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So whatever the amount, please consider making a donation to Conversations with Tyler today at conversationswithtyler.com slash donate. Thank you. Thank you so much for your support and now on to the show. Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with John Gray, who is one of the most important and influential thinker, not just of one generation, but I think you could say of two generations. John started his career in the book world with books on Hayek and Mill. He's written numerous books on many topics. I can just tell you that I buy them all and read them all right away. It's very difficult to summarize John, but that's fine because today I can present you with John Gray himself. John, welcome. Thank you very much for that very generous introduction, Tyler. Now your new book, it is called The New Leviathans, Thoughts After Liberalism. I have a number of general questions for you. Who are the intellectual children who will carry on your work? I don't seek disciples. But do you receive them? I have some people who are influenced by my work, but they're in a very wide range of activities and disciplines and by no means all or most of them are academic philosophers. I've had people contact me who've been poets, war correspondents, novelists, a wide range of types of people with different intellectual and other interests. And I guess when I left academic life, which I did in 2007, that's 16 years ago, one of the reasons I did so was in order to address an audience wider and more variegated than that of academic colleagues. And I also wanted to be able to write in a way and in formats that were not common or accepted in academic contexts. So my current book like several of my recent books is not organized in theses or chapters or there are arguments and facts that I hope plenty, but it's organized in short sections, some of them vignettes of historical events or persons, some of them arguments from within philosophy itself. So I don't seek any school which carries on my way of thinking or writing. But who were the young minds whose works excite you? When they come out, you think, ah, I'm going to read that. And you pick it up right away. The way say I would pick up a new book by you right away. Well, I'm not a young mind by any means, but I hope my mind is still young, though I'm not myself yet. I don't really, I mean, I read columnists. For example, I like Michael Lynn's work. I always read what he writes. I read novels in Britain. I just did a conversation with the novelist, McCarran, who writes spy thrillers. I do have conversations with academic theorist, David Runciman, whom you probably know from Cambridge, has written on a number of themes interesting to me, including Hobbes and artificial intelligence. But I don't think there's a single set of writers who could be called theorists, political theorists or philosophers that I follow closely. If liberalism is indeed done, as the subtitle of your new book suggests, Thoughts After What is it exactly we should teach young people? We should teach them the high points of the traditions we know well. So if I was asked to produce a curriculum for a young person of, shall we say, 18 to 20, 23, I guess I would include within it great dramatic works like those of East Coast and Sophocles later Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. I would include among philosophical writings, some of the rules, for example, John Stuart Mill, even though I disagree with them profoundly, a very resourceful and intelligent thinker, Hayek, another one among conservative thinkers, Michael Oakshott, and one by whom I myself have been greatly influenced. Although he's not much read nowadays, George Santiana is one of the big intellectual influences on my life, including another American writer, a poet, Wallace Stevens, who wrote a great poem about George Santiana, when Santiana was living in his old age in a nunnery in Rome. So I would pick great points in our tradition and also other traditions, the Bhagavad Gita, Taoist works like Schwanzer and Laozi. And I would give them a whole range of those. I would not teach them a doctrine or an ideology or a religion, though, of course, if they wish to be instructed in religion, that's a different matter. And the Bible, yes or no? Definitely. Definitely. The whole of the Bible, one of the key texts for me is the Book of Genesis, two books, the Book of Genesis and the Book of Job, the Book of Genesis, because I believe in the middle of Genesis, one of the central neglected truths of the human situation is brought out, which is that knowledge is ethically neutral. It can be used in various ways. It may in some sense be intrinsically good, but it can be put to good and bad uses. And Job, because I think it's in the Book of Job that the origin of, if you like, skeptical thinking is rather than in the Greeks. I think the Socrates, for example, is often thought of as a fearless inquirer who doubted everything. He even said that. I only know that I know nothing he's supposed to have said, at least in some accounts of him. But he did believe that the good and the true and the beautiful are one and the same. He believed in the ultimate rationality and justice of the universe. Job didn't. He questioned God. He questioned the rationality and the justice of the universe. So I think Job's questions, even though he eventually returned to the God, he questioned, are more profound. And so I definitely teach the Bible would be a key text, along with other religious texts, because one of my strong arguments or at any rate concern, strong themes of my recent work is that no one can really understand modern politics who doesn't really understand religion because much of modern politics is a succession of footnotes to religion. And those are two of the most pessimistic books in the Bible, right? So there's no resurrection. Genesis is a world without law. Job, in a sense, the message is justice is either arbitrary or meaningless or very difficult to fathom. No, Job goes back at the end. He does go back to. But it's not very convincing, right? If you're an honest reader of the book, you roll your eyes and say, oh, come on, is this really the message here? Or is this a kind of Straussian book, right? Well, you mean it might have a hidden message and the hidden message. In this case, it's the obvious one. Correct. And do you take the Straussian reading of the book of Job? Yes. I mean, I'm not a theorist. I'm an atheist. So for me, it would be quite easy to accept that the world, the cosmos, the human situation, human life, human events do not correspond to any ideas of justice we might have developed in that they might even be largely random and largely judged by our ideas of justice. Very unjust. It's quite easy for me to accept that. And that's in fact what I think. But if you are a theorist, I think it takes considerable strength of mind and considerable intellectual energy and vigor to question the way Job questioned. I admire Job's questioning for that reason. If we look at physics, circuit 2023, is a true atheism really viable? So if I see the leading contenders as string theory, many worlds, quantum mechanics, to many observers, they appear at least as absurd as actual theology, which has a kind of simplicity. Well, God created the world. Has an atheism become more theological than theology itself? No, not the kind of atheism I hold. But what you say, Tyler, is, of course, very true of many traditions of atheists thinking, perhaps even the dominant ones, because the dominant traditions of atheist thinking in Europe and America and elsewhere, remember, atheism in this sense is something that comes from within theism, from within monotheism, reproduced the central categories and concepts of the religion they deny, even as they deny the beliefs. I mean, a lot of atheism is categories taken from theism, but then turned upside down. So what you say is true of that. But I don't think of my atheists I'm influenced by would include writers like Schopenhauer, who was an atheist and a pessimist, of course. And in the key kind of atheism, I attack in my new book, but I've been attacking for 20 or 30 years, is the one which attributes to the human species, some of the characteristics that used to be attributed to the deity to God. That's to say, they think that the human history, they think is an art of with some kind of built-in structure doesn't necessarily produce inevitable results, but there is a kind of providential move from ignorance to knowledge, which has consistently greater benefits over time. And that seems to me to be a secularization of Christian and other ideas of divine providence in history. For me, there's no providence of any kind in history. There's no logic in history, although particular situations may have a logic of their own. But the logic, of course, may not be benign. It may be to use your word absurd. That's to say, we may find human beings recurrently trapped in situations in which what they do is bound to produce results different from or even opposite from the ones they want. And I think that is a recurring human situation. But there's no logic like Hegel thought or Marx thought or Mill even thought taking that idea from Auguste Comte, the French founder of positive. There's no logic in which history develops through a series of successive stages to some higher and higher levels. There's nothing like that. So my atheism and the atheism of Schopenhauer or Samuel Beggett or a number of other ideas, I could cite, isn't the same as the theological atheism to which you refer, which, as I say, is there's been around for an awful long time. It's not just recent. Of course, you're right. In other sense, which is that I would say the highest point of recent science, recent physics might be a recognition that the world is finally unintelligible or absurd. But that, of course, is the view that an atheist like Samuel Beggett or Schopenhauer also and I would endorse, too. So there is a convergence in that sense, but it's an anti-theological convergence, not a theological convergence. Aren't you then a kind of Gnostic of a sort where the random forces of history or the evil demiurge, the true nature of creation is forever hidden from us and you don't call it God, but the actual moral structure of your beliefs is theological nonetheless? No, because, I mean, there have been people who've played with Gnosticism and I might be one of them. I mean, David Hume was not ever commonly thought great Scottish philosopher, great skeptic, as David Hume in one of his dialogues on religion, he says, maybe the universe has been created by a senile God who then forgot what it created or intervened randomly for getting each different a God with dementia, so to speak. Now, he was sort of playing with the idea of a demiurge. In this case, the demiurge was a senile mind, a senile divine mind, but he didn't really attach any significance to it. I don't take that view. There's no mind, senile, benign or otherwise behind what was the universe or its events. There might not even be a universe in the sense in which the Greeks or the Romans, the Stoics, Marcus Aurelius, they all talk about a cosmos. By a cosmos, they mean something unified by a logos by some kind of reason. That might not exist. There might really ultimately only be events, various kinds happening and not happening. So no, I don't think there's any mind there at all. You might say, I guess, in my view, that if that there are recurring patterns in history, which illustrate some of the flaws of the human species. But as I've constantly argued in my work over the last 20 years, the human species isn't an agent any more than any other biological species is an agent. When people talk about humanity doing, isn't that they're making a category error? All there are is the multitudinous human animal with its different groups, different traditions, different ways of life. And even each single person has a variety of purposes and values which conflict with each other. So there's no humanity in that sense. And that, by the way, discussed in my book with relation to Hobbes because he, along with Spinoza, he thought that too. He thought all the were was in the end were individuals in the world. And that applies to humans to say humanity isn't an agent. It doesn't do anything. Can't do anything because it doesn't exist in that sense. About 30 years ago, I said to Jim Buchanan, something like, you know, one of these days, John Gray is going to end up a Catholic. I think nowadays I would cite Eastern Orthodox instead. But why don't you just take the plunge? What do you have to lose? You're right, I am attracted more to Eastern Orthodoxy than I am to Catholicism, partly because its rituals and art are so beautiful. And for me, many of my judgments are aesthetic. And also because it is much less, it gives them a much smaller scope to reason, to human reason than does Western Christianity and Catholicism in particular. I mean, after all, Catholicism claimed to unify the thought of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers with Christianity. In other words, you might say that to what Catholicism did was trying to reconcile Athens and Jerusalem. I don't think Athens and Jerusalem can be reconciled in that way. And the Eastern Orthodox tradition is closer. I would think if there was anything that could be called original Christianity, it's closer to it. So I am interested in it, but I couldn't find myself subscribing to it because it is a very, I mean, like all forms of monotheism or most forms. It's very anthropocentric. It seems that the human story, as it were, has something in it of the divine. And that's where as the stories of other living species, even those with minds like I've written a book on cats, for example, they certainly have minds quite different from human minds, but they have minds all right. Theistic tradition assumes that there is a kind of linkage between the human mind and the divine mind. And in that sense, the human mind is superior to the minds of other animals. I think all forms of Western monotheism think that I don't. So I couldn't, even though I do find Eastern Orthodoxy attractive, I couldn't, I can't imagine myself subscribing to it. Do you think that being pessimistic gives you pleasure? Or what's the return in it from a purely pragmatic point of view? Well, you're well prepared for events. You don't expect. But it's a kind of preemption, right? Are you worried that you become addicted to preempting bad news through pessimism? No, I know when something comes along, which contradicts my expectations, I'm pleasantly surprised. So I get pleasant surprises. Whereas if you're an adamant optimist, you must be in torment every time you turn the news on because the same old follies, the same old crimes, the same old atrocities, the same old hatreds just repeat themselves over and over again. I'm not surprised by that at all. That's like the weather. It's like living in a science fiction environment, which it rains nearly all of the time. But from time to time, it stops in this beautiful sunlight. But 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. Why can't one just build things and be resiliently optimistic in a pragmatic, cautionary sense and take comfort in the fact that you would rather have the problems of the world today than say the problems of the world in the year 1000. And it's not a kind of absolute optimism where you attach to the mood, quite mood, but you simply want to do things and draw positive energy from that in itself, reinforcing. Why isn't that a better view than what you're calling pessimism? Well, I'm not saying people shouldn't adopt the view you've just described how they can do what they like, because one of the and feel what they like and think what they like as long as they don't harm other people to some large extent. I'm not a gospelist. I'm not trying. I'm not actually trying to persuade or convert anyone to or from anything. If you read my work over the last 30 years, you'll know that. I don't care what the writer readers believe, but I'm offering a particular way of thinking that might interest some people. So if you're the people that interests, I guess are people who either through reading and thinking or through personal experiences have found themselves in situations in which organized society in the kind of background of stability, which is necessary if you ought to build things in a pragmatic way and be optimistic about them is absent, which it has been for large stretches of human history and will be again that is today in large parts of the world. So if you were a Russian, let's say, and had somehow managed to live till your in your 70s or 80s now, you somehow survived what you had lived through. You would have seen not one set of background institutions of banking and money and law and ideology, but several. You would have seen several worlds. You would have lived in several worlds in each of which had passed away to bring about another world with some continuities with the past and some recurring features, but another aspects radically different. So it wouldn't occur to you that there would be a kind of long term stability in things which would enable you to be pragmatically optimistic. Let me give an example, maybe, which is more recent back in the 80s. I met some people in California. Who were engaged in that time at that time in projects of freezing their bodies or their brains in order to resurrect them technologically later on and become thereby, if not a mortal, then a mortal that they wanted to escape death. I put the following question to them. This would be, I can't remember the exact year, but some in the early to mid 80s. I said, well, you know, I understand this, but aren't you assuming when you send off, when you have make arrangements, you signed a contract to have your body or your brain sent off when you die and frozen in some desert, some depository somewhere in Nevada or somewhere else to be reopened when technologies advance, which they thought might take 50 or 100 years to the point at which you could be defrozen without damage to your tissues and your brain cells. Aren't you assuming a high degree of background, institutional stability, not just of the human species, but most of the 20th century up to that point had not exhibited in 1985. You could look back at two World Wars, the stock market crash of 1929. That's just affecting America. If you lived in Russia, you would have lived through the collapse of the Roan of Empire, a civil war, which lasted three or four years, but in which over 10 million people died and fled to different countries with different languages and different ways of life and so on. You would have had autism and the Holocaust. You would have had Maoism emerging in China. You would have had not any background stability of institutions or values, but almost continuous punctuated equilibrium of how can you such a paradoxical phrase. So 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 put your brain in to be kept in this apartment will still be there? And they looked at me aghast. And of course what they said was what everybody always says now, I find it funny that the joke sometimes wears thin. They say that what a terribly apocalyptically pessimistic view that is. What I'm saying when I say things like that or when I criticised Wukiyama in 1989 is I expect human history to be in the future as it has been in the past history and human events will go on as normal with new technologies, maybe new forms of knowledge, but in their ethical and political and civilisation respects, they'll go on pretty much exactly as before. Now, it seems to me very odd to describe that as a pessimistic view. Unless you think that things in the future are going to be radically better. So I don't think that this attitude of pragmatic optimism is possible, except in privileged and rare and relatively brief points in history. It doesn't work most of the time. That I suppose you could say is pessimistic and it could have an effect on people's motivation, but actually when I write, I'm not intending, I'm not a therapist either. I'm not a critic. I'm not a hot Gospela. I'm not an evangelist, but I'm not a therapist either. I'm just trying to tell things the way they are. People can then do what they want if they're interested enough to read it. Remember, I'm not trying to get people to read me in order to convert them to my view if they stumble on my work and like it or whatever reason. That's great. If they throw it against the wall, I don't mind at all. That's up to them to I'm simply putting forth a view of things which I think might be of interest to a range of people. But you would admit that if we go back to, say, Japan in 1950 or South Korea in 1960, it's a good thing they never had your works to read in your view. Yes or no? No, no, they had they had they didn't need my works because they believed in progress, right? They made progress happen. Did they were pretty focused? Oh, absolutely. South Korea in 1960 was as poor as Central Africa. Today it's a very nice, pretty wonderful country. It's a very narrow historical perspective, I may say. So Japan modernized not in 1950, but in the 1860s, 70s and 80s onwards. They still had their own. They began under the EEG generation to be. They became the second or the third. Maybe it depends how you count them. Well, sure. But the standard of living in 1950 compared to today, it's an amazing difference, right? You wouldn't hesitate to choose living in Tokyo today compared to 1950. But aren't you aware, Tyler, that throughout history there have been periods of 50 years in which things have got much better. And then there's been a catastrophic war or a pestilence or so, which has swept it all the ways. So you can pick any 50 year period you like. And you'll find many of them of which this is true. But if you take a slightly longer, one of my key ideas is that practically all of economics and social theory is based on the last 300 years. It's a very small data set for the for human history or human life. If you take a bit longer one, if you include the Aztecs, the Romans, not just the Meiji Empire, but either Japan, which, by the way, I think was incomparably more cultured and civilized than the majority of human cultures are today. If you take a broader view, then what you will see as long term trends will look like blips. Are you short the market? I would if I could be bothered. Well, you could earn an immense fortune and give it away to charitable causes. Keep it for yourself, buy more cats. Yeah, do what you want with the money. Yes. Why not do that? I've done a bit. I will add two answers that you can't short it all the time because it doesn't go down all the time. And you might spend your entire if you had a long boom, 30 or 40 year long boom. And I guess we had, I mean, 20 we've had, right? According to you, we should be near the end of it. We are near the end of it, but it doesn't be so short the market. No, because, as you know, I mean, I think in Iraq, when Iraq was at its worst stage, the market went up vastly. Equity markets bear no systematic relationship to the underlying economies over these shorter periods. The other thing is I have done a bit of investing and I haven't always done badly, but it takes too much time. That's too boring. And rather than, as you would call it, there's an opportunity cost, which is the rest of my life. I can't be bothered to get too fixated on it to make money. I have enough money now for my own purposes. I have had cats, not hundreds of cats, but you don't need hundreds of cats. I've had four cats, it's quite enough. I still love cats, but I've lived with four cats for 30 years over a period of 30 years. They passed away now, all of them, the last one at the age of 23, good age for a cat. So I don't need to do that. Why should I do it? I might get more satisfaction, intellectual and aesthetic from observing what happens without trying to profit from it directly. If you did, in fact, have the means to direct a billion dollars to any cause, what cause would it be? It's a very good question. I guess it would be conservation, animal conservation of environments or at least of species that are rapidly disappearing now, because I did say earlier on that a lot of my judgements, value judgements are aesthetic. And I think a world which was denuded of a world, let's say of 10 billion human beings, or it's a kind of Parfitian question, you recognize this. Though it's not a thought experiment, which he ever did. As far as I know, I've read his works and I knew him slightly, but I don't think he ever did this experiment. What a world in which a very large number of human beings not only existed, but had very high levels of well-being. In other words, I'm not talking about the famous repugnant conclusion in him, whereby if you have a vast world in everybody's life, so barely worth living and you add up the utility, it could be better than a smaller world with any fewer human beings. Those lives were much higher. I'm not talking about that at all. I'm thinking of a different thought experiment that he never did to my knowledge, never involved himself in, which is between two worlds, one in which you have an enormous number of people, let's say human beings, 100 billion and all their lives are, in most respects, at least, very worth living, but in which there are no other species. And a different world in which there's a much smaller human population, but a thriving biosphere around it. Now, I'm not trying to judge this because I'm not a utilitarian in terms of desire satisfaction or some other utilitarian theory of value. But the second world, the world in which there are fewer human beings living well, but in what John Stuart Mill, by the way, who tried to be a consistent utilitarian but never was, he said, without what he called flowery ways, this is in his 1848 Principles of Political Economy, he said the world would be barren and he thought what almost not worth living in. I share that for you. Would you be biased toward conserving the lives of intelligent mammals and maybe octopuses or not? You mean as over unintelligent animals? Sure. So you could save a lot of ants, maybe rather cheaply, that many people would prefer, you know, to conserve white rhinos and pandas in China. I'd prefer to live in a world in which conservation was not necessary, in which the biosphere as really was the case until maybe until the so-called Anthropocene, in which we're supposed to living. That was the case until a few hundred years ago, which is that whatever human beings through their activities could damage particular ecologies. I mean, the islands of which Homer, where Homer set some of his poems were at the time of Homer, probably covered by trees, thick trees and forests and now most of them are not. So the right throughout human history and prehistory human beings have damaged or altered their environments. But there hasn't been a time until now in which the whole of the biosphere could be damaged and injured. So I prefer to live in a world in which that's not true. But of course, you might say, well, we don't live in that world. So we've got to decide. I'd just say it would be hard to decide. But what I would not do is make the decision on highly speculative grounds of those proposed by effective ultras and others, which involve making extrapolations into millions and millions of years into the future about what could be the best or worst outcome. I think those are very unsound ways of moral reasoning because there's far too much in them that is speculative and uncertain. I would probably try and make the decisions that could be made for now in the relatively near future of 50 or 100 years or even less than that about which animals or ants, probably species are going to survive whatever happens, most kinds of ants, but gorillas and tigers and highly complex species which depend upon delicate environments could be destroyed by wars. They can be destroyed by poaching. They can be destroyed by diseases that spread more quickly when their environment changes. So I probably focus on them. Under what circumstances would you be willing to sacrifice your life or for what? Not for humanity, that's for sure. For the biosphere. Well, I guess in principle, but how can one life change the biosphere? I can only basically for something or someone that I love. In other words, it's an entirely your philosophically well read. So it's an entirely to me, your agent, relative thing. I mean, there may be values or goods or bats I can think about in an abstract way, but they're not platonic in the sense that they exist in some metaphysical realm, independent of the human world. They're all, I would say, protections of the human world or at least of the living world. I mean, animals have needs and therefore they have other animals have needs and values just as we do. So I would only sacrifice my life for someone or something that I love, nothing else. What did your parents believe? They were secular Christians in the sense that I mean, Britain is a much more or at least in my lifetime has been a much more secular. I don't like the word secular because most of what is secular is just built religion, actually. But Britain has been England, especially Scotland and Ireland. To some extent, even Wales have been a bit different. They've been a very society for the last maybe 100 years, let's say, in which religion has not been a matter of not being as life shaping as it's been in many parts of the world and still isn't apart from new religions that have grown in the country like or not new religions. They're very old religion, but grown in the country because of immigration, Islam, Hinduism and other religions. They were just perfectly normal for whom religion was a part of life. But I guess if they read P.G. Woodhouse, they might have agreed with him. P.G. Woodhouse is a common writer, lived in America a lot. He was asked towards the end of his life in an interview. I think he lived on Long Island or somewhere. I can't remember. But anyway, he's asked, do you, Mr. Woodhouse, have any religious beliefs? To which he replied, you know, it's frightfully hard to say. I think that's tremendously clever, much more intelligent than the most philosophers, because what you recognize was that belief is a very when you get outside of formulating scientific propositions and so on. It's a very fluid, vaporous kind of thing. And so you can have residues of religious belief, even if you're an atheist and you might not be able to formulate your beliefs, even if you have strong religious beliefs, you might still not be able to formulate. I guess they would have said that was not something they spent a lot of time talking about or thinking about. What do you make of recent speculations concerning UFOs? Is that just more theology? Well, I've always assumed that the whole thing was an information program generated mostly in the United States to cover up the Black Weapons programs at the time. That's what I've always assumed. In other words, I've always assumed that it was mostly disinformation. Could there be something in them? Yes, I suppose so. I think there's a Harvard astronomer now, isn't I? I've forgotten his name. Harvey Loeb, yes. Yeah, yeah. Who thinks there is? And I'm open to that, but nothing really sort of turns on it for me. There's a wonderful piece of Russian science fiction. You probably know it by the what are they called? Not Stravinsky, the... Anyway, Stravinsky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the fixed site, the novel, a short novel, is about a visitation to the earth of an alien species. And why did they come? What was their purpose? What was there? What do they want to know about the human species? Nothing. Turns out they came for a picnic. But could it be a kind of proof that pessimism is wrong? So some other set of beings out there survive to the point where they can make it here and they come here and they don't kill us all or enslave us otherwise. It's not pessimism or optimism. I'm not fixated on that. I think they're silly categories, actually. It depends on your background expectations. It's that they have no interest in us. That's a good thing. It is if you think they would otherwise kill us, but maybe they wouldn't. They just have to... I think it's a wonderful idea because it means that from their point of view, I mean, they might be, by our standards, more intelligent than we are, or I don't know, if they lasted a long, longer than we had or are likely to last, then they might be more intelligent or wiser, at least. But they're simply not interested in us. They come and leave some litter, like human picnickers do, and then leave. So to me, although I'm open to the idea of UFOs, which, of course, is a sort of spin-off from the idea, can there be intelligent life forms in other planetary systems or other parts of the universe, I mean, I can't actually imagine that we're the only living, certainly, or even the only sentient. I find that hard to imagine, but the distances are so vast that less technology in other places has developed to extraordinary extents. We might be the only one that ever... We might be alone, apart from, of course, other intelligent species on the planet, like gorillas and possibly octopuses that exist alongside us. We might never be in significant contact with these other intelligences if they exist, but it doesn't really matter much to me one way or the other, because I think we've actually done a rather good job making ourselves more alone already, actually, by crudifying the biosphere through mass extinctions and so on. Should the UK work toward having the two Ireland's reunite? I think it'll happen. I don't know whether the UK will work towards it, but I've always held... Will you cure it on or you'll be sad, or what will your view be? Well, I think historically, the relations with Ireland of England have been mostly rather tragic or painful. They've not ever been very good. So I think it will happen. I've always argued, if you... I mean, I write a lot in the New States where I now have a fortnightly column, and I've always argued that Scotland would not break away, most likely at any time that we could see in the future for various specific reasons that I gave. And I think I was one of the very, very few people who were arguing that because there was a time in which it was supposed to be inevitable. I never thought it would happen, particularly after Brexit, because after Brexit, breaking away would mean leaving the UK and then having several years in a limbo before they were accepted to Scotland, Independence Scotland was accepted by the EU again, just wasn't going to happen. And it won't happen now. It won't happen probably for 10, 20, 34, or ever, but Ireland I think will happen because partly for demographic reasons, which is that the population balance in the two parts of Ireland is shifting. But I think just long-term, partly because of Brexit, partly because it's proved hard to work out a settlement with the EU for Northern Ireland without diluting the legal sovereignty that Brexit was supposed to achieve. I think it will happen. And whether it be good or bad, I think it probably will happen. How should the city of Bath deal with its problem of having too many tourists? It's really crowded, right? It's impossible to park, difficult to walk around. It doesn't feel like the city of Bath anymore, at least sometimes of the year. Relatively, well, I suppose in that sense during the pandemic it was much more walkable, but it was also much less lively because although it's crowded the city of Bath, it also has lots of interesting shops and cultural life, partly because of the tourists. It has theaters, cinemas, bookstores, rather wonderful bookstore called Toppings, which is in the tourist center and is always full. And you wouldn't have those things if you cut back the number of tourists. You could have a tourist tax, some countries or some places at least, too. I think Bhutan has a tax of $200 a day. Just... I think they upped it to 400 recently, but yes, it used to be 200, I believe. Well, I don't say that's wrong. I mean, if they had, you see, if they had, that is still in many ways a very unique and cohesive culture. So if they had hundreds of thousands of tourists, more could be destroyed than could be justified, perhaps in terms of the benefits it gave to the people who lived there before, but Britain is a very individualistic and multicultural society as it stands. So I don't think anything much is destroyed. Just parking, you may be. But if you, it is difficult, but that can be coped with in various ways. I think in all of these things, in most countries, at most times, in most places, the aim is to achieve a kind of balance. You see, if it was completely destroyed, I must say, to give an example there, you might have had this experience too. I have been to Italian cities and museums and art galleries where the crowds were so enormous and so permanent and so thick and the waits were so long. And when you got in to see the pictures, you could hardly see them at all. At that point, almost, it's not worth going. So I do see your point. You'd have to raise the price significantly, probably, of just being there, to make it worth being there. You'd have to pay more for it to be worth being there. Is Monty Python still funny? Oh, I think so. Our present king, I think, is a fan. I'm a fan too. It's funny because it's absurdist humor and I like absurdist humor and lots of British people do. It can be dark humor. After all, the Monty Python team or part of it, most of it, produced Brazil. Have you seen that film? Sure, of course. Terry Dunham, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Great film. And very dark, wouldn't you say? Absolutely. But it's funny too. It's funny partly because it's so dark. And also, the end of The Life of Brian, a film that, by the way, I've been told, I was told by John Cleese, actually, couldn't be made now. This was 10 years ago, but I'm sure it couldn't be made 10 years later either. At the end of it, there's the wonderful optimistic song. Is there not when they're all hanging on the cross? Bright side of life, yes. The bright side of life. That's optimism. You're hanging on the cross and you're not gonna stop hanging on the cross. You're gonna hang on there till you die. And yet you see the bright side of it all. That's optimism. So I do, I love Monty Python. If someone says, well, today, European literature, it's alive and well and flourishing. There's Kinev's Guard, there's Elena Ferrante, many other fine authors, submission by Hulebeck. Do you agree or aren't we living in a wonderful time for the written word, a kind of renaissance of literature? I'd go further than that. I mean, I do read an enormous amount. Not, I don't like very long books like the Danish author, Knauske, I find them. The only very long book I like is Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. I mean, that's a, you can read that for your entire life in a way. And on and off in bits, I've never read it from beginning to end. I have to admit that. But on the whole, I don't like long books. I would go further than that, Tyler. You might find this surprising. I'm a great fan of film as an art form. And I think even what might be called popular films, even TV is in a golden age, I would say now. If I think of the series I've enjoyed in recent years, Breaking Bad, True Detective, British series of various kinds, some of the great historical, I think they weren't made, couldn't be made for various reasons and new technologies have made them even better in some respects before. So that is a great thing. I think, I mean, I'm in the process of shifting over from physical books. I'll keep a few, but I'm getting rid of thousands of books now for various reasons, literally thousands, to Kindle. And the reason for, I've got thousands and thousands on Kindle already. And the reason for that is partly practical because I can carry it around with me. I can go on holiday and have all these books with me without any difficulty at all. But it's also kind of beyond that. I mean, I can, if they're books connected with my writing, I can search them very easily rather than spending two hours of a finite lifetime. And I'm 75, so it's more finite than it used to be. Searching for a particular phrase or sentence. I can find it instantly. So that's a very good thing. And also now with the quality of the printing and of the formatting and of the illustrations and art of them is very high. So that's progress too. Remember, I've never argued that progress doesn't occur. I mean, I've often, I've benefited myself from anesthetic dentistry. I recently benefited from quite recently just a few months ago from cataract surgery, wonderful things. But my argument is that progress, actually, even of the scientific and technological kind can always be reversed. And often there's when there is a general civilizational collapse. I should say, by the way, that one of the, I've often contrasted scientific and technological process with ethical and political progress and said that the former scientific and technological is exponential in a way that improvement or progress in ethics and politics, isn't it? That's more entropic. But there are people who I respect greatly like Peter Thiel, who argued that even in science and technology, this is more of an age of stagnation than we commonly think that group think and various types of institutional foul up of limited creativity. And that actually even the, you might call the paradigmatic forms of cunitive advance, which is what progress is. Progress isn't just a brief period of 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. And that's generally true in science and technology. But if you, of course, if you look at the whole span of the last 3000 years, there have been many periods in which technologies and skills and knowledge have been lost. So that could happen again, I think. But ethical and political progress is much more fragile than that, but it does occur. And sometimes technological progress can improve human lives a lot, not just in medical contexts or dental contexts. By the way, Thomas de Quincy, the celebrated opium addict writing in his book said, I can never remember if it's a quarter or a third, but he said, I think either a quarter or a third of all human suffering was toothache, which are probably true at that time or might have been true anyway. It's definitely not true now. So I share that view and they can even increase, I mean, new methods of filming and streaming of films and so on have increased the aesthetic qualities of life because they made it much easier for someone sitting in a study as I do or to have access to beautiful forms of film art. But I think in what people, I suppose, conventionally think of as ethics and politics, it's always a good idea to expect the worst to come back. It's always a good idea to think that among the competing memes, it'll be the memes that are vicious, the most vicious and the most toxic, which will win. I think that's happening now in the world, actually. Has Herman Melville influenced you much? Yes, a lot. How so? I don't know about influence because I'm not novelist, but it's one of the books I, Moby Dick, I've read others as well. The Confidence Man is a great book, for example. And Bart will be the short story. It's a great short, fantastic show. He's a fantastically deep, profound, difficult writer. But of course, Moby Dick is the big one. Full of biblical stuff, as you know. There's a wonderful edition by the American 30 or 40 years ago, Harold Beaver, which has a 200 page set of notes at the end, which all the biblical and other references and delusions are explained. But he's an incredible writer. And not really, it's almost not a novelist. I didn't know what you would call Moby Dick. By the way, I saw it, I knew well, a scientist for the last 15 years of his life. G. Ballard told me that that was one of his books, favorite books that he kept recurring to Moby Dick. He kept rereading it and rereading it. Can you imagine going on a quest for God the way some of Melville's characters do? Or is there, there's too much disappointment you're setting yourself up for if you do that? Well, I guess I'm not unhappy enough to want to go on that. I guess you go for that. I mean, you turn to God for things that you want very much, which are impossible, and you know are impossible than the natural order of things. That's the deep reason, at least in theistic cultures. If you, if someone you love has died and you can't bear it, then the idea that there still exists in some other realm and may be even happier in that realm can be a great comfort. If you're trapped in some situation which is completely hopeless in ordinary naturalistic reasoning, you know you're not going to get out. You know you're going to be killed. You know you're going to start that. Then you turn to God in those circumstances. But I guess I've been lucky. I haven't been in circumstances like that. Well, how I react. I mean, there's a contrary. That's why, you know, that people say there are no atheists and foxholes. I think there are actually. I think some of the atheists and foxholes were believers before they got into the foxhole. But it is true. I mean, sort of empirical, empirically, I'm a great admirer of the Russian writer Valam Shalamov, who survived. I think it was 16 or even 19 years in the very worst camps in in Soviet Russia, gold mining camps where the average lifespan was three years. Those are great books. Yeah, they're great books. But in the way he describes them, by the way, he was frustrated by the description of him as a gulag writer because he said, I only wrote about the gulag because it happened to be in the gulag for so long. He said he loved Proust. He loved. He found a copy of Proust once, which was then stolen. But he just said, you know, that's because I was there. That was how I did my life. That's why I wrote. Not because I wanted to write about the gulag, but he didn't want to forget it either because he thought that something could be written of value about it. But he says that the people who survived, the people who broke down mentally and then physically the quickest were the Communist Party members and hierarchs who came in. The ones who lasted a long time were the professional criminals. The ones that lasted the longest were religious believers because they knew, I mean, if you were in a camp where nearly everyone would be dead in three years, there weren't death camps in the way the Nazi camps were, but nearly everyone in them, in a section of camps, it wasn't true of the gulag, but section, would not be there in three years, they couldn't be dead. If you knew that, how do you, when you look around you, you see every single day you see somebody lying in the snow who's sort of perished, who was in the next bunk to you, the previous night. How do you adapt to that, how do you adapt to that? And he thought that religious faith, but he hadn't on himself, he had not at all himself. Yet he still did survive semi-miraculously or by, not in a, I think, in a whole way, he was damaged by it, but he did survive and he did continue writing even after he escaped for a long time, decades. So I can understand why people turn to divine power to do what they know to be naturally impossible. That's one of the deepest motives at least, now people turn to religion, but I've been lucky, I haven't had to do that yet. If someone set their views up to minimize disappointment in life, do you think their resulting philosophies and attitudes would be much different from yours or the same? Well, I don't see myself as minimizing disappointment, I think that's a rather miserable sort of going life. It's better to be regularly disappointed and intensely disappointed. If what you're being disappointed in was worth pursuing and experiencing. I mean, many love affairs lead to disappointment, but if you decide then I'm not gonna have them. I think that's a rather miserable view. Which by the way is one of my objections to traditional epicureanism and Lucrishnism. Traditional epicureanism and Lucrishnism aims for happiness by setting the bar so low that you can't be disappointed. So if you think of what's absent in Lucrishnism's view of the good life or in Epicurus' good of the view of what's absent, well, anything that cause turbulence of mind, Lucrishnism says explicitly, you shouldn't fall in love with other people. Have lots of promissious sex, find some slaves, get it out of your system so you don't need to fall in love. If you don't fall in love, you won't then be unhappy because when you fall out of love, he says that explicitly and in a kind of gentler way, it also underlies Epicurus' philosophy. Science is not valued in, remember in Epicurus, except as a means for improving the comfort of life. There isn't a kind of scientific quest, a semi sort of mystical scientific quest as there was in Europe. At the start of the scientific revolution, most of the needs of the scientific revolution were astrologers or mystics. Of course, Newton was a numerologist and a fundamentalist in his reading of the Bible. They all had attached great spiritual and mystical significance to science. Epicurus and Lucrishnism didn't, it was just a tool whereby we could be made more comfortable. Sport, the highly competitive sports, the virtues of war, the martial virtues, they're not there either. Now, it's a very minimal, if you think of what an entirely Epicurian world would look like, there'd be no faith or religion because that's led to masses of... Sure, but that's you, right? No faith, no religion. Yes, that's me, but I don't do it in order to... That's just my condition, that's just how I am. I don't feel the need for it, but not because I want to avoid disappointment. I can't imagine doing living in order to... But what I'm saying is that there are many philosophers, the Epicurians, 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 to. There's so minimal that they're less likely to be afforded. I don't do that, I think the opposite. I'm much more like Nietzsche in that respect. I think he's better, I mean, or at least to me, aesthetically better and maybe more interesting in a way of life. If someone said, how did you live your life? 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 comparative sports because I might lose. I never invested because I might lose my capital. I find all of those rather sort of miserable ways of living. But 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 in his 18 or 20, he was a gun runner for monarchist rebels in Spain. He then became a seamen 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 been 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. A tremendous mental torment went to that because 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 brought up in. He was a tremendous pessimist, but he lived a life of extraordinary adventure. And 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. That's, I think, you'd be more inclined. If you're an optimist, you have some kind of clear, otherwise I say, 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-optimistic, you'll settle on what you want to do. And if it's at least possible, I mean, 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 and on a wild goose, go 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're not an optimist, you might be very well inclined to do them. And I like people like that. Last three questions are about you. First, who recognized your talent first and how? Oh, I can give it a specific person. He's mentioned in the acknowledgments of my recent book, in the U of I, it was a teacher in a grammar school in the northeast of England, back in the 1960s, called Charles Constable, who was a very well-read man. And he was the one person who introduced me to R.G. Collingwood's book, The New Leviathan Singular, on which I wouldn't say this book is based. It's quite different in every respect, but it gave me the thoughts that 60 years later then found fruition in this book of mine. He thought that I could benefit from a university education, including one from Oxford. So I joined, that wasn't unique in any way. I joined a group of people, young people, six formers, as we called them, five or six or seven or eight, I might have been as many as 10 or 12, who he sort of groomed to apply to universities like Oxford, Cambridge and some others. And so I joined that group after he noted that and I was successful in going there. So that was him. What is your most unusual successful work habit? That's an interesting thing. It has to be unusual, does it? Not just- Yes, so that you work hard is not really unusual. Obviously it matters. I don't know how unusual it used to be, but I used to like having a cat nearby. I don't anymore because I like traveling. I haven't been able to do much recently because of the pandemic and other things, but and I think if you have a cat or another animal companion, and even for long periods is not a good idea. But I don't know if that's, I've read actually of a lot of writers who've, and I think of myself primarily now as a writer, not as a philosopher, philosophers are professors. I'm not a professor anymore. As a writer, the kind of mixture of calm companionship and complete indifference that the cat has for you and your work and your thoughts is very calming. So I don't know if it's not unusual, but I certainly, I found that helped my work. Nowadays I sometimes play music or I interspersed my work if I'm working on my computer with looking at maybe some little few moments, 10 or 15 minutes of a film I've watched before and there may be some passage in the film that I find particularly beautiful or thrilling. So I use that too, but I'd say that would be called slacking, but I don't think of it as slacking. I think of it as recharging the mental batteries to go on to work. Last question, what will you do next? Very good question too. Well, I'm now primarily, most of the things having written this book, I have a column I referred to and I do some reviewing. I've done a lot of reviewing of both of Pinker and other Fukuyama, the writers like that, but I also review quite a bit of fiction. I'm reviewing at the moment a memoir by the film producer, Werner Herzog and a novel by him. And so I try to review a wide variety of books. I'll continue doing that and I may collect them, but I might start trying to write something. I might think of writing a book purely of aphorisms. I like aphorisms because as I say, they're short and uncluttered and can be beautiful. A lot of people don't like aphorisms because if you write an aphorism, you can't have 10 pages before it explaining what you mean by it. And you can't like an academic work. A lot of academic works, they say, I'm not saying this, I'm not saying that. I don't think this, I don't think that. I'm not criticizing Professor Sohn, so I am criticizing the other. Three quarters of the book is a set of digressions about what they're not doing. An aphorism just says something. You don't have to accept it or not it, but it sounds sometimes dogmatic for that reason. It sounds as if you're trying to impose it on someone, which I might do some more essays. I'm more and more interested in theology as a root of many of our present intellectual and other perplexities and dilemmas. I think if you think of what I call secular terms, you can't really understand the world that we now live in. Not just because religions come back as a force in war and a force in politics, but because many of the things that don't seem religious are actually inspired by, not just religious needs and impulses, but even by religious categories or symbols or myths. The singularity, for example, is obviously something connected with ideas of revelation and of a ratchet. It's obviously not an idea that it would be easy to have if you'd never have been, if you knew nothing about those Christian intuition, other traditions in which these ideas of apocalypse and revelations are sort of here. So I think I might write something more about that. I'm happy to recommend all of John's books, including the new one, The New Leviathans, Thoughts After Liberalism, that's John Gray, G-R-A-Y. John, thank you very much. And Tyler, thank you for your brilliant questions. They were very well chosen and very worth answering. And that doesn't always happen. I'm not usually an optimist about interviews, but in this case, whatever expectations I've had of disappointment have themselves been disappointed. I look forward to seeing you next whenever that is. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowan, and the show is at Cowan Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.