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The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, by John Gray
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A searching, captivating look at the persistence of myth in our modern world
"By nature volatile and discordant, the human animal looks to silence for relief from being itself while other creatures enjoy silence as their birthright."
In a book by turns chilling and beautiful, John Gray continues the thinking that made his Straw Dogs such a cult classic.
Gray draws on an extraordinary array of memoirs, poems, fiction, and philosophy to re-imagine our place in the world. Writers as varied as Ballard, Borges, Conrad, and Freud have been mesmerized by forms of human extremity―experiences that are on the outer edge of the possible or that tip into fantasy and myth. What happens to us when we starve, when we fight, when we are imprisoned? And how do our imaginations leap into worlds way beyond our real experiences?
The Silence of Animals is consistently fascinating, filled with unforgettable images and a delight in the conundrum of human existence―an existence that we decorate with countless myths and ideas, where we twist and turn to avoid acknowledging that we too are animals, separated from the others perhaps only by our self-conceit. In the Babel we have created for ourselves, it is the silence of animals that both reproaches and bewitches us.
- Sales Rank: #866149 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published on: 2013-06-04
- Released on: 2013-06-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.47" h x .88" w x 6.03" l, .76 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 240 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
“Gray's godless mysticism asks us to look outside ourselves and simply see. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds . . . Sometimes I think John Gray is the great Schopenhauerian European Buddhist of our age. What he offers is a gloriously pessimistic cultural analysis, which rightly reduces to rubble the false idols of the cave of liberal humanism.” ―Simon Critchley, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“[Gray's is] a powerful message, and not without elements of profundity. And it is conveyed with eloquence of language and dignity of thought.” ―Robert W. Merry, The National Interest
“Gray's fans should find much here to please them. The range of literary, historical and philosophical extracts--from Conrad and Zweig to Borges and John Ashbery, and from Nietzsche and Freud to Robinson Jeffers and Czeslaw Milosz, to name only a few--is broad and deep. Gray's own utterances are by turns characteristically dark, audacious and outrageous.” ―Caspar Henderson, The Telegraph
“Silence of Animals is a beautifully written book, the product of a strongly questioning mind. It is effectively an anthology with detailed commentary, setting out one rich and suggestive episode after another, each of which becomes only more suggestive by the juxtaposition.” ―Philip Hensher, The Spectator
About the Author
John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including The Immortalization Commission, Black Mass, and Straw Dogs. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics.
Most helpful customer reviews
46 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
What to do when faith deserts us?
By Acorn
This new book by John Gray is a meditation on how we deal with the world when our faith in progress and human betterment deserts us. It explores the theme through the prisms of literature, art, philosophy, and to a lesser extent, psychology rather than being a scientific or historical study. As with all of Gray's work, it has some telling insights and observations, and ranges over a fascinating mix of the familiar and obscure to give depth and substance to his ideas.
The Silence of Animals is arranged in three parts. The first looks at the idea of progress and how people's belief in it has disintegrated when faced with human barbarity. The two world wars left ruin in their wake and Gray looks at the reactions of writers such as J G Ballard, Norman Lewis and Stefan Zweig to the rapid disappearance of civilised behaviour in the brutality of war. Barbarism can also emerge from economic crisis: the Great Depression and the inflation in inter-war Germany, and the financial crash of 2008, each destroyed the wealth of countless families. They rendered years of faith in saving and building a future utterly meaningless, even as the alchemists of finance breathed a sigh of relief over their canapés at finding their own fortunes unscathed.
Gray was previously an academic political theorist and he sees authoritarian politics, whether of the left or right, as an attempt to deny the chaos of reality and to fake a sense of order. People like certainty and the dream of a better day to come, and therein perhaps lies the appeal of those charlatans who would have us believe that they can plan and control our future.
In the end, progress is a myth because evolution is about survival, not about constant improvement. Gray characterises evolution as a process of drift rather than a rise to ever greater heights of rationality, peace and order.
In the second part of the book Gray looks at the ideas of Sigmund Freud and in particular his views on myth creation. Freud saw the internal self as forever at war between the forces of Eros (love, creativity) and Thanatos (hatred, destruction). Psychoanalysis can be seen as a process of coming to terms with this perpetual disorder. We might be driven by unconscious forces over which we have no control, but by accepting and trying to recognise them we can attain some degree of autonomy in our lives.
All our constructions of the world are myths of one kind or another. Gray rejects Jung's idea of universal myths and notes that museums are full of old gods that people once thought were eternal and immortal. Our stories about the world change all the time, as do we, and part of Freud's work was to reconcile us with our ever-emergent selves.
Science appears to be different and Gray makes a neat distinction between scientific method, which tests our beliefs against facts, and the way we usually operate which is to select the facts that reinforce our beliefs. We are an incorrigibly irrational lot. But even science is myth-like: any scientific theory only works for a certain period of time before being replaced by another or being rendered irrelevant by a new paradigm. Our understanding of the world is thus made up of changing theories and stories, often inconsistent and sometimes plain barmy, and none of them ever fully explains everything. Spending your days searching for a theory of everything? Get a life.
Given that the world is chaotic and that our stories and theories about it are patchy and ephemeral, how can we best engage with the world? This is the theme of the final section of the book. Here Gray investigates how people have sought to look at the world from different perspectives and analyses two extraordinary books by J A Baker, who tried to see the world through the eyes of animals. He also looks at how people have pursued silence and used meditation, exercises that try to take us out of the hubbub of the world and the manic chatter in our heads. The value of these activities is that they change us and our perceptions of (and enjoyment of) the world.
The world view depicted by Gray might seem to presume pessimism and often Gray's thoughts appear this way, but accepting the chaos of the world and our inability to fully grasp it can also be refreshing and liberating, and can heighten our enjoyment of ourselves, other people and the world about us. Being alive becomes interesting in itself.
There is no discussion of the French existentialist philosophers, and surprisingly no discussion of Buddhism, even though these two have a lot in common with Gray's perspective. The final section of the book felt incomplete as a result. There is also far too little about the human need for certainty in life and how this blinds us to the greater joys of the world. In the first part of the book he consigns the progress myth to the rubbish bin, but if we have to live by myths is the progress one so bad? Public policy, education systems and charitable aid are all built on the lie of progress but they have produced some positive social results. Gray never considers whether some myths might be preferable to others and how we might decide that.
There is a wealth of engrossing detail in this book, supplemented by extensive notes. His exploration of some of the lesser known byways in literature whetted my appetite to pursue them further. Even if you find Gray's views unconvincing, the journey with him is well informed and never dull. This work will inspire you to reflect on how you understand yourself and the world in which you have randomly arrived.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A masterpiece of philosophy. It demolishes the modernity's so-called certainties and moves towards an embrace of disorder.
By Umer Vakil
This collection of essays was a dense read, but it must be read more than once. I couldn't help but underlining a couple of lines - simply so I could return to them later. Their value comes from the incredible eloquence with which the dominant ideologies of Western history are critiqued. For Gray, in the end, the only solace humans can find is in contemplation - but not as a key to seek redemption from being human , but as a path towards new perspectives on a disorderly world.
What I love is his ability to unify such large bodies of thoughts, underline their underlying ideas, express them - and then highlight the conflict between these philosophies with other philosophies - or their (oft non-obvious) common assumptions.
His most important contribution to thought is the succinct take-down of one of the biggest myths of the modern world: that progress, be it material or moral, is at heads with religion. For him, progress is simply an extension of the Christian belief in history's trajectory converging to an event. Even the Socratic tradition of finding redemption in Knowledge - or in that case - Science, is also a belief in eventual salvation. This is in opposition to the ancient Egyptians or Greeks, who thought that "nothing was new under the sun". Ancient pagans did not see the world divided between "civilized" in tune with progress, and the "savage", not in tune with it - but as humanity as a single entity always at war with itself.
To Gray, Liberal Humanism happens to be myth, a strange mythological force that is denial of its own mythological status due its scorn for religion. Humanism as a philosophy takes a few claims as self-evident and bases itself on these axioms: "that a rational life is devoid of myths... that moral progress, even if incremental, is possible...that humans are inherently freedom loving", although an observation of history's embrace of countless tyrants almost immediately refutes this central axiom. Fortunately, history has no goal or direction and these assumptions can easily be shown to be defective through simple reasoning by the likes of philosophers such as Gray.
Of course, these two dominant thoughts are only the unique targets in a few essays. Freud's and Nietzsche's anti-humanism is looked at with far more sympathy - a philosophy embracing internal struggle, and not settling for ultimate salvation. Freud’s philosophy is at complete odds with the Socratic tradition: Socrates thought that logic and thought can lead to self-understanding, leading to goodness, while Freud maintained that the mind is inherently illogical - and redemption through knowledge too is mythological ideal. These aren’t abstract debates restricted to earlier decades, modern social scientists - economists, psychologists and so on feel that the science can capture the intricacies of human thought, and that this understanding itself constitutes progress. The same can be said of the Positive Psychology and New Age movements, the Romantic movement described by T.E. Hulme… all that believe that humans have an endless potential that can be utilized. Most dominant ideologies are dissected by Gray, and either partially embraced or brutally dismissed.
I have read some reviews that claim that the economic effects of progress such as environmental destruction etc. are ignored by Gray - but this is a philosophical treatise, and it doesn’t hold that those factors are not important. In fact, I’m sure he has covered these aspects in his other books.
A review of all the ideas in this book would take pages and pages - but no summary will ever do this book justice. I’ve done a rather poor job covering them, almost deliberately since summaries tend to be ineloquent and ugly.
The crust of this book and its mission of contemplation (though not maybe exactly the contemplation Gray had in mind) can be taken by Gray’s mention of J.A. Baker in his essay “Another Sunlight”. Baker tried to observe a hawk he was watching and enter its field of vision, looking at the world a new light “The hawk was Baker’s point of exit from the human world. ‘I have always longed to be a part the outward life, … Seen through a hawk’s eyes the works of humans had the look of natural things.” Gray says: “People who love other creatures are often accused of anthropomorphize them. This was not true of Baker. Rather than anthropomorphize other species, Baker tried the experiment of anthropomorphize himself. Seeing the world as he imagined hawks might see it, he was able at times to be something other than he had been. He too raced to oblivion, losing himself as he followed the peregrine.”
48 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
Gray's Anatomy of Civilizationj
By Cotton Mather
That Gray puts to bed the rationalist's love affair with humanism is less important than the fact that he euthanizes what is left of faith as well.
Ignore Thomas Nagel's NY Times book review. As much as I like Nagel's work, his review is off considerably. He claims that Gray inserts far too much secondary quotation from other books. This is not really even a matter of opinion. It is simply false. Gray uses what is necessary to convey his ideas within an intellectual's context. Nagel also claims that Gray hammers away for no reason as there are many examples of progress available. Well, Nagel just walks into the trap here as Gray explains why such examples are part of a greater myth.
Gray has carefully explained the nature of our wishful thinking and, without ideological bias or academic rancor, he has done his part for disenchantment. Yet, he has not, in any way, attempted to create a nihilist's playbook. He allows much for the advance of meaning.
Really--a marvelous book. It deserves much more attention than it seems to be getting.
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