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John Gray Quotes
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John Nicholas Gray is an English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is an atheist.Gray has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism , which argues that free market globalization is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals , which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religions; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia , a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.

Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life. Gray has written that "humans ... cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them." Wikipedia  

✵ 17. April 1948   •   Other names John Gray, John Gray (philosopher)
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John Gray: 164   quotes 1   like

John Gray Quotes

“In Leopardi’s view, the universal claims of Christianity were a licence for universal savagery. Because it is directed to all of humanity, the Christian religion is usually praised, even by its critics, as an advance on Judaism. Leopardi – like Freud a hundred years later – did not share this view. The crimes of medieval Christendom were worse than those of antiquity, he believed, precisely because they could be defended as applying universal principles: the villainy introduced into the world by Christianity was ‘entirely new and more terrible … more horrible and more barbarous than that of antiquity’. Modern rationalism renews the central error of Christianity – the claim to have revealed the good life for all of humankind. Leopardi described the secular creeds that emerged in modern times as expressions of ‘half-philosophy’, a type of thinking with many of the defects of religion. What Leopardi called ‘the barbarism of reason’ – the project of remaking the world on a more rational model – was the militant evangelism of Christianity in a more dangerous form. Events have confirmed Leopardi’s diagnosis. As Christianity has waned, the intolerance it bequeathed to the world has only grown more destructive. From imperialism through communism and incessant wars launched to promote democracy and human rights, the most barbarous forms of violence have been promoted as means to a higher civilization.”

John Gray

The Faith of Puppets: Leopardi and the Souls of Machines (p.32-3)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Life , War , World , Religion

“An old fairy tale has it that science began with the rejection of superstition. In fact it was the rejection of rationalism that gave birth to scientific inquiry. Ancient and medieval thinkers believed the world could be understood by applying first principles. Modern science begins when observation and experiment come first, and the results are accepted even when what they show seems to be impossible.”

John Gray

Foreword: Two Attempts to Cheat Death (pp. 5-6)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

World , Birth , Science

“Nietzsche was an inveterately religious thinker, whose incessant attacks on Christian beliefs and values attest to the fact that he could never shake them off.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Deception: Nietzsche's Optimism (p.45)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs. In Kant's time the creed of conventional people was Christian, now it is humanist. Nor are these two faiths so different from one another.Over the past 200 years, philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error — the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Deception: At the Masked Ball (p. 37)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

People , Faith , Error , Time

“A far smaller proportion of the population is in jail in Japan than in any Western country - around a twentieth of that in the United States. Evidently the Japanese have yet to embrace Western values.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Non-Progress: 'Western Values' (p.180)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Country

“Through all of history and pre-history it has been accepted that there is something wrong with the human animal. Health may be the natural condition of other species, but in humans it is sickness that is normal. To be chronically unwell is part of what it means to be human. It is no accident that every culture has its own versions of therapy. Tribal shamans and modern psychotherapists answer the same needs and practise the same trade.”

John Gray

Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 84)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Health , History , Nature , Animals

“The true goal of the bourgeois life, in other words, is not self-enactment, but diversion. Most people need the organised distraction of work (if they can find it). Idleness - the life of the playboy who doesn't answer the phone - is simply too demanding.”

John Gray

"A difficult business," http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/04/bourgeois-life-work-botton New Statesman (2009-04-16)

Life , People

“Though it is often assumed that naturalism must be hostile to religion, the opposite is true. Enemies of religion think of it as an intellectual error, which humanity will eventually grow out of. It is hard to square this view with Darwinian science – why should religion be practically universal, if it has no evolutionary value?”

John Gray

Sweet Morality (p. 224)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Hostility , Religion , Error , Nature

“Autonomy means acting on reasons I have chosen; but the lesson of cognitive science is that there is no self to do the choosing. We are far more like machines and wild animals than we imagine. But we cannot attain the amoral selflessness of wild animals, or the choiceless automatism of machines. Perhaps we can learn to live more lightly, less burdened by morality. We cannot return to a purely spontaneous existence. If humans differ from other animals, it is partly in the conflicts of their instincts. They crave security, but they are easily bored; they are peace-loving animals, but they have an itch for violence; they are drawn to thinking, but at the same time they hate and fear the unsettlement thinking brings. There is no way of life in which all these needs can be satisfied. Luckily, as the history of philosophy testifies, humans have a gift for self-deception, and thrive in ignorance of their natures.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Vices of Morality: Animal virtues (p. 115-6)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Love , Life , Hate , Fear

“Near-ubiquitous technological monitoring is a consequence of the decline of cohesive societies that has occurred alongside the rising demand for individual freedom.”

John Gray

In the Puppet Theatre: An Iron Mountain and a Shifting Spectacle (p. 121)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Freedom

“The idea that consciousness is a mystery is a prejudice inherited from monotheism. The early seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes believed that animals other than humans are insensate machines. Obviously, this was a restatement in rationalist terms of the Christian belief that only humans have souls. Even if mind and matter were categorically distinct, that would not mean humans alone have minds. It was reported that in order to test his theories, Descartes used to throw animals out of the window and observe their reactions. Looking at behaviour of this kind, one might reasonably conclude that humans are the senseless machines.”

John Gray

Freedom for Über-Marionettes: What Science Won't Tell You (p. 151)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Soul , Idea , Animals

“Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them. In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

As It Is: Sisyphus's Progress (p. 195)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Age , History , Thinking

“The whole world is in some ways better than it's ever been in the past. And, indeed, I think for many people the meaning of their lives really depends on that belief. If you strip out that belief in progress, if you start thinking of the world in the way in which the ancient pre-Christian Europeans did, or the Buddhists and the Hindus or the Taoists of China do, many people think that's a kind of despair. I don't know how many times I've been told "If I thought that, John, I wouldn't get up in the morning" and "If I agreed with you, John, that history had no pattern of that kind, I wouldn't get up in the morning."”

John Gray

I said, "Well, stay in bed a bit longer, you might find a better reason for getting up."
Quoted in "John Gray at the Writers' Festival, part 1," http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2008/2284016.htm The Philosopher's Zone, a discussion with Alan Saunders on ABC Radio National (2008-06-28)

People , World , Way , History

“In Kleist’s essay humans are caught between the graceful automatism of the puppet and the conscious freedom of a god. The jerky, stuttering quality of their actions comes from their feeling that they must determine the course of their lives. Other animals live without having to choose their path through life. Whatever uncertainty they may feel sniffing their way through the world is not a permanent condition; once they reach a place of safety, they are at rest. In contrast, human life is spent anxiously deciding how to live.”

John Gray

The Faith of Puppets: Leopardi and the Souls of Machines (p.25-6)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Life , God , World , Way

“Instead of enabling humans to improve their lot, science degrades the natural environment in which humans must live. Instead of enabling death to be overcome, it produces ever more powerful technologies of mass destruction. None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.”

John Gray

Sweet Morality (p. 235)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Death , Nature , Knowledge , Science

“The result of toppling tyranny in divided countries is usually civil war and ethnic cleansing.”

John Gray

"The death of this crackpot creed is nothing to mourn," http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jul/31/comment.politics1 The Guardian (2007-07-31)

War , Country

“In evolutionary prehistory, consciousness emerged as a side effect of language. Today it is a by-product of the media.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Non-Progress: A Theory of Consciousness (p. 171)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“Cheating ageing by a low-calorie diet, uploading one’s mind into a super-computer, migrating into outer space … Longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal.”

John Gray

Sweet Morality (p. 235)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Life , Death , Age , Animals

“To affirm that humans thrive in many different ways is not to deny that there are universal human values. Nor is it to reject the claim that there should be universal human rights. It is to deny that universal values can only be fully realized in a universal regime. Human rights can be respected in a variety of regimes, liberal and otherwise. Universal human rights are not an ideal constitution for a single regime throughout the world, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different.”

John Gray

Two Faces of Liberalism (New Press, 2000, ISBN 0-745-62259-3. 168 pages), ch. 1: Liberal Toleration (p. 21)

World , Peace , Way , Universe

“The populist rant about greedy banks that is being loudly ventilated in Congress is a distraction from the true causes of the crisis. The dire condition of America's financial markets is the result of American banks operating in a free-for-all environment that these same American legislators created. It is America's political class that, by embracing the dangerously simplistic ideology of deregulation, has responsibility for the present mess.”

John Gray

A shattering moment in America's fall from power (2008)

“Against the many Russian thinkers influenced by Hegel who believed that history was governed by universal laws to which one could only submit, Turgenev upheld the freedom of different societies to pursue different paths of development and of individuals to pursue, even in opposition to powerful historical forces, their own goals and values. Here Turgenev endorsed the celebrated dictum of Alexander Herzen, with whom he disagreed on other matters: that history has no libretto. Human history is a realm of contingency and unpredictability, in which each generation faces conflicts that have no ideal solution.”

John Gray

'Isaiah Berlin: The Value of Decency' (p.105)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Law , History , Freedom , Universe

“… the idea of Gaia is anticipated most clearly in a line from the Tao Te Ching, the oldest Taoist scripture. In ancient Chinese rituals, straw dogs were used as offerings to the gods. During the ritual they were treated with the utmost reverence. When it was over and they were no longer needed they were trampled on and tossed aside: 'Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.' If humans disturb the balance of the Earth they will be trampled on and tossed aside. Critics of the Gaia theory say they reject it because it is unscientific. The truth is that they fear and hate it because it means that humans can never be other than straw dogs.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Straw Dogs (p. 33-4)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

God , Hate , Truth , Fear

“Contrary to generations of western progressives, it was not Russian backwardness or mistakes in applying Marxian theory that produced the society that Lyons observed. Similar regimes came into being wherever the communist project was attempted. Lenin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Ceausescu’s Romania and many more were variants of a single dictatorial model. From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia. If 1984 is such a powerful myth, one reason is that it captures this truth. Yet there is a flaw in Orwell’s story, which emerges in his picture of the all-powerful interrogator. The dystopia of perpetual power is a fantasy, and so is O’Brien. Soviet torturers were sweating functionaries living in constant fear. Like their victims, they knew that they were resources that would be used up in the service of power. There was no inner-party elite safe from the contingencies of history.”

John Gray

An Old Chaos: Two Times Two Equals Five (p. 52)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Truth , Fear , History , Communication

“The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run.”

John Gray

"Joseph Conrad, Our Contemporary," from Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (2004)

War , Knowledge , Freedom , Suffering

“The belief that there is some hidden cabal directing the course of events is a type of anthropomorphism – a way of finding agency in the entropy of history.”

John Gray

In the Puppet Theatre: Puppetry, Conspiracy and Ouija Boards (p. 133)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Way , History

“Throughout the years in which the US was punishing countries that departed from fiscal prudence, it was borrowing on a colossal scale to finance tax cuts and fund its over-stretched military commitments. Now, with federal finances critically dependent on continuing large inflows of foreign capital, it will be the countries that spurned the American model of capitalism that will shape America's economic future.”

John Gray

A shattering moment in America's fall from power (2008)

Future , Dependency , Country

“If we are to put interrogators to work in defence of liberal values, their role in the community must receive proper recognition. They will require intensive counselling to overcome the inevitable traumas that this difficult work involves. They must be enabled to see themselves as dedicated workers in the cause of progress. Psychotherapy must be available to help them avoid the negative self-image from which some torturers have suffered in the past.”

John Gray

A Modest Proposal (2003)

Communication , Suffering , Past , Help

“Echoing the Christian faith in free will, humanists hold that human beings are – or may someday become – free to choose their lives. They forget that the self that does the choosing has not itself been chosen.”

John Gray

Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 86)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Faith , Forgetting

“… we are approaching a time when, in Moravec's words, 'almost all humans work to amuse other humans.' In rich countries, that time has already arrived. The old industries have been exported to the developing world. At home, new occupations have evolved, replacing those of the industrial era. Many of them satisfy needs that in the past were repressed or disguised. A thriving economy of psychotherapists, designer religions and spiritual boutiques has sprung up. Beyond that, there is an enormous grey economy of illegal industries supplying drugs and sex. The function of this new economy, legal and illegal, is to entertain and distract a population which - though it is busier than ever before - secretly suspects that it is useless. Industrialisation created the working class. Now it has made the working class obsolete. Unless it is cut short by ecological collapse, it will eventually do the same to nearly everyone.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Non-Progress: An Irony of History (p. 160)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World , Religion , Sex , Home

“Their minds befogged by fashionable nonsense about globalisation, western leaders believe liberal democracy is spreading unstoppably. The reality is continuing political diversity. Republics, empires, liberal and illiberal democracies, and a wide variety of authoritarian regimes will be with us for the foreseeable future. Globalisation is nothing more than the industrialisation of the planet, and increasing resource nationalism is an integral part of the process. (So is accelerating climate change, but that's another story.) As industrialisation spreads, countries that control natural resources use these resources to advance their strategic objectives.”

John Gray

"Folly of the progressive fairytale," http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/09/russia The Observer (2008-09-08)

Democracy , Fashion , Nature , Reality

“Liberals tend to regard being subjects of the Queen as an insult to their dignity. But at least the archaic structures by which we are ruled do not force us to define ourselves by blood, soil or faith, and we are protected from the poisonous politics of identity.”

John Gray

"Monarchy is the key to our liberty," http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jul/29/comment.politics1, The Observer (2007-07-29)

Faith

“The idea of politics as a conservation in which the collision of opinions is moderated and accommodated, in which what is sought is not truth but peace, has been almost entirely lost, and supplanted by a legalist paradigm in which all political claims and conflicts are modelled in the jargon of rights.”

John Gray

'Oakeshott as a Liberal' (p.80)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Truth , Peace , Idea

“The evidence of science and history is that humans are only ever partly and intermittently rational, but for modern humanists the solution is simple: human beings must in future be more reasonable. These enthusiasts for reason have not noticed that the idea that humans may one day be more rational requires a greater leap of faith than anything in religion. Since it requires a miraculous breach in the order of things, the idea that Jesus returned from the dead is not as contrary to reason as the notion that human beings will in future be different from how they have always been.”

John Gray

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 75)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Faith , Religion , History , Idea

“Tyranny offers relief from the burden of sanity and a licence to enact forbidden impulses of hatred and violence. By acting on these impulses and releasing them in their subjects tyrants give people a kind of happiness, which as individuals they may be incapable of achieving.”

John Gray

An Old Chaos: What a Tyrant Can Do For You (p. 57)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

People , Happiness

“Caring about your self as it will be in the future is no more reasonable than caring about the self you are now.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Vices of Morality: A weakness for prudence (p. 105)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Future

“Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same. Scientific inquiry may be an embodiment of reason, but what such inquiry demonstrates is that humans are not rational animals. The fact that humanists refuse to accept the demonstration only confirms its truth.”

John Gray

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 81)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Truth , Knowledge , Animals

“Again, science has the power to silence heretics. Today it is the only institution that can claim authority. Like the Church in the past, it has the power to destroy, or marginalise, independent thinkers. (Think how orthodox medicine reacted to Freud, and orthodox Darwinians to Lovelock.) In fact, science does not yield any fixed picture of things, but by censoring thinkers who stray too far from current orthodoxies it preserves the comforting illusion of a single established worldview.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Against Fundamentalism - Religious and Scientific (p. 19)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Thinking , Silence , Science , Past

“Today the doses of madness that keep us sane are supplied by new technologies. Anyone online has a limitless supply of virtual sex and violence. But what will happen when we run out of new vices? How will satiety and idleness be staved off when designer sex, drugs and violence no longer sell? At that point, we may be sure, morality will come back into fashion. We may not be far from a time when 'morality' is marketed as a new brand of transgression.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Non-Progress: A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun (p. 165-6)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Sex , Fashion , Time , Madness

“We are not authors of our lives; we are not even part-authors of the events that mark us most deeply. Nearly everything that is most important in our lives is unchosen. The time and place we are born, our parents, the first language we speak - these are chance, not choice. It is the casual drift of things that shapes our most fateful relationships. The life of each of us is a chapter of accidents.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Vices of Morality: The fetish of choice (p. 109-110)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life , Fate , Parent , Chance

“Much in the study of the paranormal was what we would now call pseudo-science. But the line between science and pseudo-science is smudged and shifting; where it lies seems clear only in retrospect. There is no pristine science untouched by the vagaries of faith.”

John Gray

Foreword: Two Attempts to Cheat Death (p. 5)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Faith , Study , Science

“As machines slip from human control they will do more than become conscious. They will become spiritual beings, whose inner life is no more limited by conscious thought than ours. Not only will they think and have emotions. They will develop the errors and illusions that go with self-awareness.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Non-Progress: The soul in tha machine (p. 187)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life , Error , Thinking

“Scientific fundamentalists claim that science is the disinterested pursuit of truth. But representing science in this way is to disregard the human needs science serves. Among us, science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today, only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up. The political projects of the twentieth century have failed, or achieved much less than they promised. At the same time, progress in science is a daily experience, confirmed whenever we buy a new electronic gadget, or take a new drug. Science gives us a sense of progress that ethical and political life cannot.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Against fundamentalism ― Religious and Scientific (p. 18-9)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life , People , Truth , Fear

“Nothing carries so much authority today as science, but there is actually no such thing as ‘the scientific world-view’. Science is a method of inquiry, not a view of the world. Knowledge is growing at accelerating speed; but no advance in science will tell us whether materialism is true or false, or whether humans possess free will. The belief that the world is composed of matter is metaphysical speculation, not a testable theory. Science may succeed in explaining events in terms of causes and effects. In some accounts it may be able to formulate laws of nature. But what does it mean for something to cause something else and what is a law of nature? These are questions for philosophy or religion, not for science.”

John Gray

Freedom for Über-Marionettes: What Science Won't Tell You (p. 149)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

World , Religion , Law , Question

“The most pitiless warriors against drugs have always been militant progressives. In China, the most savage attack on drug use occurred when the country was convulsed by a modern western doctrine of universal emancipation — Maoism. It is no accident that the crusade against drugs is led today by a country wedded to the pursuit of happiness — the United States. For the corollary of that improbable quest is a puritan war on pleasure.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Unsaved: Artificial Paradises (p. 141)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

War , Pleasure , Wedding , Universe

“The human population growth that has taken place over the past few hundred years resembles nothing so much as the spikes that occur in the numbers of rabbits, house mice and plague rats. Like them, it can only be short-lived.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Disseminated Primatemaia (p. 9)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Past , Housing

“Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world.”

John Gray

Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 96)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

World , Science

“Contrary to the cartoon history of ideas that prevails today, Darwinism’s threat to religion did not come principally from challenging the biblical account of creation. Until a few centuries ago the Genesis story was known to be a myth – a poetic way of rendering truths that would otherwise be inaccessible. At the beginning of the Christian religion, Augustine warned against the dangers of literalism. The Jewish scholars who preceded him always viewed the Genesis story as a metaphor for truths that could not be accessed in any other way. It was only with the rise of modern science that the Genesis myth came to be misunderstood as an explanatory theory. Yet Darwinism was still a major threat to religion, for it confronted Victorians with the prospect of their final mortality. Darwin forced them to ask why their lives should not end like those of other animals, in nothingness. If this was so, how could human existence have meaning? How could human values be maintained if human personality was destroyed at death?”

John Gray

Cross-correspondences (pp. 21-22)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Death , Truth , Religion , Way

“While it is much preferable to anarchy, government cannot abolish the evils of the human condition. At any time the state is only one of the forces that shape human behaviour, and its power is never absolute. At present, fundamentalist religion and organized crime, ethnic-national allegiances and market forces all have the ability to elude the control of government, sometimes to overthrow or capture it. States are at the mercy of events as much as any other human institution, and over the longer course of history all of them fail. As Spinoza recognized, there is no reason to think the cycle of order and anarchy will ever end. Secular thinkers find this view of human affairs dispiriting, and most have retreated to some version of the Christian view in which history is a narrative of redemption. The most common of these narratives are theories of progress, in which the growth of knowledge enables humanity to advance and improve its condition. Actually, humanity cannot advance or retreat, for humanity cannot act: there is no collective entity with intentions or purposes, only ephemeral struggling animals each with its own passions and illusions. The growth of scientific knowledge cannot alter this fact. Believers in progress – whether social democrats or neo-conservatives, Marxists, anarchists or technocratic Positivists – think of ethics and politics as being like science, with each step forward enabling further advances in future. Improvement in society is cumulative, they believe, so that the elimination of one evil can be followed by the removal of others in an open-ended process. But human affairs show no sign of being additive in this way: what is gained can always be lost, sometimes –as with the return of torture as an accepted technique in war and government – in the blink of an eye. Human knowledge tends to increase, but humans do not become any more civilized as a result. They remain prone to every kind of barbarism, and while the growth of knowledge allows them to improve their material conditions, it also increases the savagery of their conflicts.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 264-5)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

War , Religion , Way , History

“In ancient Europe, Stoics asserted that a slave could be freer than a master who suffers from self-division. In China, Daoists imagined a type of sage who responded to the flow of events without weighing alternatives. Disciples of monotheistic faiths have believed something similar: freedom, they say, is obeying God’s will. What those who follow these traditions want most is not any kind of freedom of choice. Instead, what they long for is freedom from choice.”

John Gray

The Faith of Puppets: The Freedom of the Marionette (p. 6-7)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

God , Faith , Imagination , Freedom

“Religion is not a primitive type of scientific theorizing, any more than science is a superior kind of belief-system. Just as rationalists have misunderstood myths as proto-versions of scientific theories, they have made the mistake of believing that scientific theories can be literally true. Both are systems of symbols, metaphors for a reality that cannot be rendered in literal terms. Every spiritual quest concludes in silence, and science also comes to a stop, if by another route. As George Santayana has written, ‘a really naked spirit cannot assume that the world is thoroughly intelligible. There may be surds, there may be hard facts, there may be dark abysses before which intelligence must be silent for fear of going mad.’ Science is like religion, an effort at transcendence that ends by accepting a world that is beyond understanding. All our inquiries come to rest in groundless facts. Just like faith, reason must at last submit; the final end of science is a revelation of the absurd.”

John Gray

Sweet Morality (p. 226-7)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

World , Fear , Faith , Religion