Beasts of Eden

Granta 12.99

Whenever I read an interesting book I add my own index of favourite or stimulating passages to the blank pages at the end, which I later transcribe into a quotations file in my computer. In most cases this amounts to two or three quotes, so it’s easily handled, the work of a minute or two. It is a measure of my excitement over John Gray’s new book that I have filled three pages with quotes and references, which will take me the best part of a morning to load into my computer.

Part of my excitement over Straw Dogs comes from its style or technique. I’ll come to the content soon, but let me stick with the format for a moment because here the medium really is part of the message.

Nietzsche pioneered the aphoristic approach to philosophy. Most of his books, unlike the tedious narratives of other philosophers, consist of numbered aphorisms, some as short as a line or two, some that are pages long. A good aphorism can encapsulate a whole philosophy in a pithy saying that is designed to make the listeners think.

Great teachers are usually great aphorists, and Jesus was among the best. When Jesus said "let the dead bury the dead", he undermined traditional religion in a handful of words. John Gray takes a bit longer than that, but he is an even more devastating demolitionist than Jesus, and the aphorism is his weapon of choice. On the evidence of this book, he is up there with Nietzsche in the way he wields it.

Not that Nietzsche is his favourite philosopher. That accolade probably has to go to Schopenhauer and, like Schopenhauer, Gray has written a book of gloriously exhilarating pessimism. He believes with Schopenhauer that "like other animals, we are embodiments of universal will, the struggling, suffering energy that animates everything in the world".

The word animal is the clue here. Gray believes that we are animals. Unfortunately, unlike the other animals with whom we share the planet, we are prey to overweening discontents that constantly ruin our happiness and will probably end by destroying us. For Gray we are not homo sapiens but homo rapiens, compulsive predators whose cruelty and greed are unrestrained.

Contrary to traditional explanations, the root of this psychic pathology does not lie in our animal nature, but in our futile attempts to deny it. Gray sees the denial of our true nature as the cardinal error of Christianity, but the rot started long before the formation of the Church, Plato being the other great villain of the piece.

However, he also seems to suggest that Plato and Christianity were simply the instruments of a process that took humans over when they invented writing.

Gray denies that it is consciousness or language that distinguishes us from the other animals. They are conscious, too, and they communicate with each other in subtle and complex ways that we are only just beginning to understand. No, it was the invention of writing that was the real fall of humanity.

He writes: "From its humble beginnings as a means of stocktaking and tallying debts, writing gave humans the power to preserve their thoughts and experiences from time. At the same time it has allowed them to invent a world of abstract entities and mistake them for reality. The development of writing has enabled them to construct philosophies in which they no longer belong in the natural world."

That, according to Gray, is the source of all our woes. We have invented abstractions, such as religion, that destroy us by persuading us that we are not really of this world and therefore have a distinctive leverage over it that other species lack.

The great monotheistic religions, particularly Christianity, were the original instruments of this illusion, but the secularism that has succeeded them is following the same programme under a different label. "Unbelief is a move in a game whose rules are set by believers. Atheists say they want a secular world, but a world defined by the absence of the Christians’ god is still a Christian world. Secularism is like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies. If atheism has a future, it can only be in a Christian revival; but in fact Christianity and atheism are declining together."

The great idol that Gray is attempting to overthrow in this magnificent book is what philosophers and theologians call teleology, which is the belief that there is some great purpose to nature and life that we can discover or have revealed to us. In our pursuit of these great illusory ends we have tortured and destroyed each other in unimaginable numbers, 60 million of us in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1959. The modern eschatologies of communism and scientific global capitalism are simply secular variants of that ancient teleological virus. Purpose and progress are killing us, says Gray; why can’t we, like the other animals, just settle for life as it is?

He ends this trumpet call of a book with these words: "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?"

Not everyone will agree with Gray, but everyone should be provoked by this book into fresh and painful thought. There can be no higher praise.