would surge towards its full say the secular forces would be immediately released and if you want to check this look up on the internet with what Wolfowitz said about the shear he said the shear of course had profoundly secular we knew that after what he was relying upon some special CIA report but half any Commission Lord although he was tossed out of the CIA because he tended one has read that when they told him there might not be quite like that you know there might be quite a lot of religious even theocratic no no that's all nonsense they're all basically secular the whole thing it's only tyranny do you get rid of the tyranny and boom you're in the next phase and a very similar idea and I know this to be true was held by Milton Friedman about the former Soviet Union get rid of the Soviet state and you would have free markets because free markets were natural and they were written into the tea laws of human history all human history with tending to produce the global free market so it's deeply rooted this teleological thinking and in fact people cling on to it as a sort of talisman you might say a magic talisman which preserves the meaning of their lives so if your life is bound up with various improving projects if you think that without if you think it without this belief and the project you're interested in might just vanish trickle away we will be replaced by something else or swept the way then it we've got rather depressing for many people and I've had people say well if I thought as you do I wouldn't get up in the morning so I can assure if I will stay in bed a bit longer you might you might find a better reason for getting up in the morning than simply having these these beliefs to avoid depression suggest to you by the way that kind of the underlying state is one of crypto despair because if you didn't have that if you if he weren't so afraid it's not kind of genuine but it's like someone wrote about Jon Stewart bill sorry let me get right John Stuart Mill wrote about religion he said religion in Victorian England he said religion in our time he said from being a straitjacket has turned into a dressing-gown I think that's kind of something in that certainly now I mean the idea that we've sort of got got to believe otherwise form to despair that applies to these secular religion see secular treats their secular projects in other words we didn't believe that the whole world was trending Deford human rights or democracy or the global free market or some other nonsense would fall into despair well the third because I'm going to start now shortly is the third thing I wanted to just talk about a little bit briefly in conclusion that I mentioned it at the start is the idea of salvation and time and I mean in other words the idea of religions is essentially a kind of activist ethical project that what-what the test of a religion is what changes can actually make in the world and can what improvements can be made in the world and I suppose and the way in which religion is I think Western religion has quite a lot of it's been tied up with ideas a world improvement probably at least since Pelagius I mean one of the kind of dominant thinkers I think now although not many people who are shaped by him know his name is I mean there's plague in as it was always regarded as a heresy which is again the idea that only only circumstances or ignorance or oppression hold back the the inherent goodness the inherent advance of the human species palladianism from which a lot of subsequent enlightened enlightenment thinking not all enlightened thinkers thought like this by but the Hobbes didn't Spinoza didn't but later on a Freud didn't but quite a lot of secular thinkers in life secular enlightenment thinkers have taken this this view and of course it raises the sort of secular version of the problem of evil if evil is just error why are human being so fond of error I mean there's a secular kind of see there which is as insoluble a secular problem reverses insoluble or as much of a challenge to the reason at any rate as as in as in Christian monotheism but I want to what what this because close on is that within the broad family of things we describe as religion or thinking office religion it are across many strands which don't have anything very much to do with him transforming the world or improving the world all religions or most religions contain contemplative traditions and all the many philosophies which stand outside Kristin Kristin ba'athism had kept including monotheism proving beans including suits because me Platonism and they are Platonism including the ancient mystery religions including of course Buddhism Hinduism and others have had ideas of the contemplative life which have not been justified although they can be I am aware of that but I would restore eclis have not always been or even often being cashed out I was explained in terms of the value of contemplation to other human beings I'm reminded oh you might think this is rather frivolous but in Russian Christianity in Orthodox Christianity there's kind of a well-known says Severn is to kind of well no distinction between holiness and them all hurt you see I mean in other words a holy person can be kind of morally not very admirable and I came across this you know post-revolutionary to a Russian writer we ended up in Germany marriage cough ski I don't have anything read him but he actually invented a Russian Saint to embody this idea was called keyhole the sordid and keyhole the sordid had the very worst because the pettiest vices gossip nastily about other saints foreign cigarettes didn't give them back made small promises didn't keep them but despite all this he was tremendously holy now I sort of like this myself then because it's actually sort of he was by the way not at all a critic of Russian orthodoxy he was a tremendous admirer of it held to a version a little towards the end of his life very passionately so he wanted to make this kind of distinction between the virtues ethical thirties the practical virtues and holiness and I think that we are one which is sort of alien to the more Western Greek traditions of Christianity and the ones we have today and so one thing which I think sort of deserves recovery in religious traditions not just Christianity or Anglicanism or even monotheism but more generally in which perhaps deserves recovery outside of what we can't conventionally think of religion altogether is the idea that looking at the world contemplating the world finding the world beautiful and wonderful can have value intrinsically and inherently in and of itself regardless entirely regardless of any good effect it might have on the world

Channel: St Paul's Cathedral

Views: 23,184

Keywords: John Gray, agnostic, religion, St Paul's Cathedral, Giles Fraser, Christianity, immortality, singularity, progress, science, faith, philosophy, lecture

Id: Pgj3Nqs5LVM

Length: 29min 5sec (1745 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2011