

“In the most general terms,” he tells us, “humanism is the idea that the human animal is the site of some kind of unique value in the world.” “A related aspect of humanism is the idea that the human mind reflects the order of the cosmos.” “A third aspect of humanism is the idea that history is a story of human advance, with rationality increasing over time.”

Gray rejects all three of these beliefs, along with the pretension of humanism to offer a scientifically respectable replacement for religion: “In a strictly naturalistic view — one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm — there is no hierarchy of value with humans somewhere near the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with its own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science.”

Gray admires pessimists like Schopenhauer, Conrad and Freud, who find the sources of barbarism and cruelty in human nature, are not surprised by the continuing horrors of history and do not expect things to get better. Humanity’s historical record provides plenty of material for such a view; one has only to read the news every day. Yet those who have more hope for humanity than Gray are not unaware of the facts. It is a question of interpretation. From Gray’s point of view, Enlightenment figures like Kant and John Stuart Mill, who evoke better human possibilities, are purveying a consoling myth. From the opposite point of view, Gray is merely helping himself to the cut-rate superiority of the confirmed cynic.

The question Gray poses is of fundamental importance, so one wishes the book were better. It is not a systematic argument, but a varied collection of testimonies interspersed with Gray’s comments. Half of “The Silence of Animals” consists of quotations, some of them very long, from dozens of authors — some prominent, like Koestler, Orwell, Borges and Beckett, some deservedly obscure. This seems an indolent method of writing, though Gray does get off some good aphorisms of his own: “To suppose that the myth of progress could be shaken off would be to ascribe to modern humanity a capacity for improvement even greater than that which it ascribes to itself.” “The needy animal that invented the other world does not go away, and the result of trying to leave the creature behind is to live instead with its ghost.”

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The book consists of three parts. The first deals mainly with the supposed myth of human progress, the second with the disposition of humans to mythologize themselves and the world through fictions; the third proposes an alternative of pure contemplation that just lets the world be. That is the meaning of the title: we are invited to become more like other animals, freed of the perpetual need for commentary, understanding and transcendence.

Credit Javier Jaén Benavides

The content of the second section, “Beyond the Last Thought,” is exemplified by the following mindless declaration: “Science is not distinguished from myth by science being literally true and myth only a type of poetic analogy. While their aims are different, both are composed of symbols we use to deal with a slippery world.” There is also a murky discussion of language and its relation to reality that reveals how little Gray understands the depth and difficulty of the subject. On the great philosophical question of how our minds have enabled us to create the remarkable edifice of scientific knowledge, he has nothing to offer. He cites Wallace Stevens in support of the need for fictions to appease our attachment to belief. But the bare insistence that our minds do not reflect “the order of the cosmos” is not enough to deflect attention from something about the power of human reason that evidently demands to be explained.

Gray’s skepticism about the value of humanity and its hopes for progress deserves more attention. “Science and the idea of progress may seem joined together, but the end result of progress in science is to show the impossibility of progress in civilization,” he writes. “Human knowledge increases, while human irrationality stays the same.” One has only to think about the history of the past hundred years to see how scientific progress can proceed alongside moral and political barbarism. How can we defend the humanistic belief in progress against this record?

It is important to keep in mind that the progress hoped for is not a transformation of human nature. We can assume that people’s innate capacities and dispositions haven’t changed significantly in the course of recorded history, nor will they change in the next millennium or two. Evolution works more slowly than that. The question concerns cultural progress.

Clearly science and technology have put extraordinary knowledge and power at the command of beings who come into the world with the same brains and mental faculties as humans born 5,000 years ago. Any victory over our species’ destructive tendencies will likewise have to come from institutional and cultural development. We know what humans are capable of: in the wrong circumstances and with the wrong formation, they can behave monstrously. The hope for progress can consist only in the belief that there is some form of collective human life in which the capacity for barbarism will rarely find expression, and in which humans’ creative and cooperative potential can be realized without hindrance. Gray regards such hope as utopian, but it can be supported both by experience and by reflection. Moral and political progress is inevitably more difficult than scientific progress, since it cannot occur in the minds of a few experts but must be realized in the collective lives of millions; but it does happen.

Experience shows that some societies are much more decent than others, and that in fits and starts, cruelty, oppression and discrimination have become on balance less acceptable over time. One notable piece of evidence is the general success of Kant’s prediction, made in 1795, that democracies would not go to war with one another.

The reflective grounds for hope come from the moral sense itself. Most human beings would like to find standards for individual conduct and social institutions that reasonable persons could agree on. Although they now disagree, they are prepared to argue with one another in an effort to resolve those disagreements. Gray thinks the pursuit of convergence on standards is a delusion, kept alive in the face of repeated failure by cognitive dissonance. But his own pessimism seems more willful than the hope he condemns.

It is true that we are faced with a secular version of the problem of evil: how can we expect beings capable of behaving so badly to design and sustain a system that will lead them to be good? Gray is right that some of the attempted solutions to this problem have been catastrophic. But there have also been great advances. The common desire for justice makes it unreasonable to abandon the search or the social and political experiments, now extending to international institutions, that give it concrete form.



On Progress and Other Modern Myths

By John Gray

228 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

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