Review by New York Times Review
"In the most general terms," he tells us, "humanism is the idea that the human animal is the site of some kind of unique value in the world." "A related aspect of humanism is the idea that the human mind reflects the order of the cosmos." "A third aspect of humanism is the idea that history is a story of human advance, with rationality increasing over time." Gray rejects all three of these beliefs, along with the pretension of humanism to offer a scientifically respectable replacement for religion: "In a strictly naturalistic view - one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm - there is no hierarchy of value with humans somewhere near the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with its own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science." Gray admires pessimists like Schopenhauer, Conrad and Freud, who find the sources of barbarism and cruelty in human nature, are not surprised by the continuing horrors of history and do not expect things to get better. Humanity's historical record provides plenty of material for such a view; one has only to read the news every day. Yet those who have more hope for humanity than Gray are not unaware of the facts. It is a question of interpretation. From Gray's point of view, Enlightenment figures like Kant and John Stuart Mill, who evoke better human possibilities, are purveying a consoling myth. From the opposite point of view, Gray is merely helping himself to the cut-rate superiority of the confirmed cynic. The question Gray poses is of fundamental importance, so one wishes the book were better. It is not a systematic argument, but a varied collection of testimonies interspersed with Gray's comments. Half of "The Silence of Animals" consists of quotations, some of them very long, from dozens of authors - some prominent, like Koestler, Orwell, Borges and Beckett, some deservedly obscure. This seems an indolent method of writing, though Gray does get off some good aphorisms of his own: "To suppose that the myth of progress could be shaken off would be to ascribe to modern humanity a capacity for improvement even greater than that which it ascribes to itself." "The needy animal that invented the other world does not go away, and the result of trying to leave the creature behind is to live instead with its ghost." The book consists of three parts. The first deals mainly with the supposed myth of human progress, the second with the disposition of humans to mythologize themselves and the world through fictions; the third proposes an alternative of pure contemplation that just lets the world be. That is the meaning of the title: we are invited to become more like other animals, freed of the perpetual need for commentary, understanding and transcendence. The content of the second section, "Beyond the Last Thought," is exemplified by the following mindless declaration: "Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world." There is also a murky discussion of language and its relation to reality that reveals how little Gray understands the depth and difficulty of the subject. On the great philosophical question of how our minds have enabled us to create the remarkable edifice of scientific knowledge, he has nothing to offer. He cites Wallace Stevens in support of the need for fictions to appease our attachment to belief. But the bare insistence that our minds do not reflect "the order of the cosmos" is not enough to deflect attention from something about the power of human reason that evidently demands to be explained. Gray's skepticism about the value of humanity and its hopes for progress deserves more attention. "Science and the idea of progress may seem joined together, but the end result of progress in science is to show the impossibility of progress in civilization," he writes. "Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same." One has only to think about the history of the past hundred years to see how scientific progress can proceed alongside moral and political barbarism. How can we defend the humanistic belief in progress against this record? It is important to keep in mind that the progress hoped for is not a transformation of human nature. We can assume that people's innate capacities and dispositions haven't changed significantly in the course of recorded history, nor will they change in the next millennium or two. Evolution works more slowly than that. The question concerns cultural progress. Clearly science and technology have put extraordinary knowledge and power at the command of beings who come into the world with the same brains and mental faculties as humans born 5,000 years ago. Any victory over our species' destructive tendencies will likewise have to come from institutional and cultural development. We know what humans are capable of: in the wrong circumstances and with the wrong formation, they can behave monstrously. The hope for progress can consist only in the belief that there is some form of collective human life in which the capacity for barbarism will rarely find expression, and in which humans' creative and cooperative potential can be realized without hindrance. Gray regards such hope as Utopian, but it can be supported both by experience and by reflection. Moral and political progress is inevitably more difficult than scientific progress, since it cannot occur in the minds of a few experts but must be realized in the collective lives of millions; but it does happen. EXPERIENCE shows that some societies are much more decent than others, and that in fits and starts, cruelty, oppression and discrimination have become on balance less acceptable over time. One notable piece of evidence is the general success of Kant's prediction, made in 1795, that democracies would not go to war with one another. The reflective grounds for hope come from the moral sense itself. Most human beings would like to find standards for individual conduct and social institutions that reasonable persons could agree on. Although they now disagree, they are prepared to argue with one another in an effort to resolve those disagreements. Gray thinks the pursuit of convergence on standards is a delusion, kept alive in the face of repeated failure by cognitive dissonance. But his own pessimism seems more willful than the hope he condemns. It is true that we are faced with a secular version of the problem of evil : how can we expect beings capable of behaving so badly to design and sustain a system that will lead them to be good? Gray is right that some of the attempted solutions to this problem have been catastrophic. But there have also been great advances. The common desire for justice makes it unreasonable to abandon the search or the social and political experiments, now extending to international institutions, that give it concrete form. Gray thinks the belief in progress is fueled by humanists' worship of "a divin-ized version of themselves." To replace it he offers contemplation: "Contemplation can be understood as an activity that aims not to change the world or to understand it, but simply to let it be." Though he distinguishes this from the ideal of mystical transcendence toward a higher order of being, it, too, seems more like a form of escape than a form of realism. Hope is a virtue, and we should not give it up so easily. Thomas Nagel's most recent boote is "Mind and Cosmos.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 7, 2013]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Gray (Straw Dogs), emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, carves a winding path through 20th century intellectual history to build an attack on liberal humanism, and questions the assumptions that humans cling to as proof of our inherent goodness and perfectability. Drawing on a history of atrocities, Gray asserts that "civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism." He suggests that modern society's vehement belief in historical progress comes from the pairing of a Socratic faith in reason with a Christian notion of salvation. To counter these myths, Gray constructs his own pantheon of "thinkers who were not afraid to doubt the worth of thought," drawing upon philosophers and poets who point to how "life can be lived well without metaphysical comfort." The result is a constellation of ideas that resist order, salvation, and the primacy of rationalism. Although his vision seems closer to some thinkers than others-he returns repeatedly to Wallace Stevens and spends a great deal of time reenvisioning Freud-Gray describes each of his guiding lights, addressing his or her conceptual limitations before moving on. The result is a work of modern philosophy that is no less readable and compelling for being rigorously bleak. Agent: Tracy Bohan, the Wylie Agency. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Another bucket of cold water splashed in the face of idealism by Gray (European Thought/London School of Economics; Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, 2007, etc.), this time focused on humankind's stubbornly feral nature. The author opens with series of stories about human atrocity, drawn from both fiction (Koestler, Conrad) and fact (Europe in the world wars), as if to shock readers into recognizing that the notion of human progress is bunk. "There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized," he writes. "There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself." It's a persuasive argument, though Gray doesn't attack it with the rigor of a philosopher so much as with the breadth of a well-traveled literary scholar, drawing from John Ashbery and Sigmund Freud as much as Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. He connects the idea that mankind is progressively becoming more civilized with other long-lived religious myths (indeed, he describes it as largely a function of Christianity), but this is not another entry in the "angry atheist" literature, and he's not interested in proofs for or against God. In recognizing that our lives are constructed on fictions, he writes, we acquire a degree of freedom not provided by baseless optimism. He points to the case of British author Llewelyn Powys, gravely ill for much of his adult life, who threw off his sexual and religious shackles and determined to live happily and free of delusions. Gray doesn't bother with the moral complications of such hedonism; he seeks only to demolish moral certainties, not to reckon with their replacements. However cold his perspective, though, the author brings a liveliness to his prose, augmented by the top-shelf authors he quotes. The world is all chaos, Gray wants us to know, but he has a good time delivering the message.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
