John Gray

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2018

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

John Gray is a philosopher. His academic career included professorships at Oxford University and the London School of Economics, and visiting professorships at Harvard and Yale in the USA. He retired from academia in 2008, and has dedicated himself to writing full time since then. He is the lead book reviewer of the New Statesman and a regular contributor to the Guardian. Born in 1948 in South Shields, his father was a Tyneside dock worker, his mother a homemaker. A voracious reader as a child, and encouraged by his history teacher at his grammar school, he won a scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Initially of the political Left, he became an advocate of the policies of the Right before the advent of Thatcherism. He then moved again to the Left. He supported the Leave cause in the Brexit referendum. John contends that history is not progressive, but cyclical, and that any improvements other than certain scientific discoveries can be easily lost or reversed. He cites the use of torture against terror suspects as an example. John has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which predicted the global financial crisis; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), which attacked philosophical humanism; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of Utopian thinking in the modern world. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.0	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item
0:12.0	that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
0:16.0	For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.
0:22.0	You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.
0:30.0	My cast away this week is the philosopher John Gray.
0:53.0	If you can't yourself as curious, then listen up.
0:56.0	His forte is using a glintingly sharp intellect to prod the pulp cavity of Western liberal presumptions, penetrating comfy certainties with deft intellectual precision,
1:07.0	painfully exposing a plethora of widely held preconceptions.
1:11.0	These days, he writes full-time and broadcast too.
1:14.0	But for almost 10 years, he was professor of European thought at the LSE, having also spent a stretch as professor of politics at Oxford,
1:22.0	and time too, as visiting professor at both Harvard and Yale.
1:26.0	The eldest son of a time-side docker, he started out on the political left, but his self-confessed recurrent habit of inquiry seems to have resulted in a refreshingly supple approach to political allegiance.
1:39.0	He's had stints identifying with both the right and left.
1:43.0	He says, my aim is not to convert anyone. I don't care what you believe.
1:47.0	I write for those that are curious who want to question, who want to look at their thinking and reflect on it, and see whether they want to carry on with it.
1:56.0	So John Gray, welcome.
1:58.0	The notion that you don't care is a very interesting thing to me.
2:03.0	So your purpose in writing and broadcasting, then, is to encourage your readers, encourage listeners to really think about what they think.
2:10.0	How do you know if you're being effective? Because it's a sort of one-way conversation.
2:15.0	Oh, it's not one-way at all, really. My writings do tend to provoke strong responses, and I can see when I've touched a nerve in the strong, sometimes virulent reactions of many of my critics.
	...

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