Tyler Cowen Interviews John Gray

In which atheism and pessimism don't sound so bad after all

I’m in the midst of reading several of John Gray’s books, including his most recent The New Leviathans. (Expect to hear more about Leviathan in upcoming posts.)

Yesterday I listened to Tyler Cowen’s podcast interview — which talks about just about everything besides Gray’s new book! It’s well worth a listen and includes many more nuggets and pearls than the few I’ve included below.

You can also read the transcript.

Cowen spends a good amount of time at the beginning trying to get to the bottom of Gray’s atheism.

It’s important to understand that Gray’s brand of atheism is not the usual kind, what he calls “theological atheism” (in his book Straw Dogs it’s “humanism”), where the divine mind or Providence is basically just replaced by the human mind or the activities of “humanity” — which Gray thinks is not a real thing. Species (as such) don’t exist. (It’s a construct we invented, and I agree.) Species aren’t agents; they aren’t doing anything. Gray asserts that he is an atheist like Schopenhauer, rather, who was also a pessimist.

Nor is Gray’s pessimism like what you might think, either. His take is more that — because “humanity” isn’t really doing anything — it can’t, as such — or going anywhere, there’s no such thing as lasting progress. Sure, there can be “blips” over 50 or even 100 years when things improve — like economic development in South Korea, or industrialization in Meiji Japan (he thinks Edo Japan was “incomparably more cultured and civilized”), or modern dentistry — but it won’t last.

Also, there’s an important difference between science and technology, on the one hand, and politics and ethics on the other.

I’ve often contrasted science and technological process with ethical and political process, and said that the former — scientific and technological — is exponential in a way that improvement or progress in ethics and politics isn’t. That’s more entropic.

There are people who I respect greatly, like Peter Thiel, who have argued that, even in science and technology, this is more of an age of stagnation than we commonly think, that groupthink and various types of institutional follow-up have limited creativity. That actually, even, you might call the paradigmatic [laughs] forms of cumulative advance, which is what progress is.

Progress isn’t just a brief period, a blip when things get a bit better, and then they stop being better and get worse. Progress means that what has been achieved on the past is largely retained as the process of improvement goes on. That’s generally true in science and technology. Of course, if you look at the whole span of the last 3,000 years, there have been many periods in which technologies and skills and knowledge have been lost. That could happen again, I think.

Ethical and political progress is much more fragile than that, but it does occur. And sometimes technological progress can improve human lives a lot.

Gray discusses the implications of his brand of skepticism through an example of someone enamored of cryogenesis — freezing one’s body or brain for revival in some more advanced future when medical science will be able to revivify and cure them. What confidence can they have that their plan will really work out the way they think? Gray would ask them,

Why do you assume that in 100 years from now, in 2085, why do you assume that there will still be a capitalist system in America, that there will still be laws and contracts, and that the firm you’ve put your brain in to be kept in this deposit will still be there?

And then he recites all the chaos that the world has gone through in the 20th century!

This is the kind of pessimist he is. One simply cannot be confident, so he doesn’t hold out great expectations — and this lets him be pleasantly surprised whenever the sun does shine.

Contrast that with optimists, who must live incredibly frustrated lives, constantly seeing the next tragedy, betrayal, disaster, human atrocities and hatreds.

If you think that basically there is beautiful sunlight all the time, but you’re just living in a small patch of it, most of your life will be spent in frustration. If you think the other way around, as I do, your life will be peppered, speckled with moments in which what you expect doesn’t happen, but something better happens.

Gray also rejects an Epicurean or Stoic mindset that would tell you to avoid all disappointments in life. Talk about being truly miserable! Rather it’s better to risk, for that will be adventurous and interesting. Better to be like Joseph Conrad, also a pessimist, but someone who lived well. Gray’s philosophy is an “aesthetic” one.

What I’m saying is that there are many philosophers — the Epicureans, and to some extent the Stoics as well — who do propose that. They propose that you cut down the basic demands you put on life. They’re so minimal that they’re less likely to be [disappointing]. I don’t do that. I think the opposite. I’m much more like Nietzsche in that respect. I think he’s better, at least to me, aesthetically better and maybe more interesting way of life.

If someone said, “How did you live your life?” and you said, “I successfully avoided all love affairs and, thereby, avoided all disappointments. I never attached any great importance to knowledge, only so far as it met my needs for comfort. I never engaged in competitive sports because I might lose. I never tried. I never invested because I might lose my capital.” I find all of those rather miserable ways of living.

Of course, you don’t have to be an optimist. Think of someone like Joseph Conrad, very far from being an optimist in any respect, but he had a fantastically interesting life. When he was 18 or 20, he was a gun runner for monarchist rebels in Spain. He then became a seaman for 20 years, almost lost his life two or three times in catastrophic shipwrecks, and so on and so forth.

He wrote his novels — he’d certainly be advised against this by Epicurus if you could bring him back from the grave — in his third language, not his second language. He didn’t write them even in French. He wrote them in English, which was his third language. Tremendous mental torment went into that. I’ve read about him suffering for hours to get the right word, which might have been because he was a perfectionist, but also because it was a word in English, which was not one of his early languages, or that he was brought up in.

He was a tremendous pessimist, but he lived a life of extraordinary adventure. I tend to think that pessimists — the pessimists I’ve known in my life anyway — are more likely to live lives of extraordinary adventure because it doesn’t matter to them as much as it does to optimists whether they win or lose. What matters to them is whether what they do is interesting, whether what they do enriches their life in the sense that it shows them things, shows them people, shows them worlds, shows them landscapes, gives them experiences, not only that they hadn’t had before, but even maybe that they couldn’t imagine before.

If you’re an optimist, you have some kind of clear — otherwise, I think the distinction is really rather silly — but you have an idea of how you want to live, of the successful projects you want to get involved in.

If you’re not an optimist — let’s just call it a non-optimist — you’ll settle on what you want to do. If it’s at least possible, if it’s at least in broad terms something that you could do or you could actually achieve, you can, if you want, go off on a wild journey into the Amazon. You might not come back, but you might see a lot of interesting things. If you can at least do these things, if they attract you, then if you are non-optimist, you might be very well inclined to do them. I like people like that.

All in all, atheism and pessimism, and a disbelief in progress, don’t sound so bad after all.

Your thoughts? Leave a comment.

Original artwork by Jeremiah Humphries depicting “boat is modeled after the real life steamboat that [Joseph] Conrad worked on when he was a professional sailor.”

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