One of my readers asked me recently for a short list of the books from my Save the World Reading List that were most influential in forming my natural/environmental philosophy. Here's what I answered:
In logical reading order:
- Full House -- Stephen Jay Gould
- When Elephants Weep -- Jeff Masson
- Freeman Dyson's Brain -- Wired Magazine
- The Story of B -- Daniel Quinn
- A Language Older Than Words -- Derrick Jensen
- The World We Want -- Mark Kingwell
- The Spell of the Sensuous -- David Abram
- The Truth About Stories -- Thomas King
- Humans in the Wilderness -- Glenn Parton
- Against the Grain -- Richard Manning
- The Commonwealth of Life - Peter Brown
- A Short History of Progress -- Ronald Wright
- (Haven't found it yet -- will report when I have)
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Well, the missing and perhaps final slot on this list has now been
filled, by London School of Economics Philosophy professor John Gray's Straw Dogs.
The book is three years old, and perhaps because some readers thought
it had something to do with the Peckinpah film of the same name, they
gave it a pass. I knew I'd found something important even before I'd
finished the Introduction of this astonishing tour de force.
The structure of the book -- a rambling but disciplined narrative of a
philosophical learning voyage, based substantially on a series of
quotes from dozens of thinkers from many different disciplines, leading
to a tentative conclusion -- is very similar to my paper How to Save the World
-- though I wouldn't presume that either the argument or breadth of
research of my work compares to Gray's. Philosophy is, after all, how
he makes his living. But I find this structure, similar as it is to a
story of personal discovery, a compelling one. Furthermore, Gray's
annotated bibliography is laid out in parallel to his story, so you can
see his stepping stones in arriving at the bleak place where his
intellectual voyage has taken him.
In a mere 200 pages, Gray lays out a courageous yet grim philosophy
that is utterly unique, and in the process quickly deconstructs and
discards all the major schools of philosophical, political, social,
economic, religious, scientific and ecological thought, from
pre-history to post-modernism. Even nihilism is debunked as naive
romantic fantasy. His thesis is stark, simple and relentless: We
humans have not changed and cannot change what we are, what we do, how
we behave or what we value. We are doomed by the coding in our DNA to
continue along our inexorable path of self-destruction, and to inflict
large-scale but ultimately transitory damage on our planet in the
process.
This view recalls Ronald Wright's wry summation of human destiny from A Short History of Progress:
It's entirely up to us. If we
fail -- if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer
sustain us -- nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes
run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.
Except that in Gray's view it is not up to us at all. Our role was cast
millennia ago, and we're merely playing it out. Quoting EO Wilson
"Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth", Gray goes on: "The
destruction of the natural world is not the result of global
capitalism, industrialization, Western civilization, or any flaw in
human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of
an exceptionally rapacious primate."
If he is correct, Gray would seem to be counseling and chronicling
nothing less than the end of philosophy, the end of the need or purpose
for studying and analyzing human thought and ideas. If what has driven
all our behaviour for all of human history is subconscious, programmed,
inevitable, what possible purpose is there for study of, value
judgements about, proposed actions in respect of, or recriminations
for, the marginal and insignificant part of humans called consciousness? It is like the royal court debating what words the king should use to order back an impending tidal wave.
In this review, I'm going to save the remarkable first chapter of Straw Dogs until last, and quote from it extensively. In that chapter, simply called The Human,
Gray puts it all out there. The remaining four chapters present a more
measured, but still breakneck, argument in support of his disdain for
the still-accepted mythologies of, respectively, philosophy, morality,
religion and technology. Where many find solace and hope in human
capacity to reason, in human standards of ethics, in faith, and in the
promise of science and 'progress', Gray finds merely illusion,
distraction, deception, and folly.
In Chapter Two Gray recounts the entire history of 'rational'
philosophy and our obsession with seeking Truth. "The truth will set
you free" the Christian bible says. But Gray says the humanist search
for Truth is wasted effort, that we would be better off looking for it
in all the animals we are slowly crowding off the planet. In his
philosophy Gray aligns himself most closely with Schopenhauer, Hume and
the Taoists, and he wades scornfully through the philosophies of
Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Spinoza, Pascal,
the Greeks, the Buddhists, the Postmodernists, the 'Cult of
Personality', 'heightened consciousness' movements, and the illusion of
'free will' ("as organisms we process 14 million bits of information
per second; the bandwidth of consciousness is around eighteen bits").
He calls the belief that we as individuals and as a species have
control of ourselves and our world The Deception.
We labour under an error. We act
in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope
with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot
shake off the sense that we are enduring selves, and yet we know we are not.
In Chapter Three Gray moves on from rational philosophy to moral
philosophy and our obsession with seeking Fairness and Justice. He
discounts morality as sheer superstition and documents the long history
of human genocide, cruelty and injustice. He shows that our concept of
justice is as ephemeral as our sense of fashion. He condemns what
morality is forcing us to try, impossibly, to do ("to live as if we
were free") and instead counsels the Taoist approach ("the good life is
only the natural life lived skilfully; it has no particular purpose,
and nothing to do with the will or trying to realize any ideal...The
core of ethics is not choice or conscious awareness, but the knack of
knowing what to do. It is a skill that comes with practice and an empty
mind; it means living effortlessly, according to our natures.") This
strikes me as entirely consistent with reconnecting with our instincts,
the knowledge that is encoded in our DNA.
Then in Chapter Four Gray turns to all the forms of religious faith,
from animism through to our modern faith in human ingenuity, science,
technology, and even post-humanism, and their incessant obsession with
Salvation.."It is rare that individuals value their freedom more than
the comfort that comes with servility, and rarer still for whole
peoples to do so", he laments. Modern man no longer really needs
salvation, and now looks to religions, old and new, as a distraction,
an entertainment. Gray is especially hard on Christianity, which he
says was novel in believing that there is only one 'true' God, and
launching hundreds of wars and atrocities in defence of that misplaced
faith. "Polytheism", he says, "is too delicate a way of thinking for
modern minds". The main difference between humans and other animals is
perhaps, he says, that they do not fear death because they are not
burdened by time and do not, like humans, "cling abjectly to life". He
is particularly disdainful of modern religions that drive us to aspire
to self-mastery and self-improvement (including many oriental
religions, the teachings of Gurdjieff, Marx and the Bolsheviks, the
Gnostics, the believers in higher consciousness from drugs, virtual
reality, 'lucid dreaming' or post-humanism, and, presumably, the even
more recent new age leaders like Wilber).
Finally in Chapter Five, Gray focuses on our most recent and now
all-consuming faith in Progress. He reiterates recent revisions in our
perception of 'prehistoric man' (expounded e.g. by Sahlins, by Quinn,
and by Manning) -- that prehistoric man's life was in fact not 'nasty,
short and brutish' but rather much healthier, freer and easier than
ours. But he ridicules those who romanticize prehistoric man, claiming
that man has been rapacious and wasteful since our first appearance on
the planet, and never lived in peaceful harmony with the rest of life
on Earth -- and never will. Our evolution from hunter-gatherer to
farmer to industrial worker to 'knowledge worker' was utterly
involuntary, a forced evolution by factors over which we had and have
no control. In our new economy, when we are no longer needed for brute
labour or even warfare, we have invented new jobs amusing each other,
entertaining and distracting ourselves from our own economic
uselessness.
Our only real religion is a
shallow faith in the future...[Meanwhile] the pressure to maintain
social cohesion is relaxed. The wealthy can pass their lives without
contact with the rest of society. So long as they do not post a threat
to the rich, the poor can be left to their own devices. Social
democracy has been replaced by an oligarchy of the rich as part of the
price of peace.
Our modern Western obsession with violence and crime, well supported by
the entertainment 'industry' and the media, stems from the need for
constant distraction from our uselessness. And the consumer society
demands "deviant and unexpected" novelties to keep us buying. All of
the counterculture myths of the last two centuries have merely fed this
boredom, this longing for action, an escape from emptiness, and these
myths have merely fueled the economy and the houses of religion
further, in self-perpetuation. Morality is once again the new novelty
of this decade. Meanwhile the new wave of political movements like Al
Qaeda operate exactly like the modern corporation they are modeled
after -- stateless, privatized, exploiting the weakness of individual
states for their own advantage, their own 'bottom line'. "[Although
caused by competitive pressure], war is often embraced as a release.
Like tyranny, it promises to cut the cord of circumstance that tethers
average humanity to its chores. As with tyranny, the promise is
fraudulent. If war is celebrated, it is because for much of humankind
it stands for a dream of freedom...Among bored consumers in rich
post-military societies, it has become another entertainment. Real war,
like smoking, has become a habit of the poor."
Truth, Morality, Salvation, Progress. If these are all illusions,
deranged fantasies without substance or value, where then do we turn
for answers? It is in the opening chapter, The Human,
where Gray reassembles and digests the arguments of the subsequent four
chapters and hones them razor sharp. I cannot pretend to be able to
distill this already highly synthesized argument any further, so here
are a bakers' dozen powerful passages from this staggering 30-page
essay-within-a-book:
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 to 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. Humanists insist that by using our knowledge we
can control our environment and flourish as never before -- a secular
version of Christianity's most dubious promise that salvation is open
to all.
James Lovelock has written: Humans on the Earth behave in some ways
like a pathological organism, or like the cells of a tumour or
neoplasm. We have grown in numbers and disturbance to Gaia, to the
point where our presence is perceptively disturbing...the human species
is now so numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady. Gaia is
suffering from disseminated primatemaia, a plague of people.
A human population of approaching 8 billion can be maintained only by
desolating the Earth. If wild habitat is given over to human
cultivation and habitation, if rainforests can be turned into green
deserts, if genetic engineering enables ever-higher yields to be
extorted from the thinning soils -- then humans will have created for
themselves a new geological era, the Eremozoic, the Era of Solitude, in
which little remains on the Earth but themselves and the prosthetic
environment that keeps them 'alive'.
[Quoting Reg Morrison, The Spirit in the Gene] If the human plague is
really as normal as it looks, then the collapse curve should mirror the
growth curve. This means the bulk of the collapse will not take much
longer than 100 years, and by 2150 the biosphere should be safely back
to its preplague population of Homo Sapiens -- somewhere between a half
and one billion.
Climate change may be a mechanism through which the planet eases its
human burden...[or] new patterns of disease could trim the human
population...War could have a major impact...weapons of mass
destruction -- notably biological and (soon) genetic weapons, more
fearsome than before...It is not the number of states that makes this
technology ungovernable. It is technology itself. The ability to design
new viruses for use in genocidal weapons does not require enormous
resources of money, plant or equipment...In part, governments have
created this situation. By ceding so much control over new technology
to the marketplace, they have colluded in their own powerlessness.
If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power
conferred on 'humanity' by new technologies will be used to commit
atrocious crimes against it. If it becomes possible to clone human
beings, soldiers will be bred in whom normal human emotions are stunted
or absent. Genetic engineering may enable centuries-old diseases to be
eradicated. At the same time, it is likely to be the technology of
choice in future genocides. Those who ignore the destructive potential
of new technologies can only do so because they ignore history. Pogroms
are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and
poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been
tyrannies, but without modern means of transport and communication,
Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags. Humanity's worst
crimes were made possible only by modern technology.
For much of their history and all of prehistory, humans did not see
themselves as being any different from the other animals among which
they lived. Hunter-gatherers saw their prey as equals, if not
superiors, and animals were worshipped as divinities in many
traditional cultures. The humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves
and other animals is an aberration. Feeble as it is today, the feeling
of sharing a common destiny with other living things is embedded in the
human psyche. Those who struggle to conserve what is left of the
natural environment are moved by the love of living things, biophilia, the frail bond of feeling that ties humankind to the Earth.
The mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment.
It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth -- and thereby to
be the agent of its own destruction. What could be more hopeless than
placing the Earth in the charge of this exceptionally destructive
species? It is not of becoming the planet's wise stewards that
Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter.
Science has been used to support the conceit that humans are unlike all
other animals in their ability to understand the world. In fact, its
supreme value may be in showing that the world humans are programmed to
perceive is a chimera.
In a competition for mates, a well-developed capacity for
self-deception is an advantage. Truth has no systematic evolutionary
advantage over error.
Humans use what they know to meet their most urgent needs -- even if
the result is ruin. When times are desperate they act to protect their
offspring, to revenge themselves on enemies, or simply to give vent to
their feelings. These are not flaws that can be remedied. Science
cannot be used to reshape humankind in a more rational mould. The
upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans cannot be other than
irrational.
[As Gould showed] Once life has emerged, it evolves by the natural
selection of random mutations. The human species is no different from
any other in being just one throw in the cosmic lottery... Man must
accept that his/her existence is entirely accidental. [Quoting Jacques
Monod] He must realize that he lives on the boundary of an alien world;
a world that is deaf to his music and as indifferent to his hopes as it
is to his suffering and his crimes.
[Referring to the ancient Chinese ritual of creating, worshipping and
then discarding straw dogs] If humans disturb the balance of Earth they
will be trampled on and tossed aside. Critics of Gaia theory say they
reject it because it is 'unscientific'. The truth is that they fear and
hate it because it means that humans can never be other than straw dogs.
Gray saves his criticism of environmentalists until later, but finds
them (us) just as foolish and unrealistic as the supporters of
religions and philosophical dogma:
We can dream of a world in which
a greatly reduced human population lives in a partially restored
paradise; in which farming has been abandoned and green deserts given
back to the earth; where the remaining humans are settled in cities,
emulating the noble idleness of hunter-gatherers, their needs met by
new technologies that leave little mark on the Earth; where life is
given over to curiosity, pleasure and play. There is nothing
technically impossible about such a world...A High-tech Green utopia,
in which a few humans live happily in balance with the rest of life, is
scientifically feasible; but it is humanly unimaginable. If anything
like this ever comes about, it will not be through the will of homo rapiens.
I accept, with great reluctance but some relief, the logic of this
argument. But I cannot help wondering if Gray threw this passage,
buried near the end of the book, down as a kind of dare, a gauntlet, a
challenge. Prove me wrong, he seems to be saying. Please.
No matter how much I accept his argument, I can still do no less than
try to prove him wrong. That is what I, perhaps, have been programmed
to do, but it changes nothing. I will try, John, to show you that, at least in this, you are mistaken.
The Introduction to this book was written a year later than the rest,
in May 2003, and it concludes with this wonderful summation of the
entire book:
Political
action has come to be a surrogate for salvation; but no political
project can deliver humanity from its natural condition. However
radical, political programmes are expedients -- modest devices for
coping with recurring evils. Hegel writes that humanity will be content
only when it lives in a world of its own making. In contrast, Straw Dogs
argues for a shift from human solipsism [belief in our aloneness and
our disconnection from everything else]. Humans cannot save the world,
but this is no reason for despair. It does not need saving. Happily,
humans will never live in a world of their own making.
Wade through the twelve readings in my critical list in the green box
at the start of this review, and you will find many diagnoses of human
nature and the human condition, and prescriptions for turning our
nature and our talents to create a Future State better than the
desperate and desolate one in which we live today. All of these
prescriptions call for some kind of collective awareness, collective
understanding, and hence collective action. Gray would have us believe
that belief in the possibility of such collective phenomena is absurd,
unwarranted, unsubstantiable, even insane. So what do we do? Gray says
to do nothing more than becoming more our animal selves -- reconnecting
with the rest of life on Earth and with our primeval senses and
instincts, getting outside our heads, coping with contingencies,
relearning to play, living in the moment, turning back to real, mortal
things, and simply seeing what is.
What we need to answer now is whether this philosophy-ending
neo-determinism just gives us a convenient excuse to stop trying to
'save the world', or whether Gray is right and we are wasting our time
and our lives trying, perhaps even making the situation worse. It is
hard to come to grips with, and accept, the conclusion that our
species' time on this planet is coming quickly and inexorably to a most
unpleasant end, that we 'alone' of the billions who have walked this
planet might actually witness, and are witnessing already the early
signs of the next great and inevitable extinction of life on our
planet. As Gray says:
Homo rapiens
is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving.
Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone Earth will
recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have
disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be
around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will
forget mankind. The play of life will go on.
But I confess, I have this strong urge to stop writing now, and to
spend the rest of the day playing with Chelsea the dog. And then to go
for a walk in the woods, and wonder.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
