John Gray, ‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals’:
“....The bequest of Socrates was to tether the pursuit of
truth to a mystical ideal of the good. Yet neither Socrates nor any other
ancient thinker imagined that truth could make mankind free. They took for
granted that freedom would always remain the privilege of a few; there was no
hope for the species. By contrast, among contemporary humanists, the Greek
faith that truth makes us free has been fused with one of Christianity’s most
dubious legacies – the belief that the hope of freedom belongs to everyone.
Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind
can know the truth – and so be free. But if Darwin’s theory of natural
selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary
success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error
that humans are different from all other animals....”
