Humanist myths

Thomas Nagel doesn’t much like John Gray’s latest , The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths , an assault on humanism along these lines. Gray rejects the idea that humans are unique, the notion that the mind reflects the order of the world, and the myth of progress. Instead, there’s just animals: “In a strictly naturalistic view — one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm — there is no hierarchy of value with humans somewhere near the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with its own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science.”

Nagel grants that Gray can turn a phrase, and quotes some of his best:

“To suppose that the myth of progress could be shaken off would be to ascribe to modern humanity a capacity for improvement even greater than that which it ascribes to itself.” “The needy animal that invented the other world does not go away, and the result of trying to leave the creature behind is to live instead with its ghost.”

Gray leaves some of the most important questions unaddressed: “On the great philosophical question of how our minds have enabled us to create the remarkable edifice of scientific knowledge, he has nothing to offer. He cites Wallace Stevens in support of the need for fictions to appease our attachment to belief. But the bare insistence that our minds do not reflect ‘the order of the cosmos’ is not enough to deflect attention from something about the power of human reason that evidently demands to be explained.” ’

Gray’s questions are Nagel’s, but Nagel has recently answered by challenging the premise of naturalism, rather than indulging what he thinks of as “the cut-rate superiority of the confirmed cynic.”