Straw Dogs [Paperback]

 

 

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There are two kinds of people: those able to face the truth and those who prefer comforting illusions. The second group, which is by far the largest, will not like this book at all, for it brings the very unwelcome news that man, or 'homo rapiens' as Gray prefers to call him, is merely an accidental product of evolution and that the only thing special about him is an extreme rapaciousness and destructiveness which will soon lead to his extinction.

It is heartening to see a figure such as John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, choosing, as title for his book, an allusion to what is arguably the single most important verse in Lao Tzu's 'Tao te ching:'

"Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs" (V.i).

Gray explains: "In ancient Chinese rituals, straw dogs were used as offerings to the gods.... When it was over and they were no longer needed they were trampled on and tossed aside" (pp.33-34). Yes. And oughtn't it to be as obvious to us as it was to Lao Tzu that this is exactly how we ourselves are treated - trampled upon by age, disease, natural calamities, the malice of our fellow men, misfortunes of all kinds, and the final indignity of death?

It has always seemed to me that this single line of Lao Tzu effectively serves to sweep away much of the nonsense that passes for 'Western Thought,' a thought that one is sometimes tempted to feel has always been in fundamental error about almost everything, for here there is no talk about God, or Immortality, or the Soul, or Progress, or man's superiority to all other creatures, etc. No. Here, in contrast, is the simple unvarnished truth. We are not superior, and we do not occupy any especially privileged niche or position. Nature treats us exactly as it treats all other creatures - as straw dogs, as anyone can see by looking around them.

John Gray has written a refreshingly down-to-earth, though not exactly cheerful, book that draws out many of the deeper implications of Lao Tzu's verse while pointing up the errors and follies of so many of our 'thinkers' (and the good sense of a few). The book consists of a series of comments which revolve around six topics: The Human; The Deception; The Vices of Morality; The Unsaved; Non-Progress; As It Is.

Within just 200 pages of text, this short book succeeds in questioning many of the dominant myths and illusions of our age and is a book to read, ponder, and re-read. It concludes with a useful and interesting 30-page annotated list of Further Reading.

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 libraray. 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 latest, "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!

According to the blurb on the front cover, this book challenges our assumptions about what it is to be human. If that is the case, then this is truly a philosophical work, since the first task of philosophy is precisely that. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
The book is an attempt to strip thought of all its illusions to show that ultimately there is nothing much left to find endearing or particularly humanitarian about the human condition, and not much to separate us from other species of animals. This is hardly a novel idea.
To begin with, truth is conceived as something that is the opposite of illusion, and that anything that is not truth is consequently illusion. This is turned into a metaphysical principle effectively, and all of history becomes reconceived in its dark light, revealing that since the dawn of civilisation to the present day, everything has been based on illusions of one sort or another. There are the usual aphorisms about wars being fought because of religious differences and so on. Hardly a novel or radical thought.
This principle becomes what the algorithm is for Daniel Dennett. Gray sees it everywhere and in everything and warps history towards it as though it were some newly discovered dark matter. Philosophers are paraded forward in thumbnail sketches and quickly dispatched as charlatans doing more harm than good. Socrates, for instance, was a shaman, so he has to go. Heidegger's 'Being' is a disguised form of Catholic anthropocentrism, so that too needs to be discredited, as well as for its usual Nazi affiliations. He praises Schopenhauer but criticises Kant, not seeing that the 'Will' in the former is a refinement of the noumenal in the latter. Nor does he mention the function of representation in Schopenhauer, but this is hardly a surprise since it would not support his belief in artificial intelligence. But it is possible he is not aware of this, since what he says about Schopenhauer reads like notes cribbed from Bryan Magee whose understanding of Schopenhauer is far superior. In fact, all these sketches might well have been drawn second-hand from basic philosophy texts. Only those philosophers who side with his etiolated principle receive any praise. In short, he claims philosophy to have been a disguised religion from the outset, which he passionately detests and it all has to go, leaving only science with some sort of torch of truth, whose sole value has more to do with practical necessity than any notions of truth.
The problem is that John Gray fails to recognise science as the application of a metaphysics of inertia, and it is from this that he has drawn his vision of which he is apparently unaware. For instance, it should be no surprise that the world is running out of work or gainful employment, since according to this brand of metaphysics, the purpose of work is to remove the necessity of itself, and so we approach that which is built into the assumptions of the science which he cherishes and does not question, creating a world of people bored witless and hard-pressed to find new distractions. Having dismissed all that has given meaning to Mankind as illusion, this is the only philosophy that remains, and it is this philosophy that John Gray is actually defending, and not questioning.
In a book of less than 200 pages, he often presents his views in short, Wittgensteinian-like statements, but succeeds in mimicking Oscar Wilde on a bad day, 'Ideas of justice are as timeless as fashions in hats.' Perhaps, but fashions are often stylised forms of necessity, to keep our heads dry and warm when facing the elements. Or maybe it is relying on the short attention-span of the reader that likes its philosophy presented in this sound-bite form. Perhaps, but I doubt it. It is simply that there is no more to add.
Far from challenging assumptions, he ends up defending them. In attempting to unmask reality, he has turned himself into a prophet of doom, one of those ringing a bell and sounding the end of time dressed in a sandwich board. Most of the time we ignore them, but in this case we are duped by others into seeing this as 'one of the great works of our time'. This is the worry.
But here is an acid test. Reading a serious philosophy text can often take several weeks, months and sometimes years. This book can be read in just 3 or 4 hours and not a word or idea need be contemplated for longer than it takes to read it. Perhaps the emperor's new clothes were really this sandwich board, and we should at least find the good sense in ourselves to demand more than this from others, and that we should rightly pass them by when they ask us to see what is not there, and divert our eyes from this sterile form of defeatist thought.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Straw Dummies
This is a critique of liberal humanism, defined as the faith in inevitable progress to a utopian world, courtesy of science, reason, technology and morality. Read more

Published on May 29 2004 by Rafe Champion

2.0 out of 5 stars primal scream philosophy
I hope Professor Gray feels better.
I have to tell you I enjoyed many aspects of this book, Straw Dogs. Nihilist philosophies of the West can be very entertaining. Read more

Published on Feb 21 2004 by walkingondiamonds

5.0 out of 5 stars The Answer is "42"
When I first read a review of this book in the Economist, I put it on my must read list. Extracts from other reviews at the front of the book certainly describe it much better... Read more

Published on Feb 7 2004 by Too Soon Old

5.0 out of 5 stars in other words...
row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream
merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
life is but a dream

Published on Feb 6 2004 by 2cleverbyhalf

2.0 out of 5 stars A POISON PILL FOR THE INTELLECTUALLY CHALLENGED
STRAW DOGS - Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. By John Gray. 246 pages. London: Granta Books, 2002. ISBN 1-86207-512-3 (Hbk).

Are you feeling bad? in despair? Read more

Published on Feb 2 2004

3.0 out of 5 stars Sloppy thinking, sloppy writing
In a nutshell: collect all the negatives about human existence to sustain your claim that the whole species should be done with, the quicker the better, so that mythical Gaia can... Read more

Published on Dec 30 2003 by Ward Schelfhout

4.0 out of 5 stars Existential postmodernism
London School of Economics Professor John Gray's technique in this original and at times delightfully self-indulgent tome of shock jock philosophy works like this: Throw out a... Read more

Published on Dec 23 2003 by Dennis Littrell

4.0 out of 5 stars Modern Thought but Not There Yet
I became interested in this book while reading a review panning it in The Nation by one Danny Postell (thanks to Arts & Letters Daily). Read more

Published on Dec 17 2003 by N N Taleb

3.0 out of 5 stars Down in flames--Mayday!
Having read a number of Gray's other books on liberalism and found them, despite aggravated differences of perspective, crisply interesting at least in an acerbic sort of way, I... Read more

Published on Dec 10 2003 by John C. Landon

5.0 out of 5 stars An anguished plea
John Gray concludes his book with a tragic entreaty: "Can we not think of the aim of life as simply to see? Read more

Published on Nov 6 2003 by Stephen A. Haines

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