Shades of Gray

The title is obvious:

“Shades of Gray”

“Grays’ Anatomy.”

You can usually tell which Prof. John Gray you’re dealing with by the beardedness index. Having to bring all that together in one place would require a large variety of prop hair.

(Though I wasn’t that impressed by Romano’s review, to be honest.)

You left out John Gray the Hayekian classical liberal (unless that was meant to be the Post-Millian one.)

#3: All of the John Gray’s in Henry’s last paragraph are, in fact, the same person at different times.

Was John Gray ever a Rawlsian? I must have missed that one. I always thought that was the one thing he wasn’t.
Surely John Gray the Oakeshottian conservative-pluralist, John Gray the Berlinian liberal-pluralist, and John Gray the anti-liberal pluralist also belong in there somewhere? (And does John Gray the proponent of the Gaia hypothesis fit under the green conservative, or Ballardian nihilist, rubric?)

I confess that I had also missed John Gray the Rawlsian liberal. The excerpt from the article (at 13) is helpful, but I can’t help pointing out that it is a common mistake to read Rawls, as Gray is here reported as doing, as an advocate of welfare state capitalism. Rawls explicitly argues for a more radical alternative – ‘property-owning democracy’ – precisely because it goes further (so he argues) in securing the genuine independence and equality of citizens. In fact, Rawls’s position is not that far away from the left-Millsian one that Gray started out from….

Iran “currently practices a type of democracy — in effect a more stable version of the system that is developing in Iraq — that gives its present leadership a degree of legitimacy.”

A point made by many.

“Suicide terrorism is not a pathology that afflicts any particular culture, nor has it any close connections with religion.”

The first is statement is simply true. The second not. And of course it’s not a “pathology,” it’s often just a strategy.

“One of Gray’s bugbears is progress. ‘Humanists like to think they have a rational view of the world,’ Gray writes, ‘but their core belief in progress is a superstition.’ Later he adds: ‘Outside of science, progress is simply a myth.’

Not that far off base. But I think he’s confusing humanism with the enlightenment. Humanism predates the enlightenment by either 200 or 1000 years. It’s both pre and anti-christian.

“the idea of progress is a secular version of the Christian belief in providence”
Romano adds: “(even though all scientific notions of progress explicitly reject any notion of providence).” explicit rejections or no Romano sounds like a simpleton. see “enlightenment” above.

I’ve been reading my parents’ old copy of The Armies of the Night, and Mailer comes off as a crank. I’d certainly never call him a philosopher, He’s a writer and writers are cranks by definition. Most philosophers were too until the invention of the Ph.D. If Romano is by comparison a “responsible” “morally serious” “rational” maker of structurally sound arguments, he’s also a bit dim. Gray may be a nut, and maybe he’s an interesting nut, and maybe not. But you learn more from the foolishness of interesting minds than from the seriousness of mediocre ones.

Perhaps I’m being dense, but doesn’t the quote from Robin’s article given in comment 13 depict Gray rejecting, rather than embracing, Rawlsian liberalism? Or is it meant to imply that he was a Rawlsian until he got, oh, a hundred pages or so into ToJ? If anything, the article makes it seem that Gray was sympathetic to a sort of social-democratic liberalism UNTIL he encountered Rawls’s version of it (or until he encountered the prose in which Rawls articulated his version of it).

J. B. Bury in his great book, The Idea of Progress, (1920) http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=5703&pageno=185 traces the emergence of the modern concept of Progress to Bacon and Descartes (and Perrault in his defence of the “moderns” against the Ancients). Likewise in the same century, Bossuet, in his Histoire Universelle, championed “Providence” as the guarantor of religion and stability.

Bury does not concede that Progress is a “superstition” but he says that to be valid as an idea, it must be decoupled from “the illusion of finality” [the absolute]. He concludes:

“It is quite easy to fancy a state of society, vastly different from ours, existing in some unknown place like heaven; it is much more
difficult to realise as a fact that the order of things with which we are familiar has so little stability that our actual descendants may be born into a world as different from ours as ours is from that of our ancestors of the pleistocene age.
The illusion of finality is strong. The men of the Middle Ages would have found it hard to imagine that a time was not far off in which the Last Judgment would have ceased to arouse any emotional interest. In the sphere of speculation Hegel, and even Comte . . . did not recognize that their own systems could not be final any more than the system of Aristotle or of Descartes. It is science, perhaps, more than anything else–the wonderful history of science in the last hundred years–that has helped us to transcend this illusion.

But if we accept the reasonings on which the dogma of Progress is based, must we not carry them to their full conclusion? In escaping from the illusion of finality, is it legitimate to exempt that dogma itself? Must not it, too, submit to its own negation of finality? Will not that process of change, for which Progress is the optimistic name, compel “Progress” too to fall from the commanding position in which it is now, with apparent security, enthroned? [words in Greek] … A day will come, in the revolution of centuries, when a new idea will usurp its place as the directing idea of humanity. Another star, unnoticed now or invisible, will climb up the intellectual heaven, and human emotions will react to its influence, human plans respond to its guidance. It will be the criterion by which Progress and all other ideas will be judged. And it too will have its successor.

In other words, does not Progress itself suggest that its value as a doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain not very advanced stage of civilisation; just as Providence, in its day, was an idea of relative value, corresponding to a stage somewhat less advanced? Or will it be said that this argument is merely a disconcerting trick of dialectic played under cover of the darkness
in which the issue of the future is safely hidden by Horace’s prudent god?”

That’s wonderful, Roger.

I curious, though, if there’s anyone who thinks the later stuff by Gray is any good. I’ve never heard anyone think so and all indications is that it’s pretty bad. This is too bad since I liked his book on Hayek quite a lot and thought his book on Liberalism was interesting.

Seth –as a Philadelphian, and a reader of the Inquirer, The Nation, and the Kronkle, I can assure you that Romano is generally known to be a bit dim. Doesn’t seem to me that that reflects on other journalists, philosophers, or artists.

The Corey Robin article linked to above was nicely done but doesn’t hold up well, seven years later. Norman Barry, who I think is supposed to come off badly in it, looks rather better as a diagnostician seven years and twelve positions later– with the accusation of promiscuity and the intimation of opportunism. The article gives an account of a one-time transformation which we now know can’t be right.

Another Barry, Brian, wrote in a review of a Nomos volume in the APSR:

“John Gray tells us that he has changed his mind, but scarcely why, and the phenomenon itself occurs too often to be significant.”

“I can’t think, offhand, of any societies where suicide terrorism (as opposed to suicide bombing, timed-bomb terrorism, or whatever) is a significant strategy chosen by local elites that are not in a global ‘worst 10 places to live’ list. At a societal level, that marks it as a pathology.”

40 years of occupation have an effect on people, yes.

I curious, though, if there’s anyone who thinks the later stuff by Gray is any good.

*raises hand*

Um, the Japanese Emperor for whom the kamikazi sacraficed themselves was considered a Shinto god. ;]

The name kamikazi means “wind god”

Wikipedia says: “In the Japanese language, kamikaze (Japanese:神風), usually translated as “divine wind” (kami is the word for “God”, “Spirit”, or “Divinity”; and kaze for “wind”). The word kamikaze originated as the name of major typhoons in 1274 and 1281, which dispersed Mongolian invasion fleets.”

Tribute still is paid to the kamikazi pilots in Shinto temples, I believe.

Was the suicide bomber Chen Ta Erh in Malraux’s Man’s Fate who sacrifices himself to assassinate Chang KaiShek motivated by a religious impulse (Marxist Providence)? Hard to say.

In retrospect one might have wished that some of the generals in the failed plot to assassinate a Hitler had shown a little of the same spirit of self sacrifice instead of wasting their time arguing who would get to control what after the Fuhrer’s death.

I’m certainly no fan of John Gray but I don’t think he’s ever written anything as smug and stupid as Romano’s “takedown” of him.

Which of Gray’s latter works did you like, Daniel, and why? I’m genuinely curious to know since they’ve been pretty heavily panned. As I said, I liked some of his earlier work.

I am curious also. “Straw Dogs”, “Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern”, and “Black Mass” are the works I have read so far. I just started “False Dawn”. I suppose these are his later works.

In particular, I found “Straw Dogs” to be a real eye opener. Not that I quit my job, left my family, or anything, but it quite frankly changed my outlook on life.

Gray does seem to be both heavily criticized and heavily praised. Libertarians are pissed because Gray is an apostate, so I understand why they blast him. But why all the Romanoesque bashing by non-Libertarians? Is it that they don’t like being called deluded animals or something? :-)