Ideas that Matter: The Concepts that Shape the 21st Century
SEEING THEMSELVES as fiercely independent thinkers, bien-pensants are remarkable chiefly for the fervor with which they propagate the prevailing beliefs of their time. Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill's godson and a scion of one of England's great political dynasties, exemplified this contradiction throughout most of his life. British philosopher A. C. Grayling can now be counted amongst his number.
Though Russell, born in 1872, may seem a faintly archaic figure today, the type of thinking he embodied has not disappeared, and there are many who follow him in promoting a militant version of liberal conventional wisdom as the all-purpose solution for human ills. George Santayana, a thinker of insight and subtlety (these days much neglected), summed up Russell's predilections perfectly: "His radical solutions were rendered vain by the conventionality of his problems. His outlook was universal, but his presuppositions were insular."
Along with countless others, Russell fell victim to the belief that the solution to the world's problems would be found in increasing internationalism, socialism, the withering away of religion and the continuing advancement of science.
This is, in effect, a version of his godfather's "religion of humanity"-the secular humanist creed imbibed by Mill from the French positivist thinker Auguste Comte, which aimed to replace the traditional faiths of the West with a belief in human progress.
At times Russell was seized by despair, doubting the capacity of human beings to realize the glorious prospect ahead of them. What he never doubted was the faith he had in common with the rest of the progressive intelligentsia: if only humankind could bring itself to be reasonable, the future would be so much better than the past.
A. C. Grayling takes up this same mantle with fervor and conviction. A prolific author who seldom lets a year pass without producing one or more volumes, he is a man who also offers enlightened instruction to bewildered humanity. In the decade before the turn of the millennium, Grayling delivered himself of ten books, including one on Russell. Since then, he has published Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age (2002), Life, Sex and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2003), What is Good?: The Search for the Best Way to Live (2003), The Mystery of Things (2004), The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century (2005), The Form of Things: Essays on Life, Ideas and Liberty in the 21st Century (2006), Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness (2007), Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights that Made the Modern Western World (2007), The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the 21st Century (2007), Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defence of Civil Society and Enlightenment Values (2009), and To Set Prometheus Free: Religion, Reason and Humanity (2009). Formidable as this list may be, it is by no means exhaustive. As well as several volumes of technical philosophy, Grayling published still more, one of which was a biographical study, Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius (2005), perhaps his most interesting and original work. And now we have Ideas that Matter, Grayling's third attempt to guide the perplexed through the quandaries of the twenty-first century.
INDUSTRIAL-STYLE authorship of this kind is a triumph of the will rather than a display of intelligence. The effect is one of wearisome repetition, and one wonders what Grayling imagines he has achieved by the exercise. All of these volumes preach the same sermon: history is a record of crime, oppression and superstition; but salvation is at hand through rational inquiry, the gift of the Greeks that was lost in the Dark Ages and rediscovered in the Enlightenment. Repeating this as Grayling does, over and over again, suggests that he believes the lesson has still not been understood, and throughout his extensive corpus of polemical writings he has the manner of a querulous teacher hammering rudimentary lessons into the heads of refractory schoolchildren. For Grayling, it seems, few if any of the difficulties of ethics and politics are insoluble. The remedies for human ills are obvious, or would be so if only humans were not blinded by superstition. Never doubting that he is free of this vice, Grayling writes as one conveying the simple truth.
