First off, despite the title and the famous Man Ray nude on the cover, there is little about sex here; titillation seekers will have to look elsewhere. A. C. Grayling is a professor of philosophy, formerly at Oxford and now at the University of London. He contributes to high-toned journals on both sides of the Atlantic, has published several books, and writes a weekly column, “The Last Word,” for The Guardian. Combining literary journalism with the teaching of philosophy bespeaks erudition, eclecticism, and a certain welcome eccentricity.
Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God is a collection of Grayling’s columns, which run chiefly from two to four book pages, plus a few longer pieces from elsewhere. They are grouped into seven sections: “Moral Matters” (ranging from “Meat” to “Marriage”), “Public Culture,” “Community and Society,” “Anger and War” (encompassing “Safety” and “Slavery”), “Grief and Remembrance” (including “Suicide”), “Nature and Naturalness” (containing “Monsters,” “Madness,” and “Clones”), and “Reading and Thinking” (with pieces on “The Essay,” “Biography,” “Philosophy,” and “Reality”). One might rashly assume that such small meditations on large topics may be fine in a newspaper, but meager fare between hard covers. True enough, required concision sometimes leaves us hungry for more. But Grayling makes a virtue of journalistic constraint: craving for more should stimulate the reader to further thought along the adumbrated lines—call it heuristics. Concentration here does not entail embarrassing lacunae, militate against clarity, or indulge in jesting Pilate tactics, deliberately failing to abide our question.
Grayling is a liberal: growing up colonial English in Central Africa, surrounded by subservient servants, “together with the realisation that Plato’s politics are extremely disagreeable … gave my political views their permanent list to port.” Yet this liberalism is anything but kneejerk, as behooves one who, at age twelve, came across Socrates in a well-stocked little African library, and proceeded to educate himself by reading—in those hot, isolated, televisionless days in Africa—some of the best books written from classical antiquity onward to his own day.
He is a nonbeliever and a scorner of all religion, which he compares to believing in fairies at the bottom of your garden, and perceives as one of the root causes of intolerance, persecution, and war. Although he may not summon up new arguments for his cause—are there any left?—he assembles the best existing ones, and presents them with originality, pungency, and compactness.
Take a typical passage:
The causes of most conflicts involve large admixtures of mutual ignorance, the parent of suspicion and hostility… . Everyone knows these lessons of experience: stated, they seem painfully obvious. But experience also teaches how infrequently they are heeded… . Experience’s greatest lesson, it would seem, is that the lessons of experience are too easily forgotten—or, which comes to the same, too late learned.
Each of these essays begins with an epigraph—always pertinent and often pert, culled from an amazingly wide range of sources—this piece, “Experience,” having for motto a Chinese proverb, “Experience is a comb nature gives to the bald.”
Apropos nature, here is a passage from “Nature”:
People use “natural” and “unnatural” as emotive terms expressing their preferences. What is considered natural and acceptable in some cultures is thought disgusting in others, and at certain times in history what is considered natural is for that reason despised—as at the end of the nineteenth century, when the rich ate white bread and sugar because whiteness denotes purity, with all the pleasant natural bits “refined” away, whereas now people eat brown bread and sugar because brown is the color of health and shows that the foodstuffs are closer to their natural origins. With such changes of fashion and use affecting it, the concept of naturalness is practically useless.
Or consider the following, from “Madness,” with a superscription from Pascal, “Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would be another form of madness”:
In the collective form of insanity, whole populations … rise from sleep at about the same time each day, move in great herds to locations at some distance from their home territory, perform repetitive maneuvers there, return home when evening falls, slump in front of a flickering colored light, and after a while fall asleep again. They repeat the process day after day for decades. The disease is called “normal life,” and variations from it are regarded as eccentric; if the variations are marked enough, they are even called “madness” and “delusion.”
It should be stressed that Grayling is neither a fanatical naysayer nor a disheveled counterculturist, but a rationalist with feeling, a proponent of intelligent change, the need for which he scouts out diligently, but propagates with seemly self-control. About radical extremists, he writes: “One wonders if they are in the pay of those against whom the protest is directed … the only ones who benefit from what they do.” He points out the absurdity of today’s African-Americans seeking reparations for ancestral slavery. And he is not so pacifist as to ignore times “when bad people have to be stopped from doing something worse.”
His erudition seems boundless, and is not confined to literature, history, and philosophy; he easefully encompasses science, sociology, economics, and politics as well, with wonderful quotations and citations at his fingertips. Without naming British sources, such as an educated Briton can be expected to command, and what with my interest in the humanities governing my choices, I list incompletely and at random Justice Hand, Anatole France, Aretino, Thomas Paine, Tertullian, Pompidou, Aijaz Ahmad, Tzvetan Todorov, Ovid, Seneca, Eliphas Levi, Robert Mapplethorpe, Star Trek, Adorno, Quentin Tarantino, the Panchatantra, Joseph Wood Krutch, Max Lerner, Gide, Ben Franklin, Aesop, Victor Hugo, Remy de Gourmont, Francis Steegmuller, Ambrose Bierce, La Rochefoucauld, Turgenev, Petrarch, Elbert Hubbard, Unamuno, Stanislaw Lec, Margaret Fuller, Wittgenstein, and on and on.
In the section “Reading and Thinking,” literature and philosophy mingle fruitfully, with great usefulness to readers and reviewers. Here you will find one of the fairest discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of Harold Bloom and a cogent appreciation of one of Grayling’s favorites, Hazlitt, in the context of a tribute to the essay genre, which “began in English in the seventeenth century with Francis Bacon and—despite the hurry of contemporary journalism and the desiccation of academicism—still flourishes.” And reading this book, we are ready to agree that “perhaps the closest thing to the ‘familiar essay’—the intimate, informal essay random in topic and design—is the newspaper ‘column,’ where the columnist’s personality and style are the main point.”
One wishes that the OUP had not let slip such typos as Euripedes, vomitarium, Goring, Grand Armee, Bettleheim, and an occasional lapse in grammar and syntax. (An index, too, would have served.) Never mind; Grayling’s admirable credo might be the Virgilian “parcere subiectis et debellare superbos,” but the lowly to be spared only if deserving, the mighty attacked only when abusing their power. Would there were more such men of good sense.
