Straw Dogs is
the title of a Sam Peckinpah film and of a book by John Gray.
John Gray is professor of European Thought at The London School of Economics, London (51 degrees North, 0 degrees West). The reader observes, after finishing Straw Dogs, that John Gray doesn't think much of European thought.
Straw
Dogs
is
a
brisk, lively, yet curiously enervating
read, a vivid swirl through philosophy,
animal behaviour
and popular
culture.
Gray
is
a big fan of arch-pessimist Schopenhauer.
Like
other animals, we are embodiments of universal Will, the struggling
suffering energy that animates everything in the world.
Gray
is good when quoting
voraciously
from,
and commenting quirkily upon, the work of dead philosophers.
He has a winning Sunday paper/colour supplement style, used to
telling
effect in snatches of writing that are robust and catchy. It is
highly readable pop-philosophy at its best, especially when nailing the myth of perpetual progress.
The idea of
progress is only the longing for immortality given a techno-futurist
twist.
The
technological pursuit of immortality is not a scientific project. It
promises what religion has always promised – to give us freedom
from fate and chance.
Gray is astutely
accurate in his delineation of the cult of Christianity as the
mid-point between Greek philosophy and the Enlightenment in the
series of myths we use to make sense of the here and now and to make some sense of hope and possibility for the future.
After
all, there's never been a kingdom given to so much bloodshed as that
of Christ.
That's
Montesquieu, isn't it?
Oh,
really? Who's he?
Somebody
well worth reading.
Gray
has no time for moral philosophy. The section The
Vices of Morality
is the most trenchant in the book and he has a right go at Socrates.
We
think of morality as set of laws or rules that everyone must obey,
and as a special sort of value, which takes precedence over every
other.
The
reader senses
that Gray is less secure when relying on his own invention
and concludes that, after all the fireworks and the allusions, Gray is simply
a downbeat
Malthusian of the old school; every problem in the world is due
to over-population and the only solution is the
mass
annihilation of many
of Gray's fellows, which is likely
anyway as we are homo
rapiens and
killing is what we are
good at.
The reader notes
that Gray does not offer himself, his family, friends and colleagues
as members of the species to be taken out. Gray reserves that role
for a generalised body referred to as 'the poor', who, as always in
such works, are elsewhere, never in the world of the writer.
Images of the Sunday
supplement magazine come to the reader's mind. There is a centre fold
spread of aching text and stunning photos of the horrors of war, the
devastations of famine or the trauma of an industrial catastrophe,
such as in Dhaka (23 degrees North, 90 degrees East) recently.
And following this,
there is the high-gloss photo of a luxury saloon car or a watch of
improbable ostentation or even a grotesquely sleek and powerful
racing yacht. The Sunday supplement tells us that believing the
dreams of their advertisements is the way to confine the horrors of
the world elsewhere. The choice is ours.
All the grand
narratives get the Gray treatment and are dismissed: Western and
Eastern philosophies (the Eastern ones, especially Chinese and
Japanese, fare slightly better), the Homeric Greek ideas, the
Socratic Greek ideas, Christianity, the Enlightenment, Marxism,
Fascism and Stalinism.
Notably, the current
dominant narrative - a globalised casino-capitalism – is not
treated quite so forcefully. This surprises the reader given that
Gray works in an academic institution which has as a motto rerum
cognoscere causa (to know the cause of things). As ever, what you
see depends on where you look from.
The reader plans to
read Gray's first book: False Dawn: The Delusions of Global
Capitalism and notes that it is not sufficient to base everything on contingency and a deterministic, cyclical, even
downwardly spiralling, fate, drawing us to destruction.
We are contingent,
rapacious, social animals, with choices, if not purposes and aims.
The reader is left
wanting more than Gray's concluding note.
Can we think of
the aim of life as being simply to see?
What you see depends
on where you stand. Gray's vantage is
metropolitan, academic and wealthy.
His book is
stirring, readable and the epitome of I'm-alright-jackery.
Straw
Dogs:
book; John Gray; Granta Books: London; 2002
Straw
Dogs:
film; Sam Peckinpah; ABC Pictures; Los Angeles; 1971
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