Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

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Well, the book is in some ways an experiment in that respect,” he says. “Of course, it’s not a scientific inquiry. But if you live with a cat very closely for a long time – and it takes a long time, because they’re slow to trust, slow to really enter into communication with you – then you can probably imagine how they might philosophise.” This is the point Gray elects to miss and has elected to miss many times before. Human beings are social creatures whose sociability manifests itself in feelings of empathy and altruism. But these feelings are not always in evidence and sometimes they give way to hatred and to violence. Hatred and violence are not exceptional. History, as Gray never tires of reminding us, is strewn with the corpses of the murdered and maimed. But nor are hatred and violence the rule. And when we encounter them – sometimes, not always – our better selves are mobilised. Moreover, it is in this spirit – and not in any post-Christian attempt to take a lathe to the crooked timber of humanity – that we try to improve the lot of our species: so that Mary Turner’s descendants are not strung up and emptied of their progeny; so that orphans with tears in their unseeing eyes are taken in and given a bowl of soup; and so that our own children can have a decent education and the chance of a job at the end of it. Is this a hubristic belief in progress? The very suggestion dies on the lips. Quoting T.S. Eliot’s line that humankind cannot bear very much reality, Gray thus invites us to cultivate ‘godless mysticism’, the aim of which is not some higher knowledge or even self-knowledge, but knowledge’s absence. ‘Godless mystics do not look to merge themselves with something larger they have imagined into being; they look to wipe away their inexistent selves.’ This ‘negative epiphany’ or ‘nullifying of the self’ is most likely to occur in moments of ‘contemplation’, by which Gray means not philosophical contemplation – far from it – but intense observation of the world, and of the natural (or rather non-human) world especially. As a guide to the kind of thing he means, he recommends J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), the quotations from which would appear to justify Gray’s estimation of it as a work of genius. But Gray is not only interested in the literary quality of Baker’s book – an account of a year spent following, observing, and indeed channelling, the peregrine falcon. He also wants us to understand how the author’s ability to lose himself in nature – even to the extent of seeing the world from the falcon’s point of view – is one that, if we could only emulate it, would make our lives much easier to bear.

In the mid-to-late Seventies, for instance, he was one of a nexus of disaffected former left-wing thinkers who realised that if Britain were ever to lift itself from torpor and decline, if the country were to be modernised, there had to be a radical break from the stultification and mediocrity of the recent past. The political and economic consensus on which Britain was rebuilt in the immediate post-war years - interventionist government, a strong welfare state, powerful unions - had to be smashed, along with the old affiliations of class and club.If you’re an academic, before you say anything at all, you have to give about 20 caveats,” he says. “And when I was a professional academic, I used to do that. But now I take a different view. I just say I’m just putting this out for you to consider. Don’t throw it away – or if you do at least give it to Oxfam.” The Revolution of Capitalism: [31] Why an increasing number of people believe that Karl Marx was right. JG: I’m not sure it makes much sense to talk of conservatism these days. Certainly I share the view, often held by conservatives in the past, that there is such a thing as human nature, that it’s relatively constant and in some ways inherently flawed. (Thinking this way is one reason why I’m not a post-modernist.) It was this type of conservatism that the painter Francis Bacon had in mind when he said he always voted for the right because it made the best of a bad job. The poet T.E. Hulme said something very similar. But that kind of conservatism scarcely exists any more: Today conservative thinking oscillates between neo-con progressivism – a species of inverted Marxism – and paleo-conservative reaction, which amounts to not much more than a collection of ugly prejudices (racism, homophobia, misogyny). Both these versions of “conservatism” seem to me hostile to the conservation of civilised life. The genuine scepticism of David Hume is much preferable to anything that passes as conservative today. You criticise humanism for failing to recognise its own utopian mythology, but you celebrate the value of certain myths. (You mention the stories of Icarus and Prometheus as cautionary tales against the dangers of hubris.) Is there a way to distinguish harmful myths from truthful myths, delusion from insight?

And what does he say to those critics who argue that his writing dwells on the reductive, brutish side of humanity, as opposed to its great collective achievements? It’s sometimes supposed that I want to convert those whose lives are informed by a myth of progress to some other world-view – my own, for example. Nothing could be further from the truth. My writings are aimed at a particular kind of reader – one who isn’t completely satisfied with the prevailing view of things. If these readers see things differently after reading me, that’s great – but I’d be disappointed if they saw things in only one way. Gray, John (1997). Endgames: Questions in Late Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 978-0-415-17315-5.

Thoughts on humans and other animals

BBC Radio 4 – A Point of View – Episodes by date, November 2014". bbc.co.uk. BBC . Retrieved 28 November 2014.