What is Good? - A. C. Grayling

I had heard A.C. Grayling on Radio 4 and he conformed to my ideas of what a philosopher ought to be. You can keep your sexy pseuds like Alain de Bottom and Julian Panini; philosophers should be querulous old men like Grayling. I like to imagine that he lives in an Oxford College where he enjoys drinking sherry and looking wistfully at pretty undergraduate boys. For all I know he is a heterosexual at a red-brick university, but I have to admit I’d find that disappointing...

I do not know very much about philosophy (for years I thought that Jeremy Bentham was that bloke who played Sherlock Holmes in the ITV series) but I do like a good think. 32 years of thinking have yielded the following results: I really don’t see why there should be a god. For a while I was worried that I had now had no basis for ethics, but was just making up stuff as I went along. Then it occurred to me that unless you are a moron fundamentalist, if you follow a religion, you still have to decide which bits of it you are going to practice and how you will resolve its contradictions, so there isn’t really much difference for atheists. Everyone who isn’t actually a complete mental is having to make it up as they go along.

Professor Grayling has been thinking much longer than me and come to a rather more extreme conclusion that religion is not just unnecessary to moral and ethical thinking, but actually inimical. The whole book is presented in terms of two steps forward in the form of advances in thought made by secular scholars, followed by one step back of religious backlash. Grayling sees religion as a force for evil in the world, which has been temporarily compelled to pretend to be nice by its unpopularity and shrinking power base in the developed world. And it’s hard to argue with him once he gets going in on this theme, with religious wars and inquisitions to back him up. However, there is still the occasional inflammatory statement left in the text with no surrounding evidence. E.g. “Islam is by nature fundamentalist”. WTF? Maybe this correct (how would I know, I know buggerall about Islam but what I see on telly), but I don’t think you can damn a whole religion without supplying a line of argument and some facts to back it up. Especially if the thrust of your whole book is that reason is better than dogma.

For reasons beyond my feeble intellect, the book deals only with Western philosophies. Why? The title is “What is Good?” not “What Have Various Europeans Believed Through History?”. For example, all I know about Confucianism is that it was a Chinese ethical system with no god. I would have liked to know more, and I'd have thought a book by an atheist philosopher might have told me.

Obviously, the book doesn’t actually tell you how to live (distrust anyone who does!) but if, like me, you think Kierkegaard is probably an Ikea shelving unit, it will give you a starting point. Now that I have read Philosophy 101, I've decided to become a Stoic, like Marcus Aurelius. (Anyone who has seen me coding will know I have a long way to go.) My favourite aspect of Stoicism, is the bit where you get to be Emperor and swan about in a long cloack while having Russel Crowe unleash hell on your behalf.