Re-Reading a book by John Gray

 The Hubris of Humankind: John Gray’s Straw Dogs

Having read the verdict of Will Self on Straw Dogs, I had to buy this book way back in 2003.  Here is what Self wrote in New Statesman: “My book of the year… I read it once.  I read it twice and took notes.  I arranged to meet its author so I could publicize the book – I thought it that good… a devastating critique of liberal humanism, and all of it set out in easy-to-digest (although hard-to-swallow) aperçus.”  

John Gray is a philosophe provocateur supreme.  It is a dark book, but never depressing.  Richard Holloway, writing in Scotsman, declared that the book was suffused with “gloriously exhilarating pessimism.”  In addition, it is a real page-turner as John Gray entrances us with a clear style that is unencumbered by philosophical jargon.  In this sense, he renders academic philosophy accessible to the layman.  I also liked this book as I am at heart a romantic and a person interested in spirituality in the broadest sense of that term, indeed a broad-church theist, though un-practising, very much a poet and literatus at heart rather than a philosopher.  It is good for the soul and the mind to read something rich and provocative from an atheistic materialist.  In the foreword, Gray contends that “the twenty-first century, the world is strewn with the grandiose ruins of failed utopias…. [that] political action has come to be a surrogate for salvation…. Humans cannot save the world…. It does not need saving…” (p. xv-xvi) 

As you will have realised by now, this is a book with an extremely broad sweep, a text that demands considered attention.  It is a well-argued, clear and precise text, unencumbered by jargon that makes the reader sit up, think and question their own presuppositions and prejudices.  If you like being challenged by philosophy, this is the book for you.  I will briefly summarise the first chapter by way of whetting your appetite for a very inspirational read.

 Chapter one of this book is called simply “The Human”, and is subdivided into twelve short subdivisions, each hammering home a specific point.  It is worth outlining all 12 points by way of introduction to this hard-hitting but gripping book. Each of the chapters in this intriguing book is neatly divided into clear sections, as if Professor Gray is giving his reader a clear and precise, yet profound lecture, point by point.

Section 1: Science versus Humanism: “Humanism can mean many things, but for us it means belief in progress.  To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals…” (p. 4) His main contention is that humankind has vastly overrated itself.  Again, Gray reminds us that we are human animals, and indeed we need this frequent reminder.  From Biblical times, we have all been brainwashed with the belief that we humans are the veritable summit of creation, set there by a powerful Creator God, and from that summit, we can lord it over all the other animals.  For sure, the Jewish religion, followed by the other monotheistic world religions, Christianity and Islam, have always taught us that we are the stewards, rather than the lords of creation.  Whatever about these theological and moral tenets, humankind has always abused its power over all of creation, over our fellow creatures (always deemed to be lesser creatures – what’s now called specism – a prejudice on a par with racism).  According to Gray, this in a nutshell is the Myth of Religion.  However, for him, Humanism itself is an equal but unacknowledged myth, packaged as scientific truth, namely the myth of indefinite or linear progress.  It is, of course, acknowledged as a truth of almost axiomatic standing.  However, it is also unacknowledged as a myth equal in standing to the religious one. Let us listen to Gray’s succinct, direct and clear words here: “Most people today think that they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny.  This is faith, not science… In Victorian times there was [a bitter controversy] between Christians and believers in evolution.  Today it is waged between humanists and the few who understand that humans can no more be masters of their destiny than any other animal… The humanist belief in progress is only a secular version of this Christian faith… Christianity’s cardinal error – that humans are different to other animals – has been given a new lease of life. [that is, in humanist belief].  (p. 3 - 4)

Section 2: The Mirage of Conscious Evolution: Yet the prospect of conscious human evolution that scientists like Professor E.O. Wilson, a brilliant biologist, invokes is a mirage.  The idea of humanity taking charge of its destiny makes sense only “if we ascribe consciousness and purpose to the species; but Darwin’s discovery was that species are only currents in the drift of genes.  The idea that humanity can shape its future assumes that it is exempt from this truth.”  (p. 5-6)

Section 3: Disseminated Primatemaia: This marvellously imaginative disease was one created by James Lovelock, that amazing scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist, and futurist who was known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, in which he postulated that the Earth functions as a kind of superorganism, and he proposed that Gaia or Mother Earth is suffering from a plague of people, hence the above interesting heading denoting this fatal disease:  Disseminated Primatemaia.  Lovelock even used the term “human plague” to wake us up to overpopulation and to the havoc we as a species are wreaking on the earth and all the other species of animals.  Let’s listen here to Gray’s magic prose: “The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialization, ‘Western civilisation’ or any flaw in human institutions.  It is the consequence of an exceptionally rapacious primate.  Throughout all history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.”  (p. 7)

Section 4:  Why Humanity will never master Technology: As I have already pointed out Gray continues to remind us that we are animals and he prefers the title “human animal” to “human being.”  One can understand why he does, given that the second term is way more abstract and conceptual while the former is considerably more concrete for an atheistic materialist like Gray.  Also, he reminds us on an ongoing basis that we have considerably overrated our importance in the universe.  With his background in philosophy and politics, he reminds us that of the 200 or so sovereign states in the world, most are unstable.  Why?  Well, the human animal is at base greedy, selfish and power-hungry – my words, not Gray’s.  He describes most of these states as being “rusted through with corruption.” (p. 12)

    We have to bear in mind that this is now quite a dated book but reviewing it some fifteen or so years after I first read it, he makes some still truly relevant points. For instance, he contends that it is the quite large number of sovereign states that makes technology ungovernable.  We only have to think of states like India, Pakistan or Iran having access to nuclear weapons.  Then, of course, there is the threat of the design of new viruses for use in genocidal weapons – and this does not require as much money as nuclear weapons.  Then Gray mentions something I never heard of before, viz., knowledge-enabled mass destruction, known by the acronym KMD.  Furthermore, there is the ethical problem of how biological weapons can be kept out of the hands of terrorist groups.  In effect, Gray is here rehearsing the old argument that humanity’s worst crimes were made possible only by modern technology.

    It would seem to me that ethics and morals do not evolve naturally.  They have to be worked out painfully.  By this I mean, that it is only in the wake of the consequences of evil that humankind wakes up to its base desires and the suffering caused by them, e.g., only after the evils of slavery have universal equality of all humans themselves been recognised and indeed, only in the wake of mass genocide during World War II was the Declaration of Human Rights acknowledged, codified and promulgated.  Ethics and morals grow as a result of reflecting soberly and sincerely on humankind’s unbridled instincts for destruction.  In the words of Gray, which finish this section, we read: “Technical progress leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature.  Unfortunately, that problem is insoluble.”  (p. 15)

Section 5:  Green Humanism:

Gray reminds us clearly that most Green thinkers offer yet another version of humanism, not an alternative to it.  If Humanism is another religion, then it follows that being Green is another one yet. We may talk about human societies.  Yet, what are we but a greater and grander example of ant and bee societies.  I find it difficult to disagree with Gray.  He quotes the scientist Lynn Margulis and her scientist son Dorian Sagan thus:

We are a part of an intricate network that comes from the original takeover of the Earth.  Our powers and intelligence do not belong specifically to us but to all life.  (Quoted p. 16)

    It would seem to this blogger that the Greens are yet another “religious group” in the sense that they propose that they are the stewards of creation, as outlined before them by the Christian interpretation of Creation and Redemption.  Yet again, Gray’s dark outlook is sobering – the notion that human action can save humankind and/or the planet is absurd.  Humankind is part of nature, not above it.  We are equal to the animals, not above them.  Once again Gray’s prose is clear: “The humanist sense of the gulf between ourselves and other animals is an aberration.” (p.17) I like Gray’s term “biophilia” or love of all living things.  Only when we have such love, namely a love for all the living things of the earth, ourselves included, will we be really and truly our real selves.  Again, this latter sentence is mine but its import is Gray’s.

Section 6: Against Fundamentalism – Religious and Scientific: Religion has wielded mostly unopposed authority in human affairs for a long time.  Now this authority is waning.  However, its authority has now been ceded to the sciences.  Again, Gray points out that the cost of this ceding of power is making human life accidental and insignificant.  In a wonderful flourish of words, he sees religious fundamentalists as “symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure.” (p. 18)   Science serves two needs in humankind: (i) hope and (ii) censorship.  Now hope, of course, you’ve already guessed it, is a religious virtue which has now been ceded to science.  People cling to the hope of progress.  This isn’t a genuine belief at all, but rather a fear of what will happen if they give up this belief.

    Gray reminds us more bleakly again, that is, should we need reminding, that the political projects of the twentieth century have all failed.  Science gives us hope because their political counterparts have failed.  In another swipe at science, Gray reminds the reader that orthodox science acts like the church did against heretics or maverick thinkers. (Orthodox medicine versus Freud; orthodox Darwinians versus Lovelock etc.)  Let’s not detach science from its human needs and make of it something that is not natural but transcendental.  He finishes this section with his typical flourish: “To think of science as the search for truth is to renew a mystical faith, the faith of Plato and Augustine, that truth rules the world, that truth is divine.”  (p. 20).

Section 7: Science’s Irrational Origins: Once again Gray surpasses himself with the paradoxical nature of his titles.  He really does want to provoke us into questioning our presuppositions and suppositions.  He asks whether science really is the embodiment of rational enquiry as its proponents would have us believe?  Again, Gray cuts to the point, and is nothing if not provocative: “The origins of science are not in rational enquiry, but in faith, magic and trickery.  (p. 21) Without ‘chaos’ there would be no knowledge.  Without a frequent dismissal of reason, no progress.  Realities like intrigue, jealousy, envy, prejudice, conceit and passion opposed reason and forced it to make progress.  The greatest scientists like Galileo, Newton, Tyche Brahe and Johannes Kepler were all believers in God.  As pictured by philosophers, science is a supremely rational activity.  Yet the history of science shows scientists flouting the rules of scientific method.  Not only the origins but the progress of science comes from acting against reason. (p. 23)

Section 8: Science as a Remedy for Anthropocentrism:

A good example of anthropocentrism occurs in the Book of Genesis when God is presented as “walking in the garden in the cool of the evening,” a sentence that paints the godhead as a human being or Anthropos.  We use anthropocentrism to make sense of our world.  The ancient writers of the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament sought to make sense of their world and in so doing they sought to impose an order on it.  Indeed, their order was mythic – a great tale of creation and later of the fall of humankind to give some meaning and order to human affairs as they saw it in those early times. Here Gray reminds us that leading scientists like Erwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg point out that our world is far from being an orderly cosmos: “It is a demi-chaos that humans can hope to understand only in part.  Science cannot satisfy the human need to find order in the world.  The most advanced physical sciences suggest that causality and classical logic may not be built into the nature of things.  Even the most basic feature of our ordinary experience may be delusive.”  (p. 23) Indeed, Quantum Mechanics reminds us that we (the observers) change what we actually observe.

Section 9:  Truth and Consequences: Gray reminds us yet again that Humanism is a religion as if we need to be reminded.  Yet, I suppose the maverick nature of his provocative views would allow for such a repetition.  Humanism believes in “truth,” as if this entity existed somewhere.  Once again humanism’s belief in truth is yet again an unacknowledged expression of faith.  And so, the progress of this faith can be expressed thus: “Socrates founded European thought on the faith that truth makes us free.  He never doubted that knowledge and the good life go together.  He passed on this faith to Plato, and so to Christianity.  The result is modern humanism.”  (p. 24)

    I have always unquestioningly accepted Socrates’ great dictum which was repeated so often during my years at college that I swallowed it whole.  That dictum is the famous one: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  Gray even puts a big question mark under this by stating that the examined life may not be worth living either.  Indeed, he proposes that even here in these words there is a trace of ancient or archaic religious belief – insofar as Socrates claimed to hear an “inner voice” or “the voice of God.”  In this he was guided by a “daimon” or an inner oracle or angel power which he followed.  This, Gray argues quite cogently is a trace of shamanic practices.  (See p. 25) In other words, European rationalism may have been born in mystical experience.  However, “modern humanism differs from Socratic philosophy chiefly in failing to recognise its irrational origins – and in the hubris of its ambitions.” (p. 25)

    I loved Gray’s outright dismissal of memes as a ridiculous concept.  Once again he sees this proposal as one which illustrates man’s illusions and delusions of grandeur, his sheer and unadulterated hubris and his sheer belief in his own ego.  Memes are clusters of ideas and beliefs, which are supposed to compete with one another in much the same way as genes do.  This theory supposes or proposes that the fittest memes survive:

    Unfortunately, memes are not genes.  There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution. (p. 26) A cursory look at history is all that is needed to realise that this theory is piffle because look at what The Roman Catholic Church, the Muslim religion, The Jewish Religion, The Nazis under Hitler and then Stalin did and these winners were not the ones with the great memes.

    An interest in the truth is not necessary for survival or reproduction.  Then Gray cuts us to the quick by stating: “Deception is common among primates and birds.” (p. 27) Truth, he avers, has no systematic evolutionary advantage over error.  Ponder that now!  Again, he cuts through all the shibboleths to state that the “uses of knowledge will always be as shifting and crooked as humans are themselves.”  There is a lesson here for all of us.  Human beings are animals seeking to protect their offspring and often they are very irrational in this pursuit.  The Enlightenment is a gospel of despair if it were to be true to being totally rational, in accepting the irrationality of humankind and the absurdity of hope or faith.

Section 10: A Pascal for the Enlightenment: Pascal admitted that we human beings need our illusions to give us hope and meaning.  In short, such illusions do, in fact, keep us going.  We must “stupefy our reason and fortify our faith in mankind.”

Section 11: Humanism versus Naturalism:

Here I was spellbound by Jacques Monod’s beautiful, if not poetic, prose.  Gray quotes him at length.  Monod was one of the founders of molecular biology.  This biologist argued that life is indeed a fluke – we are just a lucky draw in the lottery of life.  Let me quote a little of Monod’s wonderful words:

[Humankind] must at last awake from his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation.  He must realise that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering and his crimes. (Quoted p. 30)

    According to Monod, we are a lucky species among the millions of others as we know that we are an accident through our being self-conscious.  The Christians who argued so forcefully against Darwin feared that it left humanity looking so insignificant.  Gray’s message to us is to grow up and realise that we are indeed insignificant in the scheme of things.

Section 12:  Straw Dogs: This section repeats the very title and theme of the book, that we humans are nothing too special, being merely Straw Dogs.  Once again Gray reminds us that Humanism is a Secular Religion.  Yes, John, we’ve got the message.  Here, he gives us an insight into the Gaia theory of James Lovelock.  Gray points out that Lovelock’s theory of Gaia is very much built on pre-Christian or archaic or primordial religion, viz., animism.  Humanism believes in the myth of progress, a mere unreflecting re-presentation of the Christian myth while the world of the Gaia scientist is one very much of the animists where we are creatures of the very slime of the earth whence we first crawled.  If the more orthodox humanists clash with the Gaia humanists, it is merely a collision of myths. Critics of the Gaia theory say they reject it because it is unscientific.  The truth is they fear and hate it because it means that humans can never be other than straw dogs.  (p. 34) Now we are at the very heart of Gray’s materialist or atheistic humanism.

    As I said above in my opening line, John Gray is a philosophe provocateur supreme.  It is indeed good to be provoked at times and to be knocked out of our complacency by the thoughts and arguments of philosophers who are diametrically opposed to our own presuppositions and principles.  A challenging but inspiring read.  

Straw Dogs, John Gray (2003), Granta Books: London.