John Gray: belief

Transcript context

…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? You don’t call it God, but the actual moral structure of your beliefs is theological nonetheless. No, there have been people who’ve played with gnosticism, and I might be one of them. David Hume, who’s not ever commonly thought — great Scottish philosopher, great skeptic — as a . . . 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 he’d created, or intervened randomly, forgetting each different . . . A god with dementia, [laughs] so to speak. Now, he was playing with the idea of a demiurge. In this case, the demiurge was 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 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 of 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 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, it isn’t that. They’re making a category error. All there is, 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 in conflict with each other. There’s no humanity in that sense. That, by the way, is discussed in my book with relation to Hobbes because he, along with Spinoza, thought that, too. He thought all there was in the end were individuals in the world. That applies to humans, too. Humanity isn’t an agent. It doesn’t do anything, can’t do anything because it doesn’t exist in that sense. I bet 30 years ago, I said to Jim Buchanan something like, “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?…

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