More like a rabid Riesenschnauzer

"Straw Dogs" is a difficult book to review. It's even more difficult to come to terms with. Perhaps we're not supposed to. I like to think that John Gray wrote it as a deliberate provocation. The message of the book is a kind of dystopian super-pessimism. The author sounds like William Catton or James Howard Kunstler on a very bad acid trip! Of course, this is the British professor John Gray, not his U.S. namesake (the guy from Venus).

Despite his frankly bizarre pessimism, Gray nevertheless raises a number of interesting points. He correctly points out that the Western idea of Progress is really a secularized version of the Christian idea of history. He also points out that if we take Darwinism seriously (and by implication materialism and atheism), there is no room for progress, hope or improvement of the human conditions. Pessimism is the logical conclusions. From a Darwinist standpoint, humans are simply animals, period. They are not qualitatively different from other products of blind cosmic chance and necessity. Indeed, Homo sapiens is hardly even a "species", since there really is no such thing from a strict Neo-Darwinist perspective. A "species" has no essentialist character. It's just a heap of roughly similar individuals, destined to change and disappear in the course of evolution. Humans are just straw dogs...

I found the book fascinating, since one of many reasons why I gave up consistent materialism a few years ago is that, drawn to its logical conclusions, it really is suicidal. Or, if suicide aint your cup of English Breakfast Tea, nihilistically hedonistic. The finest blend, yes? I also realized that I never really was a consistent materialist to begin with. I have probably always been a subconsciously teleological-vitalist panpsychist, without realizing it. I suspect most "materialists" cheat in this manner. So how consistent is John Gray?

I admit that the answer is "very". Still, there are some philosophical problems with his pessimism. Humans are the only animals that can be maladaptive or maladapted, so pessimism itself proves that we *are* different from animals. No self-respecting chimp can be misanthropic (or mis-anthropoid). Humans are capable of abstract thought, but how is that metaphysically possible, if abstractions are sheer illusions? (Gray seems to suggest that they are.) In a certain sense, Gray himself secularizes an aspect of Christianity. While his opponents secularize "the second coming" or the millennium, Gray arguably does the same thing with the fall of man and original sin! He is Ecclesiastes, or a kind of Augustine without the City of God.

There are also problems with Darwinism, or the strictly materialist worldview in general. I think you know the drift: where does consciousness come from? What about paranormal phenomena, etc? Gray rejects even mysticism and other kinds of spiritual experiences. Gray's complete rejection of free will is also problematic - how can even the *illusion* of free will exist, metaphysically speaking, in a completely deterministic universe? The Darwinist speculations about evolution giving us the power of self-deception (we just *imagine* that we are good, have free will, etc) are surely a cop-out, brought about by the inability of reductionist materialism to cope with such things as true altruism, free will, and so on.

So why not become a suicidal maniac or hedonistic pleasure-seeker? Gray has no real answer, but surely a workable philosophy must provide one - in itself a philosophical problem for misanthropes. Why can't we live (or die) like misanthropes? The author's favourite philosopher, Schopenhauer, suggested that we show compassion for everything living since we are all products of the same Will (a kind of World-Soul). He also proposed asceticism as a way of extinguishing the Will (how is *that* possible, metaphysically speaking?). Gray mentions that Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer's conclusions: why not affirm the Will instead, in all its cruelty, and live like a hero while we can? Why indeed. There doesn't seem to be any good response to Nietzsche from a Schopenhauerian perspective! The author points out that Nietzsche went mad, but it's easy to find Supermen who didn't. Why does John Gray adopt a relatively benign moral position, when you might as well adopt the opposite one? And why does he dabble in Taoism, if he is anti-religious?

In fact, why should we listen to John N. Gray at all? He says that science is irrational, so why should we take Darwinism as gospel truth? And since we have no free will, only pretend to be good guys, and are really a kind of automatons, why should *anything* Gray says in "Straw Dogs" matter, at all? Surely there's a problem with a philosophy which tries to give us good arguments for the non-existence of good arguments (with apologies to one C.S. Lewis)...

Despite the above, "Straw Dogs" isn't a bad book. Quite the contrary. Gray's pessimism is a kind of sulphuric acid, and makes it possible for him to question our most deep-seated assumptions, most notably our hubristic anthropocentrism. Sure, it *is* hard to believe that humans in their present state are the Ultimate Goal of the Universe. Our professor also attacks the most cultish cornucopians, who believe in literal, physical immortality through high tech. Even noxious weeds have flowers... ;-)

However, I can't say that I'm willing to follow Mr. Gray all the way. Rather, I see "Straw Dogs" as a good reminder of the ultimately misanthropic conclusions of a materialism consistently applied.