Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (Paperback)

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 moulds.

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 ago, 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 yourself and your universe...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.

That said, if you’re prepared to do some thinking of your own, Straw Dogs often makes for an exciting and stimulating read.

Gray’s opening gambit is that humans are simply the most evolved animals, rather than (as Christians, Jews, Muslims and others would have it) something created by God quite separately from the beasts. Gray mocks those atheists who continue this tradition of seeing other animals quite separately from humans, but spends the whole book repeating this mistake himself!

We learn that termite colonies respond to outside stimuli and adapt to their environments by working as a whole, leaving individual termites with no sense of self. Okay. But then we’re told this means only humans have a sense of self, as if what’s true of termites is true of all other animals. And so it goes on, with Gray continually lumping all other animals together in an attempt to separate man from the beasts in the same way as those he initially condemns.

Yet there is insight trying desperately to get out. If Gray had developed his idea, he may have suggested that termites represent an extreme in which a sense of community is absolute and the self non-existent. Developing this idea further, he may have considered that other animals (Iberian Lynx, perhaps) appear to have an extreme sense of self, but little or no sense of community. He may have concluded that there a continuum on which all species, including humans, may be placed. He may have excitedly asked what other measures might be developed from studying other animals to help us better understand the human animal.

Sadly, Gray fails to develop this or any other thoughts. So Straw Dogs is a collection of jumping off points: unfinished ideas to stimulate great debates.