The popular and widely admired English philosopher Bertrand Russell was famous for constantly changing his mind. From one book to the next, he would switch opinions. And this was, by many, considered a great virtue of his approach to philosophy.
Yes, it is often important to be flexible, but perhaps there is a limit. Supposed you believe stealing is bad one week but then the next you change your mind. Is this a virtue? Suppose you believe supporting your children is the right thing for you to do but then switch you outlook and become a deadbeat dad. Is this to be admired?
It is nowadays thought to be so, if one is to go by who is getting all the accolades among contemporary thinkers. In fact, those positions various labeled post-modernist or deconstructionist or, again, multiculturalist all propound the idea that nothing much is stable in the world and the wise people among us do not hold on to the illusion that some things are of lasting importance, value or truth.
A good case in point is someone I once knew pretty well. John N. Gray used to be a fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, in Great Britain and he was at the time a pretty good friend of the free society. He wrote admiring books about John Stuart Mill and Frederick A. Hayek, both champions of individual liberty and free markets. I recall having Gray to a seminar I arranged where he gave a talk along these lines and most people believed then that he is someone who has come to appreciate that freedom is superior to serfdom or slavery.
Alas, there was one aspect of John Gray's thought that always struck me as problematic. He was what is called a Pyrrhonist, a skeptic about the human ability to know anything at all. This is one of the many views philosophers have propounded throughout human history, all the way from the ancient Chinese Lao Tzu to today's Professor Peter Unger (at least the last I read him). The basic idea is this: people always see things in their particular way, which gives them a distorted understanding of how the world is. Thus we are always basically ignorant of the world. OK, so the position is trouble by self-contradiction: if you know that what it says is true, then some things can be known, and then why couldn't other things be known as well. But this has always struck the people who championed skepticism as a cheap shot and they rarely pay attention to it. They continue to insist that it is true that we know nothing.
Back then, when John Gray was but a young Turk at Oxford, I was always arguing with him about this basic element of his thinking. And I also didn't trust his endorsement of anything. For consider: if we know nothing, why should we stick to any opinions we have, about anything? Whatever is convenient to believe is probably just as easy to believe as anything else.
Sure enough, John Gray has proven me right: over the last two and a half decades he has moved from being a libertarian, a champion of a fully free society, to endorsing, instead, the British Labor Party and denouncing capitalism and, especially, its extension over the globe. His latest pronouncement goes as follows: "The free market has produced a mutation in American capitalism, as a consequence of which it is coming to resemble the oligarchical regimes of some Latin American countries more than the liberal capitalist civilization of Europe, or of the United States itself in earlier phases of its history." Gray maintains that "the confluence of ethnic and economic divisions and antagonisms in the United States is not found in any other First World country." And his book False Dawn is devoted to denouncing globalization, that is, the exportation of free market institutions across the world.
OK, why bother with this particular egghead? Well, there is a lesson here. When you believe nothing is knowable by us, you can say anything you want. It cannot be shown to be either right or wrong, it is just there for whatever personal purposes it may serve.
In higher academic circles being against the United States of America is very popular – it pays with good positions. Gray is now a bigwig at the London School of Economics, writes essays for all kinds of prominent publications – the last being Harper's. Wherever there are good tidings, Gray can adjust his position to make out like a bandit. What is to stop him? Truth doesn't exist, no one can know anything, so surely no one can launch any valid complaint against the man, at least as he must see things. But consequences do follow from such dilettantism. One's own integrity is the first victim. It is impossible to be consistent within oneself if one has no starting point. So for all we know a person like Gray could switch tomorrow, if that becomes trendy, and start supporting globalization. And, of course, principled thinking and public policy also suffers under the influence of such opportunistic thinking. Why complain about some politician or public policy that is helter-skelter, topsy-turvy, irrational, pointless? No standards can be found to indict any of that. The citizenry then can have no way to check whether those in power are making any sense or simply indulging their own fancy.
As to the substance of Gray's claim about the USA, what is interesting is that the central difficulties of American culture arise precisely from its earlier violation of the principles of free market capitalism. Take the worst in American history, slavery. In a free market capitalist system everyone is a sovereign citizen, no one may own anyone else, no one may force anyone to behave in any way without the person's consent. Slavery is in direct violation of this capitalist position. A slave no only isn't permitted to own things. A slave is forbidden to be his or her own master, which is fundamental to capitalism. America's lingering ethnic and racial difficulties then arise more from having failed to be consistently capitalist, rather than the other way around, as Gray claims. Globalization, in turn, is the movement around the world that aims to abolish restrictions on individual freedom of trade. Involuntary servitude, which is so widespread in Third World countries and still has some traces in Europe, would have to be completely abolished. There could be no entrenched upper and lower classes, no unchallengeable political, even intellectual elite.
Resistance to globalization, as to capitalism itself, comes from those who wish to hang on to their legally secured special status in society. American capitalism gained its major boost when slavery was finally abolished and had it not be for the influx of anti-capitalist intellectual trends – mostly exported from Europe to the USA via the influx of European academics – America would have been a shining example of a free society. Instead, it is a confused and mixed-up system, with fascist, socialist, welfare statist and capitalist elements in every corner of the place. But never mind that – when you begin with the premise that nothing can be known, why worry about historical accuracy at all? It is all deuces wild.
January 10, 2002
