A Dark View of the Future
From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche, the Western tradition has been based on the belief that humans are radically different from other animals. Straw Dogs is an exhilarating, sometimes disturbing book that explores how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned. Taking inspiration from art, poetry, the frontiers of science, and philosophy itself, John Gray argues that the belief in human difference is an illusion and offers instead a posthumanist view of the world. . . . In a work of thoroughgoing iconoclasm, British philosopher Gray attacks the belief that humans are different from and superior to animals. Invoking pure Darwinism, he savages every perspective from which humans appear as anything more than a genetic accident that has produced a highly destructive species (homo rapiens)--a species that exterminates other species at a phenomenal rate as our swelling numbers despoil the global environment. Gray explains the human refusal to confront the darker realities of our nature largely as the result of how we have consoled ourselves with the myths of Christianity and its secular offspring, humanism and utopianism. Human vanity, he complains, has even converted science (which should teach us of our insignificant place in nature) into an ideology of progress. But neither hope for progress nor confidence in human morality passes muster with Gray, who envisions a future in which the human population finally contracts as a world politics that grows ever more predatory and brutal shatters all such illusions. As a work of ruthless rigor, this provocative book will force readers to reexamine their own convictions. Bryce ChristensenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
posted by Lorenzo 2:00 PM
