style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">A little over a decade ago, John Gray secured his status as one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals with his anti-humanist polemic Straw Dogs. Gray dismissed the central tenets of the optimistic, secular carriers of the Enlightenment torch as baseless articles of faith, no more free of myth than the religions they were meant to supersede. Humans were nothing special, just animals like all the others; social and moral progress did not inevitably follow from scientific and technological advances; and the self was neither free nor rational but yet another illusion.