John Gray is certainly piquant. He says clearly some things that I have long vaguely thought. I have even now not really come to terms with the idea, both tempting and frightening, that history may have no meaning. The recurring nightmares of apocalypse endemic to our imagination these days are only the reverse side of the fantasy of progress. Progress means that people are good and will be rewarded: apocalypse means that people are bad and will be punished. What we are having great difficulty with is the idea that history is just what happens when people bump into each other (as they do constantly, in a crowded world.) If it doesn’t mean anything in particular, we can peer into the space between utopia and apocalypse which is actually where we are headed, and maybe get some more sensible bearings. We are not altogether helpless, but we spend ridiculous amounts of thought and effort designing futures that are never going to conform to anybody’s design: and our commitment to teleological histories makes us intolerant extremists, across the board: my liberal friends are frothing at the mouth these days quite as much as any Christian Nationalist.
But Gray sees the question of free will oddly, to my mind. He seems to see no space between an absolutely free will and will as an absolute delusion. But here again it seems to me that reality is in the space between. We are subject to causes and conditions, as any other animal is. Much of what we think and do is born and performed outside of our narrow spotlight of consciousness; in some cases we have to find out what we are and what we want by simple empirical observation, because there are many things about ourselves we can’t see by way of introspection. There are many doors in the chambers of our mind that are locked, and we can only guess what’s in them. But that doesn’t mean that we see nothing in the light, and it doesn’t mean we are only hallucinating when we think we are deliberating. It means that we have to be humble, but it doesn’t mean we have to grovel.
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None of this is to say that our current lurch into tyranny is not a political calamity. It is. But if you feel it as a spiritual calamity -- if it empties the meaning out of life -- then you were giving history a responsibility for salvation that it can't bear. History is not going to save us, and it was never going to save us.
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