Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8099 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 246 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
John Gray's Straw Dogs attempts to present a world view in which humans are not central and which argues against the humanist belief in progress. The heart of the book is summed up in the idea that modern humanists have still not come to terms with Darwin, still not come to terms with the idea that humans are like other animals. Christians and modern humanists in the Platonic-Cartesian tradition typically think of humans enjoying a special relationship to God, or a special status in nature in a way that other animals do not. Even the great debunkers--philosophers such as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger--end up making human beings the centre of things or the end point of some world-historical process. By contrast, in a Taoist, Shinto, Hindu or animist culture Darwin's discovery would have been easily accommodated since these faiths see humans and other animals as kin.

In short, for Gray, humanism is nothing more than "a secular religion thrown together from decaying scraps of Christian myth". Gray champions James Lovelock's view of the Earth as a self-regulating system whose behaviour resembles, in some ways, that of an organism. The Gaia hypothesis is the backdrop to Gray's apparently relentless pessimism about the fate of humankind. What it teaches us is that this self-regulating system has no need of humanity, does not exist for the sake of humanity, and will regulate itself in ignorance of humanity's fate.

Straw Dogs can be usefully compared with Mary Midgely's excellent Science and Poetry since both take off from the view of man as animal while sharing similar views about the cultural role of philosophy. Both encourage us to overcome the Platonic-Cartesian-Kantian philosophical tradition while stressing the importance of Gaia in emphasising our essential continuity with the physical and natural world. For Gray, humans "think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals". Straw Dogs could have been made to stretch for 500 large pages. Instead you get 200 small pages of gold; simple, concise, riveting.--Larry Brown

J.G. Ballard
'An essential guide to the new Millennium. Straw Dogs challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human'

Will Self
‘That rarest of things, a contemporary work of philosophy, wholly accessible, and profoundly relevant to the rapidly evolving world'

Customer Reviews

Overrated
This polemic is an attack on humanism. Is it just another deluded philosophy? Nothing more than the various religions it tries so hard to differentiate itself from?

If you are going to constructively criticise something, you need to be sure you understand what it is you are criticising. Does Gray? Most religions use scripture as some sort of starting point to define their belief system. Christianity has the Bible, Islam the Koran, Hindu has - amongst others - the Upanishads. Each religion then tries to interpret their respective scripture. They may disagree on the details but the basis of the belief system is defined. Humanism, has no scripture. So is it just a subjective philosophy?

The closest we have to an objective and consensual understanding of humanism would be the Amsterdam Declaration issued by the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Most Humanist associations would ascribe to this. Gray doesn't reference this at all. Instead he uses his own ideas for what humanism is and attacks that. I really think this is the book's major short coming. "Straw Dogs" veers very closely to nothing more than "Straw man" arguments.

In a nutshell, Gray's hypothesis is that, what he sees as the central tenants of humanism - the concept of salvation in knowledge and progress in Science - seem very questionable. But are humanists really looking for salvation? Why use religious notions in an irreligious paradigm? And surely we have unquestionably made progress on some issues through Science? Are we better off not taking pain killers and boycotting our Doctors?

There are plenty of arguments, with flashy turns of phrases and references to leading thinkers, but I thought many of them, when examined, had very little substance to them.
Some examples:
1. In the opening Chapter he says that Darwin and Einsteins discovery's contradicted Scientific evidence at the time.
Now that's an exceptionally audacious and questionable claim to make. Instead of substantiating it, he moves on to other points.

2. The idea that technological progress always damages the environment or humans. Not sure if that applies to solar panels, wind turbines or hydro electric power?

3. At several points in the book, he seemed to think that the humanism consider humans better than animals. A little bit of research would have told him that many humanists consider themselves no better than any animals and hence are vegetarians and / or would be extremly sensitive to the plight of their cousins.

He does make some interesting points. George Bernard Shaw's liking of social Darwinism and his point that the human disdain of inevitable boredom is something which drives capitalism. But overall, as intellectual book, it doesn't offer much. Gray is a very good writer, good turn of phrases, but overall there's not enough substance and originality to any of his arguments.

Straw dogs is very much a straw man
The reason I stopped reading this execrable book after sixty pages is not because I thought it was wholly wrong - indeed I agreed with much of what gray said.

The reason why the book was totally facile was because Gray never backs up his assertions by evidence or even argument; it's just a collection of his opinions. Such assertions carry zero weight, and so this is basically an exercise in narcissism... besides which it's supposedly 'revolutionanry' disbelief in progress has actually been the status quo during the last century, from the existentialists and nihilists down to the postmodernists.

Furthermore, the book fails to distinguish between counting humans as 'other than' animal and in the notion of progress, which is highly compatible with evolutionary theory. Of course, Gray is right in saying that progress in the west is descended from Christian eschatology, but, and this is my third problem with Gray's assertions, progress has appeared as a natural concept falling out of Taosim, Shinto, and even in a modified form Hinduism, and the manyh religions of Africa.

Indeed, Gray evidently knows little about Afro-oriental religion and uses them without understanding in his assertions.

An unthinking book for people who like to seem like they think a lot harder than they do. Appalling.

Hard to dismiss on many levels....
John Gray makes - in my opinion - a convincing argument for accepting the improbablity which most of us face: that of ever knowing the "truth". You can bet your life (I don't exaggerate) that the likes of Dawkins et al are way off the mark in their assumed position of authority when it comes to third person verification of the fundamental properties of reality. Equally, philosophy is limited (though it's far more self-conscious of the fact!) in its ability to make any assertion "absolute". Religion/Theology is likewise destined to suffer the fate bestowed upon it by history - namely that of being utterly subjective in its origins.

So, barring a personal revelation of Eckhartian proportions (which is hard to imagine even with unflinching commitment), we, as individuals, are doomed to suffer the speculative and contingent "knowledge" which is offered up by science and philosophy. And this is where Gray's argument comes into its own.

Since we cannot know whether we know it all (or if we ever will - and this is often overlooked by presumptuous and overreaching "experts" like Dawkins), we must assume at best a provisional, contingent view of reality as a whole - including all possible paradigmatic visions (within reason, of course...) and including the acknowledgement that the origin of moral values is fundamentally contentious. So, Gray's assertion that a "spiritual life is a life without meaning" is not nihilistic, pessimistic or even hopeless, but genuinely agnostic and broad-minded. It's no accident that he falls upon Taoism in order to illustrate the futility in speculating about the nature of reality as a whole. Philosophy and science have long since failed to provide the "evidence" so sorely lacking in terms of anything "transcendent" or "spiritual", and yet science cites the advancement of humanity as being the ultimate goal while at the same time telling us that the universe and eveything in it will eventually be annihilated and that there is nothing beyond our limited physical existence and the illusory self which our organic brains create. Wonderful. Fills me with such joy and purpose.

I think, therefore, that John Gray's eventual suggestion that one can only find something approaching peace of mind (for he doesn't even advocate this!) in understanding the arrogance with which we humans view the totality of all that exists - and in admitting that that arrogance is ludicrously misplaced - is deeply sane and, indeed, is the only sensible proposition barring the kind of aforementioned personal revelation. I don't care whether his arguments are backed up with detailed and fastidious logic or not (they would only be proven flawed in time anyway) - the fact of his clear-sightedness remains. For this reason alone (and there are others) I applaud the fact that someone in John Gray's position is writing in such broad terms about such fundamentally unsettling and challenging issues.

A timely reminder that self-consciousness and presumption are endemic to the species as much as they are individual flaws.

* Post script update: In a world beset by hopeless postmodernism, unsettling neuroscientific discoveries and band-aid style spirituality, returning to this book as a source of reassurance that the illusion we call an individual life is not something we need challenge too squarely is deeply pacifying. Even when one finds oneself questioning this seemingly paradoxical and counterintuitive attitude it's genuinely refreshing to fall back on this excellent work as a uniquely human and ingeniously artful way of tempering the perpetual scab-picker which is thought. The search for truth ends here, and with it the need to qualify one's existence. Brilliant - wish I could edit my rating and give it 5 stars.