5/9/2024 0 Comments Lewis giles tattoo chimera![]() ![]() But he hasn’t proven the case that mankind really is rapacious. He has already slipped the word ‘rapacious’ into the mix, to soften us up for this. But Gray goes further, coining a different mock-scientific name, homo rapiens. He gives us Lovelock’s list of possible future scenarios for the human race and, finally, plumps for one of them: after reaching a tipping-point that might be cataclysmic, the population will eventually stabilise at around half a billion. Sometimes he is happy to use ready-made concepts like Lovelock’s mock-scientific categorisation of mankind as ‘ disseminated primatemaia’. …which is a possibility that is supported by his use of emotive language to harden his case. What I suppose Gray is doing is throwing contentious ideas into the mix, and we aren’t supposed to take his assertions as proofs at all… So the founders of rationalism and the founders of religion aren’t so far from the animism that pre-dates them all…. Socrates’ interior ‘voices’ put him in a shamanistic tradition, and Socrates led to Plato, who led to Christianity. That’s ok… but sometimes he suggests that a case is proven after what is little more than a few contentious sentences. It’s written in bite-sized pieces that Gray suggests ‘might be dipped into at will’. They are not the same thing at all because, as he seeks to demonstrate, technological advances always lead to more efficient ways of waging war and lead to our ever-faster ruination of the world.īut just because I’m on Gray’s side doesn’t mean there’s nothing unproblematic about this book. Ever more frequent new discoveries and technological advances make it easy to believe in progress, but it is a chimera. But according to Gray, this ‘humanist’ idea is based on the religious, human-centred world-view it is supposed to have ousted. The main thread is that in a post-religious world the idea of scientific progress has replaced religious belief as the accepted, consensual view. We aren’t the possible saviours of the world, we’re a species that has become a contagion on the face of the earth.Īs I said, this is all pushing at an open door as far as I’m concerned, so quite a lot of ‘The Human’ feels rather repetitive. ![]() As for Lovelock… Gray uses his Gaia hypothesis, first posited in the 1970s, as a central metaphor of how things really are. We can’t help believing that, unlike every other organism on the planet, we can think our way out of the messes we’ve caused. Gray’s main point in connection with the former is that modern ‘humanist’ thought – I’ll come back to his use of what he calls humanism – takes on board all of Darwin’s findings except one: we – he is talking about all of us – can’t bear the idea that we are as circumscribed by our genetic evolution as every other creature. The names cited most frequently both in the foreword and the first section are Charles Darwin and James Lovelock. Whereas in 2002 it might have been controversial to assert the fundamental incorrigibility of the human race, now, in the circles I move in, it’s a given. Perhaps, in the decade or more since it was published, books like Gray’s have moved things on. But as far as I’m concerned he’s pushing at an open door. The foreword to the paperback edition is a kind of reply to those critics who found Gray’s assertions too problematic to be acceptable on its first publication. First published in 2002, this series of linked essays feels less contentious now than it must have seemed then.
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