BACKGROUND: John Gray was born in South Shields in 1948. He has been professor of politics at Oxford and professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. He recently retired from the LSE to concentrate on writing.

Gray was a friend of the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997) for the last 25 years of the latter’s life and developed Berlin’s work on liberalism. Berlin believed that the central problem in liberalism was its inability to resolve conflicts between opposing world-views, or beliefs, such as Islam and Christianity. If liberalism is to work, it needs to stop two such opposing world-views actively locking horns and it certainly does not exist to favour, and then impose, one world-view over the other.

INFLUENCE: Many of Gray’s works explore the various ways in which humans delude themselves over their plans and actions. Underpinning this delusion is the belief that humans are very different from all other animals, something that has informed most of humankind’s religions and/or belief/political systems.

Gray’s position is that the basis of this ill-founded belief is that humans can continue to improve their lot, usually with the advance of knowledge and science. Gray’s book False Dawn (1998) examines the delusions of global capitalism and the book’s principal argument is that economic globalisation is a fantasy.

Why a fantasy? While many clearly different political and cultural systems have embraced a form of capitalism, Gray argues that it has rarely been an unquestioning or wholesale embrace of Western-style capitalism. Rather, these differing societies have absorbed the bits of capitalism that would work for them and have integrated these principles into their own perfectly viable and evolving economic systems, much in the way that a language evolves.

Two Faces of Liberalism (2000) advances the notion that it is pointless to impose or even look for a rational consensus in societies of what constitutes the ‘good life’. Instead, taking Berlin’s theory of value-pluralism further, we should willingly accept that modern societies “contain several ways of life, with many people belonging to more than one”. No one way of life has more value than any other.

With Straw Dogs (2002) Gray debunks the myth that humans are different to, and in some way above, other animals. While Gray accepts that humans use reason in a way that is not replicated by other animals, he argues that this is not a justification for believing that humans can consider themselves to be above all other animals.

Gray’s last work, Black Mass (2007), is, in my view, his best. Here he analyses, in enjoyably trenchant prose, the way in which Utopian zeal has informed many of the world’s principal religions and belief systems. By “Utopian” I mean the deluded belief that humans can impose ‘rational’ systems on societies in order to achieve the goal of ‘perfection’ or meaning. Enter stage left the Inquisition, Robespierre and Joseph Stalin, to mention only a few who have sought to enforce conformity in the pursuit of an ideal.

The central – and controversial – political idea in Black Mass is the notion that the Enlightenment, so venerated by Western scholars and thinkers, was actually the origin of the Utopian fantasies that would eventually lead to mass murder on such an unprecedented scale in the 20th Century. Gray argues that some of the worst crimes committed
by totalitarian regimes in the last century “were done in the service of progressive ideals”.

Finally, while Gray has been influenced by Berlin, Schopenhauer, Hume and, more contemporaneously, Lovelock and Oakeshott, it is more difficult to detect just whom Gray has influenced. His importance as a modern thinker surely lies in his meticulous tracing of the intellectual linkages between today’s neo-conservative agenda and such diverse movements as the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins and the Nazis.

SUMMARY: Individual liberty, if it is prized, has never been as threatened as it is now – ironically at a time when Andy Warhol’s prediction of 15-minute fame for everyone is virtually achievable.

Gray developed Berlin’s articulation of the problem of liberalism and has urged us to reject the idea that we can improve the world through the imposition of belief systems. Instead, we should accept that “all or nearly all ways of life have interests that make peaceful coexistence worth pursuing”.

This month’s Great Thinker was written by Mark Norris, a freelance HR and staff development consultant. If you would like to nominate, or contribute, a Great Thinker, please contact TJ Online editor Sue Mennell at sue@trainingjournal.com

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