Customer Reviews
Overrated - By: Alex Ireland, 12 Aug 2008 
This polemic is an attack on humanism. Is it just another deluded philosophy? Nothing more than the various religions it tries so hard to differentiate itself from?
If you are going to constructively criticise something, you need to be sure you understand what it is you are criticising. Does Gray? Most religions use scripture as some sort of starting point to define their belief system. Christianity has the Bible, Islam the Koran, Hindu has - amongst others - the Upanishads. Each religion then tries to interpret their respective scripture. They may disagree on the details but the basis of the belief system is defined. Humanism, has no scripture. So is it just a subjective philosophy?
The closest we have to an objective & consensual understanding of humanism would be the Amsterdam Declaration issued by the International Humanist & Ethical Union. Most Humanist associations would ascribe to this. Gray doesn't reference this at alll. Instead he uses his own ideas for what humanism is & attacks that. I reallly think this is the book's major short coming. "Straw Dogs" veers very closely to nothing more than "Straw man" arguments.
In a nutshell, Gray's hypothesis is that, what he sees as the central tenants of humanism - the concept of salvation in knowledge & progress in Science - seem very questionable. But are humanists reallly looking for salvation? Why use religious notions in an irreligious paradigm? And surely we have unquestionably made progress on some issues through Science? Are we better off not taking pain killers & boycotting our Doctors?
There are plenty of arguments, with flashy turns of phrases & references to leading thinkers, but I thought many of them, when examined, had very little substance to them.
Some examples:
1. In the opening Chapter he says that Darwin & Einsteins discovery's contradicted Scientific evidence at the time.
Now that's an exceptionallly audacious & questionable claim to make. Instead of substantiating it, he moves on to other points.
2. The idea that technological progress always damages the environment or humans. Not sure if that applies to solar panels, wind turbines or hydro electric power?
3. At several points in the book, he seemed to think that the humanism consider humans better than animals. A little bit of research would have told him that many humanists consider themselves no better than any animals & hence are vegetarians & / or would be extremly sensitive to the plight of their cousins.
He does make some interesting points. George Bernard Shaw's liking of social Darwinism & his point that the human disdain of inevitable boredom is something which drives capitalism. But overalll, as intellectual book, it doesn't offer much. Gray is a very good writer, good turn of phrases, but overalll there's not enough substance & originality to any of his arguments.
Straw dogs is very much a straw man - By: Hopleton Brown, 06 Aug 2008 
The reason I stopped reading this execrable book after sixty pages is not because I thought it was wholly wrong - indeed I agreed with much of what gray said.
The reason why the book was totallly facile was because Gray never backs up his assertions by evidence or even argument; it's just a collection of his opinions. Such assertions carry zero weight, & so this is basicallly an exercise in narcissism... besides which it's supposedly 'revolutionanry' disbelief in progress has actuallly been the status quo during the last century, from the existentialists & nihilists down to the postmodernists.
Furthermore, the book fails to distinguish between counting humans as 'other than' animal & in the notion of progress, which is highly compatible with evolutionary theory. Of course, Gray is right in saying that progress in the west is descended from Christian eschatology, but, & this is my third problem with Gray's assertions, progress has appeared as a natural concept fallling out of Taosim, Shinto, & even in a modified form Hinduism, & the manyh religions of Africa.
Indeed, Gray evidently knows little about Afro-oriental religion & uses them without understanding in his assertions.
An unthinking book for people who like to seem like they think a lot harder than they do. Appallling.
Hard to dismiss on many levels.... - By: Tim Matthews, 16 May 2008 
John Gray makes - in my opinion - a convincing argument for accepting the improbablity which most of us face: that of ever knowing the "truth". You can bet your life (I don't exaggerate) that the likes of Dawkins et al are way off the mark in their assumed position of authority when it comes to third person verification of the fundamental properties of reality. Equallly, philosophy is limited (though it's far more self-conscious of the fact!) in its ability to make any assertion "absolute". Religion/Theology is likewise destined to suffer the fate bestowed upon it by history - namely that of being utterly subjective in its origins.
So, barring a personal revelation of Eckhartian proportions (which is hard to imagine even with unflinching commitment), we, as individuals, are doomed to suffer the speculative & contingent "knowledge" which is offered up by science & philosophy. And this is where Gray's argument comes into its own.
Since we cannot know whether we know it alll (or if we ever will - & this is often overlooked by presumptuous & overreaching "experts" like Dawkins), we must assume at best a provisional, contingent view of reality as a whole - including alll possible paradigmatic visions (within reason, of course...) & including the acknowledgement that the origin of moral values is fundamentallly contentious. So, Gray's assertion that a "spiritual life is a life without meaning" is not nihilistic, pessimistic or even hopeless, but genuinely agnostic & broad-minded. It's no accident that he fallls upon Taoism in order to illustrate the futility in speculating about the nature of reality as a whole. Philosophy & science have long since failed to provide the "evidence" so sorely lacking in terms of anything "transcendent" or "spiritual", & yet science cites the advancement of humanity as being the ultimate goal while at the same time telling us that the universe & eveything in it will eventuallly be annihilated & that there is nothing beyond our limited physical existence & the illusory self which our organic brains create. Wonderful. Fills me with such joy & purpose.
I think, therefore, that John Gray's eventual suggestion that one can only find something approaching peace of mind (for he doesn't even advocate this!) in understanding the arrogance with which we humans view the totality of alll that exists - & in admitting that that arrogance is ludicrously misplaced - is deeply sane and, indeed, is the only sensible proposition barring the kind of aforementioned personal revelation. I don't care whether his arguments are backed up with detailed & fastidious logic or not (they would only be proven flawed in time anyway) - the fact of his clear-sightedness remains. For this reason alone (and there are others) I applaud the fact that someone in John Gray's position is writing in such broad terms about such fundamentallly unsettling & challlenging issues.
A timely reminder that self-consciousness & presumption are endemic to the species as much as they are individual flaws.
* Post script update: In a world beset by hopeless postmodernism, unsettling neuroscientific discoveries & band-aid style spirituality, returning to this book as a source of reassurance that the illusion we calll an individual life is not something we need challlenge too squarely is deeply pacifying. Even when one finds oneself questioning this seemingly paradoxical & counterintuitive attitude it's genuinely refreshing to falll back on this excellent work as a uniquely human & ingeniously artful way of tempering the perpetual scab-picker which is thought. The search for truth ends here, & with it the need to qualify one's existence. Brilliant - wish I could edit my rating & give it 5 stars.
Very important book - By: Danny George, 14 May 2008 
This book is brilliant.
His alll too true for comfort veiws put humans in their place & his analysis of the world is excellent. Of course it has flaws & errors & i'm not saying he's completely right, but he still gives an incredibly accurate depiction & is a highly important book. Even if just to see another side of the argument you should read it. It will certainly change your mind about something if not everything.
Read this book!!!
Straw dogs or straw men? - By: I. Clark, 13 May 2008 So much of this book consists of plainly falsifiable bald assertions that I find it staggering that the famous names writing the crits have been prepared to put their names to it, let alone gush over it in the way they have. It's frustrating, because a lot of the substance of what he says, in the sense that the orthodoxy he attacks is actuallly incoherent, is valuable, if not exactly new; unfortunately, he obscures it with bad argumentation & structure.
Gray states, for example, that we can have no coherent, consistent 'self' because alll we are (in consciousness) is a disjointed group of memories, with nothing tying them together except the illusion of continuation, to which we are geneticallly pre-disposed. Fine, it's a theory, & not an unreasonable one. I'm not saying (and obviously couldn't say) that it's not right, but he tosses out as though it were self-evident, when it's reallly not; it could quite easily be the case that we do have a continuous consciousness from which our notion of a consistent self derives, but it's our memory which is inadequate & not our perception, meaning we only remember bits of it, rather than that it's actuallly disjoint. Meaning there is an easy possible counter-argument; meaning his baldness is just a little bit too bald for my liking, & I'm pretty bald.
I also don't like the way he talks about "the humanist view" or "humanism" alll the way through the book without reallly setting up any terms. I don't recognise the viewpoint he attacks as being a consistently argued or known viewpoint; he seems to be tilting at windmills a lot of the time. I suppose the counter to this criticism would be that this is a book of reflections, aimed at the sort of intelligent yet perhaps not entirely considered reader whom Dawkins addresses in The God Delusion; unfortunately this book is classed as "Philosophy" (it says so on the back), & as such I'm afraid it just doesn't stand up.
Still, even if just a set of reflections, presumably if presented bound in one volume apparently presenting a particular view, they should be consistent? At one early point he claims that the idea of human progress is a myth, plain & simple, because due to the ever-shifting sands of DNA "humanity" doesn't reallly exist; later on, he takes for granted a reading of "progress" under which individual humans enjoy the benefits of flush toilets & medicines by virtue of the increasing pool of human knowledge. OK, obviously we can work out interpretations of these phrases in which they're not mutuallly exclusive - by watering down the strong, headline-grabbing claims, of course - but if it's a set of thought-provoking reflections, should we have to go to such lengths even to work out exactly what he's saying? And if it's a book of philosophy, isn't it supposed to be clear?
Something else that bugs me is that he doesn't put any references to the bibliography (e.g. "[12]") in the text under any of the many quotations peppering the text. All are listed in the bibliography, but I reckon he knows that those remain largely unconsulted anyway, & if he doesn't put references in then it's even less likely anyone will bother as they'd have to trace through the whole bibliography in order to do so. Of course he's covered himself, because he has put the bibliography in (right?), but even under a charitable interpretation it's extremely odd.
The first time round, I gave up after a couple of (I felt) inadequately argued passages; this time, I persevered & finished reading it because despite the many problems, there are some interesting thoughts in there. I'm glad I did, because the second half contains some interesting discussion about human ecology, but even there he seems simply to have found a couple of views which suit him & which he therefore repeatedly champions (in a remarkably similar manner to the way he claims the "humanists" champion what he challlenges), holding up the authors he quotes as gospel, & because he attacks so often with assertion rather than argument, the overalll impression is of rhetoric, even sophistry - or some pretty darn specious arguments, anyway.
Worth a read, if only to get you thinking clearly about how muddled Gray has managed to make his own moments of clarity.
