John Gray: prediction

Transcript context

…I’m not saying people shouldn’t adopt the view you’ve just described, Tyler. They can do what they like 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 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 or the reader disbelieves, but I’m offering a particular way of thinking that might interest some people. If the people it interests are people who, either through reading and thinking or through personal experiences, have found themselves in situations in which organized society and the background of stability — which is necessary if you’re 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, and is today in large parts of the world . . . If you were a Russian, let’s say, and had somehow managed to live till you’re in your 70s or 80s now, you’ve somehow survived what you had lived through. You would’ve seen not one set of background institutions of banking and money and law and ideology; you would’ve seen several worlds. You would’ve lived in several worlds, each of which had passed away to bring about another world with some continuities with the past and some recurring features, but in other respects radically different. It wouldn’t occur to you that there would be long-term back stability in things which would enable you to be pragmatically optimistic. Let me give you an example, maybe, which is more recent. Back in the ’80s, I met some people in California who were engaged 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 immortal, then amortal. They wanted to escape death. I put the following question to them. This would be — I can’t remember the exact year, but somewhere in the early to mid ’80s. I said, well, I understand this, but aren’t you assuming when you make arrangements, you sign a contract to have your body or your brain sent off when you die and frozen in 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 de-frozen without damage to your tissues and your brain cells . . . Aren’t you assuming a high degree of background institutional stability, which actually, not just for 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, and that’s just affected America. or 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, and that’s just affected America. If you’d lived in Russia, you would’ve lived through the collapse of the Romanov empire, a civil war which lasted three or four years, but in which over 10 million people died or fled to different countries with different languages and different ways of life and so on. You would’ve had Nazism and the Holocaust. You would’ve had Maoism emerging in China. You would’ve had not any background stability of institutions or values, but almost continuous punctuated equilibrium, if I can use 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’ve put your brain in to be kept in this deposit will still be there? They looked at me aghast, and of course, what they said was what everybody always says. Now, I find it funnier then; the joke sometimes wears thin. They say, “What a terribly, apocalyptically pessimistic view that is. How appalling. ” What I’m saying when I say things like that, or when I criticized Fukuyama 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 civilization 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. 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. Actually, when I write, I’m not pretending. I’m not a hot gospeler. 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 for whatever reason, that’s great. If they throw it against the wall, I don’t mind at all. That’s up to them. 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?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.