John Gray: disagreement

Transcript context

…If liberalism is indeed done, as the subtitle of your new book suggests — Thoughts After Liberalism — what is it exactly we should teach young people? We should teach them the high points of the traditions we know well. 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 Aeschylus and Sophocles, later Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. I would include among philosophical writings some liberals. For example, John Stuart Mill, even though I disagree with him profoundly — a very resourceful and intelligent thinker. Hayek. Another one among conservative thinkers, Michael Oakeshott. And one by whom I myself have been greatly influenced, although he’s not much read nowadays, George Santayana. He’s one of the big intellectual influences on my life, including another American writer, a poet, Wallace Stevens, who wrote a great poem about George Santayana when Santayana was living, in his old age, in a nunnery in Rome. I would pick great points in our tradition and also other traditions — the Bhagavad Gita, Daoist works like Zhuangzi 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. The Bible — yes or no?…

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