Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4113 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• 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

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.

Very important book
This book is brilliant.
His all too true for comfort veiws put humans in their place and his analysis of the world is excellent. Of course it has flaws and errors and i'm not saying he's completely right, but he still gives an incredibly accurate depiction and is a highly important book. Even if just to see another side of the argument you should read it. It will certainly change your mind about something if not everything.
Read this book!!!

Straw dogs or straw men?
So much of this book consists of plainly falsifiable bald assertions that I find it staggering that the famous names writing the crits have been prepared to put their names to it, let alone gush over it in the way they have. It's frustrating, because a lot of the substance of what he says, in the sense that the orthodoxy he attacks is actually incoherent, is valuable, if not exactly new; unfortunately, he obscures it with bad argumentation and structure.

Gray states, for example, that we can have no coherent, consistent 'self' because all we are (in consciousness) is a disjointed group of memories, with nothing tying them together except the illusion of continuation, to which we are genetically pre-disposed. Fine, it's a theory, and not an unreasonable one. I'm not saying (and obviously couldn't say) that it's not right, but he tosses out as though it were self-evident, when it's really not; it could quite easily be the case that we do have a continuous consciousness from which our notion of a consistent self derives, but it's our memory which is inadequate and not our perception, meaning we only remember bits of it, rather than that it's actually disjoint. Meaning there is an easy possible counter-argument; meaning his baldness is just a little bit too bald for my liking, and I'm pretty bald.

I also don't like the way he talks about "the humanist view" or "humanism" all the way through the book without really setting up any terms. I don't recognise the viewpoint he attacks as being a consistently argued or known viewpoint; he seems to be tilting at windmills a lot of the time. I suppose the counter to this criticism would be that this is a book of reflections, aimed at the sort of intelligent yet perhaps not entirely considered reader whom Dawkins addresses in The God Delusion; unfortunately this book is classed as "Philosophy" (it says so on the back), and as such I'm afraid it just doesn't stand up.

Still, even if just a set of reflections, presumably if presented bound in one volume apparently presenting a particular view, they should be consistent? At one early point he claims that the idea of human progress is a myth, plain and simple, because due to the ever-shifting sands of DNA "humanity" doesn't really exist; later on, he takes for granted a reading of "progress" under which individual humans enjoy the benefits of flush toilets and medicines by virtue of the increasing pool of human knowledge. OK, obviously we can work out interpretations of these phrases in which they're not mutually exclusive - by watering down the strong, headline-grabbing claims, of course - but if it's a set of thought-provoking reflections, should we have to go to such lengths even to work out exactly what he's saying? And if it's a book of philosophy, isn't it supposed to be clear?

Something else that bugs me is that he doesn't put any references to the bibliography (e.g. "[12]") in the text under any of the many quotations peppering the text. All are listed in the bibliography, but I reckon he knows that those remain largely unconsulted anyway, and if he doesn't put references in then it's even less likely anyone will bother as they'd have to trace through the whole bibliography in order to do so. Of course he's covered himself, because he has put the bibliography in (right?), but even under a charitable interpretation it's extremely odd.

The first time round, I gave up after a couple of (I felt) inadequately argued passages; this time, I persevered and finished reading it because despite the many problems, there are some interesting thoughts in there. I'm glad I did, because the second half contains some interesting discussion about human ecology, but even there he seems simply to have found a couple of views which suit him and which he therefore repeatedly champions (in a remarkably similar manner to the way he claims the "humanists" champion what he challenges), holding up the authors he quotes as gospel, and because he attacks so often with assertion rather than argument, the overall impression is of rhetoric, even sophistry - or some pretty darn specious arguments, anyway.

Worth a read, if only to get you thinking clearly about how muddled Gray has managed to make his own moments of clarity.