Myth of Progress

Probably because I read Straw Dogs a couple of years ago, the idea of the Myth of Progress was probably already in my head, but I was surprised to find that John Gray has a new book out that directly addresses this idea. 

Notes from reviews of The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
by John Gray

• The chief tenet of the Enlightenment is that the growth of knowledge is the key to human emancipation.
• Modern societies ... abound in new, short-lived religions, "flickering and fading", as J G Ballard has put it, "like off-peak commercials".
• We can't renounce technology, and the idea that we can is just hubris in another guise. 
• There is no power in the world that can ensure that technology is used only for benign purposes. Partly this is because we cannot agree on what such purposes are. Partly it is because even when enough people are agreed there is no power that can enforce the consensus.
• "Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science."
• "The power of myth," Gray writes, "is in making meaning from the wreckage of meaning."
• As Gray insists, we are going precisely nowhere – and a good thing, too. The world is not a teleology, there is no grand end in view, just round the next revolutionary corner, just over the next mound of heaped-up corpses.

*

Straw Dogs is one of my favourite books, but I must admit, this review from the Guardian is not far from the truth:

His book is so remorselessly, monotonously negative that even nihilism implies too much hope.