Review of 'Straw Dogs' and 'Black Mass' by John Gray

Human progress is a myth, freedom is a fantasy, the individual self is a chimera, our lives are lived from start to finish as illusions, justice and morality are social constructs relied on solely for convenience, human beings are entirely ignorant of motivation and can no more control the future of the race than the most base amoeba can.

This is the pessimistic world view of John Gray, one of the few genuine practising philosophers alive today who still devotes his life’s work to making sense of the human condition. We are no better than beasts, he concludes, because – frankly – we are beasts. The earth has existed long before humans arrived, and humans will disappear millions of years before the sun finally bursts apart and swallows up the solar system. Humans are merely one of millions of species who have inhabited the earth only as long as the span of our striations of DNA lasts.

If you think your own life might be small and purposeless in the scheme of things, reading John Gray may only exacerbate such feelings until your sense of your self shrinks into a miserable chewing gum sized ball. An epigram for his whole collection of writing might be the scribble Darwin wrote in his notebook in 1838: ‘He who understands baboon will do more for metaphysics than Locke’. Gray, to put it bluntly, is a man at odds with the whole corpus of Western Enlightenment philosophy, from Rousseau, Descartes and beyond.

In Straw Dogs, his 2002 polemic, he devotes a brisk 200 pages to a sweeping destruction job of a whole gamut of Post-Enlightenment theories. For example, atheism: ‘Secularism is like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies’, Post-Modernism: ‘just the latest fad in anthropocentrism’ – humans arrogantly thinking they can define the terms of reality, environmentalism: ‘A high-tech Green utopia, in which a few humans live happily in balance with the rest of life’.

Environmentalism, Gray argues may be scientifically feasible, but is humanly unimaginable. In the 17th Century, the population of the world was half a billion people, the same number as the increase in people in the last decade alone. This, points out Gray, is palpably unsustainable. If the Twentieth Century was dire for its spate of genocidal warfare, this one could be even worse, as increasing population growth combined with scarcity of resources will ignite flashpoints all over the planet as the game is up for the rich nations and their hitherto unquestioned dominance over the world’s reserves.

Straw Dogs is a wide ranging polemic, but in Black Mass, the successor book, the target is more specific: the policies of neo-conservative Western governments who believe that the world can be remade in their image. Politics, given the animal natures of human beings, is inherently impossible and therefore corrupting. The desire of Bush, Blair, and the team of neo-cons who laid out the Iraq plans is the modern incarnation of a religious will, which, Gray argues, has always been present in societies. The Enlightenment, 250 years ago, merely gave this yearning a secular edge.

Stalinism, National Socialism, Neo-Conservatism, free market liberalism: all are ideologies that betray a religious, utopian impulse. The plans to introduce democracy in Iraq was as misguided and unrealisable as the Marxist claims that capitalism would be overthrown and a post-state brotherhood of humanity would be realised. Gray concludes the book by saying the only way to proceed in political affairs, as with all human affairs, is with clear eyed realism in the manner of his few philosophical and political heroes: David Hume, Edmund Burke, Isaiah Berlin.

Those who maintain faith in progress will reject Gray’s analysis on the grounds that some reforming, progressive ideals have been instilled in society: slavery was abolished, in the face of those who said it was unrealisable. Why should the citizens of the Middle East not have a chance to be freed from tyranny and live in democratic peace like their more fortunate coevals in Western Europe? However this is precisely Gray’s point – there is not enough resources in the world for everyone to eat at the ‘rational’ liberal democratic table. That is the privilege of the wealthy nations, who fiercely safeguard their resources (successfully, up to now at least). Liberalism is cast as a sort of Range Rover, I-Phone type of political theory – something only the rich can afford.

Gray’s arguments are trenchant, and easy to follow if hard to swallow. His style is that of the apercu – brisk, swift, impressionistic. Such a loose limbed writing style is easily open to objection. But he incorporates large bibliographies in the back of his books for those interested in investigating his arguments further. De-coupling human beings from their human-centric world view is a difficult operation. The tradition in which Gray writes: Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Schopenhauer, is a lonely and uncomfortable one, and it is unsurprising that his bulletins on the current state of man are met with hot opposition.

By Fred Bosanquet