THINKING OF ANSWERS
Questions in the Philosophy of Everyday Life
By A.C. Grayling. Bloomsbury. 352 pages. £16.99
ISBN 978-1-4088-0598-5
Dr. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. According to the blurb on the book, he is a multi-talented author, and Britain’s most eminent publicly-engaged philosopher. He is certainly a prolific author and a regular broadcaster and columnist. Some readers of this newspaper are likely to have come across him.
Thinking of Answers is a collection of his journalism, and the result is as near as it gets to a secular humanist book of daily readings, though it has to be said that there is not a great tradition of this particular form of literature. Rummaging among the books in a secondhand shop, one is not likely to come across a thumbed copy of Day by Day with T.H. Huxley, or New Every Morning with Richard Dawkins, or even The Wit and Wisdom of Tom Paine, any more than one may find a humanist promise box among the ‘collectables’.
I remember years ago finding that once I started reading the collected journalism of George Orwell I could not easily put it down. Reading Professor Grayling’s collection has not had the same effect. There are 100 or so articles here, in 300 pages or so. If anyone is going to read this book at all, it must be as Ten Minutes a Day with Professor Grayling.
No one can seriously believe that philosophical questions can be answered in a few pages The only reason that I can think of that justifies collecting such pieces together and publishing them is for their entertainment value.
Conventionally liberal
Riffling through some of these pieces, I was struck by a number of things. One was how conventionally secularly liberal they are. They are also terribly solemn, the thoughts of a Roundhead rather than of a Cavalier. No epigrams, no wit, no self-mockery. I don’t think that it’s ever Professor Grayling’s intention to raise a smile. Getting up from the breakfast table having read his thought for the day will not make the reader chuckle all the way to work. But Grayling is sometimes unintentionally funny, as when he pronounces that getting brown by sunbathing is a fashion, but eating brown grains is not. And when he tells us: ‘The most important thing about the universal toilet signs in airports is the promise they hold for the future’.
It is true that there is a column on laughter, which (the laughter, that is) is said to be not the crackling of thorns under a pot, but a mark of intelligence. Though not the only mark, one hopes. Laughter, the author says, is testament to the absurdity of the world, but there is little reflection by Professor Grayling on the possibility that his own world may be absurd. He seems pretty content with his own outlook and its agenda. But he is put out by what he regards as irrationalities of various kinds, including especially the irrationality of religion.
The author intends to offer suggestions and ideas. Certainly there are frequent references to a whole range of philosophers, and to current events. The book’s title, Thinking of Answers, suggests that he makes the answers up for himself, perhaps while he himself is at breakfast. The range of topics on which Dr. Grayling offers his views are certainly quite remarkable — ‘Poverty’, ‘Celebrity’, ‘Body and Soul’, ‘Stendhal on Love’, ‘History’, ‘Stem Cells’, ‘Waste’, ‘Sport’, Happiness’, ‘Prudery’. In many of these cases, while Professor Grayling’s point of view comes over, his arguments are often less easy to spot. Sometimes, when he’s short of an answer, the reader is served history instead. Indeed, there is quite a bit of out-of-the-way history here, for instance in his answer to the distinctly unphilosophical question, ‘Does the word “Byzantine” deserve its negative connotations?’ There’s also a good deal of name-dropping.
Intellectual agony column
In his defence, his columns demand that he comes quickly to some sort of conclusion, and they are each written to questions put to him. So they are an intellectual agony column. But the result is often platitudinous, and there is evidence of some carelessness. Surely the reason why car seats for children ought to be legally enforced is not that children are not competent to ensure their own safety, but that children are smaller? Not even seatbelts ensure the wearers’ own safety.
Some philosophers have been confident about the reliability of their own reasoning processes to provide truth about the world beyond its appearances. This is how Professor Grayling sees the world. Another, more entertaining way of getting someone to think about a question is to be unconventional, to be skittish, questioning, ridiculing, poking fun. The Calvinist Pierre Bayle was one such. In philosophy there is a strong and honourable sceptical tradition. But there’s not much of the sceptic about Grayling.
Far from offering suggestions for how to think about every aspect of a question and then arrive at one’s own conclusion (as the blurb promises), the reader is fed conclusions in fairly generous portions. As we’ve seen, Grayling tackles questions that are purely factual, and many of his answers a matter of common sense. Perhaps what matters is not so much what is said as that it is Professor Grayling who is saying it.
Of course this reviewer’s impression of this collection of columns may be quite misleading. These pieces came out drib by drab. To collect them together — and to revise them, for goodness’ sake — alters their character. A joke may be funny, but it does not follow that a book of jokes provides oodles of laughter. An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but eating umpteen apples a day will take you to his surgery. A weekly column may come over as spontaneous and stimulating. It does not follow that a book of weekly columns, carefully revised by the author and thoughtfully provided with an index, will be equally so. However, working one’s way through such a surfeit does enable a reader to discern the tramlines along which the columnist’s mind runs.
Philosophy has to start from somewhere, from premises, assumptions, opinions. Professor Grayling’s columns, when read wholesale, make his opinions increasingly apparent and then entirely predictable; being ‘environmentally sensitive’, including being alarmed at climate change; in favour of the decriminalisation of certain drugs (including heroin, apparently); financial profit but not too much of it. Democracy? Yes and no. Political correctness? Yes and no. Freedom of expression? Yes and no.
Religion fails
And of course religion, especially what the author takes to be Judeo-Christian religion, routinely fails to pass the test of rationality. The author frequently gives evidence that he does not think much of religion, but also that he does not think much about it. I don’t suppose he’d like it if his students gave as little attention to philosophy. Sin, the existence of God (routinely associated with the existence of fairies), mortification (exclusively identified with asceticism), the ‘triumph’ of science over religion, ungenerous remarks about the Red Cross and Christian charitableness. The tramlines are all too obvious, as are the dogmas of careless irreligion. There are obvious falsehoods, one being that religion and Darwinism are incompatible. But at least none of the remarks is infected with post-modern relativism.
In hope of a more spiky, sharp approach to at least some of these questions I turned to a couple of chapters whose titles seem to promise more: ‘Contrarianism’ and ‘Self-deception’. Contrarianism is derided but genuine debate applauded. But then the policy of the BBC, of offering two sides to a question, where it occurs, is accused of fomenting wrangling or strife. Yet the expressing of multiple opinions is applauded, but only if there is a referee, a judge. But who? And it emerges that a contrarian is one who opposes debating the legalisation of drugs and brothels, the case for each of which is helpfully summarised by Professor Grayling, but not the case against. As for self-deception, it is the optimists who are self-deceived, but thankfully so. Dull, dull, dull.
Paul Helm,
Teaching Fellow, Regent College, Vancouver, Canada
