While we wait for Bush to take us to the next stage in what may yet turn
into the nastiest war of all time ('cos we are really talking of a war for
those resources which are the basis of modern civilisation), we might as
well read the words of, probably, the bleakest philosopher of all time --
one John Gray, ex-Oxford don and presently Professor of European Thought at
London school of Economics.John Gray is a brilliant thinker -- so everybody agrees -- but is a total sceptic. He's savaged almost everything else so far in a stream of books, and if he lives long enough he's probably going to write a book telling everybody not to read his books because they're worthless. I'm intrigued by this fellow who is acquiring the same sort of (questionable) guru status in philosophy as Stephen Hawking has in science. In today's Independent, Will Self -- a writer who's as iconoclastic as anybody (until John Gray came along!) -- interviews Gray about his latest book, "Straw Dogs" and pronounced himself disturbed. Wow! So I thought some FWers with philosophical leanings might like to read an extract from "Straw Dogs". I'll append it below. My own criticism is that John Gray, who puts himself forward as a polymath, thus well qualified to speak on anything -- whether religion, philosophy, humanism, liberalism, economics, evolution, science and so forth (savaging them all of course) -- is, however, totally oblivious to the greatest intellectual product of the last century, viz quantum physics, and its philosophical byproducts which includes a far more constructive and hopeful, albeit mysterious, interpretation of "religion, philosophy, humanism . . . . .". But I won't go on about quantum physics and the missing element in John Gray's education. Instead, I'll just point out where John Gray trips himself up with his own words in the following extract. After stating that we are mere automatons in the whole scheme of things, he then writes in the penultimate paragraph: "We control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves." He should have had the courage of his total scepticism and written: "We control nothing of what we we most care about; all of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves." He didn't have the courage to write that, and that is what damns his whole approach. Keith Hudson <<<< Three extracts from 'Straw Dogs' Science vs Humanism Most people today think that they belong to a species that can be master of its destiny. This is faith, not science. We do not speak of a time when whales or gorillas will be masters of their destinies. Why then humans? We do not need Darwin to see that we belong with other animals. A little observation of our lives soon leads to the same conclusion. Still, since science has today an authority that common experience cannot rival, let us note that Darwin teaches that species are only assemblies of genes, interacting at random with each other and their shifting environments. Species cannot control their fates. Species do not exist. This applies equally to humans. Yet it is forgotten whenever people talk of "the progress of mankind". They have put their faith in an abstraction that no one would think of taking seriously if it were not formed from cast-off Christian hopes. If Darwin's discovery had been made in a Taoist or Shinto, Hindu or animist culture it would very likely have become just one more strand in its intertwining mythologies. In these faiths humans and other animals are kin. By contrast, arising among Christians who set humans beyond all other living things, it triggered a bitter controversy that rages on to this day. In Victorian times, this was a conflict between Christians and unbelievers. Today it is waged between humanists and the few who understand that humans can no more be masters of their destiny than any other animal. Humanism can mean many things, but for us it means belief in progress. To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals. This is the hope of nearly everybody nowadays, but it is groundless. For though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive. Darwin showed that humans are like other animals; humanists claim they are not. Humanists insist that by using our knowledge we can control our environment and flourish as never before. In affirming this, they renew one of Christianity's most dubious promises -- that salvation is open to all. The humanist belief in progress is only a secular version of this Christian faith. In the world shown us by Darwin, there is nothing that can be called progress. To anyone reared on humanist hopes this is intolerable. As a result, Darwin's teaching has been stood on its head, and Christianity's cardinal error � that humans are different from all other animals � has been given a new lease on life. Post-Modernism Post-Modernists tell us there is no such thing as nature, only the floating world of our own constructions. All talk of human nature is spurned as dogmatic and reactionary. Let us put these phoney absolutes aside, say the Post-Modernists, and accept that the world is what we make of it. Post-Modernists parade their relativism as a superior kind of humility � the modest acceptance that we cannot claim to have the truth. In fact, the Post-Modern denial of truth is the worst kind of arrogance. In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, Post-Modernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness. The idea that there is no such thing as truth may be fashionable, but it is hardly new. Two-and-half-thousand years ago, Protagoras, the first of the Greek sophists, declared: "Man is the measure of all things." He meant human individuals, not the species; but the implication is the same. Humans decide what is real and what is not. Post-Modernism is just the latest fad in anthropocentrism. At the masked ball "I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife." In Schopenhauer's fable the wife masquerading as an unknown beauty was Christianity. Today it is humanism. What Schopenhauer wrote of Kant is no less true today. As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs. In Kant's time the creed of conventional people was Christian, now it is humanist. Nor are these two faiths so different from one another. Over the past 200 years, philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error � the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals. Philosophy has been a masked ball in which a religious image of humankind is renewed in the guise of humanist ideas of progress and enlightenment. Even philosophy's greatest unmaskers have ended up as figures in the masquerade. Removing the masks from our animal faces is a task that has hardly begun. Other animals are born, seek mates, forage for food and die. That is all. But we humans � we think � are different. We are persons, whose actions are the results of their choices. Other animals pass their lives unawares, but we are conscious. Our image of ourselves is formed from our ingrained belief that consciousness, selfhood and free will are what define us as human beings, and raise us above all other creatures. In our more detached moments, we admit that this view of ourselves is flawed. Our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves. We control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves. Yet we insist that mankind can achieve what we cannot: conscious mastery of its existence. This is the creed of those who have given up an irrational belief in God for an irrational faith in mankind. But what if we give up the empty hopes of Christianity and humanism? Once we switch off the soundtrack � the babble of God and immortality, progress and humanity � what sense can we make of our lives? 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray is published by Granta, �12.99 >>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
