Gray quotes this so as to ask: "Why do other animals not seek deliverance from suffering? Is it that no one has told them that they must live again? Or is it that, without needing to think about it, they know they will not?" Gray - who the New Statesman has called 'the philosopher of pessimism' - is often caricatured as a sour misanthrope, a wilful catastrophist. He is nothing of the kind. In truth, he is, like JG Ballard, about whom he writes so well in Straw Dogs, a visionary. Modernity is his urgent, defining subject, and here he attempts to articulate nothing less than what the young Oxford philosopher Edward Skidelsky has called 'a total view of the world', a Weltanschauung. The academic and author Danny Postel of the University of Denver also took issue with Straw Dogs. Postel stated that Gray's claim that environmental destruction was the result of humanity's flawed nature would be "welcome news to the captains of industry and the architects of the global economy; the ecological devastation they leave in their wake, according to Gray, has nothing to do with their exploits." [27] Postel also claimed that too much of Straw Dogs rested on "blanket assertion", and criticised Gray's use of the term "plague of people" as an outdated " neo-Malthusian persiflage about overpopulation". [27] Postel strongly condemned Gray for outlining "complete political passivity. There is no point whatsoever in our attempting to make the world a less cruel or more livable place." [27]

So The Silence of Animals finds Gray more determined than ever to describe human beings as self-deluded. But it also has another emphasis – not new, exactly, but newly prominent. An early clue to this renewed emphasis comes in the first of the book’s three sections, in which Gray does indeed go over old ground, providing his readers with tantalising examples of humanity’s progressive folly, as evidenced in the humiliations of empire and the catastrophe of all-out war. But the interesting thing about these examples is that all of them are taken from literature, from books by Joseph Conrad, Norman Lewis, Arthur Koestler, Curzio Malaparte and George Orwell, to name only a few. In a sense, this is unsurprising. Gray has always been a ‘literary’ intellectual – one for whom the canons of literature complement the canons of philosophy. But in The Silence of Animals it soon becomes clear that writers are being used not only as sources, but as exemplars of another way of thinking. Writers, Gray seems to want to say, are afforded greater insight into the world for precisely the reason that they are not philosophers.Humanism is not science, but religion — The post-Christian faith that humans can make a world better than any in which they have so far lived.” Gray accepts that many of the intellectual battles of earlier centuries have been won: that the Judaeo-Christian system has been overturned, that Darwinian evolution is self-evidently true, that the self is a flimsy construct, that humans are scarcely different from other animals. But, at the same time, he has little belief in progress or in the ultimate benefits of science. He may be a master of aphoristic philosophy, but he employs specious, contradictory and surprisingly confused reasoning as much as he delivers worthwhile blows to our complacency. He quotes Wittgenstein - "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" - and trumps him with John Aspinall: "It's clear that Wittgenstein hadn't spent much time with lions." Very droll, and indeed elsewhere Gray is fond of quoting Aspinall; but you could make a counter-example by saying that Wittgenstein never ran a zoo whose keepers misunderstood the animals enough to be eaten by them. Wheen, Francis (2004). How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. London: HarperCollinsFourth Estate. p.187. ISBN 0-00-714097-5.

To say that The Silence of Animals doesn’t begin to answer that question would be to put it delicately. For Gray gives us an image of humankind as fundamentally and dangerously irrational. He gives us Man the Myth-maker. Turning to Freud, who in Gray’s estimation has been fundamentally misunderstood as providing ‘a therapy for modern ills’, Gray suggests that ‘the upshot of his work is that we are obliged to admit that our knowledge of ourselves cannot be other than highly limited.’ And so we tell stories about the world, and about our special place within it, and about how we are going to make it better; and in this way we avoid the truth that we are animals and that our lives are without meaning. The term agonistic liberalism appears in Gray's 1995 book Isaiah Berlin. Gray uses this phrase to describe what he believes is Berlin's theory of politics, namely his support for both value pluralism and liberalism. A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with Neoliberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from non-western traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims. Colls, Robert (10 January 2003). "Ethics Man: John Gray's New Moral World". The Political Quarterly. 69: 59–71. doi: 10.1111/1467-923X.00137. There is unlikely to be a more provocative or more compelling book published this year than Straw Dogs . . . Gray is one of the most consistently interesting and unpredictable thinkers in Britain.” — Jason Cowley, The Observer (London)De Botton, Alain (4 March 2013). "Alain de Botton on five great philosophical pessimists". The Telegraph . Retrieved 1 December 2022. Gray, John (1996). Mill on Liberty: A Defence (2nded.). London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12474-4.