Gray is one of the most controversial writers in Britain today. He has legions of ad – mirers and not a few detractors, but it is the complexion of his detractors that tells us most about him. Though he despises the lazy assumptions behind the labels we pin on each other, he would probably let the label “atheist” be fixed to his lapel if he had to make a choice; but he is an atheist who despises the evangelical zeal of the “new atheism” and has sympathy for the old religion it is trying to supplant. I’ll come back to that later in this review but let me return for a moment to Berlin and his influence on Gray. What I got from Gray’s book on Berlin was a sense of the tragic and intractable nature of the human condition. Gray writes that the first implication of Berlin’s perspective is a rejection of any idea of a perfect society or a perfect human life. Its second implication is that a developed morality cannot have a settled hierarchical structure that solves our dilemmas by telling us how to act.
more from Richard Holloway at The New Statesman here.