Having another go at God
Nicholas Fearn
THE FORM OF THINGS by A. C. Grayling Orion, £12.99, pp. 243, ISBN 0297851675 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 C. Grayling once helped put an end to a romantic relationship of mine when I At. ook a girl to one of his philosophy lectures. I feared the worst when he was forced to depart from the advertised subject to dispatch a New Age lunatic who was heckling from the back row. But my date only marvelled at his wit and proceeded to lap up every word on St Thomas Aquinas and rationality. Having expressed precisely the same opinions on precisely the same subjects myself the previous day, I was put out that my own efforts had elicited merely a shrug.
The problem was that though philosophers are supposed to judge arguments solely on their merits rather than their provenance, no one judges philosophers themselves in this way. My girlfriend told me that because I was only 23 years old at the time, I simply did not look the part as far as she was concerned. In mitigation, Professor Grayling probably wouldn’t look the part in a rugby strip or behind the wheel of a Ferrari, but then I don’t play rugby or drive a sports car either. Heigh-ho.
All self-respecting philosophers hope in public that they are listened to for their arguments, but one suspects that they would rather everyone just took their word for it once in a while. Professor Grayling reached this rank some years ago, hence a year does not go by without a new collection of his short pieces appearing. The latest covers subjects as diverse as moral outrage, the death of civilisations and face transplants. At least, those are the titles of the essays. The real focus is on the author’s libertarian social views and his contempt for religion, which he describes here as ‘directly descended from the ignorance of the caveman’. Philosophers are a godless bunch in general. The tragedy of the current generation is that they missed out on the fun of killing God, and they would like to bring Him back so they can take their own turn with the knife. That said, it has been a winning formula through multiple volumes. Grayling may doubt that religion, rather than the Church’s wealth, really did inspire the great art of the cathedrals and frescoes, but it certainly brings out the best in him. One of his sharpest thoughts is worth repeating: that the modern Church is mild and tolerant only because it no longer possesses the power to be vicious.
However, he would acknowledge that he is preaching only to the converted. No man or woman of faith is going to read these bite-sized polemics and feel that his or her beliefs have been addressed, understood and refuted; nor would the author expect them to. As every book critic knows, you can say whatever you like in a review, however half-baked, controversial or cruel, because no one expects you to properly justify your views in such a small space.
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