Book review: The Silence of Animals, by John Gray
Every couple of years or so John Gray presents a new book in which he imparts to us many wise things we seem incapable of heeding.
by John Gray
Allen Lane
He offers a negative dialectics that is wonderfully bracing if one is prepared to entertain it. "Accepting that the world is without meaning," he writes, "we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the inexhaustible world that exists beyond ourselves."
For Gray, the so-called modern world has never managed to cast off the yoke of organised religion and its doctrine of means and ends. Most of us in the West imagine ourselves to be living in secularised societies, but the religious impetus towards the manufacture of meaning for human affairs underlies most of our assumptions about what we are, where we came from and where we are going. As Gray insists, we are going nowhere - and this is a good thing. The world is not a teleology; there is no grand end in view, just around the next revolutionary corner, just over the next mound of heaped-up corpses.