The Silence of Animals
Mark Barrett
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths by John Gray
John Gray is by now widely known as the political philosopher least likely to do Things Can Only Get Better as a karaoke turn. Way back in the 1970s he made his name as an enthusiast for the transformative powers of free markets. He subsequently changed his mind about that, and started decrying globalisation and neoliberal economics.
Then he seemed to throw his hands up altogether, and is now famous for the position he set out 10 years ago in Straw Dogs: that human improvement is a preposterous chimera, knowledge a practical impossibility and morality a childish story we tell ourselves. We’re no better than animals — and in telling ourselves that we are, we license ourselves to behave far worse.
So, has the Prof cheered up? Not exactly. Indeed, as you embark on The Silence of Animals you may suspect that, in a spirit of consistency, he has set out to disprove the concept of “progress in John Gray’s publishing career”. Hasn’t he said all this stuff about progress being a myth before?
Well, he has. But it bears saying again — and in the first of his three sections he says it with great force, persuasiveness and aphoristic verve. This is perhaps by way of a recap. He takes down utopians of various stripes and then starts wiggling the dentist’s drill in the liberal molar with his attack on the intellectual incoherence of secular meliorism — the idea that the spread of reason (or science, or liberal democracy, or what have you) will make us nicer, wiser and happier. He quotes a lovely send-up of Rousseau’s line that “Man is born free — and everywhere he is in chains!” Alexander Herzen, the 19th-century Russian essayist, asked drily: “What would you say to a man who, nodding his head sadly, remarked that ‘Fish are born to fly — but everywhere they swim’?”
How can knowledge make us more civilised, Gray scoffs, when “in science and technology progress is cumulative, whereas in ethics and politics progress is cyclical”? These are simply different categories of thing: knowledge builds up; history repeats itself. And how can the realisation of human potential be the goal of history, “when rational enquiry shows history to have no goal”?
Gray makes a more than usually rigorous case, too, that humanists are just as much in the grip of a mythology as the religious dopes they pride themselves on having surpassed: “a Socratic myth of reason” mashed up with “a Christian myth of salvation”. Humanists — entranced by Socrates’s conviction that reason can make sense of the world — have simply dethroned God and put the human mind in his place. Science and myth, writes Gray, are not such opposites: both are useful, untrue stories we tell ourselves about the world.
It is in the second and third sections of the book that Gray takes off into slightly different territory, albeit territory hinted at in Straw Dogs. They start to probe the question, given all these givens, of how to live (inasmuch as we have any choice, which Gray rather doubts). The conventional answers — to seek harmony with nature, understanding of or wholeness in ourselves or, of all things, happiness — are rejected: none solves humanity’s problems because all of them centre on humanity itself. In Gray’s book, it’s humanity that is the problem: we need to get over ourselves.
Gray is attracted instead to what he calls “Godless mysticism” — an escape from human thought itself into “mere being”. He finds hints of it in negative theology (the attempt to express the transcendent in terms of its radical difference from anything we can express) and in the titular “silence of animals”, which differs in quality from that of humans because (or so he asserts) only humans construct a picture of themselves out of language.
We seek silence, Gray seems to be saying, as a refuge from selfhood — an active escape from our ceaseless construction of meaning. Animals, on the other hand, just shut up. Gray puts it thus: “To overcome language by means of language is obviously impossible. Turning within, you will find only words and images that are parts of yourself. But if you turn outside yourself — to the birds and animals and the quickly changing places where they live — you may hear something beyond words.”
Generally a lucid writer, Gray occasionally seems to tie himself in knots here — but since he’s engaged in the tricky business of expressing the inexpressible (using language to point at exactly what language can’t point at), you might expect a bit of a struggle. Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery are much on his mind, and appropriately given the way both poets, in different ways, push at the borders of what language can express.
As the Herzen quip above suggests, Gray is often more than happy to let others illustrate and even make his arguments for him: the book is full of quotes, and he casts himself, increasingly as the book goes on, as much in the role of curator as narrator. Perhaps, in effect, he is seeking to construct a canon of allies in his war against the ruinous anthropocentrism Socrates bequeathed to the western tradition. I can suggest two more. In Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the protagonists travel back in time and twit Socrates with a quotation. “All we are,” they tell him, “is dust in the wind, dude.” On the evidence of this absorbing book, Gray would agree.
John Gray discusses his book at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Tuesday, March 19, at 4pm (book at oxfordliteraryfestival.org).