AC Grayling, one of the presenters at the Global Atheist Convention, talks about his view of humanity in The Australian.
Transcript from the Weekend Australian, Saturday 20 February 2010
How to be good without bothering God
British philosopher Anthony Grayling remains optimistic about the future of humanity
MIRIAM COSIC
ANTHONY Grayling is just the man for these troubled times. The war on terror? Globalisation and its discontents? Bioethics? The decline of manners? Ask Grayling, a trained thinker hard to place on the political Left or Right, tough on cant but easy on human frailty.
No ivory tower theorist, Grayling takes the Bertrand Russell approach to the life of a philosopher: ethics is not just a rarefied conversation, it must be practised in the real world.
Not least, he says, because public support of universities demands their products are useful to society.
He is older than the present crop of celebrity philosophers — he has just turned 60 — and it shows in his rigour. He doesn’t enter the public domain to offer easy answers but rather to make us think. And think for ourselves.
“Human beings of all kinds, given the opportunity to reflect, find themselves wanting to make sense of things, to impose some kind of pattern which is satisfying to themselves,” he says during a recent telephone conversation. “But most people would rather die than think, and they shortcut things by taking on pre-packaged ideas about the world.”
The articles he writes in British newspapers and the books he writes for the layman, with catchy titles such as The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the 21st Century, are intended to help readers counteract that tendency to take the easiest path.
Grayling is coming to Australia to take part in the Perth Writers Festival later this week and the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne in March. He will share the podium in both places with Richard Dawkins, a fellow Brit and non-believer.
One of the many problems with religion, from his perspective, is that it makes exclusive claims to the moral life. From ancient times, inquiry into the good and flourishing life, the spiritual, emotional and intellectual responses to the world was seen as a measure of what it means to be human. “All that was hijacked over the last 1500 years by religion,” he says. “The idea developed that it’s only in the religious setting that you can have a sense of the numinous and of the significance and depth of things.”
That exclusivity leaves out, among other things, the small daily communions — the walk in the park, the visit to a gallery, attendance in a concert hall, dinner with friends — that add immeasurably to the texture of life, a commonplace in the philosophy of classical antiquity.
People worry about the pixels rather than the big picture most of the time
Religion, he says, “monopolised thinking about those matters, and about ethics, to the extent that if someone wasn’t of a religious frame of mind, didn’t have a religious commitment, they would be regarded as incapable to thinking ethically. And yet the opposite is true. “If you don’t have a hand-me-down frozen ethical pizza from the warehouse of ideas, but you have to think about it yourself, make it from scratch with fresh ingredients, you’re likely to have thought about it much more seriously.”
Grayling likes a metaphor; it’s how he anchors the metaphysical in the concrete for general audiences. Later he employs another, when asked what most troubles people in Anglo-Saxon societies such as his and ours.
People worry about the pixels rather than the big picture most of the time, he replies. And that, to our cost, leads to moral panics and other passing sensations. “As kids, we used to play in parks, jump on our bike and go riding out to the country by ourselves,” he says, by way of example. “We allow our children to do much less now, in a situation which is actually much safer for them. As the curve of concern about child safety goes up, the actual risk to them goes down. Back in the 19th century, much worse things happened to children than happen to them now.”
We worry too much about things that are not so bad, and don’t worry enough about things we should worry about, he says: he points to erosions of civil liberties in the hope it will make us safer against terrorism and crime.
Grayling grew up in Zambia and then Malawi, where his father worked as a banker. The family was emotionally distant: his father quite warm but Victorian in outlook and uninterested in children; his mother equally uninterested in her offspring. “My parents were extremely bad at explaining things,” he says. “They told me that I would be going to boarding school and didn’t point out that they would be coming back to fetch me. So when I got to boarding school I thought, ‘Well, that was chapter one’.”
The beginning, perhaps, of the search for answers.
Grayling was a bookish child. “We were rather thrown on our own devices,” he says. “The adults entertained themselves with adultery and the children read as much as we could.”
He remembers the sepia-tinted portraits of bearded philosophers in the encyclopaedia at home, but it was when he received his adult reading ticket at the library that he fell for philosophy: Plato’s early dialogues, to be precise, which were easy enough for a 12-year-old to grasp.
“I thought it was wonderful that these great names were dedicating their lives to talking about truth and beauty and knowledge and virtue and justice. I thought, ‘Yep, that’s what I’m going to do’.” He is now professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.
His engagement with real life, one imagines, is what makes him believable as a popular pundit. “I should mention that I continue to be an academic,” he says when his newspaper columns are raised.
He even helps people tap into the philosophical resources of the Western tradition — “I don’t think anybody would puff themselves up as a teacher to humanity,” he says — hoping to calm people down and getting them thinking responsibly, he remains optimistic.
“The good news,” he says, “is that ethical roots run deep and the human being is a very intelligent creature. The technologies we have developed over time are an extraordinary achievement, the fact that the human race is able to throw up the Einsteins and the Michelangelos and the Beethovens in the thousands, and perhaps in the millions, shows that in our gene pool is a heck of a lot of smartness and that smartness is turned into practicality.
“The other thing to say is that our newspapers are full of conflict and war and murder, but in every city, all around the world, every day of the week there are millions of acts of kindness, compassion, affection, mutuality.
“And this shows that, as social animals, we’ve got a great deal of responsiveness toward one another. We have to work quite hard to put people into an out-group so that we can hate them and demonise them and bomb them. I think that’s true of humanity in general.”
And yet, philosophers have been agonising over the same questions for thousands of years, trying to make us better people.
“It surprises people when you point out to them that Christianity is a very young religion, and the classical tradition is only 2500 years old,” Grayling says sunnily. “And that tens of thousands of years of human history are lost in the mists before that time. And there was hardly any progress there at all up until the time of settled agriculture.
“You have to accept that human nature changes slowly, which is why conflicts occur; but we have made a bit of progress and we may be only at the very beginning of human history.
“If we can survive this little isthmus of madness, where there is too much technological capability and too little good sense to manage it properly, and we manage to get into the sunny uplands of a future where we are seriously more peaceable, constructive and co-operative, we will be able to benefit from the efforts of all the philosophers who have thought about how we should be live. Future human beings may have a much, much better life.”
