If we use the stages of grief as a model for human reckoning with tragedy, we are currently desperately bargaining that we might simply flip a switch — be it policy or market-based — and continue to expect to live as we have in the relatively peaceful End of History period of the past few decades.

Climate change activists, for example, look to the state and potential mechanisms for world governance via climate conferences to solve the problem. If only we put in the right number of bike lanes or subsidise the transition to a world of electric vehicles, industrial society would lumber on. Free-marketeers, relatedly, look to the unfettered global market to innovate our way to unleashing energy abundance never before captured in human history — a fantasy of the world economy run on nuclear power with Silicon Valley-backed AI-run vertical farms underwriting fully automated luxury capitalism.

Suggested reading

The Tories have lost their millennial converts

By Chris Clarke

These assumptions — that industrial society must continue indefinitely, or that we must develop solutions at grand scales — has us stuck in a political and technological gridlock, and limits our ability to imagine alternatives. Some of the most salient cultural traditions for this historical moment live outside the current oversized scale of market and state.

Writers such as John Michael Greer, who have compared ours to collapsed civilisations of the past, have been proclaiming that we are at the end of the industrial society. In response, forward-thinking individuals are cobbling together a worldview to get us through this period of crisis: something like the conservatism of Christopher Lasch combined with the environmentalism of Wendell Berry, a synthesis we might call Left Conservatism.

In practice, this nascent ideology looks to revive civil society, cares about ecology and culture of place, desires robust local and regional economies, is broadly anti-war, and rejects the ongoing bureaucratisation and commodification of all the most sacred aspects of life. This milieu of thinking doesn’t belong to a set political tradition — hence the contradiction in terms — but, above all, Left Conservatism centres the local, the particular and the human-scaled.

Suggested reading

America's empire is bankrupt

By John Michael Greer

Whether or not we are ready for it, we are entering a world in which the market and state are failing to meet basic needs. We will therefore need to embrace much more radical self-determination, at various scales for various problems. Those who take on the responsibility of de-scaling our economy and politics will be the most successful in the New Tragic Age, which may not be so tragic after all, depending on how we prepare.

There is an interesting history of something like Left Conservatism in the United States, especially owing to federalism and the ability to devolve power to states. Writers such as Berry, Lasch and Norman Mailer represent versions of this alternative to the typical Left-Right binary. In an interview with Martin Amis, Mailer describes the appeal of the term:

“The best thing that can be said for conservatism, and there are a great many terrible things to say about it, but the best thing to say about it is that they (conservatives) do tend to have a certain appreciation of the world as a whole. I become uneasy when I find people drawing up solutions, which is, of course, the great vice of the Left, to solve difficult problems, because I think they cut out too many of the nuances. So, Left Conservatism is my way of reminding myself that you have to deal with everything in context.”

In a globalised market and bureaucratic state, nearly every aspect of life is decontextualised — a line on a spreadsheet to be analysed by financiers or policy-makers. The principle of subsidiarity, or the idea that decisions should be made at the lowest possible scale, closest to where they will have an impact, is a helpful rule. Political questions answered on appropriate scales would allow for a patchwork of diverse cultures — working in concert when necessary and focusing on self-determination where appropriate.

Here, the environmentalism of Berry is scaled down. Instead of focusing primarily on the global and intangible, Berry’s environmentalism is about local ecologies, fundamentally inextricable from place and culture. What follows from this distinction is a radically different ontology: a concern for global concepts such as climate seems to drive activists toward acts of destruction, whereas a focus on the stewardship of a specific, knowable ecology encourages acts of creation.

Suggested reading

Net zero and the politics of narcissism

By John Gray

Lasch is best known for documenting the advancing narcissism of the modern era, but he also mourned the loss of the culture of pre-industrial times. He bemoaned “the decline of craftsmanship, the fragmentation of the community, the loneliness of the modern metropolis, the subordination of spiritual life to the demands of the market” and called for a reinvigoration of active participation in civic life. Primarily known as a Leftist, Lasch retained a respect for the positive potential of the state, as long as it remained in balance with strong families, neighbourhoods, and working “guilds”.

For both, whether dealing with the market or the state, it is the scaling down of focus that radically reorganises the field of action. The inhuman scales through which we currently engage in politics rightfully make us feel out of control. Our sense is that the only way to protect ourselves from such totalising forces is to either recoil from them or to destroy them in some way or another. You can see this most clearly in climate activism, where the sense of helplessness leads to a rage channeled toward acts of destruction. However, when the scale is more human — a neighbourhood, a family, a garden — suddenly the possibility for acts of creation or stewardship become much more real, and the responsibility for action more tangible.

Those hovering around these ideas — localism, civic orientation, care for local ecologies — are seeking to move beyond the gridlock of over-scaled politics as currently constituted. They see the future clear-eyed, and know that more partisan appeals to solutions of the global market or governance will just provide us more of the same. The “Left” part of Left Conservatism is recognition of the need to protect ourselves from the exploitative forces of the market — the desire to commodify and sell off every last sacred thing. The “conservative” part is the desire to protect the sacred from the flattening authority of bureaucracy. Despite superficial political differences of individuals, working at the local scale as neighbours can start to draw out the shared sense of the sacred: a clean environment, a safe community, a thriving home.

Many years ago, the late Alan Coren observed that three categories of books seemed to be surefire bestsellers: books about Nazis, books about golf and books about cats. In 1975, therefore, he published a book called Golfing for Cats, and put a swastika on its cover. It was a huge success. It’s with similar thoughts in mind, I suspect, that John Gray’s perspicacious editor at Allen Lane, Simon Winder, will have encouraged the great philosopher to produce his new little book, Feline Philosophy. 

It is, in its way, a more whimsical and till-point friendly companion-piece to Gray’s 2013 The Silence of Animals. And with it John Gray — for whom the idea of progress is a myth, morality a vain imagining, reason an ignis fatuus and the search for truth a fool’s errand — even dips his gnarled toe into the listicle-infested waters of self-help, supplying in his final chapter “Ten Feline Hints On How To Live Well”. Actually, it’s very charming. And, despite his gloomy worldview, he clearly loves cats, the big softy.

Suggested reading

What cats taught me about philosophy

By John Gray

Gray has one central idea, around which he circles like a cat preparing to settle in a laundry basket. It is that what marks humans out from other species is our reflexive thinking and our abstract awareness of our own mortality. Humans are miserable because we try to find meaning in something larger than ourselves – be that systems of philosophy, religious devotion or abstract ideas about the thriving of our species. All of these are, one way or another, unsatisfactory displacement activities: we are, in the cat-loving T. S. Eliot’s phrase, “distracted from distraction by distraction”, constantly trying to push down the terror of the meaningless and inevitable extinction that awaits us.

Cats don’t worry about that stuff, Gray says. They don’t tell stories to themselves about themselves. They accept their own natures, rather than seeking to change or understand them. They live in their bodies and in their sense-worlds, moment to moment. “Unless they are confined within environments that are unnatural for them, cats are never bored. Boredom is fear of being alone with yourself. Cats are happy being themselves, while humans try to be happy by escaping themselves.”

The whole project of philosophy, Gray says in the first few pages, is essentially misconceived: “posing as a cure, philosophy is a symptom of the disease it pretends to remedy”. We are made miserable by our faculty for thinking, in other words, and we try to make ourselves happy with… more thinking. As the title of Boethius’s most influential work expresses it, we look for “consolations” in philosophy, and we look in vain. “Throughout much of its history, philosophy has been a search for truths that are proof against mortality,” Gray writes — from the idea of an eternal realm of Platonic forms onwards — but as Freud was to show, the repressed tends to return.

More from this author

Harry Potter fans need to grow up

By Sam Leith

The three main schools of ancient philosophy — Stoics, Sceptics and Epicureans — all promised to bring their followers to the tranquil condition of ataraxia. Epicureans said you could achieve inner peace by adjusting your circumstances; Stoics by adjusting your reactions to the world; Sceptics by ceasing to try to make sense of it altogether. But even if you get a measure of relief through one of these approaches, asks Gray, is the life you end up with one much worth living? Gray dismisses Marcus Aurelius’s thinking as “not an affirmation of life but a pose of indifference to life”.

Rather, he says, there’s a sideways jump to be made: out of language and away from thinking altogether. Though he deplores the ruinous anthropocentrism of Aristotle and the Western tradition, Gray has a certain amount of time for the Taoist notion of tao and te — that is, the key to existence is for each creature to obey its own nature. The nearest parallel he finds in Western philosophy is Spinoza’s idea of conatus — which he glosses as “the tendency of living things to preserve and enhance their activity in the world”. Just be yourself, you could say.

Cats, having no choice but to be themselves and nursing no illusions that they do have a choice, find this quite unproblematic. They are, as Gray puts it, “selfless egoists”. Indeed, they even escape the charge of cruelty, which Gray calls “negative empathy”, because empathy itself is alien to them.

All of this is set out not just through vignettes of Schopenhauer, Montaigne and Descartes (dreadful cat-torturer, that last one: chucked them out of windows in a spirit of philosophical inquiry) but through a number of anecdotes and encounters with cats in history and literature. My to-read list now includes lesser-known short works by Colette, Junichirō Tanizaki, Mary Gaitskill and Patricia Highsmith (in the last of which a cat does a murder).

The standout is a real-life cat, the excellently named Mèo, rescued as a kitten from the Vietnamese city of Hué ahead of the Tet Offensive by the American journalist Jack Laurence. As this whisky-drinking feline refugee moved to Connecticut, Manhattan and later the UK with his traumatised rescuer, his adventures seem to present an example of feline virtue. He passes through horrors without internalising them. Taking pleasure in a sunny windowsill even as the bombs fall, he “flourished wherever he found himself”. And he offered comfort and companionship to humans not by saying or by doing, but simply by being.

Suggested reading

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Where Gray makes a bit of a leap, of course, is in his confident assertion that cats think, or rather don’t, in the way he supposes. In truth, we have no idea what goes on in a cat’s furry little head, and that alterity is what makes them so attractive. When my cat sat on the end of the bed, perfectly still, staring at nothing, how am I to know that she wasn’t wondering intently about whether existence precedes essence? Indeed, in insisting that it’s vain of philosophers to see humans as different from the rest of the animal world, and at the same time insisting that we are uniquely cursed with self-consciousness, Gray seems to me slightly to be having his Whiskas and eating it.

And what of their ethics and affections? Gray concedes that cats show affection to humans, but he says — probably rightly — that it’s a fleeting and essentially self-interested thing. A cat won’t spend much time mourning you if you die. He concedes that a mother cat will risk death to protect her kittens, but that perhaps falls under his rubric of a beast following its nature. And he doesn’t develop what seems to me an interesting point — which is that the adult cat’s meow is an inter-species communication. They don’t meow at each other: only at us. That bears exploring, I think.

You finish reading Feline Philosophy with much to chew on — and a firm sense that no self-respecting cat would have felt the need to write such a book.

Mr Johnson will not be unhappy with that. He’s very interested in the “great man” theory of history — that way of understanding the world that attributes grand events and trends to the actions of a few heroic individuals. He loves the classics with their heaven-born heroes smiting each other hip and thigh in defiance of gods and fate. His hero is Pericles, the “first citizen of Athens”. He chose politics over journalism “because no one puts up statues of journalists”. He wrote a biography of Winston Churchill, the best-known great man of British imagination: he won the war, didn’t he?

Provided he isn’t seen to have screwed up dramatically over the crisis once he’s recovered, it’s quite easy to see how the story of the prime minister who led the response to a deadly disease and nearly died from it himself will weave its way into the British imagination.

But the tale of Boris and the Virus can be told in two different ways. The way Conservatives, in particular, remember it will help decide whether the story unites or divides.

It all flows from a very basic question: why did Boris survive? How people answer that question will say a lot about politics and determine how Britain changes — or does not change — when we finally put coronavirus behind us.

Some will describe a battle of personal heroism, of grit and determination. Even when the PM was in the ICU and his fate was, frankly, uncertain, many people were talking of his toughness, his vigour, how his strong character and boundless appetite for life would equip him to “fight” the virus and win.

Suggested reading

How Boris became the body politic

By Matthew Sweet

I don’t much like that language, though I understand why people use it. I worry it overstates the role that character and personal choice play in medical outcomes. When I wrote elsewhere about this last week, I was slightly surprised by the vehemence and volume of responses. I know that Twitter isn’t Britain and all that but it’s still a bit striking to see people arguing that yes, some people die of various diseases because they just don’t want to live. That even life and death are ultimately a matter of choices made by individuals.

Others, though, will describe how he survived thanks to a huge infrastructure of medical support, provided and funded by many other people — as well as a bit of blind luck. To grossly over-simplify, some people will remember that Boris survived because he wanted to, because of things he did himself while others will say that it was because other people looked after him when he needed it.

The more weight you put on the first explanation, the more likely you are to be somewhere on the Right of the political spectrum. The idea that people choose their fate is popular among conservative-inclined voters. A very good study by the Bright Blue think tank in 2014 found that Tory voters were about twice as likely as Labour people to say that people in poverty are poor because of their own choices: they haven’t done enough to help themselves.

Similar evidence in the US suggests that people on the Right tend to believe that those who enjoy economic success do so largely or solely because of their own efforts.

As Bright Blue put it:

“One key conservative belief concerns the degree of power and responsibility individuals have over their own situation. Conservatives tend to see individuals as agents who can shape and determine their circumstances, and so see them as agents responsible for such circumstances.”

The other side of the old Left-Right binary is a familiar story, best articulated by Elizabeth Warren in 2012 talking about how people get rich:

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.”

(This is the speech that led Barack Obama to attempt the same argument with disastrous consequences in his “You didn’t build that” comments. He was talking about the social infrastructure that supports business, but he botched his lines and created a meme that helped elect Donald Trump. Words matter, folks.)

Whether Covid-19 changes politics depends on how conservatives chose to explain Boris’ recovery. If they cling to the idea of people as rugged individuals deciding their own fate, politics will remain divided on its current left-right binary. If they look beyond heroic individualism and accept that individuals exist in a network of social bonds and obligations, we might just see a real realignment and the start of genuine post-liberal politics in the UK.

For the Left, the coronavirus crisis offers little in the way of intellectual challenge. A national crisis revolving around the NHS and requiring collective social effort is likely to feel like validation instead. Jeremy Corbyn’s claim that the crisis proves him right over public spending will be the foundation-stone of a myth built by his devotees that if only he’d become PM, none of the bad things would have happens.

The equivalent retreat to the comfort-zone for conservatives would be to use the Boris story as a validation of individualism. But more interesting, challenging and profitable would be to learn from the obvious fact that the PM did not win his “battle” against the coronavirus alone.

In the modern history of ideas on the Right, some of the most prominent explanations of individual agency lead to an atomised view of society and a minimal state. Think of Ayn Rand (“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being”) or Friedrich Hayek, who said that “after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level.”

But more recent and more interesting thinkers have begun to test that heroic individualism. Think of John Gray’s Post-Liberalism. Gray, in turn, has paved the way for post-liberal political practitioners such as Nick Timothy, who has recently published his own book, Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism.

What makes Timothy intriguing and original is that he is a Conservative (and a conservative) who enthusiastically embraces the state — and rejects the idea of heroic individual success:

“Nobody, however successful they might be, has succeeded alone. They might have relied on their families to give them love and security. They might have a school, college or university to thank. They might have benefited from the kindness or wisdom of a mentor or employer. They might have been supported by the state, through the welfare system or … a Sure Start centre. Precisely because nobody has succeeded alone, we all have a debt to others. “

Which brings us, circuitously, back to Boris Johnson and how he — and by extension his party — will remember his recovery. It is notable that his short message briefed to the Sunday papers is all about the NHS and the debt that he incurred in illness. “I owe them my life,” Johnson said simply.

Suggested reading

We've cosied up to China for too long

By Nick Timothy

That is an acknowledgment that even the most heroic individual does not rise — or fall — alone. But will that acknowledgement carry through into a wider revision of Conservative thinking around public services and collective provision? That would be no surprise: Tories have been trying to embrace the NHS since David Cameron became leader in 2005. A post-crisis settlement where the Tories seek to define themselves as the party of the NHS would be a logical, if extremely difficult, aim now.

Most contemporary Tories would have little trouble embracing the NHS: the number of ideologues who actually want to break it up or sell it off is vanishingly small. More novel and challenging would be a Tory rethink about welfare.

Even though some Tories have recently tried a new approach to welfare — think of Iain Duncan Smith and Universal Credit — they have stuck with the idea of rational, autonomous individuals deciding their own path. Universal Credit was premised on the idea that claimants were deciding not to work more because the financial return wasn’t there. Even Tory welfare reformers thought welfare was a question of choice.

We may well be about to see unemployment temporarily pass the three million mark, with hundreds of thousands of people now needing benefits to get by. And all through no fault or choice of their own: can you really hold people personally responsible for being sacked by employers whose business has been shut down by a pandemic? Those Conservative attitudes to claimants will surely be tested in the months ahead.

So far, post-liberalism is a fringe element on the British Right, so politics remains broadly familiar. The 2019 election opened up the possibility for these things to change, but then the virus hit and all the emergent thinking about “levelling up” and the Tory embrace of the state was thrown into the crucible.

Are we heroic individuals who decide our own fate, or social animals whose outcomes are inextricably bound up with — and partly dependent on — the actions of others? Boris will likely get his statues one day. And how the story of his illness and its happy ending are told by his friends might just determine the history of Britain after the virus.

Already, this seems a little unfair on the atheist. The believer affirms a particular form of God. The atheist denies it. Then another believer affirms a quite different version of God, which the atheist has to set about denying all over again. It feels like a rather exhausting version of whack-a-mole.

In his brilliant inaugural lecture as Professor of Theology at Cambridge, cheekily titled “How to be an Atheist”, Denys Turner complains about forms of denial that are just too confident that they know what they are denying:

The problem is presented to us equally by those theists who know all too well what they are affirming when they say ‘God exists’ and by those atheists – the mirror-image of the first – who know all too well what they are denying when they say ‘God does not exist’. For both the affirmer and the denier are complicit in a sort of cosy and mutually reassuring idolatrous domesticity: in short, they keep each other in a job.

Here is part of the problem for the atheist. For much theology, the affirmation of God’s existence is not like the affirmation of unicorns or Santa Claus because God is not any sort of object in the world. So if, for example, you decided to embark upon some mad project of counting all the objects that exist in the universe as Thomas Aquinas suggests, you would never come across a thing called God that would go on that list.

To this extent, the atheists are clearly correct: there is no thing called God. But they are correct only in a trivial sense, because only the most Sunday school-ish mind thinks God to be the sort of thing that could exist in such a way.

Gray, himself an atheist, understands that atheism is a far richer subject that the sort of trivial denial that the so-called New Atheists specialise in. Gray says he even seriously considered writing his book without any reference to people such as Dawkins and Sam Harris, such was his estimation of their non contribution to atheistic thought. A “media phenomenon” and “a tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion” he calls it.

But Gray does venture into their territory, not least because he wants to scotch the assumption that their sort of atheism is linked with the establishment of a more progressive politics. There is no good reason that atheism leads to liberalism, greater equality or a personal freedom. Indeed, historically speaking, most campaigning atheists have been profoundly illiberal in their approach – from Auguste Comte’s atheistic religion of humanity to the various versions of Communism to Nietzsche and Ayn Rand’s philosophically batty objectivism, atheism is mostly an illiberal creed that does little to advance the cause of human flourishing.

Suggested listening

Why don't we remember the victims of communism?

By Douglas Murray

Gray is at his strongest when he seeks to expose the ways in which supposedly atheistic philosophies are often shot through with religious assumptions. He called secular humanism, for instance, a “sacred relic”, not least because it often tends to be constructed around the notion of progress, which he sees as a secularised version of Christian eschatology, with history always pointing to the sunny uplands of some grand metaphysical conclusion.

Gray rightly shrugs at all this philosophical upspeak. Calm down, he councils, like some avuncular Geordie Eeyore, we are not on the verge of something new, we are not about to reinvent what it is to be human, we are not at some special point in history. The moral challenges of today are pretty much the same as they have been for centuries. There is no short cut out of constituent issues of being human.

The idea of exploding moral or existential short cuts is where Gray’s work is most important. As he rightly insists, the idea that science or technology can somehow deliver us from the sort of questions that have driven some of us to God – questions about mortality, for instance – is every bit as superstitious as any religious belief. For many, technology and science function in today’s society very much the same way as magic once did – they both represent the fantasy that there can be some quick fix to the challenges of being human.

The idea, for example, that we (our essence) might one day be uploaded into an app so we might live forever carries with it a “parody” of what it is to be human. Likewise, the way technology appears in the argument over climate change, for example, as some future saviour for our consumptive greed and expectation of endless growth, is a classic deus ex machina that would make even the most credulous believer blush. “Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means,” Gray concludes, “Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism.”

Of the other forms of atheism, Gray also mentions what he calls the ‘God haters’. Now this is an interesting category because it includes those to whom the question of God’s existence is beside the point – they reject God if he exists or if he doesn’t.

Suggested reading

Free Minds: Sam Harris - An atheist rock star

By Douglas Murray

I once had a rather boozy lunch with the Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson (whose Who’s Who entry cites both “drinking” and “atheism” among his interests) and I remember him saying that even if God walked though the restaurant door and introduced himself, he would still be an atheist. And I completely get that. Like Ivan Karamazov in the Brother’s Karamazov, Rowson’s atheism is deeper than mere denial. It is moral rejection. And finding out that God actually exists wouldn’t make him believe in God one bit.

This makes an important point. Believing that God exists and believing in God are entirely different things. In this regard Rowson is a more sophisticated non-believer than the New Atheists who still think atheism is all about establishing whether a thing called God is on Aquinas’ inventory of things that exist in the universe.

More by Giles Fraser

Why Islam is the future of anti-capitalism

By Giles Fraser

The most interesting aspect of Gray’s book is his insistence that “if you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites” – and this strikes me as absolutely right. Gray’s own sympathies lie closer to those of  Joseph Conrad, who had no use for the idea of God, but nonetheless wrote often of his characters as sailors dependent upon the vast, beautiful indifference of the oceans. This dependence has religion-like qualities – a sense of something much bigger than oneself, a sense that the waters provided the ship with its living and purpose, the need for shipmates to establish patterns of human solidarity in the face of the dangerous circumstances.

But this sailor atheism also contained a recognition that the ocean is wholly indifferent, without higher meaning or purpose. Gray’s atheism thus retains its sense of mystery – not mystery as in stuff that is yet to be found out, but mystery as in the intrinsic unknowability of the place in which human beings find ourselves.

Over the last few decades, atheism has got rather dull. The New Atheist debate was highly successful in an evangelical kind of way – and lots of people (in the west) have been converted to it. But atheism stopped being rich or interesting. And that is a pity because, as Gray demonstrated, there is so much more to atheism than the dim witted Dawkins brigade. I did my PhD on Nietzsche, have been intellectually shaped by several important atheists, notably Freud, and even my religious heroes have atheistic tendencies.

If I have one criticism of Gray’s book it is that he could have done more with the religious side of atheism – the whole iconoclastic tradition that deliberately smashes any settled representation of God as being a product of the human imagination. Meister Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing etc.

There is a rich interaction to be had between belief and unbelief that the New Atheist debate has driven out with its juvenile ‘Boo Hurrah’ approach. My hope is that Gray’s book might spark a renewal in the creative interchange between believers and non believers. As his final words put it: “The difference between the two may be less than you think.”