Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

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Straw Dogs - Details". AFI Catalog of Feature Films. American Film Institute . Retrieved 7 May 2019.

Straw Dogs - Macmillan

Gray, John (2004). Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions. London: Granta Books. ISBN 978-1862077188. Humans may be a more advanced animal but as per the hypothesis argued here they are an animal nonetheless. They forage for food, seek warmth, attempt to procreate, communicate using sounds and markings with one another; and inevitably expire just as animals do. The secular humanist idea that we are fully in control of our lives and the decisions we make in it is entirely a religious one. We don't spe John Gray interview: how an English academic become the world's pre-eminent prophet of doom". The Telegraph. London. 28 February 2013 . Retrieved 9 August 2013. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. We are no different today from what we have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world’s religions.

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I think Gray should probably spend less time reading his own arguments and spend more time talking with those who actually work in the areas he so casually dismisses. His ideas are not new, and have been discussed ad nauseum in any journal worth its salt. It takes a kind of heroic cynicism to be quite so relentlessly negative, and that alone tells you that Gray must be overlooking quite a lot. But at any rate the book, though rather fascinating, is a mass of inconsistencies. On the one hand he spends a lot of time trying to demonstrate that humans should become less obsessed with action and more content with simply being. But on the other hand he insists that humans cannot change and any attempt to alter human nature is doomed to failure. Similarly, he bangs on about how pointless the concept of truth is – "the worship of truth is a Christian cult" – yet what is this book if not an attempt to put forward his own view of truth and overturn the "untruths" of others? If this book does not offer a kind of truth, it offers nothing. It perpetuates the heinous myth that women say no when they mean yes and it will forever taint the film, especially as the audience is forced to believe a ‘bad rape’ follows a ‘good rape’. Gray, John (1991). J.S. Mill's On Liberty in Focus. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415010016.

Straw Dogs by John Gray | Waterstones

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written that John Gray is the modern thinker for whom he has the most respect, calling him "prophetic". [25] Criticism [ edit ] We think our actions express our decisions. But in nearly all of our life, willing decides nothing. We cannot wake up or fall asleep, remember or forget our dreams, summon or banish our thoughts, by deciding to do so. When we greet someone on the street we just act, and there is no actor standing behind what we do. Our acts are end points in long sequences of unconscious responses. They arise from a structure of habits and skills that is almost infinitely complicated. Most of our life in enacted without conscious awareness. Nor can it be made conscious. No degree of self-awareness can make us self-transparent.” Postmodernists parade their relativism as a superior kind of humility — the modest acceptance that we cannot claim to have the truth. In fact, the postmodern denial of truth is the worst kind of arrogance. In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.The scene was trimmed by the censors when it hit cinemas and the film was banned on video in the 1980s due to its sexual violence. The ban stayed in place until well into the 21 st century. Champlin, Charles (December 24, 1971). "Violence Theme of 'Straw Dogs'". Los Angeles Times. Part II, p. 2.

Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals (Best of

BBC Radio 4 – A Point of View – Episodes by date, November 2014". bbc.co.uk. BBC . Retrieved 28 November 2014. Ha! I feel the exact same way, but it must be hard for you, I mean, having the same name as him. I celebrate the guy's entire catalogue. But anyway, let's get down to business, Michael! What he came up with was a very British western – Hoffman played David Sumner, a timid American mathematician who leaves anti- Vietnam War protests in the States to live with his young wife Amy (Susan George) in her native village in Cornwall.

John Gray’s Ideas

Drawing on a wide range of sources, from science to fiction to more speculative theories such as Gaia (the belief that the planet is a self-regulating organism), Straw Dogs unfurls in a series of numbered paragraphs. The style is terse and pithy; sometimes bold assertion supplants argument and there is repetition, overstatement and too much direct quotation from the work of EO Wilson and others. But there are moments of beauty and insight, too, and disgust at the excesses of history - the wars, destruction, the ideological follies. An almost identical narrative follows in which xenophobic locals act with escalating aggression towards the quiet, retiring city boy, then, following a double rape, are provoked into staging an assault on David's farm, ending in a bloodbath and David's emergence as a vengeful, macho protector of home and hearth.