John Gray and The Streets, A Philosophical Debate
Saturday, December 13th, 2008
The pop star and the professor … Mike Skinner talks to John Gray. Photograph: Suki Dhanda
Mike Skinner and me have some things in common – we are both well-known musicians; me as bass player for Gang of Four and he performing under his moniker The Streets, although he is arguably more popular. That aside I now find that we are both ardent supporters of the work of the philosopher John Gray, especially his book ‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans and Other Animals‘.
In The Streets recent release ‘Everything Is Borrowed,’ Skinner reveals Gray’s influence in his lyrics while Gray’s influence on me comes through in my writings on the conceit of ’social media’, a term that I feel is empty and is peddled furiously only by those that would profit from harnessing social networks for the purpose of creating advertising revenue. Here we are then – two musicians, a philosopher, Charles Darwin and Facebook; such a wonderful mashup. Much food for thought. Here’s the interview:
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 shit 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 shit. So does that represent progress?
(more…)
