All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
- Blaise Pascal
I was so lucky to have read John Gray early in life. He helped me become a realist and kept my idealistic younger self in check. It's a shame that no many people read him and if they read, don't understand him. We sapiens are constantly attracted to subjective bullshit, magic, confirmation bias, and no wonder he is not well-read as other philosophers. His writings will shake up most of the preconceived notions that influence most if not everything in our lives.
Andy Owen writes about his experiences of reading John Gray. He discovered John Gray almost two decades ago while he was in Afghanistan as a soldier.
Speaking at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2008, Gray highlighted an important caveat to the phrase ‘You can’t have an omelette without breaking eggs,’ which is sometimes used, callously, to justify extreme means to high-value ends. Gray’s caveat was: ‘You can break millions of eggs and still not have a single omelette.’ In my two previous tours of Iraq, I had seen first-hand – as sectarian hatred, insurgency, war fighting, targeted killings and the euphemistically named collateral damage tore apart buildings, bodies, communities and the shallow fabric of the state – just how many eggs had been broken and yet still how far away from the omelette we were.
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Gray showed that they are all various forms (however incompatible) of utopian thinking that have at their heart the teleological notion of progress from unenlightened times to a future utopia, and a belief that violence is justified to achieve it (indeed, from the Jacobins onwards, violence has had a pedagogical function in this process). At first, I baulked at the suggested equivalence with the foot soldiers of the other ideologies. There were clearly profound differences! But through Gray’s examples, I went on to reflect on how much violence had been inflicted throughout history by those thinking that they were doing the right thing and doing it for the greater good.
Killing and dying for nonsensical ideas is how many human beings have made sense of their lives.
A message repeated throughout Gray’s work is that, despite the irrefutable material gains, this notion is misguided: scientific knowledge and the technologies at our disposal increase over time, but there’s no reason to think that morality or culture will also progress, nor – if it does progress for a period – that this progress is irreversible. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the flawed nature of our equally creative and destructive species and the cyclical nature of history.
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Believing the stories we tell ourselves leads us to suppose that we’re far superior to our fellow creatures, but Gray likens our fate to that of the straw dogs of ancient Chinese rituals that were used as offerings to the gods. During such a ritual, these dogs were treated with the utmost reverence. But when it was over, and they were no longer needed, they were tossed aside. Gray quotes Lao Tzu, the 6th-century BCE Chinese philosopher and founder of the Chinese philosophical tradition of Taoism: ‘Heaven and earth are ruthless and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.’ To many, this vision is too bleak. One review of Straw Dogs described Gray as possessing ‘extravagant pessimism’ and the book as so ‘remorselessly, monotonously negative that even nihilism implies too much hope’. A further criticism is that Gray preaches a politics of inaction. He has been asked more than once: if he believes what he claims, how can he get out of bed in the morning? Gray has never bought into the idea that his work outlines a philosophy of pessimism and despair. He has proposed antidotes to the ills he identifies at both the political level and at the level of the individual.
At the political level, in the face of our history of violence, Gray counsels that we have to abandon the belief in utopias and instead adopt a form of political realism that accepts that there are moral and political dilemmas for which there are simply no solutions. Building on the work of one of his key influences, the Latvian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Gray proposes that we should aspire to an approach of modus vivendi. This recognises that there is a plurality of human values that determines many ways of living, and these values – and those that hold them – will inevitably clash. Modus vivendi is the search for a way of living together despite this, embracing the multiple forms of human life as a good thing in itself. While that’s the aim, we must accept that, as many pre-Enlightenment societies did and many non-Western societies still do, the current reality is that war is followed by periods of peace, which are followed by war again. Conflict will always play a part in maintaining the uneasy equilibrium in which our competing societies and ideologies find themselves. History makes more sense as a cycle than as a straight line of progress, and there is no right or wrong side of history to be on. This is something that the Afghans I met in Helmand intuitively grasped better than we, the forgetful invaders, did. They saw our arrival as another phase in the ebb and flow of our presence in the region, picking up from the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919. The shifting alliances of tribal and political leaders to meet their own changing needs frustrated our diplomats and military leaders who couldn’t work out whose ‘side’ they were on.
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At the individual level, Gray has frequently taken inspiration from our animal cousins, as well as from Taoism, and encouraged us to try to de-attach ourselves from the pressures of feeding our personal narratives and attaining to unreachable overarching purposes. We must renounce the delusion that one’s life is a narrative, that is – an episode in some universal story of progress. Instead, he advocates a more contemplative life, one lived moment to moment, that appreciates the immediate joys of existence in the skin we are in. The last line of Straw Dogs asks: ‘Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?’ In his later book The Silence of Animals (2013), Gray promises temporary respite from our all-too-human world if, freed of the perpetual need for meaning and transcendence, we become more like other animals. In Black Mass, Gray writes: ‘Taoists taught that freedom lies in freeing oneself from personal narratives by identifying with cosmic processes of death and renewal.’ The contemplation he advocates isn’t a turning away from the world like those of some Eastern philosophies but one that allows us to turn back to it and embrace its folly.
In his latest book Feline Philosophy (2020), Gray goes further than any of his previous work in offering practical advice on how to embrace this folly. As he ponders the essential nature, or soul, of the cat through an examination of the lives of both fictional and historical cats, he compares them to humans and identifies some key lessons we can learn from them. Gray notes that cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve. They have the innocence that Gray believes we would have had before the Fall. They have no concept of striving to become the perfect specimen of their type or attain the good life by approaching the perfection of a divine being (or even a concept of what a divine being would be).
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It is the sensation of life that Gray observes in his feline companions that we lose when we focus on some overarching purpose or commit to ideologies and religions. Gray believes that an acceptance of human limits shouldn’t be seen as a defeat, but rather as a source of wonder and enrichment. He concludes that: ‘The meaning of life is a touch, a scent, which comes by chance and is gone before you know it.’
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The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that ‘He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.’ Gray’s challenge is to bear the how without the why. He concedes that, for many, this task is too much to bear. Gray is sympathetic to those who can’t bear it, and cites the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne and his recognition that in grief he needed a distraction. The last of Gray’s 10 feline hints states: ‘If you cannot learn to live a little more like a cat, return without regret to the human world of diversion.’ But diversion in the consolations of the ‘mystics, poets and pleasure-lovers’ rather than the utopian thinkers who, as I saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, break lives in the name of unobtainable goals.
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