John Gray on Pessimism, Liberalism, and Theism

28:20Would a world in which a very large number of human beings, not any existed, but had very high levels of well -being. In other words, I'm not talking about the famous proponent conclusion in him whereby if you have a past world and everybody's lives are barely worth living and you add up the utility, it could be better than a smaller world with many fewer human beings whose lives were much higher. I'm not talking about that at all. I'm think of a different, extraordinary experiment that he never dated to my knowledge, never involved himself here, which is between two worlds, one in which you have an enormous number of people, let's say human beings, a hundred billion, and all their lives are in most respects, at least, very worth living, but in which there are no other species.

29:05And a different world in which there's a much smaller human population, but a thriving biosphere around it. Now I'm not trying to judge this because I'm not a utilitarian in terms of desire, satisfaction or some other utilitarian theory of value. But the second world, the world in which there are fewer human beings living well, but in what John Stuart Mill, by the way, who tried to be a consistent utilitarian, but never was, he said, without what he called flowery ways, this is in his 1848 principles of political economy, he said the world would be barren and he thought what almost not worth living in.

29:39I share that to you. Would you be biased toward conserving the lives of intelligent mammals and maybe octopuses or not? You mean as over unintelligent animals? Sure. So you could save a lot of ants, maybe rather cheaply. Many people would prefer to conserve white rhinos and pandas in China. I'd prefer to live in a world in which conservation was not necessary, in which the biosphere as really was the case until maybe until the so -called anthropocene, which we're supposed to be living. That was the case until a few hundred years ago, which is that whatever human beings through their activities could damage particular ecologies.

30:18I mean, the islands of which Homer, where Homer set some of his poems, were at the time of Homer probably covered by trees, thick trees and forests, and now most of them are not. So, the right throughout human history and prehistory, human beings have damaged all of their environments. But there hasn't been a time until now in which the whole of the advisory could be damaged and injured. So I prefer to live in a world in which that's not true, but of course you might say, well, we don't live in that world, so we've got to decide. I'm just sort of say it would be hard to decide, but what I would not do is make the decision on highly speculative grounds of those proposed by effective altruists and others, which involves making extrapolations into millions and millions of years.

31:04it is the future about what could be the best or worst outcome. I think those are very unsound ways of moral reasoning because there's far too much in them that is speculative and uncertain. Now we're probably trying to make the decisions that could be made for now in the relatively near future of 50 or 100 years or even less than that about which animals or you see ants probably species and I think I'm going to survive whatever happens, most kinds of ants, but gorillas and tigers and highly complex species which depend upon delicate environments could be destroyed by wars, they could be destroyed by poaching, they could be destroyed by diseases that's read more quickly when their environment changes.

31:39So I'd probably focus on them. Under what circumstances would you be willing to sacrifice your life or for what? Not for humanity, that's for sure. For the biosphere. Well, I guess in principle, but how can one life change the biosphere? I can only basically for something or someone that I love. So in other words, it's an entirely, your philosophically well read. So it's an entirely, to me, your agent relative thing. I mean, there may be values or goods or bads that can think about in an abstract way, but they're not platonic in the sense that they exist in some metaphysical realm independent of the human world.

32:19They're all, I would say, protections of the human world or at least the living world. I mean, animals have needs and therefore they have other animals have needs and values that just as we do. So I would only sacrifice my life for someone or something that I love. Nothing else. What did your parents believe? They were secular Christians in the sense that I, you know, Britain is a much more, or at least your my lifetime has been a much more secular. I don't like the word secular because most of what is secular is just built religion actually, but Britain has been England especially. Scotland and Ireland, to some extent, even Wales have been in power a bit different.

32:58It's been a very society for the last maybe hundred years, let's say, in which religion has not been a matter of, not been as life -shabbing as it's been in many parts of the world and still isn't apart from new religions that have grown in the country like, or not new religions, they're very old religion, but I'll grow in the country because of immigration, Islam, Hinduism and other religions. They were just perfectly normal for whom religion was a part of life. But I guess if they'd read P .G. Woodhouse, they might have agreed with him. P .G. Woodhouse's common writer, lived in America a lot.

33:37He was asked towards the end of his life in an interview. I think he lived on Long Island or somewhere. I can't remember. But anyway, he's asked, Do you, Mr. Woodhouse, have any religious beliefs to which he replied, you know, it's rightfully hard to say. I think that's tremendously clever in telling, much more intelligent than the most also is because what he recognized was that belief is a very, when you get outside of formulating scientific propositions and so it's a very fluid, vaporous kind of thing. And so you can have residues of religious belief even if you're an atheist and you might not be able to formulate your beliefs even if you have strong religious beliefs you might still not be able to formulate a formula.

34:19I guess they would have said that. It was not something they spent a lot of time talking about or thinking about. What do you make of recent speculations concerning UFOs? Is that just more theology? Well, I've always assumed that the whole thing was an information program generated mostly in the United States to cover up the Black weapons programs of the time. That's what I've always assumed, in other words, I've always assumed that it was mostly disinformation. Could there be something in them? Yes, I suppose so. I think there's a Harvard astronomer now, isn't I? Forgotten his name. Oh, have you lobe?

34:53Yes. Yeah, yeah. Who thinks there is? And I'm open to that, but nothing really sort of turns on it for me. The Zawentable Peace of Russian Science fiction. You probably know it by the way called not Stravinsky. Anyway, Stravinsky. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but the novel, a short novel, is about a visitation to the earth of an alien species. And why did they come? What was their purpose? What was there? What do they want to know about the human species? Nothing. Turns out they came for a picnic. But could it be a kind of proof that pessimism is wrong? So some other set of beings out there survived to the point where they can make it here and they come here and they don't kill us all or and slave us otherwise.

35:38It's not pessimism or optimism. I'm not fixated on that. I think that I think there's silly categories actually. It depends on your background expectations. It's that they have no interest in us. They can't be good. That's a good thing. It is if you think they would otherwise kill us, but maybe they wouldn't. They just have to... I think it's a wonderful idea because it means that from their point of view, I mean, they might be by our standards more intelligent than we are or I don't know. If they lasted a long, longer than we had or are likely to last, then it might be more intelligent or wiser at least, but they're simply not interested in us.

36:10They come and leave some litter like human picnics do and then leave. So to me, although I'm open to the idea of UFOs, which of course is a sort of spin -off from the idea, can there be intelligent life forms in other planetary systems or other parts of the universe or the galaxy? I mean, I can't actually imagine that we're the only living, certainly, or even the only sentient. I find that hard to imagine. But the distances are so vast that less technology in other places has developed to extraordinary We might be the only one that ever. We might be alone, apart from, of course, other intelligence species on the planet like gorillas and possibly octopus that exist alongside us.

36:54We might never be in significant contact with these other intelligence as if they existed, but it doesn't really matter much to me one way or the other because I think we've actually done a rather good job making ourselves more alone already, actually, by crucifying the the biosphere through mass extinction and so on. Should the UK work toward having the two islands reunite? I think it'll happen. I don't know whether the UK will work towards it, but I've always held. What's your it on or you'll be sad or what will your view be? Well, I think historically the relations with Ireland of England have been mostly rather tragic or comical painful.

37:34They've not ever been very good. So I think it will happen. I've always argued, if you, I mean, I write a lot of the new states where I now have a fortnightly column and I've always argued that Scotland would not break away most likely at any time that we could see in the future. For various specific reasons that I gave, I think I was one of the very, very few people who were arguing that because there was a time in which it was supposed to be inevitable. I never thought it would happen, particularly after Brexit, because after Brexit, breaking away would mean leaving the UK and then having several years in a limbo before they were accepted and independent Scotland was accepted by the EU again, it just wasn't going to happen.

38:13It won't happen now, it won't happen probably for 10, 20, 30, 4 or ever. But Ireland I think will happen because partly for demographic reasons, which is that the population balance in the two parts of Ireland is shifting. But I think just long term partly because of breaks, partly because it's proved hard to work out a settlement with the EU for Northern an island without diluting the legal sovereignty that breaks it was supposed to achieve. I think it will happen, and whether we're legal or bad, I think it probably will happen. How should the city of Bath deal with its problem of having too many tourists?

38:51It's very crowded, right? It's impossible to park difficult to walk around. It doesn't feel like the city of Bath anymore, at least sometimes of the... Well, relatively well, I suppose, not since during the pandemic, it was much more walkable. But it was also much less lively because although it's crowded the city of Bath, it also has lots of interesting shops and cultural life partly because of the tourists It has theaters, cinemas, bookstores, rather wonderful bookstores called Toppings, which is in the tourist center and as always full And you wouldn't have those things if you cut back the number of tourists You could have a tourist tax some countries are some places of these do I think Bhutan has a tax of $200 a day.

39:37I think they opted to 400 recently, but yes, it used to be 200. Well, I don't say that's wrong. I mean, if they had, you see, if they had, that is still in many ways a very unique and cohesive culture. So if they had hundreds of thousands of tourists, more could be destroyed than could be justified, perhaps in terms of the benefits it gave to the people who lived there before. but Britain is a very individualistic and multicultural society as it stands. So I don't think anything much is destroyed. Just parking you maybe. But if you it's difficult, but that can be cope with in various ways. I think the in all of these things in most countries at most times in most places, the aim is to achieve a kind of balance.

40:24You see, if it was completely destroyed, I must say to give an example, though, you might have had this experience to I have been to Italian cities. and museums and art galleries where the crowds were so enormous and so permanent and so thick and the weights were so long and when you got into see the pictures you could hardly get to see them at all. At that point almost it's not worth going so I do see your point. You'd have to raise the price significantly probably of just being there. To make it worth being there you'd have to pay more for it to be worth being there. Is multi -Python still funny?

40:59Oh, I think so. Our present king, I think, is a fan. I'm a fan too. It's funny because it's absurdist humour and I like absurdist humour and lots of British people do. It can be dark humour after all. The Monty type python team or part of it. Most of it produced Brazil. Have you seen that film? Sure, of course. Terrible game. Yeah, great film. And very dark, wouldn't you say? Absolutely. But it's funny too. It's funny partly because it's so dark. And also, the end of the life of Brian, I filmed that by the way, I've been told, I was told by John Cleese actually, couldn't be made now, this was 10 years ago, but I'm sure it couldn't be made 10 years later either.

41:37At the end of it, there's the wonderful optimistic song, is the not when they're all hanging on the cross. Bright side of life, yes. The bright side of life. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, that's optimism. You're hanging on the cross, and you're not going to stop hanging on the cross, you're going to hang on there till you die. And yet you see the bright side of it all, that's optimism. try to, I love notepi. If someone says, well today, European literature, it's alive and well and flourishing. There's Kinevskar, there's Elena Feronte, many other fine authors submission by Hulabek. Do you agree? Aren't we living in a wonderful time for the written word?

42:11A kind of renaissance of literature? I'd go further than that. I mean, I do read an enormous amount. Not I don't like very long books like Danish author Knowska. I find them. The only very long book I like which is proofs, some, some, remembrance of things past. I mean, that's a, you can read that for your entire life. In a way, and all in all, in bits, I've never read it from beginning to end. I have to admit that. But I, one can tip it, but on the whole, I don't like long. I would go further than that, Tyler. You might find this surprising. I'm a great fan of film as an art form. And I think even what might be called popular films, even TV is in a golden age, I would say now.

42:50If I think of the series I've enjoyed in recent years, breaking bad, true detective, British series of various kinds, some of the great historical. I think they weren't made, couldn't be made for various reasons, and new technologies have made them even better in some respects before. So that is a great thing. I think, I mean, I'm in the process of shifting over from physical books. I'll keep a few, but I'm getting rid of thousands of books now for various reasons, literally thousands, to Kindle. And the reason for, I've got thousands and thousands on Kindle already. And the reason for that is partly the practical because I can carry it around with me.

43:31I can go on holiday and have all these books with me without any difficulty at all. But it's also kind of beyond that. I mean, I can, if their books are connected with my writing, I can search them very easily rather than spending two hours of a finite lifetime. and I've 75 search, but finally there used to be searching for a particular phrase or sentence. I can find it instantly, so that's a very good thing. And also now with the quality of the printing and of the formatting and of the illustrations and art, it is very high. So that's progress too. Remember, I've never argued that progress doesn't occur.

44:05I mean, I've often benefited myself from anesthetic dentistry. I recently benefited from quite recently just a few months ago from cataract surgery, wonderful things. But my argument is that progress, actually even of the scientific and technological kind, can always be reversed and often is when there is a general civilization of collapse. I should say by the way that one of the, I've often contrasted scientific and technological persons with ethical and political progress and said that the former scientific and technological is exponential in a way that improvement or progress in ethics and politics isn't.

44:39That's more entropic. But there are people who I respect greatly, like Peter Teal, who have argued that even in science and technology, this is more of an age of stagnation than we commonly think. That group think and various types of institutional follow -up of limited creativity. And that actually, even the, you might call the paradigmatic forms of cumulative advance, which is what progress is. Progress isn't just a brief period of blip when things get a bit better and then they stop being better and get worse. Progress means that what has been achieved on the past is largely retained as the process of improvement goes on and that's generally true in science and technology.

45:17But if you, of course, if you look at the whole span of the last three thousand years, there have been many periods in which technologies and skills and knowledge have been lost. So that could happen again, I think, but ethical and political progress is much more fragile than that. But it does occur and sometimes technological progress can improve human lives. a lot, not just in medical context or dental context. By the way, Thomas De Quincey, the celebrated opium addict, writing in his book, said, I can never remember if it's a quarter or a third, but he said, I think either a quarter or a third of all human suffering was to say, but it's probably true at that time, or might have been true anyway.

45:56Definitely not true now. So I share that view. And they can even increase, I mean, new methods of filming and streaming of films and so on. have increased the aesthetic qualities of life because they made it much easier for someone sitting in a study as I do or have access to beautiful forms of film art. But I think in what people, I suppose, conventionally think all of their things and politics. It's always a good idea to expect the worst to come back. It's always a good idea to think that among the competing memes, it'll be the memes that are vicious and the most vicious and the most toxic, which will win.

46:34I think that's happening now in the world actually. Has Herman Melville influenced you much? Yes, a lot. I don't know about influence because I'm not novelist, but it's one of the books I have read. I've read others as well. The confidence man is a great book, for example. Bart will be the short story. He's a great short, fantastic, he's a fantastically deep, profound, difficult writer. But of course, Moby Dick is the big one full of biblical stuff, as you know. There's a wonderful edition by the American 30 or 40 years ago, Harold Beaver, which has a 200 -page set of notes at the end, which all the biblical and other references and delusions are explained.

47:16But he's an incredible writer, and not really, it's almost not a novelist. I don't know what you would call a Moby Dick. By the way, someone I knew well assigned for the last 15 years of his life, Gibala, Toby that was one of his books, his favorite books, that he kept recurring to, Moby Dick, kept rereading it and rereading it. Can you imagine going on a quest for God, the way some of Melville's characters do? Or is there, there's too much disappointment you're setting yourself up for if you do that? Well, I guess I'm not unhappy enough to want to go on that. I guess you go for that. I mean, you turn to God for things that you want very much, which are impossible, and you know are impossible than the natural order of things.

47:56That's the deep reason, if you're at least in theistic cultures. If you, if someone you love has died and you can't bear it, then the idea that they're still existing, some other realm and maybe even happier in that realm can be a great comfort. If you're trapped in some situation which is completely hopeless in ordinary, naturalistic reasoning, you know you're not going to get out, you know you're going to be killed, you know, you're going to start that. Then you turn to God in those circumstances. But I guess I've been lucky. I haven't been in circumstances like that. Well, how I'd react. I mean, there's a country that's why, you know, the people say there are no atheists and foxholes.

48:34I think there are actually. I think some of the atheists and foxholes were believers before they got under the foxhole. But it is true. I mean, sort of empirical. But empirically, I'm a great admirer of the Russian writer, Valam Shalamov, who survived. I think it was 16 or even 19 years in the very worst camps in Soviet Russia, gold mining camps where the average life span was three years. Those are great books. Yeah, they're great books. But in the way he describes them, by the way, he was frustrated by the description of him as a gulagwriter because he said, I only wrote about the gulag because it happened to be in the gulag for so long.

49:13He said, he loved Proust, he loved, they found a copy of Proust once which was then stolen, but in the gulag, he just said, that's, you know, my That's because I was there. That was how I did my life. That's why I wrote not because I wanted to write about the Gulag But he didn't want to forget it either because he thought that something could be Written of value about it, but he says that the people who survived The people who broke down mentally and then physically the quickest where the communist party members and Hierox who came in the ones who lasted a long time with the professional criminals the ones that lasted the longest were religious believers So because they knew, I mean, if you were in a camp where nearly everyone would be dead in three years, they weren't death camps in the way the Nazi camps were, but nearly everyone in them in a section of camps It wasn't true of the whole group, I would be sitting, would not be there in three years, I could be dead If you knew that, how do you, and you look around you, you see every single day you see somebody lying in the snow So the parish choose in the next bunk to you, bunk, or the previous night, how do you adapt to that?

50:14have you adapted that. And he thought that religious faith, but he had not himself. He had not at all himself. Yet he still did survive semi -miraculously or by not in a whole way, he was damaged by it, but he did survive and he did continue writing even after he escaped for a long time, decades. So I can understand why people turn to a divine power to do what they know to be naturally impossible. That's one of the deepest motives at least, not people turn to religion. But I've been lucky I have not to do that yet. If someone set their views up to minimize disappointment in life, do you think their resulting philosophies and attitudes would be much different from yours or the same?

51:01Well, I don't see myself as minimizing disappointment. I think that's a rather miserable sort of going life. It's better to be regularly disappointed and intensely disappointed if what you're been disappointed in is worth pursuing and experiencing. I mean many love affairs lead to disappointment, but if you decide then I'm not going to have them, I think that's a rather miserable, miserable view. Which by the way is one of my objections to traditional epicurianism and the Christianism, traditional epicurianism and the Christianism aims for happiness by setting the bar so low that you can't be disappointed.

51:37So if you look in, if you think of what's absent in the crucious as view of the good life or in Epicurus as good as a view of the view of what's absent? Well, anything that caused turbulence of mind, you, you, you crucious as explicitly, you shouldn't fall in love with other people. Have lots of permission to sex, find some slaves, get it out of your system so you don't need to fall in love. If you don't fall in love, you won't then be unhappy because when you fall out of love. He says that explicitly and in a kind of gentler way it also underlies Epicurus' philosophy. Science is not valued in, remember in Epicurus except as a means for improving the cognitive life.

52:16There isn't a kind of scientific quest, a semi -sort of mystical scientific quest, as there was in Europe at the start of the scientific revolution, most of them, the leaders of the scientific revolution were astrologers or mystics. Of course, Newton was a reading of the Bible, they all had attached great spiritual and mystical significance to science. Epicurus and Lucretius didn't, it was just a tool whereby we could be made more comfortable. Sport, highly competitive sports, the virtues of war, the martial virtues, they're not there either. Now it's a very minimal, if you think of what an entirely epicurean world would look like, there'd be no faith or religion because that's led to masses of...

53:01Sure, but that's you, right? God, no faith, no religion. Yes, that's me, but I don't do it in order to... I don't have... That's just my condition. That's just how I am. I don't feel the need for it, but not because I want to avoid disappointment. I can't imagine living in order to... But what I'm saying is that there are many philosophers. There be curians, and to some extent there's Stoics as well. Who do propose that? They propose that you cut down the basic demands you put on life too. So minimal that they're less likely to be afforded. So I don't do that. I think the opposite. I'm much more like nature in that respect.

53:35I mean, it's better. I mean, or at least to me aesthetically better and maybe more interesting way of life. If someone said, how did you live your life in this? I successfully avoided all love affairs and thereby avoided all disappointments. I never a chance Jenny great importance to knowledge only survived it met my needs for comfort. I never engaged in competitive sports because I might lose. I never tried, I never invested because I might lose my capital. I find all of those rather sort of miserable ways of living. But of course you don't have to be an optimist. Think if someone like Joseph Conrad, very far from being an optimist in any respect, he had a fantastically interesting life.

54:12When he was in his 1820, he was a gun runner for monarchist rebels in Spain. He then became a seaman for 20 years, almost lost his life two or three times in catastrophic shipwrecks and so on and so forth. He wrote his novels. He'd certainly been advised against this by Epicurus if he could bring him back from the grave. In his third language, not his second language, he didn't write them even in French, he wrote them in English, which was his third language. He was a tremendous mental torment when that, because I've read about him, suffering for hours to get the right word, which might have been, you know, a suicide perfectionist, but also because it was a word in English, which was not his one of his early languages that he brought up in.

54:53You've tread as pessimists, but he lived a life of extraordinary adventure. And I tend to think that pessimists, the pessimists have known in my life anyway, are more likely to live lives of extraordinary adventure because it doesn't matter them as much as it does to optimists, whether they win or lose. What matters to them is whether what they do is interesting, whether what they do enriches their life in the sense that it shows them things, shows them people, shows them world, shows them landscapes, gives them experiences. Not only that, they hadn't had before, but even maybe that they couldn't imagine before.

55:25That's, I think, you'll be more inclined. If you're an optimist, you have some kind of clear, otherwise, I say, I think the distinction is really rather silly, but you have an idea of how you want to live of the successful projects you want to get involved in. If you're not an optimist, that's just called it a non -optimistic. you'll settle on what you want to do. And if it's at least possible, I mean, if it's at least in broad term something that you could do or you could actually achieve, you can if you want go off and on a while, on a while journey into the Amazon, you might not come back, but you might see a lot of interesting things.

56:01If you can at least do these things, if they attract you then if you're not optimistic, you might be very well inclined to do them. And I like people like that. Last three questions are about you. First, who recognized your talent first and how? I can give it a specific person. He's mentioned in the acknowledgments of my recent book. In New Leviathan's, it was a teacher in a grammar school in the northeast of England back in the 1960s, called Charles Constable, who was a very well -read man. And he was the one person who introduced me to Archie Collingwood's book, The New Leviathan, Singular, on which I wouldn't say this book is based.

56:41It's quite different in every respect, but it gave me the thoughts that 60 years later then found fruition in this book of mine. He thought that I could benefit from a university education, including one from Oxford. So I joined. That wasn't unique in any way. I joined a group of people, six formers, as we call them, five or six or seven or eight, I might have been as many as ten or twelve, who he sort of groomed to apply to universities like Oxford Cambridge and some others. And so I joined that group after he noted that and I was successful in going there. So that was him. What is your most unusual successful work habit?

57:20That's an interesting thing. It has to be unusual, does it? Not just… Yes. So that you work hard is not really unusual obviously it matters. I don't know how unusual it used to be but I Used to like having a cat nearby. I don't anymore because I like Traveling I haven't been able to do much recently because of the pandemic and other things But and I think if you have a cat or another animal companion These are good for long periods is not a good idea But I did a fat I've read actually a lot of writers who And I think of myself primarily now as a writer, not as a philosopher, philosophers, professors.

57:58I'm not a professor anymore. As a writer, the kind of mixture of calm companionship and complete indifference, that's a cat has for you and your work and your thoughts is very calming. So I don't know if it's not unusual, but I certainly, I found that helped my work. Nowadays I sometimes play music or I interspersed my work if I'm working on my computer with looking at maybe some little few moments, 10 or 15 minutes of a film I've watched before and maybe some passage into film that I find particularly beautiful or thrilling. So I use that too, but I test it, that would be called slacking, but I don't think of it as slacking.

58:38I think of it as recharging the mental batteries to go on to work. Last question, what will you do next? Very good question too, well I'm now primarily. really most of the thing having written this book I have a this column I referred to and I do some reviewing I've done a lot of reviewing of both of Pinker and other Foucaillard or the writers like that but I also review quite a bit of fiction I'm reviewing at the moment a memoir by the film producer Vena Herzog and a novel by him. So I try to review a wide variety books I'll continue doing that and I may collect them but I might start trying to write something, I might think of writing a book purely of aphorisms.

59:20I like aphorisms because, as I say, they're shortened and cluttered and can be beautiful. A lot of people don't like aphorisms because if you write an aphorism, you can't have 10 pages before it, explaining what you mean by it. You can't like an academic work. A lot of academic works, they say, I'm not saying this, I'm not saying that, I don't think this, I don't think that, I'm not criticizing in progress, so and so I am criticizing the other. So you get three quarters of the book is a set of digressions about what they're not doing. And at least it just says something. You don't have to accept it or not, but it sounds sometimes dogmatic for that reason.

59:52It sounds as if you're trying to impose it on someone, which I would, I might do some more essays. I'm more and more interested in theology as a root of how many of our present intellectual and other complexities and dilemmas. I think if you think of what I called secular terms you can't really understand the world that we now live in not just because religions come back in it as a force in war and a force in politics but because many of the things that don't seem religious are actually inspired by not just religious needs and impulses but even by religious categories or symbols or myths the singularity for example is obviously something connected with ideas of revelation and of a ratchet.

1:00:36It's obviously not an idea that it would be easy to have. If you've never been, if you knew nothing, it'd never about those Christian and Jewish and other traditions in which these ideas of apocalypse and revelations are sort of, so I think I might write something more about that. I'm happy to recommend all of John's books, including the new one, The New Leviathan's, Thoughts After Liberalism. That's John Gray, G -R -A -Y. John, thank you very much. And Tyler, thank you for your brilliant questions. So, a very well chosen and very worth answering. And that doesn't always happen. I'm not usually an optimist about interviews, but in this case, whatever expectations I've had of disappointment of themselves being disappointed.

1:01:19I look forward to seeing you next whenever that is. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm Attyler Cowan, and the show is At Cowan Convose. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.