In an Oxbridge which is still far from egalitarian, I’m sure you’ll agree, his childhood in contrast to his education can’t be much more than a spectacular instance of social mobility which the status quo will hold up with pride, despite all sorts of evidence that shows social mobility to be, on the whole, close to non-existent.

And I’d imagine his career provides him with a sufficient level of comfort so as to put him in league with every other glib rationalist or empiricist like him, which was more or less the point of my comment and how I drew Dawkins and Gray together. I was merely talking about the positions from which they spring forth rather than the content of their thought.

And thank you for the tip about wikipedia, I can only hope it will provide me with the veracity which you so clearly exhibit.

Read his Wikipedia page …

“The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run. ”

— John Gray, essay “Joseph Conrad, Our Contemporary” in Heresies

John Gray was born to a working class mining family in South Shields, Tyne and Wear (also on his Wikipedia page … probably a good place to visit before you write about someone.)

This seems pretty true to form for Gray, that stridency propped up by a determination that his views can only be met with either resigned agreement or irrational indignation brought on by having one’s sky fall in. For Gray, anyone between the archetypal Creationist Pastor and himself are cut from the same cloth.

As you’ve already said, his points follow logically enough but it’s the dead ends he runs into that cause me to lose interest in him and Dawkins et al. I much prefer the line of thinking of a K-Punk, who struggles with getting to grips with a new use for religion, of once again utilising religion for communist discourse.

For Gray and Dawkins, Secular Phillistines, this is self-delusion a priori, on the basis that it takes religion as its root. For anyone who hasn’t quite walked through life so comfortably, (And this is the fatal flaw of Gray and so many other ‘Rationalists,’ that their conclusions have been drawn from a distinctly comfortable middle-class white position while they so ardently insist upon disinterest) the imagination used to re-write history, to transcend, is a necessity in being able to understand discrete systemic abuses that they’ve suffered. John Gray naturally sees such wrangling as unnecessary and illogical since the academic world accommodates him quite comfortably where so many potentially more rigourous minds falter on sociological grounds. It’s perhaps only a matter of his personality and expression that his circumstances so obviously form the basis of his world view whilst undermining its claims to impartiality, that cornerstone of Rationality, but they completely cut him off at the knees for me, make his work an ‘eminently human activity’ as you say.

For me, adressing those points where class, for example, come into play; understanding their instances in the past and confronting them in the present and future, is my primary tool of understanding the world and has been essential to my coming to terms with the world up to and including my 21st year. In that sense secular 20th century Marxism has served a parallel utility to religion in allowing space for imagination beyond that which is laid out in front of me, and I’m glad of it.

Gray scoffs at that because he’s never particularly needed that utility, being that he exists in a continuum with the well-off Victorian amateur scientist collecting fossils off Brighton beach in the noble pursuit of knowledge.