From little acorns.(Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God)(Book Review)

A. C. Grayling Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God. Oxford University Press, 256 pages, $27.50

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 mn 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"