Straw Dogs

I'm reading John Gray's Straw Dogs (read the first chapter here), which was kindly hand-delivered by an Australian friend as part of a Keep Doug Sane package. It is having the opposite effect, unfortunately. The book is fucking with my head.

To oversimplify, it argues that liberal humanism simply adopted the sense of historical progression that Christianity brought to the world, and that today we live without the courage to do away with big pictures, that we still cannot confront humans as animals, whose self of self is a fragmentary myth we impose retrospectively. The book is convincing, and comes at a time when I'm pretty receptive to Gray's arguments. I'll try and write about it more later, but for now, here are some chunks of text:

Consciousness is a variable, not a constant and its fluctuations are indispensable to our survival. We fall into sleep in obedience to a primorial circadian rhythmm; we nightly inhabit the virtual worlds of dreams; nearly all our daily doings go on without concious awareness; our deepest motivations are shut away from conscious scrutiny; nearly all of our mental life takes place unknown to us ... Very little that is of consequence in our lives requires consciousness. Much that is vitally important comes about only in its absence.

And:

Where other animals differ from humans is in lacking the sensation of selfhood. In this they are not altogether unfortunate. Self-awareness is as much a disability as a power. The most accomplished pianist is not the one who is most aware of her movements when she plays ... very often we are at our most skilful when we are least self-aware.

On he goes, inexorably, attacking the idea that conscious thought is better:

"Subliminal perception - perception that occurs without conscious awareness - is not an anomaly but the norm", Gray writes, quoting psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig as his authority: "Unconscious vision ... [has] proved to be capable of gathering more information than a conscious scrutiny lasting a hundred times longer."

Dismantling free will:

In Benjamin Livet's work on the 'half-second delay', it has been shown that the electrical impulse that initiates action occurs half a second before we take the conscious decision to act. We think of ourselves as deliberating what to do, then doing it. In fact, in nearly the whole of our lives, our actions are initiated unconsciously: the brain makes us ready for action, then we have the experience of acting.

And yet here I am in the most ordered society on Earth, with skyscrapers dotting the cityscape, with people healthy and rich and I wonder whether he is too hasty in dismissing our illusions of grandeur. Maybe?