Straw dogs

• Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
• John Gray

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Straw dogs. Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals is a British bestseller in which John Gray questions most of our assumptions about what it means to be human and convincingly shows that most of them are misconceptions. Using examples ranging from Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Marx, the author argues that the Western tradition was based on arrogant and wrong beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. Gray considers humanism to be a secular religion made up of remnants of Christian myth, and sees technology only as a tool with which humans will continue to destroy the planet and each other. In contrast, he advocates James Lovelock's theory of Gaia, according to which the natural world self-regulates to maintain the conditions of life on the planet, with no special place for humanity in it. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism think of humanity as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. John Gray argues that this belief in human supremacy is a dangerous illusion and explores what the world and human life look like after the final break with humanism. The result is this radical philosophical work that prompts the reader to question his or her deepest beliefs.

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If you believe that humans are animals, then there can be no such thing as human history, only the lives of individual humans. If we talk about the history of the species at all, then we do so only to mark some unknown sum of those lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, some are unhappy. None of them have meaning outside of themselves. Looking for meaning in history is like looking for patterns in the clouds.

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It could happen that by the end of this century, human nature will be scientifically reshaped. However, if it comes to that, it will only be a random outcome of the turmoil in the murky waters where big business, organized crime and hidden government structures compete for control. If the human species is redesigned, it will not mean that humanity has divinely taken control of its destiny. It will be just another twist of human daring.

• ISBN: 978-953-369-036-0
• Dimensions: 128x200 mm
• Number of pages: 248
• Year of the edition: 2024
• Original title: Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
• Original language: English
• Translation: Stribor Kikerec