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Book Reviews
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Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
by John Gray
(Granta Books, 2002, 246 pp, US $21.95)
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“In ancient Chinese rituals, straw dogs were used as offerings to the gods. During the ritual they were treated with the utmost reverence. When it was over and they were no longer needed they were trampled on and tossed aside: ‘Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.’ If humans disturb the balance of the Earth they will be trampled on and tossed aside. ...humans can never be other than straw dogs.”
STRAW DOGS author John Gray is one of Britain’s leading thinkers and one of the most provocative, original and heretical intellectuals today. He has been described as a philosopher of deterministic pessimism, a fatalist, a willful catastrophist, and a civilization-despising misanthrope.
It’s best not to read Gray’s latest polemic in bed! You might not want to get out again! He believes that human beings have no special privileges on the earth and that the human animal is simply one of innumerable life forms and that the earth has no special care for its ultimate destiny. For Gray we are not homo sapiens but HOMO RAPIENS, compulsive predators whose cruelty and greed are unrestrained. The root of this psychic pathology lies in our futile attempts to deny our animal nature. Responsibility for this lies with the following culprits: Plato, Christianity, Nietzsche, Enlightenment, secular humanism, philosophers, religion, scientists, theologians, nihilism, New Ageism, magic, fiction, postmodernism, Marxism, utopianism, and other modern orthodoxies.
Gray finds no hope of salvation. There is no refuge to be found in religion, mysticism, or technology or any of the other constructed illusions and abstractions. He concludes there is no purpose in life, yet we humans seem incapable of accepting this fact. Our much-vaunted consciousness plays a smaller role than we like to think, for most of what goes on in our brains never reaches consciousness at all and we are largely unaware of our own motives.
This sometimes disturbing series of essays and quasi-philosophical aphorisms representing a demolition of 2,500 years of mostly Western thought will definitely lead readers to question their deepest beliefs and perhaps illusions of what we commonly call “reality.” It’s a pretty chilling account of the human animal, and there are no sacred cows in this iconoclastic tome. Mocking the human impulse to change the world and our abiding hunger for redemption, he states “Humans cannot save the world. It does not need saving.” Humans, to Gray, are merely genetic accidents that have produced a highly destructive species (homo rapiens) that is exterminating other species at a phenomenal rate in wars and despoiling the global environment. He does champion James Lovelock’s view of the earth as a self-regulating system. This GAIA Hypothesis serves as a backdrop to Gray’s relentless pessimism about the fate of humankind, in that this self-regulating system has no need for humanity, does not exist for the sake of humanity, and will regulate itself in ignorance of humanity’s fate. I might add that Lovelock’s GAIA theories have legions of critics...largely on grounds that they are “unscientific.”
Evidence seems to be accumulating that the human species is embarked on a neomalthusian experiment to overshoot and overwhelm the ecosystem and see what happens. Would the rapacious primates in the Green Party, Sierra Club and GreenPeace agree with this analysis?
I, too, worry about human overpopulation and its consequences,and I have serious doubts that humans will EVER put voluntary restraints in place on this human impulse. Peak oil, global warming and a host of other problems stem from this. I agree with Gray that the world political body will grow ever more predatory and brutal.
Gray’s simple and stark thesis is: We humans have not changed and cannot change what we are, what we do, how we behave or what we value. We are doomed by the coding in our DNA to continue along our inexorable path of self-destruction.
One could view Gray’s work as an anguished plea for awareness as he concludes his book with this tragic note: “Can we not think of the aim of life as simply to see?” Wake up to the falsity of the dogmas under which we live. Get beyond our psychic numbing and denial. Reality isn’t a tourist resort. Nature is a harsh realm. We humans need to reconnect with the rest of life on Earth, get outside our heads, relearn to play, live in the moment, turn back to real, mortal things, and simply see what IS.
If Gray is right, humanity’s days are numbered, and someday we will face apocalypse and oblivion. This does NOT mean we should cease striving for greater social and economic equality, more environmentally friendly technologies, effective birth control, lowered consumption, control over nukes, and the list goes on.
Personally, I don’t find this book depressing. I have for sometime been reconciled to the insignificance of humanity in the universe...even as my peace and justice work proceeds. I go on living, loving, working, exploring, imagining and creating. We, of course, don’t know the future, but we do know that despair is unlikely to be a productive or helpful response. At a practical level, despair is not only useless but harmful.
My highest recommendation: read the book with an open mind, deeply ponder the thoughts, confront the corrupted and bankrupt philosophies you hold, share the book and ideas, take the ideas you value and go on with life.
Frank Kahl is a retired economics professor and an activist moving to a different drummer.
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