John Gray on Pessimism, Liberalism, and Theism
John Gray — political philosopher and author of The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism — joins Tyler Cowen in Ep. 198 to dismantle the idea that history moves toward progress, to distinguish his own pessimism from a counsel of despair, and to explain why he finds Eastern Orthodoxy aesthetically compelling while remaining an atheist.
Key ideas
- Progress as secularised theology. The dominant liberal narrative — that history moves from ignorance to knowledge, from barbarism to civilisation — is, Gray argues, Christianity’s doctrine of divine providence in a secular costume. Strip God from the story and the structure remains: an arc of improvement, a logic in events, a telos. His own atheism (following Schopenhauer and Beckett) rejects that structure entirely. There is no logic in history, only particular situations with their own logic, which need not be benign.
- Pessimism is not a counsel of despair. Gray draws a sharp distinction between minimising disappointment (the Epicurean move he rejects) and expecting the worst without ceasing to act. The pessimist is prepared for events and pleasantly surprised when they go better than expected; the optimist is in perpetual torment watching the same follies repeat. He cites Conrad — a ferocious pessimist who led a life of extraordinary adventure — as the model.
- The Book of Job over Socrates. Asked for a curriculum, Gray reaches for Genesis and Job before the Greeks. Socrates, despite his disclaimers, believed in the ultimate rationality of the universe; Job questioned it. The Straussian reading of Job — that the pious ending is a gloss and the real message is radical scepticism about cosmic justice — is, Gray says, the one he accepts.
- Atheism can reproduce the theology it denies. Most Western atheism, Gray argues, inherits the categories it rejects: it attributes to humanity the providential arc it formerly gave to God. This is as metaphysically naive as the theism it replaces. His alternative — a non-progressive, non-humanist atheism — finds support in physics: the world may ultimately be unintelligible, not merely complex, and both Beckett and quantum cosmology converge on that.
- Institutional stability cannot be assumed. The cryonics enthusiasts Gray met in California in the early 1980s were, he thought, making a category error: signing contracts to freeze their bodies assumed 100 years of capitalist, legal, and institutional continuity. But the 20th century had already demonstrated, from the Romanov collapse through Nazism and Maoism, that world-ending discontinuities are the norm, not the exception. Pragmatic optimism is a privilege of rare, brief, stable moments — not the default condition of human history.
Content
The shape of Gray’s atheism
Gray came to philosophy through Hayek and Mill, but his intellectual allegiance settled on a lineage of pessimists — Schopenhauer, Santayana, Beckett — who shared one feature: they refused to substitute humanity for God. The dominant atheist tradition in Europe and America, he argues, makes precisely that substitution. It retains the providential structure of monotheism while denying its source: history moves from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, with cumulative and largely irreversible gains. That narrative is, in his phrase, ‘a secularisation of Christian and other ideas of divine providence in history.’
His own view strips out the narrative entirely. There is no logic in history, though particular situations may have their own internal logic. Human beings are not an agent — ‘humanity’ does not exist as an acting entity any more than ‘the biosphere’ does. All there is are multitudinous individuals with conflicting purposes, recurring in situations that often trap them into producing outcomes opposite to those they intend. This is what he means by calling events absurd: not nihilism, but the recurrent experience of means-ends divergence at the civilisational scale.
He finds a convergence between this and the frontiers of physics. String theory and many-worlds quantum mechanics may be telling us, he suggests, that the universe is finally unintelligible — not merely complex but beyond rational closure. This is not a theological convergence (the universe is not pointing back to God) but an anti-theological one: both his atheism and the leading edges of science undermine the Enlightenment confidence that reality is rationally transparent.
Job, Genesis, and the curriculum question
Cowen asks what a Gray-designed curriculum would look like for an eighteen-year-old. The answer is eclectic and resolutely non-doctrinal: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Beckett; Mill and Hayek (despite disagreeing with both); Oakeshott and Santayana; the Bhagavad Gita and Zhuangzi. And definitively the whole Bible, with Genesis and Job as the load-bearing texts.
Genesis, Gray argues, embeds a neglected truth: knowledge is ethically neutral. The myth does not say that knowing more makes you better; it says that the capacity for knowledge can be turned to any use. Job goes further. Socrates, for all his self-deprecation, believed the good, the true, and the beautiful were one — that the universe was ultimately just. Job believed no such thing. He questioned God, questioned the rationality of the universe, and only returned to orthodoxy in an ending Gray reads as a Straussian surface: the hidden message is the obvious one, that cosmic justice is not guaranteed.
The significance is not theological but philosophical. Scepticism about ultimate rational order — which Gray takes to be the correct view — originates in the Hebrew tradition, not in Socrates. Job is the deeper pessimist.
Theism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the anthropocentric barrier
Cowen teases that Gray might end up a Catholic, or latterly Eastern Orthodox. Gray accepts the diagnosis in one direction: he is genuinely attracted to Eastern Orthodoxy. Its aesthetic beauty draws him (many of his judgments are, he admits, aesthetic). Its narrower scope for human reason appeals: unlike Catholicism’s Thomist synthesis — the attempt to reconcile Athens and Jerusalem, Greek reason with Christian revelation — Eastern Orthodoxy gives less ground to Aristotle. And it is, he thinks, closer to whatever original Christianity was.
But he cannot subscribe. The barrier is anthropocentrism. Every form of Western monotheism posits a special connection between the human mind and the divine mind — a dignity that does not extend to other species. Gray does not share it. He has written a book on cats; he is confident they have minds. The theistic tradition’s claim that the human story participates in the divine, while the stories of other living things do not, is one he cannot accept. Even an Eastern Orthodoxy he finds beautiful carries that assumption, and that is enough to put him outside it.
The pragmatic psychology of pessimism
Cowen presses Gray on whether pessimism is itself a pleasure — a way of preempting disappointment and therefore a kind of addiction to bad news. Gray rejects the characterisation. He is not trying to minimise disappointment; he is trying to have accurate expectations. The result is that his life is, he says, peppered with pleasant surprises: the expected bad does not arrive, and something better happens instead. The chronic optimist, by contrast, must be in torment every time the news confirms what pessimism already predicted.
The deeper point is about the conditions of pragmatic optimism. Gray does not deny that building things and being resiliently optimistic can work — he concedes it has worked, at times, in Japan and South Korea. But those periods are rare, brief, and predicated on background institutional stability that has not been the norm over the full span of human history. You cannot build with long horizons in a world undergoing the kind of total discontinuities Russia experienced through the 20th century, or that the cryonics customers of California were implicitly assuming would not happen. The non-optimist is not fatalistic; Conrad went to sea, ran guns, wrote in his third language, and lived more adventurously than any Epicurean would have advised.
Progress, technology, and what can be reversed
Gray distinguishes two kinds of progress: scientific and technological (largely cumulative and exponential) and ethical and political (more fragile and more entropic). He accepts the first readily enough — he has benefited from anaesthetic dentistry and cataract surgery and says so without irony. Thomas de Quincey may have been right that toothache accounted for a third of all human suffering in his era; it does not now.
But even scientific and technological progress can be reversed by civilisational collapse. Edo Japan, which he regards as incomparably more cultured than most societies today, passed away. Greek and Roman knowledge was lost for centuries. The 300-year dataset on which most economics and social theory is built is, he thinks, a very small sample of human history. Widen the lens to include the Aztecs, the Romans, Edo Japan, and what looks like a trend reveals itself as a blip.
He credits Peter Thiel’s heterodox view — that even in science and technology the current age may be one of stagnation, constrained by groupthink and institutional inertia — as genuinely worth taking seriously, though he does not fully endorse it. His more fundamental point is that progress in ethics and politics does not share even the partial continuity of progress in physics or medicine. Among competing ideas, he expects the most toxic and vicious to win out — and sees evidence of that happening now.
Sacrifice, value, and the non-existence of humanity
Cowen asks under what circumstances Gray would sacrifice his life. Not for humanity, he says without hesitation — because humanity, as an entity, does not exist. It is a category error. Only for something or someone he loves: agent-relative value, not abstract universal duty. He is explicitly not a Platonist about goods: values and goods are projections of the living world, not inhabitants of a metaphysical realm. Other animals have needs and values just as humans do, which is why he would direct a billion dollars to animal conservation rather than to human causes.
The thought experiment he runs through — a world of 100 billion well-off humans against a world of far fewer humans in a thriving biosphere — reveals his aesthetic commitments: Mill’s ‘flowery wastes,’ the world as richer for non-human life, is close to his own view. He is sceptical of effective altruism’s extrapolations into millions of years of future history — far too speculative to ground present action — and would focus instead on the near-term conservation of species whose complex ecologies make them vulnerable: gorillas, tigers, organisms that will not simply survive whatever happens the way ants will.
Related
- John Gray — guest
- Tyler Cowen — host
- The Materialism Debate — theme; Gray’s non-humanist atheism and rejection of progress narratives engages the same metaphysical terrain as Pinker, McGilchrist, and Lennox