Gray, J. Thomson, J. (2026, August 04). The idea of progress is a dangerous lie, with John Gray [Video]. IAI Player https://iai.tv/video/the-idea-of-progress-is-a-dangerous-lie-with-john-gray
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are what I would call the logic of situation, the logic of events. And
they're complex because they can involve many of them are the results of
previous human decisions or non decisions. There are conflicts over.
Well, let me give an example. Francis Fukuyama is, with whom I've had
many conversations and debates, argued that history had ended and which,
by which he meant there wouldn't be any deep ideological conflicts like
there were in the Cold War about the best society. There'd be some kind
of democratic capitalism. It's rather comical now because democratic
capitalism of the sort he thought would go right throughout the world
has disappeared in America. So it didn't happen. But I think behind it
was a sort of deeper illusion than the end of issues, the end of
geography. Because what we're actually witnessing now in the world is
the return of geography. What, what conflicts are about now are
resources and control of resources and access and the transit of
resources as through the straight of Hormuz or whatever happened to the
day. There are lots of counter rumors and rumors about some kind of
peace deal being of some kind having been called up. Other big straits
like the straight of Malacca, where more of world trade goes through.
Because one of the things that was assumed by the liberal or neoliberal
theory of progress or myth of progress was maritime freedom. The world
would become a single trading bloc and which it did was for a long time.
And these traits like Hormuz and Malacca and others, Panama Canal and
Suez Canal, they would all remain under international law, free maritime
time transit zones. Well, what's happened now is that Trump, through a
kind of perverse and paradoxical logic of events, by triggering this war
in Iran which he did, has enabled the Iranian regime to secure control
of this, of the straight of Hormuz, which whatever happens, they're not
going to give up whatever they say, because it's an immensely powerful
weapon which they can have used and can use in future. It's like a kind
of geopolitical nuclear weapon. Thing about nuclear weapons is you can't
easily use them twice. You get wiped out. In the meantime, you. They
can keep on using this at any time in the future when they want or
believe they. They need to need to use it.
So that's a geography people.
You see people throw words, oh, determinism, fatalism, blah, blah, blah.
It's all nonsense. Geography is a set of unalterable facts which don't
change. You can get around them. You can have land transit, though it's
more expensive. You can, you can have agreements over particular
straits. The Iranians are saying that people will be able to use it if
they pay a toll, but not in dollars, have to be in yuan or crypto or
whatever there are ways of dealing with. But it's permanent. And a lot
of the conflicts in history are about geography or constrained, heavily
constrained by geography. So there is human agency. Trump exercised it.
Unfortunately, Trump exercised a high degree. He didn't have to launch
this war. It was his whim. He didn't think about it. By the way, just as
a factor here which might be relevant. The, the former head, the then
head of the Chinese Communist Party in 2003 gave a speech in which he
said, we are carefully studying this Strait of Malacca and other straits
in the world over 20 years ago. So they've been thinking about that for
20 years. I think I can say confidently that Trump hasn't thought about
any of these straits for more than 20 consecutive minutes or possibly
even seconds, but that he had agency, all right, Plenty of agency.
If he hadn't launched this,
none of this would have happened. We'd be in a situation which, though
imperfect as all human situations are, would be much better than the one
we're in, and there wouldn't be the war that in fact occurred with all
the devastation around it. That was his human issue. So. Yes, but that's
a good illustration of my earlier point. What he did has closed the
options to the future. One option which people is getting back to what
was there before. It's gone forever. Now that they've got sovereign
control of, they're never going to give it up. So there are instances or
spikes of personalities, agency, agency in history and of course, Trump
example. But if you look person in this case it was. Or someone like
Jesus Christ, for example, the presence of Jesus Christ or Winston
Churchill changing the course of history. Yes, yes. So you wouldn't
therefore be inclined to some kind of apathy, quietism, withdrawal,
choice. It's a choice. I mean, if you. I see my role as simply
illuminating the truth or as close as I can get to it, of, of our human
situation, both in general and in particular times.
Now, you can then, as I say,
make a choice. You can. You can choose to launch or take part in a
political project in which ameliorates or mitigates the human situation,
at least for a while, which I think is very noble, many people do. Or
you can take a choice to become a monk or a nun or join a monastery or
devote yourself to beauty or. Or even to pleasure. Oscar Wilde said
somewhere, life of pleasure is not for. For everyone. The heroic life of
pleasure, he said, is much harder than the mediocre life of happiness
or contentment. If you want to do that, that's within your capacity. I
want to leave people free to make these choices themselves, both
individually and and collectively. There isn't just one response. So I'm
not. What I'm absolutely not is a missionary or a gospel for some idea
of salvation, either for individuals or for society. I just want to
illuminate where we are. And I get the reputation of being a pessimist
because I go against this modern mythology of that progress is always
possible, that civilization could be better than it's ever been, and
that once you get into that circumstance, it can be made permanent. But
look, if you go back to Greek drama or Shakespeare or Hinduism or
Buddhism, none of these assumptions are made about.
About the future of mankind
being. Being potentially better than it's ever been in the past. It's a
Western. It's a Western, a modern Western myth. And I would say it's a
kind of neochristian myth because it comes about by secularizing certain
Christian assumptions about old beliefs, sacred time, about human
history being meaningful. But Christianity has an advantage here. I'm an
atheist, so I'm not a Christian, but has the advantage. It's not the
meaning of history, though there is one, is mysterious except a God, so
it can't be falsified. And that implies a certain humility in human
action. That's to say, I think. I mean, a real Christian, I think, would
have to regard Trump's claim, or the claim of some Trump supporters
that they're acting under God's instructions as blasphemous. We don't
know what God wants out of them. We don't know what. What the underlying
meaning of history. And we can't know actually, in at least the
Christianity of Augustine.
Think of us now and in the recent, in the last hundred years. Evil is
error. You make a mistake. But I think that's a shallow view because
there's something. Schopenhauer recognized this by the way. There's
something in human life which is worse than error, which is what he
called disinterested malevolence. Cruelty. Is cruelty an error as
someone who's chronically or demically cruel. Cruel because they just
don't understand something. That's what Socrates would say. If they
really understood that what true they would. I don't accept that. My
view is that in that respect, closer to Christianity, there can be just
sheer.
The will to domination, the will to harm. Other people can exist in
human beings by itself. So we're all mixed or all human beings. I think
this is a, a true feature of Christianity. Human beings are inherently
self divided. They can do things knowing they're wrong sometimes if they
can even according to the Christian, do things because they know
they're wrong. They like to, like to transgress. They like to assert
that was the ancient understanding of Lucifer or the devil. Now don't
believe in Lucifer or the devil, but I think that's a, an interesting
metaphor for the way human beings live. But your question was can is the
idea of progress dependent on an idea of the good? I think it is, yeah.
I think it is or at least of depends on an idea that some goods are
universally human or nearly universally human. So in Thomas Hobbes,
who's a thinker, I'm much influenced by the new Leviathans. He wrote the
great book Leviathan in the middle of the 17th century. He argues that
all human beings, if unless they have a need not have a supreme good or
someone problem, but they have a summer malum which means a supreme
evil. He thinks that all human beings have as their greatest impulse,
their strongest impulse, fear of violent death at the hands of other
human beings. Now I think that's a very strong impulse, but I think he
was wrong about that because that isn't the strongest impulse of human
beings in all circumstances. Some, indeed many in some even in his time,
in the religious wars of his time, were willing to risk or even risk
violent death at the hands or even go to Certain violent death at the
hands of other human beings for the sake of some kind of meaning in
their life. And that's where Hobbes, though I admire Hobbes very much as
a writer and a thinker, he's the one that's perhaps political thinker
that's influenced me the most. He was just wrong about this. He. Beings
are not satisfied with bare existence. They want some kind of meaning in
their life. And if that meaning is challenged or risked or attacked by
others, they'll resist even at the cost of their lives. If you don't
understand that, you don't. Which I think Hobbes didn't actually. He
says somewhere he said, well, people can lose their lives through
trifles. He's thinking of things like jewels or a sense of honor. But
when he writes about religious fanaticism, which actually threatened his
life, he had to fleet and go and live in Europe for a while.
But
does the contract only work if you view it as inviolable? Well, none of
them are really inviolable because all of these institutions are. All
forms of authority are mortal. But term, they have to be attached. I
mean, I see what you're getting at. They have to be attached to some
script. The contract isn't between the subject and the sovereign. It's
the sovereign's authority emerges from a kind of covenant within the
subject.
They've got to be agreed on or
share something. So they need. There has to be, I think some kind of
range of stories or range of. There has to be some sort of common idea,
however vague about what their, what they constitute as a collectivity.
And this is why thinking that there could be a world Leviathan, a global
Leviathan or even a. I don't think all the virus are national. Some are
local, some are regional, some are imperial, some are. There can be
many city states. I've recently been in Singapore, they have. That's a
state that was invented, it's a startup state and they have a clear
conception of themselves that they worked out they invented. It did
depend a lot on the issue of one man, Lee Kuan Yew but it was invented.
The idea is we are multicultural. It's in this definition that we are
multicultural but we share an idea of or a covenant in which we all get
protected and we subscribe to common laws and so on. Now I don't think
that's necessarily achievable everywhere, maybe nowhere else actually. I
mean maybe you need a Lee, Kanye or de Gaulle or whoever to achieve
something like that. But I, I think you're right. It can't just be a
legal agreement because legal agreements, they don't have this
overriding authority. But remember Hobbes doesn't say it's inviolable.
He said if the sovereign threatens the life of the subject. Is that at
the point of the guillotine though? Is that at the point of the
guillotine?
(...)
He (Hobbes) says the. He says the. The sovereign shouldn't listen too much to the
richest people of the realm. He says listen to it shouldn't be advised
by the richest people in the realm because if he is, he'll. He'll
forget. He'll forget the claims of the rest. It's good advice
