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“Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind’s deliverer.” (John Nicholas Gray, British political philosopher)
Professor Gray believes human volition and morality to be illusions.
However, in that light, one wonders why — beyond the fact, of course, that he had no choice not to do so — Dr. Gray bothered to write a book seeking to convince us that we have no free will and that moral values are illusory.
What does it mean, if we’re really locked in the iron grip of necessity, for him to “persuade” us? Does he think it would be “good” if we were persuaded? Why? How?
And from what would science “deliver” us? Is he serious? How can science, a human creation, “deliver” us from an amoral world? And in what would that “deliverance” consist? Can science make us free? Can it create good and evil? I doubt that Gray intends this, but I suppose that science can deliver us from nihilism, amorality, and determinism by vaporizing us. Thank Nothing for nukes!
When Gray writes of humans as “they,” is he unconsciously seeking to exempt himself? Does he believe that his own consciousness is an illusion? Does it make any sense to believe that one’s own consciousness is illusory? How would one entertain such a delusion without being conscious? Does he imagine himself to be “right”?
So many questions!
I haven’t had much time for such questions today. We visited Masada (where a garrison of Jewish zealots made its futile last stand against a Roman legion in the first century AD), Qumran (where the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls lived), Qasr al-Yahud (the traditional baptismal site of Jesus, right across the Jordan River from the Jordanian baptismal site called al-Maghtas, which is more likely to be authentic), and the traditional Mount of Temptations in Jericho. We also spent time on the western shore of the Dead Sea, where most of our number went for a “swim” — or, really, for a “float.”)
Posted from Jericho, Palestine
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