Do we humans have a special place in the universe because of our ability to think and reason, or are we mere accidents of nature with, as Gray puts it, “no more meaning than the life of a slime mold”? Are we, in Voltaire’s words, “insects on an atom of mud”? Gray thinks so and advances his thesis doggedly in this book. We are, Gray believes, of no more moment in nature than the straw dogs used in ancient Chinese ritual before their peremptory disposal at the ritual’s end.
Central to the hubris of humans in the past was religion, Gray argues, but today humanism and science hold the same ritualistic place in our baseless presumption as religion, particularly Christianity, once did. Not surprisingly, Schopenhauer holds pride of place in Gray’s philosophical pantheon. That great pessimist, Gray notes, saw that “the Enlightenment was only a secular version of Christianity’s central mistake.”
To Gray human individuality and personhood are delusions, history pointless, the idea of human progress a myth. “If solipsism is the belief that only I exist,” he writes, “Idealism is the belief that only humans exist.” He implicitly scoffs at Brandeis’s famous legal maxim that the remedy for false speech is more speech. “Only someone miraculously innocent of history,” he writes, “could believe that competition among ideas could result in the triumph of truth. Certainly ideas compete with one another, but the winners are normally those with power and human folly on their side.”
To Gray morality is a distraction born from the illusion of autonomy. He quotes the “Lieh-Tzu”: “The highest man at rest is as though dead, in movement is like a machine. He knows neither why he is at rest nor why he is not, why he is in movement or why he is not.” (This view is an interesting contrast to that of Colin Wilson who, as Gary Lachman notes in his biography, “Beyond the Robot: the Life and Works of Colin Wilson”, thought that the highest human purpose was to transcend the rote activities of life that consume so much of our time and so little of our thought. These machine-like activities Wilson called “the robot.”)
Gray accurately notes the calamitous consequences of human overpopulation on a finite planet, but also recognizes why this issue which drives virtually every problem we face is largely unaddressed. “So long as population grows,” he writes, “progress will consist in labouring to keep up with it. There is only one way that humanity can limit its labours, and that is by limiting its numbers. But limiting human numbers clashes with powerful human needs.”
Jim Hoagland wrote in his review of one of my favorite books, John Ralston Saul’s “Voltaire’s Bastards”, that it was “a hand grenade disguised as a book.” John Gray has written another explosive. Eat your Wheaties before you read this dense little book, but if you are looking for a provocative, albeit a bit depressing, book, by all means read it.
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The folly of the human animal
John Gray was once upon a time an optimistic liberal. He fell under the spell of the Gospel of the Free Market in the Thatcherite 1980s, and thus made a transition to conservatism. When he discovered that Thatcherism/Reaganism wasn't really conservative at all, but rather a dogmatic radicalism, he became an old-school conservative. He proceeded to reject the Enlightenment tout court, and embraced post-modernist relativism. Now, he has taken a further step into simple misanthropy. Gray has written a jeremiad against Christianity, the Enlightenment, science, and any hope of bettering people or the planet we live on. This is a performative contradiction, of course, because if there is no cause for hope, why write a book? What's the point? Fame and money are the only reasons left, one must suppose, and that supposition is perfectly consistent with Gray's line of argument -- all lofty ideals and dreams are illusions. Despite all that, I enjoyed the book and recommend it. It's a quick, easy read, quite entertaining, and I'm sure you can find it in the library. There are many useful citations in the back to more substantial books you might want to read to pursue Gray's points, many made in the form of sound-bite one-liners. Depending on what you bring to it, you may or may not find it shocking -- STRAW DOGS is mainly based on the growing knowledge from the field variously known as sociobiology or evolutionary psychology or biological anthropology. Humans are animals, not demigods. Gray's second main point I think is less appreciated and more important, and that is the evidence that the human species is embarked on a neomalthusian experiment -- overshoot the ecosystem and see what happens. That's good cause for a jeremiad, and if Gray's disjointed ramblings focus more people's attention on this ("death focuses the mind") then it is worth something. Gray is having none of any sort of schemes for improvement, though, let alone salvation. His presentation is totally negative (we are nothing but "exceptionally rapacious primates"), which of course is a good strategy for provoking discussion, hostility and sales. I detect, though, a positive agenda, which Gray only intimates between the lines, and that is the most conservative belief system of all, animism. If humans dropped their pretense at superiority and stopped all their doomed scheming, accepting their equal status with their fellow animals, and acted with humility and reverence toward their fellow beings, then all might be well. This seems to be Gray's covert plan for salvation, and it is in fact one I can wholeheartedly endorse. Gray goes too far in throwing out the Enlightenment. Rationality does clearly seem to be lacking in most human behavior, but what of it does exist is important to foster, encourage and spread. (See Daniel Dennett's FREEDOM EVOLVES, which makes the same assumptions as Gray, but reaches a very different conclusion.) Sure it seems like an uphill struggle that we're likely to lose, but I could see that years ago (33 years ago to be precise), and I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't found reasons to try. Being an intellectual bomb-thrower is fine for someone still young and full of indignation, but there is a planet of sentient beings who expect more of someone like John Gray -- carpe diem!(verified library loan)
Top reviews from other countries
Nusly Monserrat Guzmán Morga
Entrega a tiempo en Ciudad de México
Reviewed in Mexico on September 7, 2021
