Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

Product Information

This is not, Gray insists, anthropomorphism. Rather, ‘Baker tried the experiment of deanthropomorphizing himself.’ I think it would be more accurate to say that whatever the author thought he was doing, what he actually did was to use the falcon as a channel for his own misanthropy. Or perhaps what we have here is not quite anthropomorphism and not quite misanthropy but a combination of the two: an instance of what we might call ‘misanthropomorphism’. Gray believes that our innate need to explain mortality and suffering with imagination and myth is far too fundamental. “I don’t have an idea of God or anything but I find the idea that you could wipe the slate clean of that impulse to be ridiculous. I once met in America a Christian fundamentalist, who told me in all seriousness that if young people were brought up in a completely chaste environment, they wouldn’t experience sexual urges until they got married.” He laughs loudly. “That’s exactly what Dawkins thinks about religion. Myth-making has been a part of every single human culture in history, why would we imagine that it is disappearing from our own?”

In 2002 Straw Dogs was named a book of the year by J. G. Ballard in The Daily Telegraph; by George Walden in The Sunday Telegraph; by Will Self, Joan Bakewell, Jason Cowley and David Marquand in the New Statesman; by Andrew Marr in The Observer; by Jim Crace in The Times; by Hugh Lawson Tancred in The Spectator; by Richard Holloway in the Glasgow Herald; and by Sue Cook in The Sunday Express. [ citation needed] Criticism [ edit ] Gray, John (1998). Hayek on Liberty (Rev.ed.). London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-17315-5.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? Gray, John (2003). Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. New York: The New Press. ISBN 978-1-56584-805-4.

We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces. Going nowhere: Laurie Taylor interviews John Gray". Newhumanist.org.uk. 31 May 2007 . Retrieved 9 August 2013. Admitting that our lives are shaped by fictions may give a kind of freedom – possibly the only kind that human beings can attain. Accepting that the world is without meaning, we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the world that exists beyond ourselves.Cats live for the sensation of life, not for something they might achieve or not achieve,” he says. “If we attach ourselves too heavily to some overarching purpose we’re losing the joy of life. Leave all those ideologies and religions to one side and what’s left? What’s left is a sensation of life – which is a wonderful thing.” Gray, John (1995). Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12475-1.