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Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals

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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). False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. London: Granta Books. ISBN 978-1-86207-023-3.

To those who react to what I’m saying with horror or incredulity, I’d say this: progress in civilisation is a very recent myth, only a few centuries old; it will pass away just as other myths have done. All I’m doing is to restate a view of things that most human beings have always held. If my critics can’t understand this, that’s their problem. BBC Radio 4 – A Point of View, Greece and the Meaning of Folly". Bbc.co.uk. 21 August 2011 . Retrieved 9 August 2013.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’. BBC Radio 4 – A Point of View, Cats, birds and humans". Bbc.co.uk. 11 September 2011 . Retrieved 9 August 2013. Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn’t recognise that need because they naturally revert to equilibrium whenever they’re not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written that John Gray is the modern thinker for whom he has the most respect, calling him "prophetic". [25] Criticism [ edit ]

Abstract

BBC Radio 4 – A Point of View, Believing in Belief". Bbc.co.uk. 18 September 2011 . Retrieved 9 August 2013. John Gray interview: how an English academic become the world's pre-eminent prophet of doom". The Telegraph. London. 28 February 2013 . Retrieved 9 August 2013. Gray, John (2003). Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. New York: The New Press. ISBN 978-1-56584-805-4. The globe is indeed a grim place. But the blistering eccentricity of this polemic feels more like a symptom than a solution. Gray, the gloom-ridden guru, is just the free-marketeer fallen on hard times. The iron determinism of this book is the flipside of its author's previous love affair with freedom. In its histrionic desperation, Straw Dogs is a latter-day version of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and just as one-dimensional. Gray, John (1998). Hayek on Liberty (Rev.ed.). London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-17315-5.

He laughs. “Well the dentists seem pretty good.” He came to Bath after leaving academic life – having been a professor of politics at Oxford, he was for a decade professor of European thought at the London School of Economics – to become “a freelance writer”. “I was looking for a walking city,” he says. “And I like the fact here that if you look up you can see trees.” The liberation from academia has given him more liberty, he suggests, to write exactly as he pleases, cat-like. The darkness within. John Gray on why the left is in flight from "human nature". John Gray. Published in New Statesman 16 September 2002JG: The value of other animals to humans is that they offer a window out of the human world. Without some such window, humans tend to go mad. As a result of his observation of the peregrine, J.A. Baker was saner – as well as happier – than a great many human beings. Of course, seeing the world imaginatively from the perspective of another species doesn’t mean you can become like that species or that you should try to emulate it. Other animals are superior to humans in many ways: partly because they don’t organise their lives on the basis of beliefs, there are no feline suicide bombers. But humans can’t emulate this animal freedom from belief. That’s one reason why we – unlike other animals, so far as we can know – need myths. A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with Neoliberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from non-western traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims. He is emphatically not a liberal optimist for whom there is a direction and purpose to history, that history is always moving towards its telos, its ultimate goal or end - and that end, as many today see it, is peace between mutually interdependent democratic states living under the rule of law. 'Most people think they belong to a species which can be master of its own destiny,' Gray writes. 'This is faith, not science... Looking for meaning in history is like looking for patterns in clouds... We cannot be rid of illusions. Illusion is our natural condition.' Gray, John (1996). Mill on Liberty: A Defence (2nded.). London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12474-4. In this regard, The Peregrine is an odd choice, for it is clear that Baker is some distance from putting humanity and its problems behind him. Take the following passage, for example, in which the author attempts to convey his affinity with the falcon through the use of the plural pronoun:

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