The Streets discuss philosophy with John Gray

Taken from The Observer, Sunday 7 December 2008

Few records this year addressed themes such as human consciousness and evolution (as well as reflecting the linguist's pleasure in a good piece of slang) as smartly as the Streets' fourth album, Everything is Borrowed. OMM detected in it the influence of the work of the philosopher and occasional Observer contributor John Gray - and a quick call revealed that Mike Skinner is a huge fan of the Straw Dogs author.

That bestseller, first published in 2003, argued that humans have still not come to terms with Darwin or accepted that they are like other animals - thereby knocking the humanists' belief in progress.

It seemed a good idea to put the pop star and the professor together, and so they met for a wide-ranging conversation - covering the art of storytelling and the imminent collapse of Western capitalism - in a north London pub hours before Skinner's performance at the BBC Electric Proms.

Mike Skinner: Reading Straw Dogs... I was aware of the idea that consciousness is an illusion, but it really made me think about a lot of things differently.
John Gray: The book is not intended to convert anyone to anything or to impose my world view. It's intended to stir people's thinking so that they see their lives in different ways. People have said to me - young people, old people, a couple who were trapped in a religious cult for 40 years - that they liked the book because it helped to weaken the story that they've woven of their lives, the story that was ruling them.
MS: What you seem to be saying is that it's all an illusion, life goes on and **** just happens...
JG: Well, good things happen too.
MS" But what's a good thing? It's just something that we perceive to be good...
JG: I'm not saying we should rid ourselves of the need for stories, but when that need becomes tyrannical then we can give up too much of our freedom. One story of the past few years was that wealth was going to grow indefinitely - we were all going to get richer and the ups and downs of history weren't going to apply to us. Well, stories are not true or false in the way that science is, but some are closer to human reality. And this Prozac-like story of the last 20 years - people believed it!
MS: The financial situation: the impression I have is that we're not in as much trouble as we were in 1929.
JG: Not yet.
MS: OK... and the reason for that is memes - it's the knowledge that if you don't bail the banks out, we're in really deep ****. So does that represent progress?
JG: It's an interesting question. And I'm serious when I reply by saying the proof will be in the pudding. You can say we studied the 1930s and so we won't commit the same mistakes. We'll do what should have been done then and maybe it will work. But there is a different way of looking at it. Even if avoiding those mistakes now is the right thing to do, there will be different consequences which will get us into different types of trouble. Bailing out the banks might lead to the sort of stagflation we saw in the 1970s.
The point is: there's an element of luck, and while I'm not a religious believer, if you want stories in your life, it might be better to follow religious stories rather than those you know to be shallow - like the story of unending growth.
MS: Your work can be very dark. But as a person you seem very amiable...
JG: Well, I'm not writing in order to provide consolation. One idea that's really unpopular nowadays is that there are any aspects of a human being which are inherently bad. But one thing that's distinctive in human beings - it might not be unique - is cruelty.
Now what should we do about cruelty? There's a belief that if people have a proper education, if they live in a peaceful, safe society, there won't be any evil. But is evil - for example, cruelty - normal or abnormal? I think it's normal. It doesn't mean you have to accept it.
MS: Isn't it dangerous to say evil is natural?
JG: It's the opposite. I'm a big fan of JG Ballard...
MS: I'm halfway through High-rise
JG: The very book I was going to mention! Ballard says that people from Catholic countries are less shocked by his books than people from Protestant countries, because they still believe in original sin - there are murderers and psychopaths inside us. It doesn't mean you accept that state of affairs, it means you have rules and conventions which stand in the way. That's what used to be called civilisation - though, of course, there's nowhere that's more than half-civilised. In general, I'm interested in looking at what's happening now and trying to deal with it. For instance, climate change is not fully solvable...
MS: Because it's natural or... because we're fucked?
JG: [Laughs] Well, my best understanding is that the planet is not like a clock that we can wind back. Once the carbon is in the system, there are inexorable results. Also, there's global dimming - the darkening of the skies by pollution, which also makes the world cooler than it would otherwise be. Getting rid of pollution too quickly could accelerate global warming.
Most greens are horrified by the thought that we can't stop climate change, but that's childish. Am I telling people to give up? No. In Holland, for instance, they're giving back land to the sea and building more on stilts because they expect sea levels to rise... and I find that uplifting, even though it's a very sober approach.
MS: Just to get a bit Dr Who, if we've also lost control of technology, could robots take over the world?
JG: There's nothing inherently unique and inexplicable about humans, so we could create devices that could indeed become conscious. But if we create robots that are only conscious - that don't have the 99 per cent of unconscious mental life that we have - could that hollow replica of how we imagine ourselves to be start painting in the same way as van Gogh?
Most creativity in the arts, and even in science, comes from levels of the mind that are not conscious. Conscious thought is a tiny, tiny part of the life of the mind. Have you heard of transhumanists? These are people who are interested in technologies that will allow them not to die - some of them end up having their brains frozen. They think they can remodel themselves. Now I'm not as unhappy as they are with the idea of human life...
MS: But you don't want to die - you're never going to want to die!
JG: Is that true? Do we really, really want to be different from all the human beings in the past and all the other animals?
MS: I think we all do. I think you do!
JG: If I could become the sort of creature that doesn't need to die, I'd be different from the way I am. And I don't want to become like a robot.
MS: I was famous, I guess, for a while, and one of the fascinating things about it for me - and one of the unnerving, scary things - was how my boundaries completely controlled me. I wasn't as autonomous as I thought I was.
JG: The person you were before was a by-product of your limitations and circumstances.
MS: Exactly. Dying is a boundary. Everything we do is to try not to die, and once you don't have that... I'm 30 soon and all I've got behind me are the years when I thought I was never going to die.
JG: If the boundaries that you associate with growing up are removed, you can live in a different way. The picture you have of yourself alters or dissolves. But if the wall of mortality disappeared... well, you can almost not imagine the change; I think it would turn us into something different.
MS: If we believe in Darwin we have to be believe that every evolutionary stage brings an advantage.
JG