According to story, the Ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope rejected the customs and beliefs of his day, made a vow of poverty and took up residence in a large jar or barrel, where he subsisted on onions. Diogenes is also remembered for scorning Plato and for carrying a lantern in the daytime in a fruitless search for an honest man.
John Gray is something of a Diogenes, albeit without the barrel and the onions. His new book challenges what he sees as some of the most cherished beliefs of our times. He asserts that humanism and faith in progress are facile, even dangerous. He scorns much of the Western tradition of thought stemming from Plato and Christianity which place their faith in reason or in redemption to overcome tragedy. In their place, he counsels “godless mysticism", a stance that has something in common with negative theology, Zen Buddhism or Taoism.
Gray’s fans should find much here to please them. The range of literary, historical and philosophical extracts – from Conrad and Zweig to Borges and John Ashbery, and from Nietzsche and Freud to Robinson Jeffers and Czeslaw Milosz, to name only a few – is broad and deep. Gray’s own utterances are by turns characteristically dark, audacious and outrageous. “If there is anything unique about the human animal," he writes, “it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience"; “The crisis today resembles that of the Thirties in this respect: it cannot be overcome by collective action"; “Health may be the natural condition of other species, but in humans it is sickness that is normal."
The riches also include fascinating passages from neglected classics such as Naples ’44, Norman Lewis’s account of the turmoil at the time of the Allied liberation of that city. There are historical nuggets such as the likely actual source (in Soviet collectivisation) of the equation “2 + 2 = 5" made infamous in George Orwell’s 1984. And lyrical, visionary passages by some of the finest English nature writers of the mid-20th century are cited in support of Gray’s low-comfort conclusion.
But despite its merits, The Silence of Animals is flawed and unsatisfactory: it both ignores too much and doesn’t go far enough.
A narrowly pessimistic world view
The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Gray assembles instances to support his almost unremitting scepticism about the power of reason, and his pessimism about human affairs. His account is excessively narrow to the point of distortion.
No one would deny that the 20th century, especially its first half from which most of his material is drawn, is full of catastrophes; but Gray ignores too much, both then and since, that offers grounds for hope.
For a compelling view of the whole, see
In the second section, Gray dwells on the tragic vision of
Mining cultural myths
The third section steps into that mythic territory. For Gray it is glimpsed in the moments of epiphany described by two great observers of and writers about the natural world: Llewelyn Powys, the youngest of three literary brothers whose short life was overshadowed by death from an early age, and J.A Baker, whose vigil with peregrine falcons in his native Essex occasioned some of the most extraordinary nature writing of the 20th century.
It is in this final section that the title of this book comes into view. The silence of animals is not, says Gray, a literal silence, for many if not most sentient animals inhabit vivid sound worlds. It is, however, a world without the kinds of turmoil and torment that humans experience. Is he right about that? Clearly, animals often suffer even if the suffering is not mentalised to the degree it can be in humans.
Where Gray surely is on the right track is in drawing attention to the vibrancy of non-verbalised experience. Where he doesn’t go far enough, however, is in being ready to celebrate the living world as a whole, and the many ways and levels in which humans can come to know it. But the most important shortcomings of this book are excessive scepticism about our potential to use reason to wise ends, and political quietism.
Possibility in knowledge
Mathematics and scientific laws do not and perhaps never will explain everything, but the explanations we construct with those symbols are a lot more than “a scattering of dust spread over a world that is beyond understanding". Without them we would never have experienced a deep field photograph taken by the Hubble telescope, in which a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length may show 10,000 galaxies, all containing billions of stars and quite possibly other life.
And when Gray writes of contemplation as “an activity that aims not to change the world or to understand it but simply to let it be", I disagree. Contemplation, truly lived, leads to compassion. We need to be mindful of our terrific capability to harm other humans and other life on this planet and, despite devastating and irreparable losses, organise to mitigate future harms, however poor the odds sometimes appear to be. Tragedy is not final because there are future generations to hope for. The possibilities of life, wedded to increasing knowledge, may be endless.
The Sunday Telegraph, The Telegraph, London