Why liberalism has failed | John Gray on civilisation, morality, and the illusion of progress

Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's just Ed here today and I'm introducing the episode "Why Liberalism Has Failed". And this is an interview with John Gray, who is one of Britain's most provocative thinkers. John is a political philosopher, known for dismantling liberalism and exposing the illusions of human progress. But in this talk, he really does go for liberalism and attempts to find the reason for our current political woes, the rise of fascism and the decline of left-leaning parties. And he's being interviewed by Andy Owen, so without further ado, I'll hand over to Andy. Thank you. John Gray is one of the most eminent and sometimes most controversial philosophers in Britain. After an academic career that took him from Oxford to Yale, Harvard and LSE in 2008, he dedicated himself full time to writing, producing a series of fascinating, thought-provoking and highly accessible books from straw dogs to feline philosophy and his latest book, "New Leviathan's". Known for his critiques of liberalism and the Enlightenment, John forces us to confront and comfortable truths about politics, morality and the illusion of progress. John, welcome. Thank you very much, Andy. Thank you for all the talent. To stop off with John, you're widely regarded as the leading critic of the liberal belief in progress. The quasi-religious faith that as scientific and technological knowledge increases over time, morality or culture will also progress. And we'll do so irreversibly. Your work spans everything from political theory to religion to human nature and to the limits of reason. If you have to distill the central thread running through your work, what would it be? And were there any sort of early experiences, especially growing up in the northeast at the end of the '50s and the early '60s that inform this thread? It's a very good and a very large question. I'll answer it as best I can, but I just came across a quote from General De Gaulle, who I, someone I admire very much, who when he was walking through the University area of Paris during the student upheavals of 1968, came across a graffiti which said, "Roughly translated, kill all the fools." And he turned to a reporter and said, "A vast project." So I'm not attempting to kill all the fools. I don't want to kill anybody, actually, but it's true that I have spent a large part of my work, especially since I left academic life in 2008, criticizing the idea or, as I would call it, the myth of progress. And I think the essence of that myth or one of its central elements is that a fact, the growth of knowledge in science is a fact. Whatever you think about the way the COVID epidemic was administered, vaccines pretty much work. They may have more side effects that are allowed, but they work. There are just over 8 billion human beings alive on the planet because of intensive farming, refrigerators, global transport systems and so on. I don't share the view that science is just a tissue of cultural constructions with no connections at all with an external reality. We can always, we can never be sure what that reality is. We can never be sure that our theories and hypotheses are latching on to that reality. But there must be some fit, or otherwise there would not have been the huge transformation, the huge growth of human power that that has been. Where I think the Enlightenment went wrong, and not only the Enlightenment, but even the Socratic Greek philosophy which it renewed in early modern times, is in thinking that something like that was possible in ethics and politics, or if you like, the way we live. And I think that's what I have always rejected, or at least wanted to pour, to subject to critical doubt. So I think what this supposes is that humans can learn from their mistakes and improve themselves over time, or with the generations in a kind of continuous, cumulative fashion. So that in one generation, I mean this is the way people think of progress as a kind of escalator. In one generation you might deal with slavery or cruel punishments in, in penal systems. In the next generation you can expand democracy, further generation you can have more humane treatment of non-human animals and so on and so forth, but actually history isn't like that. Accumid events aren't like that. In my writings I say, if anyone doubts progress, think of anaesthetic dentistry. Not much downside to anaesthetic dentistry. I had a cataract operation, that's progress. So there are some areas where there's a real improvement in human life, which doesn't have a shadow, but they're rare, nearly all big advances in science and technology can be used for destructive as well as constructive purposes. And what this relates to is the fact that the transmission of moral knowledge, moral moral sentiment, moral judgment is very easily disrupted. Hardly ever do you get a high level of freedom and peace and concordian society for more than two or three generations. Even when improvement is real, there's normally a shadow and it's almost always, I would say, always reversed. And what is gained sometimes is there are real gains. It's lost. Hard, hard thing for people in our generation who have been raised on the idea that the next generation will be not just materially better off than the existing one, which by the way is now doubtful, very doubtful, but some are morally even better off. And John, you were mentioning growing up in shields and early on you saw an example of this idea that even, that often progress has a shadow to it as well. I grew up in one of these streets, which now many people say it's an urban legend. It wasn't. It was true. There were streets which were multi-generational, whole families lived in them, grandparents, parents a bit. The doors were never locked at night. That is true. There was very little or any street crime, bit of violence at the pub in the night in the rough behavior that's about it. People were safe. They had flaws in the societies that were quite patriarchal. If you had strong individual ambitions, you usually had to leave. But there were in many ways, although life was hard and short for many people there. I think the lives that many people lived there were good. And I actually experienced what happened when they were leveled, because the decision was taken for good reasons, it wasn't corruption for good reasons or what was seen to be good reasons to get rid of all of these old houses, because they didn't have mod cons, they didn't have intel bars, they didn't have central eating, they didn't have any of these things. So there were levels. I spent some of my early years in, now only has one house standing in it out. We moved out my family to an orbital estate in US state, which embodied all the good intentions, all the streets were named after famous authors, Hardy, Wordsworth, Poets and so on. But within about six months of being there, first of all the families were segregated by age, which they hadn't been before. They were shaken up like marbles and deposited there. There wasn't much of an infrastructure. But graffiti appeared that never been graffiti, then vandalism. Because the assumption was you could put people in better, did have central eating, did have internal lose material, it was much better off. But socially, culturally, as a way of a human form of life, it was worse off as I actually experienced. Now what did I learn from that? Well what I learned was, later when I read the philosopher Karl Popper, great liberal philosopher George Soros, who I used to know quite well, takes him as his mentor, as a mentor, talked about piecemeal social engineering, he said, you shouldn't try and have revolutions like to have a Russia. What you should do is you should get the piecemeal social engineers to gradually solve problems in society. Well, that's an idea I've always abhored. First of all, who are these piecemeal social engineers? How do they decide what are the problems in society? One of one-value conflicts with another value, but the basic reason is human societies are not machines. They're more like spiderswebs, they're more like cobwebs. If you blunder in, start, move people suddenly to a new housing estate you've created in fields, which is what they were before, you can't expect the good features of their life before to go with them, and they didn't. So that was that bread in me, a deep suspicion, not actually of revolution. Solutions are inevitable. I benefited from a revolution, there was a revolutionary government in the British sense, came out of the second world war. I still honour and admire the labour government of 1945 to 50, and the war itself, terrible as it was in many ways, reduced, for example, dietary diseases fell because of rafferty, russianity. There was full employment, which hadn't been before. Women entered the workforce in a huge way into the factories, true their armments, factories, they went into the workforce. After the war, they didn't go back to becoming domestic servants, didn't want to. Why should they? So actually the second world war in Britain was a sort of revolutionary process, and a good one, in many of its respects. But it didn't last forever, that labour settlement, the labour settlement of 1945 to 1950. By the 1970s was beginning to run out of steam, it was beginning to disintegrate, which is when I first got involved in politics in the early 70s. Before that, I became the leader of the Conservative Party, I met her before, and then later when she was leader, and even after she was toppled as leader, I met her occasionally. By the mid 70s, it was beginning to fall apart, and that illustrates another aspect in which I reject what might be called the story of progress. The one thing we learn from experience is that human beings throughout history never learned anything for a long, and then they forget what it is they've learned. In example now, throughout much of history, including 20th century history, violence has been used as a way of settling debates, or stopping debates. Never thought that would come back, while it has the Charlie Kirk. I'm not using this in a political sense, this has been weaponised by both sides, but once somebody has been killed in the way he was killed, you can't go back to what is before. So, I'm moving, and I think in that respect, into a very dark way. But what I was going to talk about, in the mid 70s, I became convinced that this labour settlement, which I benefited so much from, which was in many ways very humane, but which had these strange examples of social engineering that had malignant effects. That was over. What was needed was something completely new, and that's why I'm often criticised as being politically inconsistent, or changing as politics change. Politics is not for me a universal project of human emancipation. Politics is a succession of partial and temporary expedience for dealing with recurring human evils. And they're different, to some extent, they're recurring over history, but they're somewhat different in each generation. So, what these big experiments, even when they're party successful, as I think the labour experimenter of 1945 was, don't last for long. Thanks, Sean. Just going back a little bit from you, when you left Sanchez, you went to Oxford, and at Oxford, you met one of your key influences, Azziah Berlin. I just wondered if you could talk for a few minutes, just about how, what attracted you to Azziah, and then also what you took from his thinking into your own thing? One of the things that attracted me is that as a little boy he'd witnessed both Russian revolutions. He was a little boy in Riga, to begin with, and then in Russia, but it was all part of the Roman Empire, that time, and he'd seen the first revolution in March of February, depending which calendar you use, and he said it was a wonderful experience, people went around kissing each other, embracing each other, there was a feeling of having gotten rid of a terrible tyranny, the Roman Alps. I'll ask that a few months, and then by the second revolution, he said fear was the dominant feeling, together with the love of power, and people began to appear in crowds dressed in leather jackets, who were represented over the secret police, who would be created or a checker by Lenin, and fear began to seep in. He stayed there for a few years, and then he and his family migrated to the west, where he had a different life. One thing that interested me about him is that he was speaking from a position of experience, which went on throughout his life. In the Second World War, he ended up in Washington, working at the British Embassy in Washington, and his job was to find out, examine the shape of opinion in America as to going into the war with Britain, which they basically, most Americans and most politicians in the Enrosive Elm set, did not want to do, but he believed, as others believed, as Churchill, who he then came to know, believed that unless the Americans came in, we were probably sunk. I mean, the war was one, the largest casualties were not American, they were Russian actually, about 25 million when they entered the war. But if the Americans hadn't come in when they did after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Russians hadn't been attacked by the Nazis, we would have either been defeated, or to my mind even worse, had to accept a shameful piece. Anyway, he was there, so he wasn't speaking in an intra-academic way when he talked to me about tragic choices. When he talked about choices in which, whatever you do, there is some irreparable loss or harm, he meant it. I'll briefly tell you one story he told me, the Second World War, which illustrates this. He knew a case where a senior civil servant appeared in his typing pool, let's say 20 people, and told them, "I'm now going to do something which is very wrong. I'm going to sack every person in this typing pool." Because one of you has been leaking information to the enemy, and as a result of that, the brave men and women are being dropped behind enemy lines, are being tortured to death and relieve them revealing information. So it's terrible for them, obviously, but also bad for the war effort. But what I'm doing is wrong, because none of you will ever get the job in any legitimate employment again, because you'll have a black security, certainly, and irreparable wrong. Well, lives will be ruined, but I'm going to do it anyway. Now, Berlin told me this story, because it represented his view of ethics, and it represents mine too, which is that, if you were what's called a utilitarian, you'd say, "Do the best thing with the best consequence, and then there's nothing to regret." You've done the best, the most rational thing. He thought there was something to regret. You've ruined these 19 of those people's lives irreparably, for no good reason, because they're innocent. Or you might do what someone wanted to keep their hands clean, might say, "I won't take the decision, I'll resign." He regarded that as I regard that as being cowardice. It's your job to take, I would have taken the same decision, as he would. So what he illustrated to me, he taught me this basic truth, I think, which that human values are not coherent. They don't form into a single coherent set. They conflict with each other all the time, and that's why trying to impose a pattern on a human life, trying to engineer a better society, always goes wrong, and the ultimate reason is an anthropological reason. Humans are highly contradictory animals. They have needs that can never be, not just impulses, or wants, but needs that can be never be fully realised, never be fully recognised, reconciled with each other. So that's what I learned from him. He was also, of course, a fountainhead of stories about life in Russia and in Europe, and in America. He knew everybody in America, just as a slightly salacious side note, when he was in America, he was in Washington, he worked with Royal Dahl, a short story. He hated each other for reasons that he didn't go into. But Dahl was there also as part of the war effort to try and drag the Americans in. His job, Dahl's job, you can read about this now, was to sleep with the wives of important American senators, and compromise them. An unverified story, where he was asked how he was feeling at one point, and he said, "I'm completely effed out." So that was his job there, and although they didn't get on, Dahl was a bit of an anti-Semite, a remained one, actually. They did work together, they even all laughed at an apartment. So Berlin knew what history human events are really like. When he talked about this, it wasn't an intra-academic discourse. He knew what it meant to either witness or take choices in which whatever you did, there was a terrible cost. There's a lot of that ethics that you capture in your book, "Straw Dogs," talking about causing a stir. "Straw Dogs" caused a philosophical stir. "Did you expect the reactions that straw dogs got, and why do you think some of them were so strong?" Well, I expected it to be ignored by philosophers, but that was very gratifying, it was. It just proved that I'd gone mad, or it'd never been a proper philosopher in the first place, but I expected that, and so that was quite pleasant. I hadn't expected it to take on, and there was no PR campaign. It was all a complete surprise. People asked me why I wrote it then. It was really because I could write it then. I mean, I had done my last sort of, I had done a lot of intra-academic work on ethics and politics and so on. I was in a position to do this, and I wanted to write in a different way that would communicate a different way of looking at the world to people who are not academics or not solely academics. That was my reason for doing it, and a voice thought side had always, at least since I was a child or a young teenager growing up in the northeast, so I'd voice these thoughts. That was my only goal. My only goal initially was to get it published, actually, and the publisher did publish it, and then a few weeks later, there was no PR, so the rang up he said, "People are seeing other people reading your book on the tube," so I thought, "Well, that's good. It had some effect." By the way, someone I got to know very well later is like the novelist J. G. Ballard, still a name for you, I think, the spear bird film, and so on. He read it, he told me right through twice in one sitting, and he gave me the best combat ever said. He said, "Every damn sentence packs a punch." That was the way. So I was very pleased, but I wrote it in order to give, not necessarily to convert anyone to my view of the world. I wrote it for those people, and there are many, who are discontented with the ruling view of the world in progressive terms, and so they're open to a different view, and I wrote it for them to be encouraged to think more freely, and a wide range of people, but they don't all come to the same view. Some who work Christians become deeper Christians, more Christians, some who are conservatives are become more conservatives, not many liberals are become more liberal, I have to say, but it has a wide variety of different impacts on different people, people who've served in wars, and a number of war photographers have written to be a number of poets and so on. As I say, not philosophers very much, but that reflects what philosophy has become, an intra-academic conversation. Sadly, the saddest fact about philosophy today is that it's philosophers are mostly professors. And a lot of what you focus on is philosophy, obviously, but it crosses over into politics, you're very engaged in politics, and I think that your quote from earlier that politics is the search for partial remedies for recurring human, impartial and temporary, and temporary, and you've said also that responsibility of someone who takes politics seriously is to look at these evils that are predominant at any given time, as they change over time, and point to partial remedies. Looking at the situation now, we have in the world looking at Trump's second presidency and the populist attack on liberalism in the US. What are the partial remedies that you would look to now, and maybe talking a little bit about a thinker that's influenced your last book, Neil Leviathan's Thomas Horbjez, what he can contribute to that conversation? Well, I begin by saying we can't expect to improve, or even the present situation, or even to prevent it becoming worse, unless we understand something of why it came about. And I think I learned an enormous amount from an extraordinarily and characteristically stupid observation by David Cameron. When he was asked what about this, that's populism. As if it had absolutely nothing to do with anything he'd ever done or failed to do. It's just a completely inexplicable upheaval of wickedness, demagoguery, ignorance, et cetera. That's populism. Well, populism, as I understand it, is a word liberals use to describe the political backlash against the social disruption produced by their own policies. They don't understand, I genuinely don't understand, that what they have done or failed to do has produced or helped to produce these morbid phenomena that we now see. It's nothing to do with them. The only thing they ever admit to when I talked to them is that they weren't liberal enough. Well, we were tremendously liberal, of course, at rational. No one would deny that, I would, but anyway. But maybe we should have gone further on that. Maybe we should have, I suggest that. So you mean when Hillary Clinton described 40% as a nation, as the American nation, as deplorables, what she should have really done is kept on saying it louder and louder. That would have converted them, telling them that they're deplorables, that their feelings are adevistic, that they're invariably racist, that the reduction in their life, their income and their wealth, which had been going on in America, or at least stagnation in their income and wealth, for 30 years, irrelevant. What they should do is shut up and be, I think she actually went to a mining town and told them that they should all, mining era, that they should all be glad that we're going to become unemployed. Now, it might be that cold as a bad thing and it might be that fossil fuel should be faced out, but you don't go to it. And if they resist, they're deplorables. So the first is to understand why this has come out. I believed in a talk I gave on the radio. I said in August of 2016 that I saw Troubled Wind and that the main reason, or one of the main reasons he would win, it was actually wasn't doing very well up to that point. It was this description of voters, or 40% of American voters by Hillary Clinton as the deplorables. I thought he would win again, as he did win again. And I think he's now going to use the power that he does have to produce an irreversible change in American government. He's basically neutered the courts, either by putting his own people in them in the Supreme Court, or ignoring them. He's got the National Guard at his disposal. I can't tell you what will happen, but I can tell you what to look for. The next thing to look for is, how does he respond when he loses the midterms? Does he say, "Well, fair dues." I don't think so. I don't think so. What he will say is it's a hoax. This is what I expect. I can't. Now, if he does that, if he really tries to resist the democratic pushback against some of his policies, then we're in a different ballgame. We're really in a different world, because then we're in a. People call it fascist, but in a way, it's worse than that, because fascism was time-bound. Fascism was primarily into war. It came about as a result, largely of the disruption of light, because of after the First World War. And after Nazism was defeated, fascism went on in some European countries, Portugal, Spain, but after Nazism was defeated. Typically, you could take out the fascist elites, you could inflict military defeat, and then what had survived, even to some extent, in Nazi Germany, over civil society could kind of re-emerge. What's happening in America now is different. First of all, America is much more polarized. This is very relevant to ideas of progress. People say progress is always possible, not when there's no agreement on what progress means. If society. We are less polarized, I think, in this country than America is, but the can't now be, I think, a reversion to the pre-Charlie Kurt, pre-The Canterbury. You've gone beyond that. Whatever happens will be different. If you want me to speculate about what will happen, my speculation will be that Trump will be the godfather of populisms, if I can call them that, more radical, and more disruptions than any either intended or imagined. Actually, what will come after Trump, because there will be an after-Trump, he's mortal, will be more radical still, either via J.D. Vance, who is more radical, more consistent, and less easily flattered. He'll not be swayed by being driven round Windsor Castle. He'll do what he wants to do, and that's for another reason, which is unlike Trump, he believes in it. Trump is a real estate operator on a reality TV showman who's moved into politics by reading the American unconscious correctly on a lot of issues, but now a lot of his policies are proving not as popular as they expected. There's a danger of a crisis of the dollar, there's inflation, the cost of living is getting worse. This illusionment will set in, and then the question is, what does he do? You've only got a year to wait, you'll find out. If he backs off, wouldn't be characteristic, wouldn't it, because he still says the last election, the one before the '41, was hope, was a joke. He even said, as you know, that he never met Peter Mendelssohn. Did you see that? You saw the pictures of him with Mendelssohn's time. Maybe I've heard someone say he had his clothes on then, so maybe he didn't recognise it. He'll simply deny it, and then what would he do? What would he do with his clothes? That maybe gives us the chance to widen the lens as well. You mentioned Peter Mendelssohn and Windsor Castle. What are the partial remedies from a UK point of view if that is the America that is going to develop over the next couple of years or so? You want to reach here. I think the difficulty is that the underlying disenchantment with mainstream politics has reached a point where it can't really be expressed without some sort of crisis. If you asked what was the trigger of the crisis, I would say, in this sounds a little dull, because it's not in the realm of ideas, but of economic realities. I think a kind of super-lissed trust crisis on the foreign exchanges might do it. What would happen if, that's why I don't believe, I mean, I'm confident in saying this, there's practically zero chance of the present government led by Keir Starmer going into an election in 2029. You won't be there that long. The government won't be there that long. It's too systemically weak. And basically, no one has any ideas hardly about what to do. I think connected with this is that the live players in British politics are, so to speak, outside most of them, of the major parties. And so they adopt non-standard positions. If you've been watching, don't say you should, but if you've been watching forage, what you might have noticed lately is that a left turn in these economic policies. Partial nationalization of utilities, water, to start with and so on. Nobody ever thought he would do it. I was sure he would do it. People would say he's just a fat right, so a fat right tribute that. No. He's more like Georgia Maloney. One of the most successful European politicians. He's got a tremendous sense of what the, there's a problem, of course, about forage's switch, which is that it's not deliverable. The problem is that if he does come to power, he won't be able to do it. Not because the civil servant stopped him, though they might try, but because it's extremely difficult to impose massive cuts on fiscal spending when they become a norm. Even, I mean, we heard of Millay and Argentina. With a chainsaw, he says he takes his economic policies by consulting a medium who is in touch with his, one of his dogs. But actually, up till now, he's been mildly successful, but now there's rebellion going on because it's been an enormous amount of sudden suffering for lots of people who don't have access to hospitals and other public services and so on. So it's very, very difficult. So I think what this means is a period of sometimes somewhere over the next year, two years, whatever, maybe sooner. There'll be some sort of economic shock, which will destabilize politics, and may ultimately then result in an early general election. And you can't be absolutely certain about what will happen, then. I mean, I remember when the Social Democratic Party, these 1980s, they emerged as a challenge to the two main parties. At one point, they were commanding over 25% of the vote. Some people now say to be the same with reform. I don't think so. I don't think so. The depth of disillusionment now is much more profound. And the problem is now we got used to getting poorer because it was slow. As long as we could borrow more and have services, however difficult they might be, national health, long-weighting lists, so on and so forth, trains that don't work very well, we got used to that. And perhaps if it could go on like that forever, just bumping along, we could remain used to it. But unfortunately, a lot of the money from that is comes from global markets, comes from global bond market. If that's pulled out suddenly, then there's a big shock. So that sort of connects with what the one thing I can sort of say with reasonable confidence is that the political world in this country and other countries will be very different by 2030. I want to leave you some time for some questions. I'm just going to ask one more question to you, John. Also, don't want to end on a complete downer. So once you've been accused of being a political pessimist, sometimes even a knight. I don't know why, but I find much that's hopeful in your work as well. I wondered if you could just explain the subtle difference between optimism and hope. Well, optimism is the belief that if you apply certain types of thinking, rational thinking, informed by knowledge, you'll get a better result almost certainly. I think that's an exploded view. I mean, you could almost say, I mean, if the belief that human rationality was a scientific theory would have been long ago abandoned, because there's really not very much evidence for it. But hope is a different thing. And I think the main reason one should be hopeful, and always can be hopeful, is that human beings, means teachers, can live well without believing the problems in their lives or their societies are soluble. You can live well in your own life. Things happen to us that we can't change. You have bereavements. You have good things to falling in love. All sorts of things happen to us that we can't really control. And shouldn't we try and control, I think, in some cases. Let them happen and then go with them as long as you can. But I think actually, the hopeful attitude is to say, we don't need a life which is steadily progressing to some goal we've set for ourselves, either as a person, individual or a society, to live well, to live in a fulfilling way, to have a life which is full of meaning, which you're going to look back on and say that was well lived. That's my main idea. I think the idea of progress in this sense and even worse, the perfection is a burden we should really shake off, try it, you might enjoy it. Thank you, John, for that hopeful answer. Thank you for listening to Philosophy for Our Times. If you enjoyed the episode, don't forget to like, share, subscribe, and if you have any thoughts on what John had to say, please find our email in the show notes and shoot us a message. But yeah, until next time, take care. See you. (Music)