The first thing that strikes you about John Gray is that he seems to never have recovered from reading
Animal Farm as a child, so severely scarred by fears of Orwellian totalitarian mind control.
1. His first surprising claim is of the negative progress of the mind control going on currently. He says we’ve regressed to the level of the Soviet state with some kind of modern-day equivalent to their oath of loyalty.
2. But is it hyperbole? Sam asks whether the pendulum is swinging back away from mindcontrol, and groupthink, or whether it is swinging ever further towards it. John pushes back, and says that things were better back in the “good old days”.
3. Ever notice how the one guys that ever say that are white males? The nostalgia fallacy is never held by women, minorities, or Atheists. All of them had it much worse 100 years ago.
4. John claims that the Soviet totalitarian state represented a huge dip downward in human flourishing, and that proves that progress is an illusion. But let's consider this a little closer too: the masses in Tzarist Russia were pretty fucking miserable prior to the revolution. I'm descended from some of them, and all you have to do is google it and you'll see. Comparing life in the aristocracy to life under Stalin is bullshit. That's the same as Butt-fucker Carleson kissing Putin's ass about how great a metro station is and not considering the dire situation across the whole country.
5. Same thing with John's bullshit take on the French Revolution. Which, no coincidence, I'm also descended from refugees from. I say "no coincidence" because America was built by refugees and slaves coming in from really fucked up countries. Apparently John's ancestors never had to flee England. Lucky them. But he's still wrong.
6. Now, the craziest bullshit is that John "proves" that atheists are wrong because, since primitive times, humans have always belived in some kind of deity. By that logic, we're wrong about the universerse, because they also all believed the sun rotates around the earth.
7. But actually, I'll give John this: he does bring up an interesting question: was our primitive, animistic mind, more attuned to the true nature of existence than our logical materialistic minds are nowadays? He doesn't get into metaphysics, but I grant he has a point: mere atheism doesn't explain the Big Bang, the existence of matter, or life itself.
8. John gives the case of pre-World War I Vienna as a moment of supreme civilization which humanity has since fallen from. And yet, at the height of his idealized moment of supreme civilization, a part of the world was being brutally devastated at the whim of a few aristocrats. It was called Galicia, and it was a center of some of the worst poverty in the world, controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
9. So John's point that moral progress is not at all like technological progress, and it is often wiped out within a few generations of an improvement, seems pretty one-dimensional. Technological progress brought global warming and dioxin and asbestos and all kinds of shit that was backward steps, locally. Only in the aggregate could you say technological progress was a thing. So my point is, it's the same with Soviet Russia and Napoleanic France, and all the rest.
10. John's supposed high point--the Classical Era--still allowed for murder of your own children, incest, slavery, racism, a misogyny that we cannot even conceive of, and everywhere, religious wars.
11. One other thing: John makes a point that we can't even be said to be in disagreement with forces opposing us because “in order for you to be able to have disagreement, there has to be agreement,” some quote about Mussolini's Italy. But this doesn’t recognize is that there was a deep bed of agreement among the general population of Italy, and it was only a few intellectuals in the elite circles who were disagreeing about whether fascism was better than communism.
12. There’s an absurdly long aside about how some British war official was not a true consequentialist, because he felt regret when he had to fire an entire office full of people because one of them was a spy. I only mention the aside as a gigantic waste of time, because so much of his answers were like this—ad hominem anecdotes. In fact, every time he said “by the way” he changed to a new subject that was neither by nor way. An example of this is when Sam is trying to make a point about moral relativism, and the next thing you know we find ourselves listening to him tell some pointless story of Bertrand Russell’s friend rescuing him from Bankruptcy.
So unless you're prepared to wade through a lot of BS and are willing to take on some privileged white guy's cursing of "barbarians at the gate," I wouldn't recommend this episode.
