A sufficiency of delight
Grayling’s reply to Gray is a much better read.
Anxious to appear original while in fact pushing a familiar counter-Enlightenment line, Gray has often entertained us with his assaults on logic and historical fact, each time repeating the two tenets of his faith, one acquired from Isaiah Berlin and the other from his Sunday school, namely, that we are condemned to live with the conflict between irreconcilable goods, and that we owe everything of significance in human achievement (not, he gloomily adds, that there has been much) to religion.
Concise, sly, cutting, and funny – also accurate. Gray is extraordinarily repetitive and predictable. I knew what his “review” would say before I read it. “Gray has often entertained us” reminds me irresistibly of Mr Bennett’s “You have delighted us long enough” to his middle daughter when she had bored everyone rigid with her relentless piano playing singing.
That Gray endlessly wears his own two old hats does not get in his way here. But I don’t mind this. What I mind is his attributing to me the idea that the scientific and social advances of the post-sixteenth century Western world are the road to perfection, and that if only we could be reasonable, accept pluralism, respect human rights, defend the rule of law, and apply the findings of science to the improvement of mankind’s lot, we would realize Utopia. No: though I do and always will champion these things (“shrilly” and “peevishly,” with “adamantine certainty” and “high-minded silliness” Gray shrilly, peevishly and high-mindedly complains), I don’t confuse Meliorism with Perfectibilism as Gray persists in doing, though I have before now, in print, tried to help him understand the difference.
That’s important. Gray is risible, but he’s also sinister. The idea that we should not be reasonable, accept pluralism, respect human rights, defend the rule of law, and apply the findings of science to the improvement of mankind’s lot is no joke, and Gray’s endless flirtation with it is a lot more repellent and more dangerous than conformity in Hampstead.
If nevertheless it is high-minded silliness to champion the cause of trying to conduct our affairs sensibly, and to free our minds and lives to the greatest extent conformable with our being social animals who owe one another moral regard, I embrace it with enthusiasm. Gray, with his shallow and rather aimless hostility to this view, is the least likely fellow to talk me out of it.
You have delighted us long enough, John Gray.
yuck!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Gray
What a disgusting misanthrope.
I don’t dispute one of Gray’s points, which is that secular humanism is indebted to its history. Though it is useful to distinguish the “debt” into two branches, the historical and the justificatory. Historically, secular humanism quite obviously does owe a debt to some of its religious forebears, some of whom were ethical luminaries. If Grayling really does dispute that, then he’s wrong.
But that doesn’t mean that secular humanism can’t strive to justify itself apart from religious doctrines. Actually, any plausible system of ethics has to. So when Gray writes “it is hard to resist the impression that he believes Western civilization would be much improved if it did not include the Judeo-Christian inheritance”, I’m left waiting for the other shoe to drop. So what? So I’m a clichee, I guess; fine fine. But my mom says I’m cool. So.
Anyway. Whichever point he’s aiming at, he doesn’t make it in the best way.
Those are two very hollow Easter eggs. Spinoza and the American deists are the saviors of religion? Really? This is a case of bland self-assertion instead of real argument. I mean, he must have read Dawkins and Hitchens, so he must know that these are precisely the items that are contested. But not another word on them?
“I have at last stirred him to revenge for having his knuckles publicly wrapped by me.”
I suppose he means “rapped”. Grayling wrapping Gray’s knuckles (with bandages? silk scarves?) evokes a tender, caring image, which I don’t think he intended.
Grayling’s reply is delightful, and I should say, completely demolishing. That’s what Gray wanted to do so badly to Grayling, and what he failed so badly to do, for the very reason that Grayling points out: Grayling is a meliorist, not a perfectibilist, and he has made this clear time and time again. The strange thing is that Gray, who claims that Grayling is repetitive, had not noticed! It is odd to criticise someone for repeating himself, but to fail to notice one of the most important things that Grayling emphasises again and again. Gray should remember that, in one of the books he names, Grayling praises Todorov’s very impressive book Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, which is all about the difficulties, try as we might, to escape the human predicament, which makes every improvement precious and yet fragile.
And this is what makes the question of history or justification irrelevant. Sure, there were Christian humanists, like Erasmus, for example, even Abelard, but notice that it is the orthodox Calvin, Luther or the Bernard of Clairvaux who are recognised to be truly representative of Christianity. Erasmus and Abelard are already declensions from it. It is fatuous to go on suggesting that secularism, human rights, and science are rooted in Christianity. They’re not. This doesn’t mean that there was no empiricism during the Middle Ages, or that no one ever spoke about rights or law, but it does mean that the first philosopher of the Middle Ages (still normative for Catholicism), sought confirmation for Christian doctrine, and never put it at hazard. ‘Reason’ is used, but only to confirm what Aquinas already knows.
But those who did put religious dogma at risk, or profaned supposedly holy things, during the seventeenth century scientific revolution, and during the eighteenth century Englightenment, put their own lives at risk as well. Voltaire didn’t live on the Swiss border for nothing. And Hume was very conscious that Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for blasphemy, condemned by the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly (which made his sentence almost a certainty), as recently as 1697, and Hume himself never received a university appointment because of clerical suspicions of irreligion. (It has even been recently surmised that Descartes may have been poisoned by a Jesuit!) And as we have seen, Harry Taylor was recently given a significantly large (suspended) sentence for placing anti-religious literature in an airport chapel! And it was the chaplain who started the wheels of injustice moving.
But Gray thinks we should just leave things go the way they are trending now, with the renewed insistance by religion to be recognised in the public square. That is, not only to be protected from insult, but to be given more say in the way that society is run. Gray thinks that it’s useless even to try anything else, for religion, he thinks, is like sex, impossible to repress. He hasn’t noticed that many people do so without difficulty. Then think of the priests who rape little children. Sex and religion are clearly not the same at all.
Thanks to Ophelia for bringing Grayling’s response to our attention. I read Gray yesterday morning, was suitably appalled, and noticed the same thing that Grayling points out. Really, Gray needs to stop and think sometimes.
It may be banal to historically link secular humanism in strands of Christianity, but it’s certainly not fatuous. The entire point of the Jeffersonian Bible was to root out the silliness of the metaphysics of Christianity and leave in the ethics, and that’s a point that he would not have bothered to make if he thought he was historically quarantined from the relevant traditions. He would have just started a new religion entirely.
So, yeah, the distinction between history and justification is both sharp and salient I think.
Whereas Grayling aims to educate (some will inevitably sneer at such a “high-minded” purpose), Gray relies on the ignorance of his readers for any positive response to his irresponsible ideas.
How otherwise explain the monstrous distortion in Gray’s account of Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities? Far from “relentless certainties and rejection of all contrary argument or mitigating circumstances” (Hastings quoted approvingly by Gray), Grayling goes out of his way to deal sensitively with the topic, but is unafraid to come to a strong conclusion, surely exactly the way such matters should be approached.
Not that much achievement? Over the course of the 20th Century, life expectancy at birth doubled and real global income per capita increased by a factor of 10 to 20. In the past decade alone about 1 billion people worldwide have risen out of extreme poverty, resulting in a massive decrease in suffering. And that’s without even getting into the improvement in attitudes toward ethnic minorities and gays in the West. But hey, its easy to deny the significance of that when you’re already living at about the 95th income percentile worldwide.
Anyone who denies the reality or significance of human progress is too foolish to be worth engaging.
I find that having the voice that Alan Bennett uses for Eeyore in my head when reading Gray helps enormously.
Sorry, Benjamin, that’s not what I said. I said it is fatuous to root secularism, human rights and science in Christianity. That there are historical links goes without saying. But modernity itself has been built on the critique of religion, and it has, to an extremely large extent, been built up in opposition to it, and is premised upon its falsity in all essential respects.
Some, like Jefferson, and even me, at one time, thought there was a core of Christianity – I wouldn’t say of Christian belief – that could be saved, but the great majority of it had, for that purpose, to be consigned to the dustbin, but the more one reads people like Gray and Hart, for example, who think that modernity is, insofar as it is worthwhile at all, a direct product of Christianity (or some other benighted creed or assemblage of superstitions), and that, as I said, is fatuous, and it is time – past time, indeed – that the whole sorry mess of empty verbiage was brought to an end.
A good book about this was one written by a Christian (in the early 70s of the last century) which demonstrates a fully formed modernist struggling to break free from the mummy wrappings of the past, and often failing, but who, in the end, made a more or less clean break of it, recognising in Christianity all the sorry mythmaking that keeps us bound by the lifeless grip of the Christian centuries. It is entitled Crisis of Moral Authority, written by Don Cupitt, and even he recognises, in his introduction to a reprint of the book, that he was still trying to hold on to remnants of Christian tradition, when his own thinking made it clear that Christianity had been, almost everywhere, a force for evil, and not for good. David B. Hart’s book Atheist Delusions is an excellent example of just how deluded Christians continue to be, still playing the game of ‘we found it first’ long after it is clear all around that Christianity wars against enlightenment and liberation still.
It’s also worth remembering that when religion was considered to be the forum for discussions of ethics, it was natural that discussions of ethics would appear in that context. This is especially true because the opposition was often arguing from the pulpit, and had to be met on their own ground; everyone loves to point to Wilberforce and Martin Luther King, but who ever mentions the thousands of ministers who defended slavery and apartheid from the pulpit?
I do! I mention them all the time. I never shut up about them.
Eric, it’s hard for me to align your purposes with mine. I assumed you were referring to my remark when you wrote “And this is what makes the question of history or justification irrelevant”, since I was the one who made the distinction, for the purposes of saying in what limited sense Gray might be right. My purpose was to acknowledge historical debt — that’s my sense of “linkage”. Whatever Jefferson wanted to do away with, there’s still a debt, a sense of carrying on.
It’s rather important, I think, that when Wilberforce introduced the subject of the abolition of slavery into the House of Commons he referred directly to the fact that the National Assembly of Revolutionary France had liberated the slaves. The influence of the Enlightenment was nowhere as highly visible as it was in the abolition movement. When Christians got into the act, some of the main considerations had to do with the subersion of white morality and racial miscegenation. (The eroticism of slavery is still a powerful influence on present thinking. Nor is it any surprise that much modern slavery is explicitly sexual.) The question of equality, however, was almost entirely an Enlighenment concern, and this is marked in both Wilberforce and King (as Hitchens points out, in relation to the latter, to great, but often misunderstood, effect).
That’s why, Benjamin, I question your claim that, “Whatever Jefferson wanted to do away with, there’s still a debt, a sense of carrying on.” Certainly, there is an historical linkage. That, as I say, goes without saying. But that there was a ‘carrying on’ in any straightforward sense is precisely what should be questioned. It was Kant, remember, who thought of all positive religion (institutional religion, organised religion) as a perversion of true religion. Jefferson wanted to break the link between the past and the future, so far as the past’s authority went. The authority, for Jefferson, was to come from reason, not from the past, and that was why he thought it worthwhile to bowdlerise the gospels. He would have done better to get rid of them altogether.
You can’t separate rational religion from positive religion in the gospels. They are the product of a nascent institution, after all. Jefferson’s heart was in the right place. Any religion, to be acceptable to enlightened minds, had to be based upon reason and humanity. He thought he could separate the historical from the rational, just as Kant did. Both were wrong, while both wanted to take only what could be demonstrated by reason. That they took a lot of dross along with them is just a sign that we need to be careful what we take to be based on rational considerations. What religious apologists like Hart and Gray get right is that religion is sticky stuff. It’s hard to get off your hands once you’ve dipped them into the tainted brew.
I’ll happily concede that the “ways of carrying on” are not straightforward. Perhaps in the Jefferson example (as well as the declensions you cited), we might say that there are debts that are only half-paid, so to speak, or debts that are paid begrudgingly.
It matters because I’d like to say that Christianity owes a non-straightforward debt to paganism. And I’d like to talk about non-straightforward debts that modern (vaguely “Western”) social systems owe to Epicurus. And I’d like to contrast these case with, say, Nietzsche, who was linked in a historical causal chain, but who actively repudiated Christian doctrines.
Anyone who denies the reality or significance of human progress is too foolish to be worth engaging.
I sympathise with Gray’s view that we overstate our moral progress. So does this guy, who I’ll quote, briefly…
That – from George Ryley Scott’s A History of Torture – was written in 1940. That old bastard’s still around (and excused). Society’s still afire with violence. Few are even vaguely energised over the killing of foreigners. The world’s much nicer for a lot of people, but are a lot of the people much nicer?
Grayling’s books are a constant joy for those of us who support the ongoing Enlightenment, while Gray just comes across as child throwing all his toys out of the pram because his mummy bought him Iggle Piggle instead of Upsy Daisey.
If it’s not exactly the toy he wants – and his doll has to be perfect – he’d rather have nothing at all.
Deep down though, I suspect all he really wants is attention.
Deep down though, I suspect all he really wants is attention
And what do you want by posting this, shatterface?
Anyhoo, Gray has an uncanny knack of being prescient. Check out his record. Not perfect but he has a pretty good batting record. Perhaps dourness is the proper reaction to reality.