Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

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The academic and author Danny Postel of the University of Denver also took issue with Straw Dogs. Postel stated that Gray's claim that environmental destruction was the result of humanity's flawed nature would be "welcome news to the captains of industry and the architects of the global economy; the ecological devastation they leave in their wake, according to Gray, has nothing to do with their exploits." [27] Postel also claimed that too much of Straw Dogs rested on "blanket assertion", and criticised Gray's use of the term "plague of people" as an outdated " neo-Malthusian persiflage about overpopulation". [27] Postel strongly condemned Gray for outlining "complete political passivity. There is no point whatsoever in our attempting to make the world a less cruel or more livable place." [27] This is the point Gray elects to miss and has elected to miss many times before. Human beings are social creatures whose sociability manifests itself in feelings of empathy and altruism. But these feelings are not always in evidence and sometimes they give way to hatred and to violence. Hatred and violence are not exceptional. History, as Gray never tires of reminding us, is strewn with the corpses of the murdered and maimed. But nor are hatred and violence the rule. And when we encounter them – sometimes, not always – our better selves are mobilised. Moreover, it is in this spirit – and not in any post-Christian attempt to take a lathe to the crooked timber of humanity – that we try to improve the lot of our species: so that Mary Turner’s descendants are not strung up and emptied of their progeny; so that orphans with tears in their unseeing eyes are taken in and given a bowl of soup; and so that our own children can have a decent education and the chance of a job at the end of it. Is this a hubristic belief in progress? The very suggestion dies on the lips. Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn’t recognise that need because they naturally revert to equilibrium whenever they’re not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement. You criticise humanism for failing to recognise its own utopian mythology, but you celebrate the value of certain myths. (You mention the stories of Icarus and Prometheus as cautionary tales against the dangers of hubris.) Is there a way to distinguish harmful myths from truthful myths, delusion from insight?

He formerly held posts as lecturer in political theory at the University of Essex, fellow and tutor in politics at Jesus College, Oxford, and lecturer and then professor of politics at the University of Oxford. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University (1985–86) and Stranahan Fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University (1990–1994), and has also held visiting professorships at Tulane University's Murphy Institute (1991) and Yale University (1994). He was Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science until his retirement from academic life in early 2008. Friedrich Hayek described Gray's 1984 book Hayek on Liberty as "The first survey of my work which not only fully understands but is able to carry on my ideas beyond the point at which I left off." [22] After a brief, unsuccessful flirtation with Blairism, Gray occupies a lonely position as a clear-eyed sceptic of the failures of globalisation. Steeped in Hobbes and Schopenhauer, he has long since recognised that all schemes to remake the world - socialism, liberalism, environmentalism - are destined to fail. Instead, we must learn to live without the consolation of religion, of scientific explanation, of any dream of the perfect society. Gray, John (2023). The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-241-55495-1. The term agonistic liberalism appears in Gray's 1995 book Isaiah Berlin. Gray uses this phrase to describe what he believes is Berlin's theory of politics, namely his support for both value pluralism and liberalism.I think many people found Straw Dogs fascinating but disturbing. I wondered if you felt the need to offer some hope to those who came away feeling battered and pessimistic. Is this what motivated the move from polemic to a more meditative mood?

Gray, John (1998). False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. London: Granta Books. ISBN 978-1-86207-023-3.

More generally, agonistic liberalism could be used to describe any kind of liberalism that claims its own value commitments do not form a complete vision of politics and society, and that one instead needs to look for what Berlin calls an "uneasy equilibrium" between competing values. In Gray's view, many contemporary liberal theorists would fall into this category, for instance John Rawls and Karl Popper. [ citation needed] Reception [ edit ] Acclaim [ edit ]

Among philosophers, he is known for a thoroughgoing rejection of Rawlsianism [ further explanation needed] and for exploration of the uneasy relationship between value pluralism and liberalism in the work of Isaiah Berlin. [7] The globe is indeed a grim place. But the blistering eccentricity of this polemic feels more like a symptom than a solution. Gray, the gloom-ridden guru, is just the free-marketeer fallen on hard times. The iron determinism of this book is the flipside of its author's previous love affair with freedom. In its histrionic desperation, Straw Dogs is a latter-day version of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and just as one-dimensional. Gray, John (2016). The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-241-95390-7.Gray believes that our innate need to explain mortality and suffering with imagination and myth is far too fundamental. “I don’t have an idea of God or anything but I find the idea that you could wipe the slate clean of that impulse to be ridiculous. I once met in America a Christian fundamentalist, who told me in all seriousness that if young people were brought up in a completely chaste environment, they wouldn’t experience sexual urges until they got married.” He laughs loudly. “That’s exactly what Dawkins thinks about religion. Myth-making has been a part of every single human culture in history, why would we imagine that it is disappearing from our own?”