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If scientific progress marches on, why doesn’t civilisation take the cue? Unfortunately, according English political philosopher John Gray, there is no equivalence between technological and moral improvement. Joe Gelonesi meets one of philosophy’s unyielding naysayers.

Of late there has been an efflorescence of intellectual optimism about the human condition. Esteemed public intellectual Stephen Pinker is a prime example of those with a glass half-full. His recent book Our Better Angels puts forward an evidence-based argument that violence has declined throughout human history, and even our wars aren’t as destructive as they used to be.

The implication is that humankind is emerging from a long night of irrational disagreement into a more peaceful and cooperative dawn. But if you put that view to John Gray, you will get an extensive rebuttal, complete with footnotes, on the tortured course of human civilisation.

Gray has built a reputation as an accomplished don of European thought. His extensive scholarship, however, has sent him in the opposite direction to the upbeat crowd.

Human beings will turn cyberspace into a projection of the material world, which is a place of continuous conflict

Gray has been assembling the prosecution case for some time. In False Dawn, Black Mass, Straw Dogs, and Silence of the Animals, Gray paints a bleak portrait of the humanity. Now, in his latest work, The Soul of the Marionette, he takes aim at our aspirations to freedom.

Gray appears an inveterate pessimist, though he does it with what seems uncannily like good cheer. Talking to Gray, you get the feeling that his clear-eyed view of human nature has freed him to enjoy the very concept of being human.

Strictly speaking, the freedom he focuses on is not the metaphysical variety that runs deep in the philosophical tradition. Rather than questions of determinism and compatibilism, Gray is concerned with what people really want from freedom.

His latest work is a reverie of ideas ignited by a short story written by little-known early 19th century German poet, Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist.

‘It’s a simple story, really,’ says Gray. ‘It concerns a conversation between two people looking at a fairground puppet, and the main speaker makes the highly paradoxical comment that the marionettes seem to him to act more freely, spontaneously and gracefully than human beings.

‘The puppets, unlike human beings, seem not to be weighed down by gravity; they seem to almost float. They seem to have a certainty in their actions that humans do not. Humans always seem stuttering in their movements almost falling down.’

Inspired by this fictional conversation, Gray asked himself what the notion of gravity meant in this scenario.

‘I think it’s pretty clear what [von Kleist] means is that the puppets are not weighed down by the burden of choice. Paradoxically, the puppets do not have to choose; they do not have the problem we have of freedom of choice—they have the freedom not to choose.’

This deceptively simple idea set Gray on a cerebral odyssey, combing through centuries of history to find clues about how our thinking has changed on the idea of the uses of freedom.

‘It’s become clear that right throughout history and to the present day there have been many traditions and streams of thought in which the type of freedom that is pursued is actually freedom from choice,’ he says.

For Gray, the history of ideas presents freedom as a problem, not an opportunity.

‘Freedom for humans, unlike for puppets or machines or semi-divine creatures, involves falling to Earth. It involves accepting gravity and the burden of choice, even if that choice is an illusion— it involves surrendering to that illusion.’

Von Kleist’s tale confirms for Gray what earlier sages had properly surmised: ‘Freedom is possible for only two types: for an inanimate machine like a marionette, or for the gods. But we humans are neither. We gain our freedoms from our imperfections—it’s the only freedom possible for such flawed creatures.’

Accepting our limitations is Gray’s long-held theme. Knowledge is never enough; science might progress but ethics doesn’t take the cue. Nothing needles him more than humanist utopianism invested with the idea that evidence and knowledge will set us free.

Gray points to the irony in the belief in the progressive effects of science. He understands it as an atavistic belief in Gnosticism—a spiritual system which promises liberation from the limitations of flawed humanity.

‘Many thinkers who say that their world view has been entirely shaped by scientific naturalism in fact promote conceptions of freedom whose origins are in mystical Gnosticism,’ observes Gray.

The ancient Gnostics promulgated a view which is at odds with the Genesis conception of an omniscient God giving loving birth to the universe. They believed that the world was set up by an ill-meaning deity—the demiurge—not a good God, and that emancipation is possible by first coming to understand this, and then regaining knowledge of how we were supposed to be. This process of awakening will hoist us back to the spiritual realm, away from the fleshly temporal world we’ve been condemned to by the false deity.

Science, says Gray, functions as a Gnostic-like lever for awakening in the modern world. We might not be conscious of it, but our project is identical to those dissenting spiritualists of a long ago. Moreover, the technologies of digital life are increasingly part of the promise.

Gray cites futurist Ray Kurzweil’s predictions of singularity, whereby human and machine will meet in an emancipatory dance. Inevitably, according to Gray, there will be a twist, and a fall.

‘It won’t be the Gnostic freedom that they will get. Human beings will turn cyberspace into a projection of the material world, which is a place of continuous conflict.’

Knowledge is never enough, according to Gray—at least not the objective and grounded sort we seek in the material world. He believes an uninterrupted internal gaze is necessary if we want to glean some home truths about the nature of our freedom.

That route is no longer available, however. Gray believes digital life has become a self-imposed panopticon which has turned an old maxim on its head. When Andy Warhol uttered that memorable phrase about 15 minutes of fame, he picked up on the growing reach of mass media. But the opt-out clause remained written into analogue life. Digital media, on the other hand, offers little avenue for escape from the quarter hour of personal publicity.

‘I anticipated this after 9/11 attacks,’ asserts Gray. ‘One of the consequences of the new technologies would be the abolition of privacy. People now under 20 years of age cannot live in a world of anonymity and privacy. It’s a thing of the past.’

Caught between the mania for the selfie and the untoward actions of spying authorities, the modern person does not have the capacity, or even the aspiration, to erect a wall between public and private, and thus is robbed of the space Gray believes is crucial to the process of understanding our fragile frame.

With everyone facing outward and ubiquitously connected, recourse to an inner world fades into the distance.

‘One of the features of the virtual world is that it is quite painful to exit from it into the actual world which still exists—outside of the box there are still horrors and beautiful things, there are wars and beautiful sunsets; they still exit. Yet, the virtual world has enormous pull. It is entertaining and distracting and what humans have always needed is distraction from their condition.’

Gray, however, is not a sceptic about technology and its capacity to adapt and grow exponentially. Artificial intelligence is on the horizon, and it just may be that Ray Kurzweil is on the money when it comes to melded hyper-intelligence. The same goes for science—its powers of advancement are there for all to see. Science and technology answers specific instrumental problems, however, not existential ones.

Gray makes it clear that he doesn’t want to convert anyone, even convince them, let alone kick start a political counter-movement.

‘[I’m writing] for my individual readers who might be receptive to the idea that there is something amiss in the prevailing world view—that the beautiful world started 50 years ago and before that was darkness,’ he says. ‘Or they’re just curious to explore the views of Herodotus, the view of the ancient historians, the view of Aristotle; the view, in short, that civilisation is natural for humans but so is barbarism, and that barbarism and human flourishing struggle perpetually in every human society.’

It’s a tough-love conclusion, but his pessimism is not exactly final and complete. In fact, Gray disputes that it’s even a form of pessimism; just a straight talking take on the world. What's more, he’s not immune to feeling joy for the mortal frame. One particular human propensity brightens the Gray-scale.

‘I was reading a book recently by Peter Singer in which he looks forward to a world which is ruled by altruistic concern for others, and in which the relief of suffering gets priority over aesthetic experience. I don’t think that such a world will ever come about. But rather than seeing that as pessimistic I’m delighted. That’s because I see aesthetic experience as giving meaning to human life.’

John Gray on the burden of freedom Listen to this episode of The Philosopher's Zone to hear more from philosopher John Gray.

The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.

