Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

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Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

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Drawing on a wide range of sources, from science to fiction to more speculative theories such as Gaia (the belief that the planet is a self-regulating organism), Straw Dogs unfurls in a series of numbered paragraphs. The style is terse and pithy; sometimes bold assertion supplants argument and there is repetition, overstatement and too much direct quotation from the work of EO Wilson and others. But there are moments of beauty and insight, too, and disgust at the excesses of history - the wars, destruction, the ideological follies. BBC Radio 4 – A Point of View – Episodes by date, November 2014". bbc.co.uk. BBC . Retrieved 28 November 2014. Among philosophers, he is known for a thoroughgoing rejection of Rawlsianism [ further explanation needed] and for exploration of the uneasy relationship between value pluralism and liberalism in the work of Isaiah Berlin. [7]

Central to the doctrine of humanism, in Gray's view, is the inherently utopian belief in meliorism; that is, that humans are not limited by their biological natures and that advances in ethics and politics are cumulative and that they can alter or improve the human condition, in the same way that advances in science and technology have altered or improved living standards. [11] Gray, John (2009). False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (Rev.ed.). London: Granta Books. ISBN 978-1-84708-132-2.George Crowder (2006). "Gray and the Politics of Pluralism". Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. 9 (2): 171–188. doi: 10.1080/13698230600655008. S2CID 144224371. BBC Radio 4 – A Point of View, Greece and the Meaning of Folly". Bbc.co.uk. 21 August 2011 . Retrieved 9 August 2013. Gray has consistently voted flexibly, for what he sees as the lesser of two political evils at any political moment. “Had I been around, I would have strongly supported the Attlee government in 1945,” he says, but by the 1970s, he believed that postwar Labour settlement had become unwieldy and corrupt. Setting himself against most of the university academy, he supported Thatcher as a necessary corrective in British political history. “But then it turned into another ‘universal project’, certainly by 1989. And I would say I started jumping off in about 1987.” He was in favour of New Labour for a while, before abandoning the idea of that project for the same reasons. Humanism is not science, but religion — The post-Christian faith that humans can make a world better than any in which they have so far lived.”

Gray, John (2004). Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions. London: Granta Books. ISBN 978-1-86207-718-8. This is the point Gray elects to miss and has elected to miss many times before. Human beings are social creatures whose sociability manifests itself in feelings of empathy and altruism. But these feelings are not always in evidence and sometimes they give way to hatred and to violence. Hatred and violence are not exceptional. History, as Gray never tires of reminding us, is strewn with the corpses of the murdered and maimed. But nor are hatred and violence the rule. And when we encounter them – sometimes, not always – our better selves are mobilised. Moreover, it is in this spirit – and not in any post-Christian attempt to take a lathe to the crooked timber of humanity – that we try to improve the lot of our species: so that Mary Turner’s descendants are not strung up and emptied of their progeny; so that orphans with tears in their unseeing eyes are taken in and given a bowl of soup; and so that our own children can have a decent education and the chance of a job at the end of it. Is this a hubristic belief in progress? The very suggestion dies on the lips. I think many people found Straw Dogs fascinating but disturbing. I wondered if you felt the need to offer some hope to those who came away feeling battered and pessimistic. Is this what motivated the move from polemic to a more meditative mood? Humans cannot live without illusion. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism.” Gray became one of the most influential of all so-called new Right thinkers, an advocate of free markets, limited government and social liberalism. But his intellectual journey, in contrast to so many ideologues of the counter-revolution, did not stop there: he soon became one of the most penetrating critics of the dogmatism of the Thatcher years and of the wider Conservative failure.Gray predicted the election victory of Trump in 2016 for something like the same reasons – “the feeling of abandonment, and disrespect in large parts of the working population” had to go somewhere – and suggests that even in the event of a Biden victory next month, those forces will not be silenced. Human beings, particularly in extremis, should never be expected to make rational choices. “As Bertrand Russell pointed out, the first world war, when it started, was welcomed largely as an interruption of boredom.” At once daunting and enthralling, Gray's remarkable new book shows us what it would be like to live without the distraction of consolations.” — Adam Phillips John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, (Granta Books 2002), p. 12. ISBN 1-86207-512-3 It is a most un-British experiment, owing more in influence and ambition to the great continental tradition of the philosophical aphorism and gnomic utterance, as perfected by Pascal, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and the French-Romanian nihilist EM Cioran, than it does to the arid language games of the Anglo-American tradition.



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