Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals 
by 

John N. Gray

 

Hemlock for the Masses

Straw Dogs is an intellectual meal and a half to digest. And it’s a fusion of styles and subjects that makes it a cuisine awkward to classify - classical philosophy, sociology, technological analysis and forecasting, with a soupçon of New Age mysticism. Having just had another substantial meal in Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God, which uses some of the same ingredients (with an extra helping of philosophy and hold the New Age), I feel compelled to compare the two.

Both books cover the same ground - the 18th century Enlightenment and its effects on modern culture. And both books reach similar conclusions - that the rationalism of the Enlightenment project has reached a philosophical as well as practical dead-end in the 21st century. And they appear to provide similarly vague suggestions about what to do about the intellectual situation - Gray retreating from his youthful right-wing free market liberalism and Eagleton from his left-wing dogmatic Marxism. They seem to have met at some mid-point around the idea of classical tragedy as an expression of our current intellectual state. Not that either author would acknowledge their commonalities. Gray thinks Eagleton is a closet religious fundamentalist. Eagleton thinks Gray is an ill-educated nihilist.

Gray looks forward pessimistically into a world of technological chaos and environmental ruin. His subject is homo rapiens, that species of animal which doesn’t think it’s an animal. This species, us, has come to dominate the planet and in all likelihood will destroy itself through its inveterate penchant for self-delusion. “Humans cannot live without illusion. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism.” 

According to Gray, homo rapiens literally has bet its collective farm on a variety of illusory ideas: God, Truth, Progress, Morality, Science, Purpose, and Meaning to name just a few. However none of these have proven either permanent or functional. The reason for their failure is not merely that they have all been the result of a misguided species-hubris, but also that they do not conform to the demands of Nature, that ultimate arbiter of intellectual taste. Gaia, the living soul of the planet, will not be mocked

Eagleton on the other hand looks backwards with an implicit optimism even in the throes of his frequent sarcasm. He has a lot less to say about anthropology than Gray and a lot more to say about the sequence of intellectual developments in and after the Enlightenment. He perceives a trajectory which has gone awry but which is correctable. Eagleton agrees with Gray about both the incompleteness of the Enlightenment as well as the resulting problem of fideistic humanism. He even recognizes the same human flaw which is its source: “Man is a fetish filling the frightful abyss which is himself. He is a true image of the God he denies.”

Stylistically the two writers depart radically. Eagleton writes with elegance and wit, packing every paragraph with philosophical allusions and subtle qualifications. He is a careful writer who understands the complexities of his subject (‘on the one hand, on the other... on the sixteenth hand’) Gray doesn’t write that way, or as well. He is austerely managerial (‘point one, point two... point ninety six’), making his case brick by intellectual brick without hesitation or qualification. Gray is not, therefore, nearly as academic as Eagleton but he’s a far more effective arguer of his case. The reader knows his point of view and can follow it step by step. 

Even more important, Gray doesn’t disintegrate into Eagleton’s anemic spiritual nostalgia. For Gray, the situation is as bad as it appears. There is absolutely nothing to have faith in - not in organized religion certainly, but neither in reason, nor art, nor pleasure, nor justice, nor least of all some inner voice which suggests some other reality across a metaphysical divide. Salvation for Gray is one of those illusions that nostalgic intellectuals crave. Eagleton’s hints that there is something we don’t yet have sight of that could pull us out of the fire.

Ultimately, however, it is clear that Gray is an exponent of Natural Law. This is a highly dangerous intellectual stance since it allows conclusions based on whatever presumptions one makes about what is natural (See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... for some of the history and consequences of these presumptions). For example, by relegating morality to the realm of the unnatural, Gray is implicitly promoting violence. While an ethic of civilized justice may well be nothing more than a shared fiction and convention, I think it’s clear that it is also far more life-affirming than the alternatives. Morality is indeed an invention of human society. And it may well be unnatural (although this is difficult to prove since it arises from natural human creatures). Perhaps moral civilization is what the religious-minded call a state of grace.

So you choose your poison - Eagleton, the philosopher of culture, who uses cultural analysis to demonstrate the deficiencies of culture without a divine presence; or Gray, the philosopher of nature, who uses a decidedly religious concept of nature to demonstrate its brutal disregard for its creatures. It seems to me that it would require a considerable faith to drink hemlock on the basis of either one.