I read this long ago, but no so long that it was a formative influence. It’s fascinating to revisit it – I really wonder if John Gray believes all of what he promulgates or if he’s being a provocateur.

This is a delectable read of ideas long familiar to me but which I thought had been forgotten. For who today would be interested in lack of ultimate purpose, the many ways science negates human values, the delusions of liberal progressives, etcetera.

Strawson is good at showing we are still tormented by these ideas: so much so, it would seem they are an ineluctable part of human nature, which would negate the whole purpose of the book.

In his belief that such ideas have wide-scale trickledown impact, he comes across to me as leaning to the idealist side. He is not trying to argue that human affairs have been dominated by competition for resources, demographics, genetic similarity. No, he sees the errors of Plato and Christianity everywhere.

But what a fascinatingly contrary (stress on second syllable) book this is! You can freely pick up statements that contradict each other: We have the same concerns as our Paeleolithic ancestors; our ancestors would find us incomprehensible. Those who believe in technological progress are deluded; green thinkers are deluded. Humans have a deluded self-image that they are different to animals; humans are the ‘sick’ animal that thinks too much.

There are lots of books – some new agey, some by scientists – which perceive in Quantum Mechanics a space to escape from determinism and the cold mechanistic universe. QM has a central role for ‘the observer’. There is no one objective reality, it depends on how we conceptualise it, etcetera etcetera. The Dancing Wu Li Masters kind of thing.

But no dancing for Gray ho-ho. For him modern science shows that ‘the world humans are programmed to perceive is a chimera.’ We can never fully understand, we don’t have control.

The structure of each section generally follows the pattern: Consciousness? Bah, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Where consciousness can be substituted in turn with free will, morality, postmodernism, the self, progress, the war on drugs, the Buddha, Platonism, quantum mechanics, the scientific method, etc.

But I think he protests too much. He mentions the relatively obscure Federov, and clearly admires the fiction of Stanislaw Lem. Straw talking about the futility of grand narratives is like a preacher denouncing the evils of pornography who keeps showing one picture after another to the congregation and telling them how disgraceful it is.

For Straw, the invention of writing is the tempting apple that started it all. Writing is a memory-enhancing device that allowed humans to inhabit a world of abstract entities and lose themselves there. “Europe owes much of its murderous history to errors of thinking engendered by the alphabet.” – When I read this I think that somewhere else Straw will be arguing that people going to war delude themselves into thinking it’s about Big Ideas when it is generally about the fundamentals of resources and demographics.

I’m not going to undertake a systematic takedown of a book that is an unsystematic takedown of … well almost everything. Except for drugs. They really work.

Straw is ultimately someone who has reached the existential insight that Man creates his own meaning, and reaches this insight down several different winding paths one after the other. And then he sits in that space at the end of all these paths and does nothing.