Just got John Gray’s Black Mass. I know that it’s an astonishing intellectual tour de force that you imperil your very soul by not reading straight after publication, but I still thought I’d wait till the paperback came out. Got it on a three for the price of two offer as well. Beat that, Faust.
I enjoyed Straw Dogs – the tone, the prose, the sentiment – without signing up to everything in it. Very Taoist book as well: not just the title or the fact that it was structured in the Chinese analect style, but the general theme. People vaguely think of Taoism as something to do with twee books about Winnie the Pooh, but it’s an extremely hard doctrine. The basic premise is that human life doesn’t matter: life itself, as a totality, is what matters, and that attempts to impose system, order and justice on the world by humans are of themselves existentially life threatening. Therefore, morality is a disease of intelligence.
That particular version of Taoism seemed to be the intellectual framework of Straw Dogs – all those references to Gaia - perhaps filtered due to the fact that Professors of comparative political thought don’t want to get into a position where they have to explain exactly what they mean by “way” or have interviewers asking when his consideration of the Tao of the Teletubbies is coming out. Or indeed, what he’s doing dicking around with that horrible Fu Manchu stuff when everybody knows that respectable public intellectuals should be dancing around a pole with Voltaire’s skull nailed to the top.
Well, Gray flits from one thing to another so it’ll be interesting to see if he develops a similar line of argument in Black Mass. More on this later.
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