Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals Paperback | Pages: 246 pages

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Title	:	Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
Author	:	John N. Gray
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 246 pages
Published	:	September 1st 2003 by Granta Books (first published 2002)
Categories	:	Philosophy. Nonfiction. Psychology. Science. Politics. Religion

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If you are an agnostic with few illusions who seeks the consolations of philosophy; if you are fortified by Ligotti’s bleak analysis (A Conspiracy Against the Human Race) and sustained by Cioran’s grim maxims (A Short History of Decay); if the fiction of J.G. Ballard, Will Self, and Jim Crace is congruent with your assumptions, congenial with your attitudes; then John Gray’s Straw Dogs may be the book for you.

The atheist Gray, who rejects the assumptions of Christianity, here targets the contemporary consensus of humanism. In ridding itself of theistic illusions, Gray believes, secular humanism didn’t go nearly far enough.

For Gray, Utopianism is a variant of the Kingdom of God, progress a non-theistic version of salvation history, the exaltation of human consciousness and the celebration of free will little more than the vestiges of a repressed belief in the integrity and persistence of the immortal soul. Gray argues that there is no real evidence for any of these commonly accepted beliefs: human consciousness is fitful, free will illusory, progress a fiction (history is cyclical, not forward-looking), and ”utopia”—given the contrary nature of man—will be (at best) the occasional result of autocratic, repressive regimes.

Although Gray’s book challenges our comfortable assumptions, it also offers its own severe form of consolation. If we cease to believe in progress, to yearn for utopia, we may save ourselves from continual disappointment; if we cease to believe in a unitary self in command of fictive choices, we may more easily immerse ourselves—as the Daoist and Zen Buddhist do—in the successive ebb and flow of time, the "lucid dream" which constitutes humankind’s richest simulacrum of reality.

Although Gray’s laconic style lacks Cioran’s witty ironies and Ligotti’s deadpan humor, he makes up for it with his wide-ranging scholarship and the concentrated power of his thought. There is much in this book to ponder, much to which a thoughtful reader may return, again and again.

Here are eight of my favorite passages:

* * * * * The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'Western civilisation' or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.

* * * * * Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The internet is as 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: 'We are a part of an intricate network that comes from the original bacterial takeover of the Earth. Our powers and intelligence do not belong specifically to us but to all life.'

* * * * * Among us, science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today, only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up.

* * * * * Over the past 200 years, philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error — the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.

* * * * * Postmodernists parade their relativism as a superior kind of humility — the modest acceptance that we cannot claim to have the truth. 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 in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.

* * * * * Even the deepest contemplation only recalls us to our unreality. Seeing that the self we take ourselves to be is illusory does not mean seeing through it to something else. It is more like surrendering to a dream. To see ourselves as figments is to awake, not to reality, but to a lucid dream, a false awakening that has no end.

* * * * * Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels. When we are at work in the world we have a seeming solidity. Action gives us consolation for our inexistence. It is not the idle dreamer who escapes from reality. It is practical men and women, who turn to a life of action as a refuge from insignificance.

* * * * * Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?

List Books Toward Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Original Title:	Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
ISBN:	1862075964 (ISBN13: 9781862075962)
Edition Language:	English

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Ratings: 3.95 From 3416 Users | 339 Reviews

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The central tenet of this book is that secular humanism is built off a worldview that - despite its protestations - comes entirely from religion. Darwinism suggests that we are animals, and while tendentiously accepting this humanists nonetheless insist on a special place and dispensation for humans. The idea of "progress", entirely a superstition, is in fact based on the Christian concept of salvation which has been transmuted into a secular worldview. Secular humanism as it has been created in

This smallish book is one of the most depressing and pessimistic 200 pages I have read in a long time. John Gray has been getting darker and darker in his vision of the world and Straw Dogs finally brings him round to bleak nihilism.The book has many virtues. It is written in an admirably simple and clear way, with thoughts broken down and laid out in Pascalian pensées, some of them only a sentence or two long. The content is never less than thought-provoking. In six broad chapters, he outlines

Although interesting and complete this book had so many flaws.- Opposition to Hegel's teleology and the goals of the enlightenment (The progress of mankind)-That atheism is christian invention (He simply refers to it as post-christian)-Replacing ethics with the mindnumbingly dumb views of Taoism and saying that morality is the disease of man-The coming of mankind as a species IS the most important event in the history of the world since man has so radically altered and exploited it (extinct

You get the sense reading Straw Dogs that if John Gray were ever to meet a nihilist he'd chide him for being unjustifiably optimistic. Unremittingly grim. A philosphical overview of the human condition that concludes it all started to go wrong for us somewhere around the invention of agriculture. Progress is measured only in the novelty of the tools we use for mass murder. Secular humanism is just Christianity-lite and scientific rationalism exhibits all the key features of a cult. We set

We get where's he going w/ it, but something about it rubbed us the wrong way ... felt like we were being lectured to ... dumbed down dribble distilled for mainstream (religious) audiences, for zombies that want to be perceived as liberal, but their brain capacities are better aligned to the tea party. Straw Dogs is a pompous mess of infomercialized dogshit, thinly spread all over the map, rehashing existing dogma but adding nothing to the conversation. And Gray speaks in absolutes, summarizing

In a nutshell we are all doomed. Humans are a plague which will ultimately exceed the worlds ecological limits. Religion has been replaced by science and progress will solve all our problems. A bleak pessimistic view of philosophy and its evolution. I am so glad me and my wife do not have children. On the positive side I like that early Greek philosophers were not focused on truth but happiness or perhaps a more relevant word would be contentment. This book is all about how messed up the world

I think that Gray is too misanthropic and he relies too much on the gaia hypothesis. He goes out of his way to talk about how the self is an illusion, free will is an illusion and even consciousness (or at least what we normally characterize as consciousness) is an illusion. Why would anyone who agrees with those points find the gaia hypothesis appealing??? Also, if humans are inevitably going to do what they will do as it is all determined (I agree with this), then why in the world would you