booklogging

Gray, John. 2002. Straw Dogs, Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. London, Granta Publications. 1-86207-596-4

I loved the breadth of evidence gathered: acting, New Age gurus, western and eastern philosophy and religion, cognitive science, Darwinian and neo-Darwinian thinkers, medical history, classics, and so on. I thought too that one of the basic theses was probably sound and needed hearing. It is a shame that it won't be heard because of some of the other things that are communicated in the book. The first part of the book proposes that the humanist faith in progress is misplaced. So far, so postmodern. However, the important point he makes is that, in fact secular humanism is parasitic upon Christian values and is unsustainable without an assumed backdrop of Christian-shaped perceptions. In this he seems to echo the critiques of people like CS Lewis and Francis Schaeffer and perhaps even Lesslie Newbiggin.

on p.77, bodily continuities are dismissively acknowledged, and I wondered; is this not betraying a kind of platonic dualism with language playing the Form part? What I'm missing is a fuller account of embodiedness and selfhood and I'm concerned that the dismissal of selfhood is ultimately reductionist, what about an emergent self? Just because you can see that there is an atomistic substructure doesn't mean that the emergent property is illusion. I'm not sure that Gray was saying this but I'm not sure he wasn't either.

On p.78 the I is said to be the 'primordial human error' yet it has been characterized as somehow Cartesian. Is this a contradiction? If it is the primordial human error, how come it seems that it only really comes into being in after Descartes or with Augustine or Plato, ex hypothesi?


I'm also concerned by the re-smuggled assumptions that appear, the exact thing that he critiques in humanism woith its smuggled assumption of Christian morality and philosophy. There is a tone adopted of criticism of Nazism yet [p.102-3] morality is shown to be fashion. “Justice is an artefact of custom” so while he shows a 'fashionable' disdain for Nazism, he undermines grounds for critique [p.107, eg] and perhaps implicitly gives succour to some of its ideas by allowing a sanguine view of violence and genocide. This is not to say that he advocates such things, merely that he gives up on the task of finding a basis for decrying them; rather the reverse. Admittedly [p.90] we have the assertion that conscience always speaks against cruelty and injustice but that sometimes it is not heard, but I am not convinced that this is true on the basis of the evidence he presents. And even so it is perhaps a weak basis for trying a Milosevic or Saddam Hussein. It is the world of Homer -wars and all- that seems to be held out as the natural human condition and he seems fairly laid-back in the book about war and violence as a normal human activity.

In claiming the morality is a sickness peculiar to humans [p.116] he undermines a basis for critique of the holocaust and also highlights that there is, after all, a significant difference between humans and animals. Perhaps morality, in Gray's terms, is one of those illusions we can not do without even if we cannot avoid the conflicts of our needs; but that is precisely the basis of ethical thinking. Though clearly he is trying to find a way past morality. Gray gives the appearance, then, of having grown weary with ethical agonizing, and so the Taoist way of living skilfully rather than living morally seems more attractive.

Concern also over the picture of Christianity that leaks from the cracks of this book. Christian morality as a way to insure against ill fortune [p.107] and as a rule-based morality. Does Christianity really commit us to seeing animals as radically different in the [platonic ?] way portrayed or as believing in the unitary Enlightenment Self? In Respect of the latter point, I kept on thinking how the portrayal seemed to lead away from Jesus's word about losing self in order to find it. I do think that there is an important challenge here for Christians facing the rest of the 21st century; to re-think our relationship with non-human creation in such a way as to honour properly the continuities and similarities that are becoming all too readily apparent in scientific discovery and thinking and are already clearly being picked up as important spiritual themes as evidenced in the growth of neo-paganism especially Druidism and shamanism and to some extent Buddhism.

Interesting quotes
In the world shown us by Darwin, there is nothing that can be called progress. To anyone reared on humanist hopes this is intolerable. As a result, Darwin's teaching has been stood on its head, and Christianity's cardinal error – that humans are different from all other animals – has been given a new lease on life. [Gray, 2002. p.4]

Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The Internet is a natural as a spider's web. As Margulis and Sagan have written, we are ourselves technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival ... thinking of our bodies as natural and of our technologies as artificial gives too much importance to the accident of our origins. [Gray, 2002. p.16]

The humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals is an aberration. It is the animist feeling of belonging with the rest of nature that is normal. [Gray, 2002. p.17]

In fact, the postmodern denial of truth is the worst kind of arrogance. In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are effectively claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness. [Gray, 2002. p.55]

But once we have relinquished Christianity the very idea of the person becomes suspect. A person is someone who believes that she authors her own life through her choices. This is not the way most humans have ever lived. [Gray, 2002. pp.58]

To deny the existence of God is to accept the categories of monotheism. [p.126]

Contemporary capitalism is prodigiously productive, but the imperative that drives it is not productivity. It is to keep boredom at bay. Where affluence is the rule the chief threat is the loss of desire. [p.163]

Searching for meaning on life may be useful therapy, but it has nothing to do with the life of the spirit. Spiritual life is not a search for meaning but a release from it. [p.197]