The Silence Of Animals: On Progress And Other Modern Myths
Prof. Charles Sarvan
“‘Peace upon earth!‘ was said. We sing it … After two thousand years… We’ve got as far as poison-gas“ – From a quatrain by Thomas Hardy
John Gray has been Professor of Politics at Oxford, Harvard and Yale; and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. He has now given up these posts and turned to writing full time.
John Gray, ‘The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths‘ – Penguin Books, 2013.
‘Silence‘, a slim volume of about two hundred pages, is a wide-ranging iconoclastic work, taking in its sights both religion and the secular. Gray rejects the Humanist idea that human beings are the site of some kind of unique value in the world. Secondly, the idea that history is a story of increasing rationality and human progress. (Secularists believing in progress, Gray claims, are only worshipping a “divinized“ version of themselves.) To secularists, belief in human progress towards humaneness has become the substitute for faith in religion. But belief in progress is a myth though, as with other myths, taken to be true. The French and Russian revolutions, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein may have produced benefits for many people but increased freedom was not among them (pages 57-8). Liberal humanists believe that humanity advances to a better world in stages, slowly, in step-by-step increments: catastrophes are but a necessary part of human advance. But this philosophy, sometimes called meliorism, is utopian, argues Professor Gray. I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of the watercolour by Paul Klee titled ‘Angelus Novus‘: “The face of the Angel of History is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (Fearing he would fall into the hands of the Nazis, Benjamin chose to commit suicide.) Read More
