John Grey, Straw Dogs

Gray writes like a man with a gigantic chip on hs shoulder. His self-satisfied shadenfruede at the human condition makes him sound like someone who's wife has just run off with hs best friend. His pompous assertion of a 'deluded humanity' infers he is above such error. As a misanthropist and reductionist, he disparages everything from Socrates to modern Humanism like a bad tempered drunk. Just about every 'insight' on the human condition from genocide to evolution are hardly original. He makes glib assumptions about how we 'homo-rapiens' wallow in ignorance, whilst self-appointed seers like him condescend to pass sanctimonious judgement. It is nothing but a narrow subjective polemic against everythng he owes his living to - not a barrel of laughs, but a good earner.

I bought the Straw Dogs book by John Grey as it was praised by the most famous members of the intellectual media, such as J G Ballard, Andrew Marr and Will Self etc. So it seemed it would be full of useful information, but it was more like useful misinformation when I read it!

Humans are described as animals full stop. That is as the Straw Dogs title suggests. I would prefer to know why humans are not animals. Heidegger is attacked in the book. As he was the best philosopher of the 20th Century, you have to ask yourself why? It seems as he was interested in Being, but he did not define it well enough for John Grey, so he is a charlatan. Life as it is lived is Being for me, so life as it is lived should not be bothered with, it seems to the author.

Anyway, he predicts that most of the human race will soon be wiped out by some unknown catastrophe, so life as it is lived is done away with. That hunter gathering was superior to farming he also states. It is like the rubbish that I was told at school in the mid 1970's; that by 2006 all the oil would be gone etc. He is therefore like a man walking along Oxford Street with a sign saying The End of the World is Neigh. Celebrities come up to him to praise him and he tells them what he thinks. He is very well informed so they praise him. What he thinks is tragic, and what he says is a mine field of miss information. Nothing to do with life as it is lived, but little more than a worse case scenario it seems. This to distract people from life, to traumatise them. Life as it is lived is made into life as these celebrities want us to think of life.

Nietzsche, we are told was only able to question life as it was lived as he was a nomad. His Superman is ridiculous we are told, as the author is no Superman. There is no wisdom in this book, just the same old trash rehashed by the rich and powerful so they can continue to walk all over every one else. It is hardly surprising.