(5) JOHN GRAY –

STRAW DOGS: THOUGHTS ON HUMANS & OTHER ANIMALS (2002)

“I’ve got a Nietzsche trigger finger!”

No, seriously – this brag (by another entry in this top ten) might well sum up the philosophical pessimism and thoroughgoing misanthropy of John Gray.

That or how I learned to stop worrying and love that humanity sucks.

Indeed, one might quip that Gray out-Nietzsches Nietzsche. For Gray, Nietzsche was a pansy who didn’t go far enough in proclaiming God as dead, since he substituted his own myth of the superman for God. (He literally writes that in this book. Well, except the pansy bit).

And yes, Gray’s oeuvre might be summed up as humans suck – a philosophy of posthumanism or anti-humanism.

Hence the subtitle of this book, which encapsulates the book’s thesis that humans have yet to reconcile themselves with evolutionary theory that they’re just another type of dumb animal.

What are we but fish that couldn’t swim and had to crawl or apes that couldn’t climb and had to think? That’s my quip but it might as well be Gray’s. Indeed for Gray, that thinking part is overblown – “Gray sees volition, and hence morality, as an illusion, and portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life.”

One might well wonder what was the point of writing the book then, if all this thinking business is just an illusion – but I do love me some grumpy philosophical pessimism, which this book has in spades.

“Gray attacks humanism as a worldview in conflict with the view of humanity as part of the evolution of life on the planet…a secular version of the Christian view of humans as differentiated from the natural world. Gray blames humanism, and its central view of humanity, for much of the destruction of the natural world, and sees technology as just a tool by which humans will continue destroying the planet and each other”.

My favorite philosophy is aphoristic, which this book also has in spades, meandering between pithy quips and “short essays on different topics”.

Straw Dogs was praised by none other than English author J.G. Ballard, himself of a somewhat pessimistic philosophical bent and “who wrote that the book “challenges most of our assumptions about what it means to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions”.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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