Straw Dogs - John Gray

QUOTES FROM BOOK BY JOHN GRAY

"Humans on Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic organism, or like the cells of a tumor or neoplasm. We have grown in numbers and disturbance to Gaia, to the point where our presence is perceptibly disturbing... the human species is now so numerous as to consitute a serious planetary malady. Gaia is suffering from Disseminated Primatemaia, a plague of people." -James Lovelock 6

"The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'Western Civilization' or any flaw in human insitutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of a particularly rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.
 It is true that a few traditional peoples lived in balane with the Earth for longer periods. The Inuit and the Bushmen stumbled into ways of life in which their footprint was slight. We cannot tread the Earth so lightley. Homo Rapiens has become too numerous." 7

"Lovelock suggests four possible outcomes of disseminated primatemai: 'destruction of the invading disease organisms; chronic infection; destruction of the host; or symbiosis- a lasting relationship of mutual benefit to the host and invader.
 Of the four outcomes, the last is the least likely. Humanity will never initiate a symbiosis with the Earth. Even so, it will not destroy it's planetary host, Lovelock's third possible outcome. The biosphere is older and stronger than they will ever be. As Margulis writes, 'No human culture, despite it's inventiveness, can kill the life on this planet, were it even to try.' " 9

"The scale and change afoot cannot be known  with certainty. In a chaotic system even the near future cannot be predicted accurately. Yet it seems likely that the conditions of life are shifting for much of humankind, with large segments of it facing much less hospitable climates. As Lovelock has suggested, climate change may be a mechanism through which the planet eases it's human burdens." 9

"The himan population growth that has taken place over the past few hundred years resembles nothing so much as the spikes that occur in the numbers of rabbits, house mice and plague rats. Like them, it can only be short-lived. Already fertility is falling throughout much of the world. As Morrison observes, humans are like other animals in responding to stress. They react to scarcity and overcrowding by turning down the reproductive urge... [...]

... if the human plague is really as normal as it looks, then the collapse curve should mirror the population growth curve. This means the bulk of the collapse will not take much more than one hundred years and by the years 2150 the biosphere should be safely back to it's preplague population of Homo Sapiens - Somewhere between 0.5 and 1 billion." 11

"There is a deeper reason why 'humanity' will never control technology. Technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world.
   Once a technology enters human life - whether it be fire, the wheel, the automobile, radio, television or the internet - it changes it in ways we can never fully understand." 14

"Hunter-gatherers saw their prey as equals, if not superiors, and animals were worshipped as divinities in many traditional cultures. The humanist sense of a gulf between ourselves and other animals is an aberration. It is the animist feeling of belonging with the rest of nature that is normal. Feeble as it may be today, the feeling of sharing a common destiny with other living things is embedded in the human psyche. Those who struggle to conserve what is left of the environment are moved by the love of living things, biophilia, the frail bond of feeling that ties humankind to the Earth." 17

"In fact, science does not yeild any fixed picture of things, but by censoring thinkers who stray too far from current orthodoxies it preserves the comforting illusion of a single established worldview. From the standpoint of anyone who values freedom of thought, this may be unfortunate, but it is undoubtedly the chief source of science's appeal. For us, science is a refuge from uncertainty, promising - and in some measure delivering - the miracle of freedom from thought; while churches have become sanctuaries for doubt." 19


"For Monod, humanity is a uniquely privileged species. It alone knows that its existance is an accident, and it alone can take charge of it's destiny. Like the Christians, Monod believes humankind finds itself in an alien world, and insists that it must make a choice between good and evil: 'The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.' In this fantasy, making in future will be different not only from any other animal but also from anything it has ever been." 31

"Schopenhaur believed he had the definitive answer to the metaphysical questions that had plagued thinkers since philosophy began. Using his critique of Kant to batter down the ordinary view of time, space and cause and effect, he offered a different view of the world - one in which there are no seperate things at all, in which plurality and difference do not exist, and there is only the ceaseless striving he calls Will." 44

"Heidegger tells us that, by comparison with man, animals are 'world-poor'. Animals merely exist, reacting to the things they encounter around them; whereas humans are makers of the worlds they inhabit. Why does Heidegger believe this? Because he cannot rid himself of the prejudice that humans are necessary in the scheme of things, whereas other animals are not." 48

"If humanists are to be believed, the Earth - with its vast wealth of ecosystems and life-forms - had no value until humans came onto the scene. Value is only a shadow cast by humans desiring or choosing. Only persons have any kind of intrinsic worth." 58

"Where other animals differ from humans is in lacking the sensation of self-hood. In this they are not altogether unfortunate. Self-awareness is as much a disbility as a power. The most accomplished pianist is not he one who is most aware of her movements when she plays. The best craftsman may not know how he works. Very often we are at our most skillful when we are our least self-aware. That may be why many cultures have sought to disrupt or diminish self-conscious awareness." 61

"The same is true of induviduals. Gentleness flourishes in sheltered lives; an instinctive trust in others is rarely strong in people who have struggled against the odds. The qualities we say we value above all others cannot withstand ordinary life." 108

"We are far more like machines and wild animals than we imagine. But we cannot attain thhe amoral selflessness of wild animals, or the choiceless automatism of machines. Perhaps we can learn to live more lightly, less burdened by morality. We cannot return to a purely spontaneous existence.
  If humans differ from other animals, it is partly in the conflicts of their instincts. They crave security, but they are easily bored; they are peace loving animals, but they have an itch for violence; they are drawn to thinking, but at the same time they hate and fear the unsettlement thinking brings. There is no way of life in which all these needs can be satisfied." 116

"Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer." 120

"Why do other animals not seek deliverance from suffering? Is it that no one has told them they must live again? Or is it that, without needing to think about it, they know they will not? Cyril Connolly wrote: "Imagine a cow or pig which rejected the body for a "noble eightfold path of self-enlightenment". One would feel that the beast had made a false calculation." `129

"There is nothing suprising in this. Those whop spurn their animal nature do not cease to be human, they merely become caricatures of humanity. Fortunately, the mass of humankind reveres its saints and despises them in equal measure." 132

Stanislaw Lem's Summa Technologiae "Phantomatics appears to be a sort of pinnacle towards which sundry forms and technologies of entertainment coverage. There are already houses of illusion, ghost houses, funhouses - Disneyland is in fact one big primitive pseudophantomat." 146

"The phantomat's power comes from the immaculate realism of its illusions. Inside it, we can only have the experiences of we want to have. We can escape not only our personal limitations but also those that can go with being human. We can swim and climb despite the fact we lack the ability to do so; we can fly like a bird and live in different epochs in the same lifetime. We can escape the limits of our everyday world." 147

"E.O Wilson has written '... the next century will see the closing of the Cenozoic Era (the Age of Mammals) and a new one characterized not by new life forms but by biological impoverishment. It might be appropriately called the 'Eremozoic Era', the Age of Loneliness.
  Humanity could soon find itself alone, in an empty world. Humans co-opt over 40 per cent of Earth's living tissue. If, over the next few decades, human numbers increase by half again, well over half the world's organic matter will be given over to humans." 149

"The move from hunter-gathering to farming hamed health and life expectancy. Even today, hunter-gatherers of the Artic and the Kalahari have better diets than poor people in rich countries - much better than those of many people in so-called developing countries. More of the worlds population is chronically undernourished today than in the Old Stone Age." 157

"Contemporary capitalism is prodigiously productive, but the imperative that drives it is not productivity. It is to keep boredom at bay. Where affluence is the rule the chief threat is the los of desire. With wants so quickly sated, the economy soon comes to depend on the manufacture of ever more exotic needs." 163

"Ecstasy, Viagra, the S-and-M parlours of New York and Frankfurt are not just aids to pleasure. They are antidotes to boredom. In a time when satiety is a threat to prosperity, pleasures that were forbidden in the past have become the staples of the new economy." 164

"Everyone asks whether machines will someday be able to think as humans do. Few ask whether machines will ever think like cats or gorillas, dolphins or bats. Scientists searching for extraterrestial life ponder anxiously about whether mankind is alone in the universe. They would be better occupied trying to communicate with the dwindling numbers of their animal kin." 188

"Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?" 199