Book Report - Straw Dogs

I recently read Straw Dogs by John Gray. It was part of my summer reading and I finished it on a boiling hot beach in Northland. When I returned to my home of Wellington I visited a friend’s place for tea. We talked animatedly about what we had done, seen, and read on holiday. As the caffeine urged on our conversation I told her what I had read in Straw Dogs. I tried my best to explain it as her eyes gradually glazed over (which is normal when I talk for more than a minute). But I could tell she was not comfortable with the ideas I was telling her. The tea in my cup had dried up and we changed the topic.

Such is the nature of Straw Dogs.

Straw Dogs is not a comforting book. It confronts ideas we hold dear in the so-called West. It is about humanity. Not Mother Theresa humanity but homo-sapiens-as-an-animal-humanity. It tears humanism and anthropocentrism apart by showing how we have developed ideas that do not fit in with the reality of our species.

The book is divided into six chapters. The first five each centre around a theme and the final is a conclusion. Chapter one, The Human, introduces us to the human animal. That we are all humans and not particularly special is a familiar theme in the atheist, Internet age. Gray comments that cities are as natural as beehives, an idea which stuck out to me. Humans may be animals, but we’re different. Surely? Thus the book engaged me and began a confrontation of ideas.

One of the most fascinating chapters follows with The Deception, which is about philosophy. Gray says that philosophy has not shaken off the belief that humans are different from other animals. He reviews the ideas of several philosophers including Kant and Schopenhauer. Kant’s ideas re-packaged and protected Christian notions, and this Schopenhauer criticised. Schopenhauer identified humans as mere participants in this world, instead of reasoned, autonomous agents. Nietzsche, who was apparently a fan of Schopenhauer, confused things by trying to give meaning to history and by inventing the Übermensch. Scandalously it seems almost all philosophers have masked humanism in different ways. Apparently Schopenhauer and Grey himself are among the exceptions.

The third chapter, The Vices of Morality, is possibly the most uncomfortable. Vices exposes the Christian basis of Western moral philosophy. The notion that a set of universal moral laws exists in some form is ecclesiastical at best. Morality is subject to fashion. Gray uses the example of homosexuality, which was illegal in many European places a century ago. There is no a-priori principal of justice that makes homosexuality immoral or acceptable. Many readers will spit out their tea at this part. Each of us is entitled to inalienable rights and thinking that this is not so is quite clearly oppression! But Gray is not saying that we don’t deserve rights. Only that they aren’t natural. I wondered how much outrage this viewpoint would cause in public as I private pondered this passage.

In The Unsaved Gray unpacks modern humankind’s obsession with “progress” as the true saviour of mankind. It is a cliché to introduce a discussion of technology with how far we have come as a species. And it is just as clichéd to extrapolate how far technology will take us. Gray says we dream of a world without ageing, war, or hunger. A world where we are saved. But this conception of human progress is borne out of Christian tradition.

The true saviour is the lack of saviour. Gray paraphrases from Report to Greco: it is the saviour who shall deliver mankind from salvation. In other words he says to stop believing in the miracle of science and technology as the destiny of mankind. He offers war and tyranny as a counter to the belief in technological progress. Technology and science can save us, and they can destroy us. So it goes.

This chapter also outlines a weird logical paradox about atheism. In short, atheism is the complement of Christianity and so cannot exist without it. For example early polytheistic religions did not concern themselves with the absolute truth of others. Yet Christianity demands submission to the absolute. Nothing is safe from Christian origin. I am still puzzled by this idea. Sure, atheism originated against Christianity. But surely a new or different form of atheism can exist independently?

Non-progress is the penultimate chapter. This is almost self-explanatory. Gray starts us in the Palaeolithic era, which was followed by the agricultural revolution. This revolution did not advance humankind. It increased our number, but decreased our quality of life. This survey continues to the present era. Social democracy, introduced by social obligations during World War II, is replaced by an oligarchy of the rich. The modern citizen’s obligations are to the market.

If we create a world of constant peace, only manufactured crime and transgression can satisfy our natural rebelliousness. As always the market will meet these demands while what constitutes crime and transgression shifts. But it is unlikely we will reach this utopia. In the present even the rich work harder than ever before. Perhaps we will become a burnt-out generation of executives seeking out manufactured transgressions (Gray cites Cocaine Nights). For some reason this makes me think of hustle culture.

Non-progress continues to smother the idea of modernisation. There is no kernel of modernisation to which we progress. This chapter is possibly the hardest to summarise, with Gray spinning up examples from pre-industrial Japan, to post-Soviet Russia, to the structure of Al-Qaeda. The chapter unravels and honestly, I’m too lazy to re-ravel it in this article for you.

The concluding chapter As It Is is the shortest. Unlike the conclusion I was taught to write in high school it introduces some new ideas. Action is conciliatory, Gray quotes from Joseph Conrad, meaning that people work or do things to give their lives meaning. In the current age idleness is condemned. Again I couldn’t help but think of hustle culture. This idea re-ignited my sense of superiority over those people who comfort their feeble existence with proper hobbies and interests, instead of reading the odd philosophy book on the beach.

Thus ends my tour of Straw Dogs. It is a powerful and confronting work but shouldn’t be taken as gospel. For me it broadened my understanding of philosophy. I don’t agree that philosophy has failed to the extent Gray asserts. Ideas serve as useful models of the world. Our understanding of the world proceeds by way of debate and discussion, not by absolutes nor apathy. The world is more than a material flurry of accidents.

Morality is a difficult but important subject and Gray seems to write it off as a failure. Going back to the homosexuality example I cannot accept that tolerance of me and other queer people is based on accident. But it is easy to believe something harsh until it affects yourself. Yet contempt for us queer people cannot be the default (the same goes for race). So there must be some grounding that grants rights. I certainly need to do more reading to understand and maybe counter Gray here.

In Straw Dogs Gray is like a man with a battering ram running through a mansion called Western Thought. This mansion has five rooms. Each room contains is a different sector of Western thought, with Gray charging in and obliterating the furnishings within. But this is a violent image, and Gray’s style is poignant and dry. The observations are sensible and his critique is blunt. Without a basic working knowledge of philosophy his work is hard to parse. But it calcified some ideas I have been pondering for a while. Whatever your view of its thesis, Straw Dogs is one of those books that will permanently shape your thinking.