Customer Reviews

Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

John Gray was once upon a time an optimistic liberal. He fell under the spell of the Gospel of the Free Market in the Thatcherite 1980s, and thus made a transition to conservatism. When he discovered that Thatcherism/Reaganism wasn't really conservative at all, but rather a dogmatic radicalism, he became an old-school conservative. He proceeded to reject the Enlightenment tout court, and embraced post-modernist relativism. Now, he has taken a further step into simple misanthropy. Gray has written a jeremiad against Christianity, the Enlightenment, science, and any hope of bettering people or the planet we live on. This is a performative contradiction, of course, because if there is no cause for hope, why write a book? What's the point? Fame and money are the only reasons left, one must suppose, and that supposition is perfectly consistent with Gray's line of argument -- all lofty ideals and dreams are illusions.

Despite all that, I enjoyed the book and recommend it. It's a quick, easy read, quite entertaining, and I'm sure you can find it in the library. There are many useful citations in the back to more substantial books you might want to read to pursue Gray's points, many made in the form of sound-bite one-liners. Depending on what you bring to it, you may or may not find it shocking -- STRAW DOGS is mainly based on the growing knowledge from the field variously known as sociobiology or evolutionary psychology or biological anthropology. Humans are animals, not demigods. Gray's second main point I think is less appreciated and more important, and that is the evidence that the human species is embarked on a neomalthusian experiment -- overshoot the ecosystem and see what happens.

That's good cause for a jeremiad, and if Gray's disjointed ramblings focus more people's attention on this ("death focuses the mind") then it is worth something. Gray is having none of any sort of schemes for improvement, though, let alone salvation. His presentation is totally negative (we are nothing but "exceptionally rapacious primates"), which of course is a good strategy for provoking discussion, hostility and sales. I detect, though, a positive agenda, which Gray only intimates between the lines, and that is the most conservative belief system of all, animism. If humans dropped their pretense at superiority and stopped all their doomed scheming, accepting their equal status with their fellow animals, and acted with humility and reverence toward their fellow beings, then all might be well. This seems to be Gray's covert plan for salvation, and it is in fact one I can wholeheartedly endorse.

Gray goes too far in throwing out the Enlightenment. Rationality does clearly seem to be lacking in most human behavior, but what of it does exist is important to foster, encourage and spread. (See Daniel Dennett's latest, FREEDOM EVOLVES, which makes the same assumptions as Gray, but reaches a very different conclusion.) Sure it seems like an uphill struggle that we're likely to lose, but I could see that years ago (33 years ago to be precise), and I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't found reasons to try. Being an intellectual bomb-thrower is fine for someone still young and full of indignation, but there is a planet of sentient beings who expect more of someone like John Gray -- carpe diem!

I could have gone with either five stars or one star, though not any star in between. That in itself says a lot about the book. If I could, I would give it both a one star and a five star rating simultaneously; indeed I think it just would not do justice to the book to reduce it to a score.

The sheer rhetorical force of Gray's words makes this compelling reading. One almost feels the need to react to it by way of criticism. At the same time, the book itself compels the reader to ask: is this criticism really just self-deception? And so I've waited to write a review for a long time.

Five stars because this book makes an impact. It forces one to think. It is a smorgasbord of important ideas. It is a book I'd recommend to any intelligent, critical reader -- if only so they can debunk a lot of it! This should be seen a compliment; even debunking Gray's ideas can be a truly fruitful exercise.

One star because the book is deeply flawed. Although I can and do agree with many of Gray's conclusions, the logic that gets him to those is, well, simply not logic. Despite his obvious intelligence and education, he doesn't really seem to understand modern science. And that is simply something the philosopher of today cannot afford.

Very little that Gray says is new. On those points with which I agree, they have been expressed better in works by Pinker (The Blank Slate), Dawkins (The Extended Phenotype) and Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting) amongst many others. These works have the benefit of being based on cumulative scientific evidence. The last chapter of "The End of Faith" by Harris is far better than the mere assertions of Gray because it establishes the link between neuroscience and spirituality.

As for philosophers, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Santayana (again, to name but three) have contended with nihilism far more interestingly than Gray. And how could I not include the name of Bertrand Russell, whose essay "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" is enough to dismiss half of Gray's arguments? That is, where there actually are arguments rather than brilliantly-disguised assertions expressed with near-religious conviction!

Final word: Both 1 and 5 stars. Gray is a force to be reckoned with. Definitely worth reading as long as you don't let yourself become hypnotized by Gray's superb rhetoric. Books I'd recommend as alternatives (or should I say antidotes) are "The Blank Slate" and "The End of Faith".

It is over a hundred years since Darwin revealed to us our animal lineage, and yet the human primate is still having difficulty coming to terms with its animal origins. All bar creationists may indeed now accept that we are descended from apes, but most of us still cling to the belief that we have somehow become different to the rest of the animal kingdom. Our ability to use language and reason, to see ourselves as selves, selves that move forward in time and, with other selves, progress by building a culture based on moral rules and a technology that seems to give us ever increasing control over our environment. Surely this is enough to set us apart from the rest of nature? No. Thankfully, a British philosopher who lives and breathes today but who speaks with the depth and clarity of a modern day Schopenhauer is here to rid you of this delusion.

Human beings are still animals claims Gray, but the more profound insight that he delivers, and that his critics seem unable to grasp or admit, is that humans, and even whatever intelligence that might emerge in a 'posthuman' future, will always be inescapably rooted in the natural world as much as the lowliest of slime molds.

We believe that language and reason are what differentiates us, forgetting that we acquired these abilities through the blind mechanisms of evolution. This means that they are, as Hume, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche declared long before Darwin, mere tools in the brutish struggle for survival. These same tools enabled the human animal to create the illusions of free will, self and morality and the delusion to think that with these, man has the ability to stand apart from the animal world and choose his own fate. But the fundamental import of Darwinism is that it tells us that 'we' were 'made' for the world. The world was not made for us, nor can we ever make it, nor indeed any world, to be for us.

Some rather simple-minded criticisms of Gray's outlook are floating around the Internet, including on this page, so lest they deter you from reading this book, here are a few brief rejoinders that can be made to them.

1/ 'Gray teaches us nothing new. Postmodernism has been around for 40 years now.' Gray clearly isn't giving just another rehash of postmodernist thought. In fact his book is a savage attack on some of the postmodernist thought that has now been neatly incorporated into liberal thinking. The belief that the world is entirely a social construction, that this construction is determined by power relationships and that therefore by changing those power relationships society can mould the world into whatever form it chooses. The way that humans see the world may indeed be due to power relationships within society, but these arise because of the fact that humans are biological animals in an inherently competitive natural world. Postmodernism is, as Gray says, 'just the latest fad in anthropocentrism'.

2/ 'Gray criticises science as a faith but seems to hold Darwinism as a faith.' Gray is primarily attacking the faith that scientific progress leads to moral and social progress. If anything is right in science it is the broad theory of Darwinism. Yet people believe that science can enable man to take control of his destiny, when one of the most fundamental tenets of modern science teaches us that science and its consequences (as with any other sphere of human activity) is ultimately determined by the same laws that govern other animals' behaviour.

3/ 'No-one seriously believes in progress anymore'. Well the western world is without doubt led by two men who wholeheartedly believe in the vision of moral progress, as we are seeing with disastrous consequences in Iraq. As both have been re-elected as their heads of government, presumably a lot of the people who voted for them share that vision. The idea that western society is not still dominated by the belief in moral progress is absurd. A generation ago homosexuality was illegal and homosexuals were routinely sent to prison. Today, someone can be sent to prison for simply arguing that homosexuality is wrong. For this to be the case, society clearly has a conviction that the moral attitudes of today are without question a progression on the attitudes of yesterday. To give a different example, on the 10th of September 2001 not one person in a hundred could have believed that America would soon be holding a serious debate on whether or not to legalise torture.

It goes without saying that I found Straw Dogs to be an utterly rewarding intellectual experience. Read it and it may change the whole way you look at the world...though probably together with a feeling that, like all great writers, Gray has articulated for you something profound that you always suspected about the world.

John Gray concludes his book with a tragic entreaty: "Can we not think of the aim of life as simply to see?" His plea for awareness reveals the cloak of obscuratism our mythology has draped over all nature. Reading Straw Dogs is like being abruptly roused from a pleasant dream. "Wake and shake!", he cries. Wake up to the falsity of the dogmas under which you live. Shake them off and recognize that we live within reality's domain, not that of phantasms and fables. These ideas disturb the comfortable, yet offer little comfort to those seeking an easy answer to life's challenges. Gray understands our need for solace, but he knows reality isn't a tourist resort. Nature is a harsh realm and he wishes us to confront enduring questions honestly. Writing this book means he thinks we can do that.

Gray's thesis relies on aknowledging our place in the realm of nature. We are, he reminds us, merely a part of the animal kingdom. We are neither a special creation nor particularly unique. Writing alone, with the continuity it provides, sets us apart while granting significant powers. The "continuity" led to the notion of human "progress" and "perfectability". In an evolutionary sense both ideas are false, and we are evolution's product. Even humanism, supposedly rational and secular, has fallen into the trap of seeking "perfectability". Gray finds this misleading and self-serving. He examines the work of Western philosophers, the guides to our thinking, finding them mistaken or misleading. In today's milieu, Lovelock's Gaia concept of the whole planet acting like a single organism, should be reconsidered. Whether the details of this idea are valid is irrelevant. It is the notion that we are apart from the remainder of nature that we must cast away. The monotheist dogma granting us "dominion over the earth" is the most pernicious idea developed by humanity, Gray asserts.

Gray's text is fragmented without sacrificing continuity. His techique allows pauses for reflection. He posits ideas, questions, suggestions, assertions freely. Stop and think about them as you read. He tumbles many icons - he indicts Christianty on the second page, suggesting what will follow. He is resolute and articulate about how important these questions are to us. A superficial look at this work may lead the reader to feel hopeless. If there was no hope, however, Gray wouldn't have bothered to write this book. Like any thinker, he's concerned about the future. The prospects appear bleak, but not insurmountable. He assumes the reader is intelligent enough to consider and act on realistic solutions. "Perfectibility" of humanity within nature may be impossible, but with an informed outlook "accomodation" can be achieved. The first step, however, is the shedding of false dogmas.

Being informed isn't an easy task, Gray concedes. He presents the thoughts of previous philosophers, but without direct attribution. If you need references, his extensive bibliography is a fine starting point. It's also a few years' study syllabus. Taking his quotes at face value isn't the issue, however. What must be confronted are the values that you, the reader, hold and cherish. Can you "live to see", or will you remain wrapped blindly within dogma? Read Gray and make up your own mind. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

_Straw Dogs_ is promoted as "a demolition of two and a half thousand years of thought." Such overexcited and overweening promotion only hurts a book that reads more like a collection of magazine articles. "Demolition" implies something hard-edged and formidable: serious arguments and evidence. But while the Western intellectual tradition may be a ramshackle old edifice, it's under no threat from this book, which has the demolitionary capacity of a handful of soggy noodles.

John Gray's book boils down to three assertions. The first is that western thought erred in considering humans significantly different from other animals. A nuanced claim might be reasonable: most religious traditions, all dualist
traditions, and some forms of rationalism have overemphasised humanity's uniqueness, and we should remember our close kinship with other animals. But Gray argues there are no important differences. A human city is no different, really, from a beehive, there's nothing special about human knowledge since even bacteria have "knowledge" (based on Gray's misunderstanding, one of many on matters scientific and historical, that bacterial movements imply "knowledge"), the internet is as natural as a spider's web, and so on.

If Gray meant that humans are part of nature so nothing we do is unnatural, he'd be right. Though only in a sense that makes the word "unnatural" meaningless. But he means more: that there is nothing remarkable or distinct, let alone impressive and admirable, about human achievements.

Let's test this by exploring Gray's equation of a spiderweb and the internet a bit further than Gray, who prefers making claims to examining them. We find that the internet and a spiderweb _are_ similar, in that if you draw a diagram of the internet to make it look like a spiderweb, then that diagram will look like a spiderweb. In other respects the comparison falls down.

For example a spiderweb is a one-spider operation, a trap to kill other animals, while the internet is a multi-user device by which many animals exchange information. Also, though Gray would rather slide over such distinctions, the spiderweb is an instinctive function of the spider, like (for example) a human's blink when a bright light flashes. Whereas the internet is, let's face it, an impressively clever and rather admirable artefact. Humanity can take a bow for the internet, though Gray won't be applauding.

Gray's second large claim is, in unacknowledged contradiction of his first claim, that humans are unique: it's just that we are uniquely horrible. We do war and genocide and ecocide, and that, Gray seems to think, is all we do. But I'm using a complex and beautiful human language (English) to interface via a keyboard with a computer, through which I can access trivia, silliness and pictures of other humans having sex, also poetry, paintings, philosophy and symphonies: a rich and not very murderous mixture.

Of course humans are flawed animals: in particular we need to stop giving political power to some of the worst of us. But in most places and most of the time most of us human animals are innocent: we bring up children, help each other, laugh, forgive, make art or love, and other good and inspiring things.

Gray's third large claim is that there is no hope and no meaning. All philosophers are wrong, except perhaps the überpessimist Schopenhauer; religion and science have both failed; humanism is only a decayed version of Christianity, and so on. But Gray's survey of philosophy is so shallow and selective, as is his outline of the human condition, that he cannot convince any reasonable person to indulge in his despair. The reality is that we do not know humanity's future: whether we will do well or badly.

For all Gray's claimed scepticism, his despair is more of a leap of faith than, for example, a cautious and conditional optimism. Moreover, while we don't know the future, we do know that despair is unlikely to be a productive or helpful response. That is, despair is not only intellectually shallow, at a practical level it is not only useless but harmful.

And Gray's claim that humanism is the ghost of Christianity is bad history. "Humanism" has had many meanings, but in its current incarnation as a non-theist ethics, it shares moral doctrines with Christianity, but they are older than Christianity. Ethical ideas common to humanism and Christianity, such as doing to others as you would be done by, the virtues of kindness, forbearance and forgiveness, and so on, all predate Christianity, and can be found in Confucius, Socrates, Seneca and countless others.

But moral doctrines specific to Christianity and the other monotheisms, such as intolerance of homosexuals and other deviants, subordination of women, the idea that people who don't believe in [insert name of religion] are worthy of eternal torture, and so on, are conspicuously absent in humanism. I wouldn't call myself a humanist, but Gray's account of humanism struck me as weirdly malicious and inaccurate. I suspect that Gray actually dislikes humanism for its intellectual and moral force, particularly in relation to Gray's moral nihilism, not its claimed lack of force.

Gray's essentially amoral despair is in a sense a product of belief rather than scepticism. That is, the idea that rejecting religion means rejecting all ethical ideas is essentially a religious idea, and not a product of post-religious thinking. In many respects Gray writes like a temporarily lapsed Catholic. _Straw Dogs_ shows signs of a "retreat into mysticism" phase; Gray's acceptance of Lovelock's "Gaia", Earth's supposedly intelligent and purposive biosphere, is one example of this, that sits oddly with his purported scepticism.

Finally, Gray's misanthropy and pessimism seem unconvincing, not just because they are not sustained by his arguments, but because I began to feel, as Gray's miserabilist pages wore on, that I was reading not so much a genuinely held position as a curmudgeonly pose.

Cheers indeed!

Laon

In 1838, Charles Darwin jotted in a notebook: 'He who understands a baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke'.

That would serve as a nice epigram to John Gray's book. He is an acute demolisher of our Post-Enlightenment human illusions: that reason is something definable to aim towards, that long term progress of the race is possible, that there is an individual self that can be developed over the life cycle, that morality is something innate in our psyches.

No, no, no. Humans have acted, over history, as poorly as the most violent and arbitrary of beasts because, frankly, we are beasts. This is where the post Darwin age leads us - to this. Better get used to it, and decouple yourself from your human centric world view because you ain't going to be around for long - the earth has existed long before human DNA came on the scene, and will exist for millions of years after we're gone, to face it's own fiery abolition at the hands of the exploding sun.

Gray writes in the controversial tradition of Darwin, Schopenhaeur, Hume, Burke. Sceptical, with a cold eye for deconstructing our human folly. His style is swift, brisk and illustrative, rather than deeply argued, but there is a sizable appendix at the back for those wishing to investigate his arguments further. As Will Self puts it, an apercus that is easy to read, hard to swallow.

it's encouraging that this book has elicited such strong responses from readers. and though both reviewers above state points that few would challenge, most of their criticisms reveal that they're missing the point.
first, there *are* serious philosophy texts that take more time to work through--but there are also texts that require little time. the quality of philosophy is only measured by its opacity by those heavily invested in their own status as 'philosophers'. the ability to crystalize complex notions into readable language is a talent--one that kant lacked. kant's writings were interesting in spite of their convolution, not because of it.

second, i've only read the book once, but my conclusions are that gray addresses the anthropocentric bias in how most of us consider the world--be it through political, linguistic, scientific, religious, etc. pursuits. he doesn't deny that humans are capable of tremendous beauty, nor does he write that
humans only destroy. he sees his skepticism as realism, and when one extracts this highly clever animal from its own conceptions of itself (not to mention the self-adulation evinced by creatures who see themselves as the center of the universe--eg. god created man--or as the pinnacle of earthly evolution (which also happens to be quantitatively its most destructive member), one is left with the impression that humans are another animal, tied to its own imperatives and intrinsic limitations. humans, to gray, are limited by qualities (some would say nature, i don't know what gray would call it) they have exhibited from earliest recorded history. to gray, we are an inventive product of the earth, and we will extinguish ourselves if nature doesn't help us first. some natural scientists have argued the same; perhaps that gray attacks western philosophy's obsolescence disturbs those pursuing those degrees or teaching those courses.

third, his attacks are against the notions that humans can somehow better the net sum lot of all of us. as a former 'conservative', he reveals his cynicism about the liberal project of the enlightenment with its concomitant notions of progress. he doesn't write that humans don't achieve or perform amazing things. he doesn't say that the internet is exactly like a spider's web in its physical construction. he writes that the enlightenment project that argues that technology, or a stable ethics, or future science will better the lot for the world ignores reality. one of his points is that with each advance in technology there has been an advance in the ability to destroy. another is that ethics (religious or humanist) are partially grounded in mores, which change over time. this doesn't strike me as a particularly controversial idea. nor does the notion that humans have the same drives (constructive and destructive), regardless of technological advancement, seem surprising. he takes to task the notion that we will develop a society that will be eternally more noble, just, free than what we've already had. he writes that better societies have existed, and may exist again, but everything of this sort is temporary and never universal.

i agree that his terse style is at times flippant (plus, some 'facts' are wrong;he could use a better editor), and i would have enjoyed reading him articulate more of his reasons for dismissing certain ideas/authors. but the book is a collection of "thoughts on humans and other animals", not a "treatise on humans and their role in the world". he didn't set out to write a tome, but rather a polemic. i think he succeeded in doing that much.

one more note about the reviews above: it seems to me the reviewers criticize gray for how his book doesn't reflect how they interpreted the marketing. experience in publishing teaches us that marketing departments take little input from authors.

personally, i don't find this book depressing. i'm reconciled to the insignificance of humanity in the universe. but that doesn't mean i'm apathetic or despondent. i plan to have children with the woman i just married. i plan to share the love i have with even more people: not because i think the world is getting better, but because i exist. and that is how gray ends his book. he writes that maybe the point to our existence is just to see. (i'd write 'be')

London School of Economics Professor John Gray's technique in this original and at times delightfully self-indulgent tome of shock jock philosophy works like this: Throw out a statement--the more it sounds like conventional wisdom the better--and then declare that it's a fantasy or the truth is just the opposite. Occasionally the juxtaposition is so startling that we take delight. At other times it reads like adolescent sophistry.

But no matter. (And besides who am I to know the difference?) Run the sound bites down the page and onto the next and keep them coming and, like monkeys hitting typewriter keys, sooner or later something is bound to be...well, not true but at least arresting. And contradict yourself. A lot. After all isn't existence itself a contradiction, or at least an absurdity? Why, pray tell, is there anything at all? Why isn't there nothing?

Gray doesn't ask this particular question. In fact he doesn't really ask questions so much as make assertions. What Gray has done here is write the quintessential Internet-Age book. His assertions are like those found on the World Wide Web: they run the gauntlet from the patently absurd to the obvious. And only we can decide which is which and which is in-between. There is no central authority or assumed rationality to guide us. Gray lets the chips fall where they may and he doesn't look back.

Let me begin with one of his statements that is true, or I should say, one that I agree with:

"The authority of science comes from the power it gives humans over their environment...To think of science as the search for truth is to renew a mystical faith..." (p. 20)

And now one that I disagree with:

"Death brings to everyone the peace the Buddha promised after lifetimes of striving...Buddhism is a quest for mortality." (p. 129) Actually the Buddha taught us how to live. His point is that we are always alive. That's what the symbolism of reincarnation means. We may achieve peace when we contemplate our demise, but when we're actually dead we experience neither peace nor its opposite nor anything at all. Death does not bring peace, but the anticipation may.

And here's one that startles, but like Chinese fast food, leaves one a few minutes later, dissatisfied--or its heady cynicism reverberates, like too much beer, perhaps: "The examined life may not be worth living."

Instead of acknowledging sources individually, Gray provides titles in the back of the book, organized by chapter, for further reading. For example he writes, "The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." (p. 26) This is by paraphrase from biologist Edward O. Wilson, although Gray does not acknowledge the source directly. There are no footnotes. Gray quotes and paraphrases as he sees fit. The subchapters, "The Poverty of Consciousness" and "Lord Jim's Jump" provide another example. The central idea presented, that our consciousness is just a highly reduced and after the fact construction of what we experience, comes from Benjamin Libet, who discovered the half-second gap between our experience and our awareness, filtered through works by Tor Norretranders and Antonio Damasio.

But this is okay. This is a popular book aimed at a general readership. What is original is Gray's treatment and his tone.

I think the weakest part of the book is in his misunderstanding of the purpose and goal of meditation and the Eastern interpretation of life. Gray writes: "The dissolution of self that mystics seek comes only with death." (p. 78) But what the mystic seeks is not dissolution of self, but an isolation of the true self from the contamination and distractions of society, from a self created and maintained by conditioning. Gray is closer to the truth when he writes that meditative states "are ways of bypassing self-awareness" (p. 62)--that is, the self-awareness created by the socialization process. Indeed even the self-awareness created by biological evolution (which has its own agenda, of course) must be bypassed.

Occasionally, Gray has the wrong emphasis. For example, he writes that "Nearly everything that is most important in our lives is unchosen." He gives as examples, the "time and place" of our birth, "our parents," and "the first language we speak," noting that they are ours by chance not by choice. (p. 109-110) But these things are arbitrary and in essence the same for everyone. What is really important is how we live, not what our name is. Whether we can choose how we live is another matter, of course. Since Gray makes it clear that humans are not, and cannot be, masters of their own destiny any more than other animals can, it's clear that he believes we cannot choose how to live--although I suspect he makes such choices, or acts as though he does, in his everyday life.

Sometimes in his haste to be alarming Gray is just plain wrong, as when he avers that "Modern science triumphed over its adversaries..." because its "founders were more skillful" at "rhetoric and the arts of politics." (p. 21) But what allowed science to triumph against the church and the tribe was its superior results. Only concrete results in the form of superior goods and services, and especially in the form of superior weapons and armaments, could defeat the tribal mind and the dictatorial clerics.

In closing here are some catchy and felicitous sound bites to give you a feel for Gray's style:

"Homo rapiens" (from page 151 and elsewhere: note the long "a").

"The middle class is a luxury capitalism can no longer afford." (p. 161)

"Social democracy has been replaced by an oligarchy of the rich..." (p. 162)

"A hypermodern economy has arisen from the ashes of the Soviet state - a mafia-based anarcho-capitalism that is expanding throughout the West." (p. 179)

Bottom line: definitely worth reading but with a grain of salt.

This is a critique of liberal humanism, defined as the faith in inevitable progress to a utopian world, courtesy of science, reason, technology and morality. I am not aware of any reasonable person in recent decades who has gone on record to espouse that faith and Gray does not actually quote anyone who does. That alone makes the book a sustained non sequitor, an attack on straw dummies.

Perhaps the naive belief that things can only ever get better is worthy of five minutes demolition work. However to target science, reason, technology and morality as unmitigated agents of destruction is altogether over the top, apart from being rather old hat. It is entirely appropriate to be skeptical about the human institutions of science and technology, they are of course human and fallible, as indeed we all are.

Similarly beware of moralists. But beware of people who criticise science and technology with nothing better to offer than the Gaia principle and eastern mysticism. And beware of people who suggests that morality does not matter.

To be fair to Gray, there are nuggets of sense on the book. "Today the good life means making use of science and technology - without succumbing to the illusion that they can make us free, reasonable or even sane. It means seeking peace - without hoping for a world without war. It means cherishing freedom - in the knowledge that it is an interval between anarchy and tyranny."

This is an echo of Bertrand Russell "In praise of idleness" where he wrote about the importance of knowledge that consists not only in its direct practical utility but also in the fact that it promotes a widely contemplative habit of mind. "On this ground, utility is to be found in much of the knowledge that is nowadays labelled useless."

The problem in Gray's book is to sift the nuggets of sense from the mysticism and anti-rationalism that constitute most of the contents. In some ways it reads like a personal retraction of a faith that he once held, as he grapples with the realisation of his own mortality, like an ageing hippie, or a somewhat chastened relict of the madness of the 1960s.

Gray has over a dozen books under his belt, some of them very good ones, from the days when he used to take Popper and Hayek seriously and appeared to understand what they were talking about. Now he has lapsed into errors that would fail him in Philosophy I.

"According to the most influential twentieth-century philosopher of science, Karl Popper, a theory...should be given up as soon as it has been falsified".
Well, actually, no. For Popper a theory that appears to be falsified is rendered problematic, there is no reason to 'give it up' because it may still be the best one we have.

"Philosophers have always tried to show that we are not like other animals, sniffing their way uncertainly through the world. Yet after all the work of Plato and Spinoza, Descartes and Bertrand Russell we have no more reason than other animals do for believing that the sun will rise tomorrow".
Well what about the work by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton...?

What are the positives in this collage of half-baked anthropology, animal studies, mysticicism, plus philosophical and sociological babble? The Gaia principle? The supposedly profound bottom line is to give up on thinking and purposeful activity. "Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?"

On behalf of the much maligned liberal humanists I would like to suggest that we can generate any number of useful aims in life beyond merely "seeing", whatever that means. We can adopt the reasonable and non-utopian aim of making the world a little better every day, starting with our own relations with our immediate associates. We can support learning and scholarship, and engage in the exchange of helpful commentary and criticism of ideas that we believe to be defective. We can promote critical rationalism, free trade, free speech, tolerance and political reforms, especially in the direction of the minimum state, to protect freedoms and promote peace and prosperity.

A short review in the Melbourne newspaper The Age in November 2003 prompted me to buy this book. Gray, according to this review,
"excoriates the `false comforts' of religion, environmentalism and humanitarianism.... At just under 200 pages, it's too short to sustain its own arguments but could certainly start a few fights."
The truth is, the book is an unreadable one for anyone mildly erudite. It is not a matter of the book not being long enough (as The Age reviewer wrote) to sustain its arguments. By page 58 I could read no more. Why?

To quote Gray: " Plato's legacy to European thought was a trio of capital letters - the Good, the Beautiful and the True. Wars have been fought and tyranies established, cultures have been ravaged and peoples exterminated in the service of these abstractions." pp. 57-58.

Gray's problem is: Plato NEVER wrote on the Good, Beautiful and True, the philosopher who did was Plotinus in his Enneads, written around 600 years AFTER Plato. There is no recorded war over a philosophical or religious position in the Greek world (Classical/Hellenistic/Roman) - that idea is anathema - though wars, for a multitude of other reasons, were endemic. The only law in Greek society before Christianity was that it was illegal to deny the divine. Plotinus eventually came to be adopted by the Arabs, who in Arab fashion paraphrased it and renamed the Enneads "The Theology of Aristotle". This garbled Arab misrepresentation entered Catholic (-cum-Protestant) Europe. Rewritten for Christians and founded on Jewish-based Christian principles found in the Bible that demand the killing of the those who worship other gods and hold other beliefs (Deuteronomy 7.1-6, Exodus 22.20, Deut. 18.10-12, Exodus 23.32-33, etc, etc), any Christian killings committed on behalf of Christ have nothing to do with either Plato , Plotinus, or the Greeks at all.

Having blamed Plato , Gray claims that Plato's ideas were a consequence of the alphabet; that his ideas could not have been represented in Sumerian pictograms (p. 57 - never mind that they have not yet been deciphered! Only the cuneiform has!) or Chinese script (p.57), and thus would not have been thought of(!). Gray claims that pictograms & script of the kind used for Chinese is not capable of engendering abstract thought, a bewildering claim because any writing is a symbolic abstraction of a sound (word) represented visually. Writing is an abstraction. He concludes: "Europe owes much of its murderous history to errors of thinking engendered by the alphabet." (p.58). This begs the obvious question: what explains war in pre-literate societies? As for the Greeks, he faces another problem, the pre-alphabetic Mycenaean Greeks who fought at Troy wrote in the syllabic Linear B; that is they waged war in a pre-alphabetic society.

On science he writes about, among other subjects, Galileo. Galileo, he claims, succeeded with his line of pursuit, not because of "scientific method", "but because he was able to represent the new astronomy as a coming trend in society", and that "he wrote in Italian" (p.21). Somehow, Galileo's earlier scientific achievements, like laws governing falling bodies, reached by the scientific method experiment, do not count... Obviously then Gray would also be unaware of the Greek Christian author from Alexandria Philoponus, 1000 years before Galileo, whose experiments were copied by Galileo to prove the physical laws governing falling bodies.
This book is an exasperating read. The kinds of criticisms that can be levelled against this book are monumental. This review does not even begin to address its shortcomings. Those who praise it demonstrate only that their intellectual poverty does not equip them to appreciate those insurmountable shortcomings.