The best we can hope for is tolerance

17 February 2007

John Gray, Britain’s foremost political philosopher, says that Ruth Kelly’s new campaign against Islamic extremism is doomed because it exaggerates the scope for cohesion in our fragmented modern world

The radically plural society we find ourselves in today is not a transitional phase leading to a point, some time in the future, when we will have the same fundamental values. It is the way we can expect to live from now onwards. There may be nothing intrinsically good about this sort of diversity but it is a fact, and teleological liberalism is a poor guide to negotiating the difficulties it brings. Luckily there is another liberal tradition in which the goal of toleration is not agreement, still less truth, but peace. It may sound odd to describe Thomas Hobbes as a liberal, but he had a better grasp of how freedom can be maintained than most of the liberal thinkers who came after him. Hobbes wrote at a time when religious wars were living memories, and understood the destructive potential of faith. Belief may be beyond regulation, but for the sake of public order its expression must be controlled. Here Hobbes agreed with his contemporary Spinoza, an ardent defender of freedom of conscience who never doubted that in the end it must yield to the need for peace.