The Silence of Animals Hardcover – July 30, 2013

This new book by John Gray is a meditation on how we deal with the world when our faith in progress and human betterment deserts us. It explores the theme through the prisms of literature, art, philosophy, and to a lesser extent, psychology rather than being a scientific or historical study. As with all of Gray's work, it has some telling insights and observations, and ranges over a fascinating mix of the familiar and obscure to give depth and substance to his ideas.

The Silence of Animals is arranged in three parts. The first looks at the idea of progress and how people's belief in it has disintegrated when faced with human barbarity. The two world wars left ruin in their wake and Gray looks at the reactions of writers such as J G Ballard, Norman Lewis and Stefan Zweig to the rapid disappearance of civilised behaviour in the brutality of war. Barbarism can also emerge from economic crisis: the Great Depression and the inflation in inter-war Germany, and the financial crash of 2008, each destroyed the wealth of countless families. They rendered years of faith in saving and building a future utterly meaningless, even as the alchemists of finance breathed a sigh of relief over their canapés at finding their own fortunes unscathed.

Gray was previously an academic political theorist and he sees authoritarian politics, whether of the left or right, as an attempt to deny the chaos of reality and to fake a sense of order. People like certainty and the dream of a better day to come, and therein perhaps lies the appeal of those charlatans who would have us believe that they can plan and control our future.

In the end, progress is a myth because evolution is about survival, not about constant improvement. Gray characterises evolution as a process of drift rather than a rise to ever greater heights of rationality, peace and order.

In the second part of the book Gray looks at the ideas of Sigmund Freud and in particular his views on myth creation. Freud saw the internal self as forever at war between the forces of Eros (love, creativity) and Thanatos (hatred, destruction). Psychoanalysis can be seen as a process of coming to terms with this perpetual disorder. We might be driven by unconscious forces over which we have no control, but by accepting and trying to recognise them we can attain some degree of autonomy in our lives.

All our constructions of the world are myths of one kind or another. Gray rejects Jung's idea of universal myths and notes that museums are full of old gods that people once thought were eternal and immortal. Our stories about the world change all the time, as do we, and part of Freud's work was to reconcile us with our ever-emergent selves.

Science appears to be different and Gray makes a neat distinction between scientific method, which tests our beliefs against facts, and the way we usually operate which is to select the facts that reinforce our beliefs. We are an incorrigibly irrational lot. But even science is myth-like: any scientific theory only works for a certain period of time before being replaced by another or being rendered irrelevant by a new paradigm. Our understanding of the world is thus made up of changing theories and stories, often inconsistent and sometimes plain barmy, and none of them ever fully explains everything. Spending your days searching for a theory of everything? Get a life.

Given that the world is chaotic and that our stories and theories about it are patchy and ephemeral, how can we best engage with the world? This is the theme of the final section of the book. Here Gray investigates how people have sought to look at the world from different perspectives and analyses two extraordinary books by J A Baker, who tried to see the world through the eyes of animals. He also looks at how people have pursued silence and used meditation, exercises that try to take us out of the hubbub of the world and the manic chatter in our heads. The value of these activities is that they change us and our perceptions of (and enjoyment of) the world.

The world view depicted by Gray might seem to presume pessimism and often Gray's thoughts appear this way, but accepting the chaos of the world and our inability to fully grasp it can also be refreshing and liberating, and can heighten our enjoyment of ourselves, other people and the world about us. Being alive becomes interesting in itself.

There is no discussion of the French existentialist philosophers, and surprisingly no discussion of Buddhism, even though these two have a lot in common with Gray's perspective. The final section of the book felt incomplete as a result. There is also far too little about the human need for certainty in life and how this blinds us to the greater joys of the world. In the first part of the book he consigns the progress myth to the rubbish bin, but if we have to live by myths is the progress one so bad? Public policy, education systems and charitable aid are all built on the lie of progress but they have produced some positive social results. Gray never considers whether some myths might be preferable to others and how we might decide that.

There is a wealth of engrossing detail in this book, supplemented by extensive notes. His exploration of some of the lesser known byways in literature whetted my appetite to pursue them further. Even if you find Gray's views unconvincing, the journey with him is well informed and never dull. This work will inspire you to reflect on how you understand yourself and the world in which you have randomly arrived.

I was drawn to this book based upon Gray's response to Stephen Pinker's recent tome on Progress, and based upon the various articles and videos of Gray online. I have been studying the topic of progress for several decades and was interested in hearing more of his views.

The two fundamental mistakes Gray makes, are first that he never carefully defines the topic of progress, and second that he then confuses what is known as the myth of progress with the possibility and desirability of progress. These are two distinct topics, and conflating the two basically interferes with his grasp of the subject.

The myth of progress is that progress is not just desirable, but INEVITABLE, and that it comes about via rationalism, science, evolution, class revolution, freedom, divine providence or whatever. Gray rightly takes down these various myths. Progress is not inevitable, is not the same thing as evolution, and is not guaranteed via any of the above simplistic paths.

However, in throwing out the bath water of inevitability and naive explanations, he also tosses out the baby. In this case, by assaulting the silly, semi religious myth, he also dismisses the mere possibility of progress. This is the idea that progress, though rare and difficult, is both possible in some places and times and is desirable. There is a giant distinction between progress being possible and progress being inevitable.

All this confusion is possible because Gray refuses to ever fully define and flesh out his term.

Compare this to Pinker's recent book "Enlightenment Now". Pinker defines progress as human flourishing as measured by empirical gains in things people commonly want such as health, sustenance, abundance, peace, freedom, equal treatment, literacy, knowledge, intelligence, happiness, opportunity, stimulation and so on. Pinker shows that these have increased over the past 200 years globally, therefore based upon the definition of human flourishing he supplies, progress is possible and has occurred. It is not inevitable. Obviously substantially more improvement is desirable, but Pinker argues that further advance is at least possible. We can argue about his recipe for further gains, and whether we will or will not be able to actually continue to advance, but his book is extremely clear and well supported empirically.

By not defining his terms, Gray makes a total mess of the topic (I assume intellectual sloppiness not malicious desire to misinform). Instead of focusing on any possibility of progress, he constantly shows how it is not inevitable and then acts as if he has refuted the idea. He refuses to define the term, tears down obviously absurd versions and caricatures of the concept and pretends he has taken down the realistic versions.

Just about every statement and argument Gray makes is (in contrast to Pinker) unsupported with any evidence, or is supported with an anecdote or by decrying that the world is not yet perfect and thus no progress has been made (though progress clearly is distinct from perfection as anyone who actually defines the terms knows).

For example, he suggests that there has been no progress on the issue of torture, we just changed the name to "enhanced interrogation." He admits in this paragraph that "any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization" but goes on to note that advances can be lost, broken or forgotten. Fair enough, but the question remains has there been a net reduction in slavery, torture, poverty, infant death, disease, and so forth? Pinker, again, provides hundreds of pages of empirical global data with charts and graphs and trend lines. They have all improved, and by a lot. Gray just gives sweeping statements without any support, apparently hoping that his readers will just share his bias and nod along in agreement.

Slavery was widespread with significant portions of humanity in chains a hundred years ago. It was both legally and morally acceptable in most nations. Now it is rare, illegal virtually everywhere, and morally repugnant to most people. If the abolition of slavery and the advance of the civil rights movements are not progressive advances, then what is?

Other criticisms of his book are that he is confused on how evolution works (though he is right that it is distinct from progress). No evolution is not, as he suggests, primarily about drift, it is a process of variation, selection and replication which leads to adaptation and problem solving.

He suggests that nobody has come up with a unit of selection or mechanism of evolution within society. Is he unaware of the writings of Boyd, Richerson, Henrich, Fog, Mesoudi and so on? If he Is unaware, why is he writing on the topic? If he is aware, why is he not addressing their arguments and mechanisms? (And for the record, Darwin did not have or require a unit of selection when he wrote the Origin of The Species.)

Finally, his take on the possibility of "unending economic expansion" is ill informed. He sweepingly assures us that the plight of the American worker leads to "mass poverty", "permanent unemployment", and "drug dealing and sex work". Of course anyone actually familiar with economic trends knows that the GDP per capita in the US is the highest ever, and is currently about 50 times higher than the historic global average. Per capita median income has increased by about 50% since 1980, and is up sharply since the recent recession (too the highest level ever). Unemployment is currently at historic lows, and since Gray is too sloppy to provide trend data on drugs and prostitution, (frankly I have no idea if they have been increasing or decreasing long term, and neither does anyone just reading Gray), I will not address this.

As any student of economics should know, there is no intrinsic limit in the value creation potential of a market. Wealth is a measure of exchangeable problem solving ability, comprised not just of materials and energy, but also ideas. It is true there is a limit on the amount of materials and energy we can capture in the solar system (though we are surely thousands of years away from this limit), but what there is no limit on is the potential ideas and problem solving ability. There is no conservation of ideas or value principal in physics. Thus, there is no intrinsic limit on value creation or wealth for humanity.

In summary, this is an extremely non-serious book on the topic of progress. Gray fails to define his terms, or support any of his sweeping generalizations with anything other than anecdotes. He creates poorly drafted straw men then sweeps them away with unsupported arguments he hopes his readers will just accept at face value. He is confused not just on progress, but on evolution, cultural evolution and economics.

If you already agree with Gray and you want to bolster your bias on the topic, then you will enjoy this book. Otherwise, I would suggest anyone reading this book would be more misinformed on the topic after reading it than before. Thus it gets the lowest possible score.