John Gray On The State Of Liberalism

John Gray is a political philosopher. He retired from academia in 2007 as Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and is now a regular contributor and lead reviewer at the New Statesman. He’s the author of two dozen books, and his latest is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. I’d say he’s one of the most brilliant minds of our time — and my first podcast with him was a huge hit. I asked him to come on this week to get a broader and deeper perspective on where we are now in the world. He didn’t disappoint.

For two clips of our convo — on the ways Trump represents peace, and how heterosexuals have become more like gays — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: this week’s inauguration; the peaceful transfer of power; the panic of the left intelligentsia; the contradictions in the new Trump administration; Bannon vs Musk; Vivek’s quick exit; the techno-futurist oligarchs; Vance as the GOP’s future; tariffs and inflation; the federal debt; McKinley and the Gilded Age; Manifest Destiny; Greenland; isolationism; the neocon project to convert the world; Hobbes and “commodious living”; Malthus and today’s declining birthrates; post-industrial alienation; deaths of despair; Fukuyama’s “End of History”; Latinx; AI and knowledge workers; Plato; Pascal; Dante; CS Lewis’ Abolition of Man; pre-Christian paganism; Puritans and the woke; Žižek; Rod Dreher; Houellebecq; how submission can be liberating; Graham Greene; religion as an anchor; why converts are often so dangerous; Freudian repression; Orwell and goose-stepping; the revolution of consciousness after Christ; Star Wars as neo-Christian; Dune as neo-pagan; Foucault; Oakeshott’s lovers; Montaigne; Judith Shklar; Ross Douthat; the UK’s rape-gangs; Starmer and liberal legalism; the Thomist view of nature; the medieval view of abortion; late-term abortions; and assisted dying.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Sebastian Junger on near-death experiences, Jon Rauch on “Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy,” Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Yoni Appelbaum on how America stopped building things, Nick Denton on the evolution of new media, and Ross Douthat on how everyone should be religious. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod:

Thank you so much for your Andrew Neil interview. I can’t remember listening to someone who has such a broad smart take on things today, and on history, who is non-ideological and pragmatic and just smart. Made my day.

From another listener:

There’s an interesting interview between Andrew Neil and Jimmy Savile in 1995. The full interview is embedded in this Daily Mail piece written by Neil, but unfortunately it’s a members-only YouTube video. Neil wrote:

At the time, it was regarded as the toughest interview he’d faced and I suppose in many ways it was. But [The Reckoning] documents over four hours how Savile had got away with his perversions for decade after decade — “in plain sight” as the show puts it — without ever being called properly to account. For my part, the only honest conclusion was that the interview had not been nearly tough enough — and that we had let his many victims down.

Neil was too good a journalist not to know about the allegations against Savile [extraordinarily predatory sex abuse of children and the sick], but given the legal situation in the UK, he could only hint at them obliquely. The media-savvy Savile tries to turn the studio audience against Neil, but eventually Neil triggers a meltdown in Savile by getting him to talk about his experiences down the pits.

The following clip with a banana appears to be the only part of the interview that’s freely available, which is a shame:

On another recent episode — Adam Kirsch on “settler colonialism” — a listener writes:

Thank you for the wonderful programming! I thought your discussion with Kirsch was really interesting and enlightening, and I appreciated the calm and civil tone of the discussion.

It’s worth noting that pre-colonial indigenous American tribes were also constantly warring, enslaving, and pushing the territorial boundaries. These unflattering attributes are not solely European but I guess, sadly, human. We’re jerks.

For example, when Lewis and Clark met Sacagawea, she was a Shoshoni teenager who had been captured at age 12 in a Hidatsa raid and separated from her family and pretty much enslaved. Her Lemhi Shoshone tribe had been pushed out of more favorable land and occupied more marginal territory — not so much “colonized” as expelled. She later, by chance, met her brother Cameahwait in 1805 — when she was part of the Lewis and Clark expedition — in a poignant and emotional reunion. (I loved Stephen Ambrose’s book Undaunted Courage; it tells one of the greatest American stories!) So the disenfranchisement of weaker groups by stronger groups is as old as the hills.

Speaking of old hills, I found this New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert totally fascinating. She makes the point that, any time humans encountered Neanderthals, Neanderthals always lost out. They interbred and lived in proximity but, like the Ice Age megafauna after encountering humans, Neanderthals always disappeared from the scene. Colonization indeed.

George Carlin had some bracing thoughts about how we talk about Native Americans and “natives” in general:

Another fan of the Kirsch pod:

Your discussion of Israelis and Palestinians was a master class. I learned more about the history of the conflict in that hour than I could in a semester of college. Both of you and Kirsch had your points of view but were respectful and so knowledgeable. The best interview ever!

And another:

I appreciated this episode so much, because you asked the kind of questions I have been wanting to ask. Too much discussion of this conflict either memory-holes October 7th or memory-holes the West Bank settlements. However, I do wish you had asked Kirsch about whether those settlements could be rolled back at any time in the future.

This next listener has a grim view of the Jewish state:

After visiting Israel ten years ago, I am less impressed than you are about what Israelis have created there. It’s a crowded country, overly urbanized and developed, which is militarized everywhere you go, with soldiers swaggering about carrying big-ass machine guns. In eastern Jerusalem, I listened to a Palestinian woman screaming as she was being arrested by Israeli police or soldiers, who were sort of laughing as they subdued her. It reminded me of the metaphor of George Orwell where he says in 1984, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

In my opinion, Israel is a highly stressed society unable to live at peace with its neighbors. It kind of doesn’t matter how intelligent and energetic you are, how attractive and healthy, how many degrees you have, or how much money you earn. If you are not at rest with yourself and the people you live next to, your life will be difficult and unhappy.

If Israel didn’t have external enemies to fight against, the extreme variety and differences in people and cultures that have immigrated there might cause Israelis to turn on each other — like the recent demonstrations against Netanyahu have shown, and the conflict between secular and religious Jews.

Here’s a dissent:

I’m your biggest fan, but I think you mischaracterized the founding intent of Israel in your conversation with Adam Kirsch. You understand the prelapsarian fantasies and fallacies of the “settler colonial” theorists, who imagine a world in which some of the fundamentals of human nature and history never compel anyone to move from their homeland. But your description of the Israeli nation-building project as yet another utopian vision — as a fundamentally bad idea — is off.

Far from an airy dream, the creation of Israel was a painstaking, desperate necessity. In the words of Haviv Rettig Gur in an excellent conversation with Michael Moynihan:

Israel is the last living Jew in the Eastern Hemisphere ... the Jews emptied out of everywhere, and as the world homogenised, few places did it as completely and perfectly as the Arab world, and the Arab world is still in the process of brutally homogenising. And the Jews found one place, one refuge, across three continents ... so is the argument that they should have died? ... Anti-Zionism that treats the idea of Zionism as if it’s one ideological option among many — Zionism as this kind of luxurious ideological option of safe people — is an entirely Western cartoon.

Actual Zionism is the last living remnants of a destroyed civilisation in the only place where they could survive. And everyone then deciding that they are the problem with the world and have to be destroyed in order for the redemption of the world to happen, everyone in the Muslim context, in the Marxist context, and now in Western academia.

So, like our friend Bill Maher says, is it unjust that a single Palestinian had to be displaced in all of this? Of course it is. But that cycle of injustice finds its origins in a much deeper nature, place, and time than 1948. To lay blame for it on the Jews of Israel, or to suggest that Palestinians suffer merely for the sake of an Arcadian Zionist dream, is to risk something you decry and avoid in every other area: a reductionist view of history.

Here’s a guest rec for a future episode:

I’d like to suggest Nicholas Christakis for the Dishcast. He’s the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale and directs its Human Nature Lab. In his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, he argues that we focus too much attention on the human’s deeply ingrained tendencies toward aggression, violence, destruction, and bigotry, and not enough on other strongly-wired aspects of human nature: social cooperation, altruism, and capacity for love. How much of the outcomes — good and bad — are wired into the human genome, and how much are determined by environmental conditions and culture? Perennial questions he’s studied and thought a lot about.

Christakis came on the pod three years ago to talk Covid and friendship, and he was a great guest, so maybe he’ll come back at some point. Another rec:

Please have on Jay Bhattacharya to talk about Covid times and censorship he faced from the Biden administration. I’ve been following his substack with Rav Arora, but I have yet to hear a truly great interview with him.

Great idea. Thank you. On the theme of this week’s column, a reader writes:

I’m a long-term Dish subscriber and someone who frequently has found your anti-DEI writings to be dumb. But I don’t write to delve into that fight. Rather, I think this post from Josh Marshall is notable:

The Purported DEI Rollback

One more point to keep an eye on. You’ve likely seen that the White House is doing a series of Executive Orders and letters to employees demanding “DEI” be rooted out of these agencies. News organizations have mostly used this terminology. But whatever you think about DEI, this is deeply and intentionally misleading. This gives the impression that they’re clawing back various #MeToo and post-George Floyd government policies. But they’re actually repealing a host of Executive Orders and departmental policies going all the way back to the Johnson administration. A lot of it is very basic employment non-discrimination rules and contracting non-discrimination rules.

Marshall’s point is important. And I realized that this may be a partial explanation for some of the frequent divides between you and some of your readers (like myself). You may be railing against some modern excesses of the DEI movement, but much of the Republican anti-DEI rhetoric is cover for rolling back civil rights laws and programs dating back to Johnson and the Civil Rights Acts. Without condescension, I understand that the latter is something you find objectionable.

That sort of conflation was echoed by John Harwood this week: “when does [Trump] bring back segregated water fountains?” To which my answer is: since when is enforcement of the Civil Rights Act undermining civil rights? Josh is an old friend and fellow pioneer of online media, but he has become very partisan lately. The LBJ policy that Trump is finally ending was not about anti-discrimination but “affirmative action.” It started the process of racial quotas and hiring for reasons other than merit. I’m thrilled it’s gone.

From another reader:

Among the various post-election topics, one that interests me very much is what I call the Death of the Uniparty. During the election, all of the establishment politicians came out for Harris. You had the Cheneys, Kinzinger, the Never Trumpers, and the Lincoln Project actually supporting her; and many others — Pence, Collins, Romney, Murkowski — said they were not voting for Trump. We were subjected to innumerable lists of former Bush, McCain, Romney, and Trump staffers all saying that they could not back Trump, and in many instances they actually endorsed Harris.

Now that Trump has won, we see the following happening: