John N. Gray - Political and Philosophical Thought

Political and Philosophical Thought

Among philosophers, he is known for a thoroughgoing rejection of Rawlsianism and for exploration of the uneasy relationship between value-pluralism and liberalism in the work of Isaiah Berlin.

Gray's political thought is famous for its mobility across the political spectrum over the years. As a student, Gray was on the left and continued to vote Labour into the mid-1970s; by 1976 he had shifted towards a right-liberal New Right position, convinced that the world was changing irrevocably through technological inventions, realigned financial markets and new economic power blocs, and that the left failed to comprehend the magnitude and nature of this change. In the 1990s Gray became an advocate for environmentalism and New Labour. Gray now sees the conventional (left-wing/right-wing) political spectrum of conservatism and social democracy as no longer viable.

More recently, he has criticised neoliberalism, the global free market and some of the central currents in Western thinking, such as humanism, while moving towards aspects of green thought, drawing on the Gaia theory of James Lovelock. It is perhaps for this critique of humanism that Gray is best known.

Central to the doctrine of humanism, in Gray’s view, is the inherently utopian belief in meliorism, namely that humans are not limited by their biological natures and that advances in ethics and politics are cumulative or that they can alter or improve the human condition, in the same way that advances in science and technology have altered or improved living standards.

Gray contends, in opposition to this view, that history is not progressive, but cyclical. Human nature, he argues, is an inherent obstacle to cumulative ethical or political progress. Seeming improvements, if there are any, can very easily be reversed: one example he has cited has been the use of torture by the United States against terrorist suspects.

Furthermore, he argues that this belief in progress, commonly imagined to be secular and liberal, is in fact derived from an erroneous Christian notion of humans as morally autonomous beings categorically different from other animals. This belief, and the corresponding idea that history makes sense, or is progressing towards something, is in Gray’s view merely a Christian prejudice.

In Straw Dogs, he argues that the idea that humans are self-determining agents does not pass the acid test of experience. Those Darwinist thinkers who believe humans can take charge of their own destiny to prevent environmental degradation are, in this view, not naturalists, but apostles of humanism.

He identifies the Enlightenment as the point at which the Christian doctrine of salvation was taken over by secular idealism and became a political religion with universal emancipation as its aim. Communism, fascism and ‘global democratic capitalism’ are characterised by Gray as Enlightenment 'projects' which have led to needless suffering, in Gray’s view, as a result of their ideological allegiance to this religion.