'GENOCIDE IS AS HUMAN as art or prayer.' So writes John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, in his latest polemic. Like Mary Midgley's Beast And Man, Straw Dogs challenges assumptions about what it means to be human. We amount to a plague of nasty, albeit inventive, animals with 'an unquenchable fondness for killing', Gray argues. The author traces our love affair with genocide to the era of the stone axe. Since then, countless wars essentially had a single common motive: the slaughter of the vanquished. In the Australian island state of Tasmania, which was colonised by Europeans in 1772, the extent of the slaughter bordered on annihilation. Forgetting their belief in the sanctity of life, driven by hunger for living space, sadism and greed, the settlers killed and castrated natives whose skins fetched a bounty. As a result, by 1880, almost the entire race had been wiped out. In the 20th century, genocide continued to flourish. Since 1950, there have been almost 20 genocides of which at least three (Bangladesh, Cambodia and Rwanda) claimed millions of victims. As technology advances, so does man's ability to satisfy his lust for genocide, Gray points out. Other charming and seemingly ungovernable human foibles that he appraises include sexual desire ('it cares nothing for individual well-being'), love of drugs ('fulfilment is found not in daily life but in escaping from it') and stupidity. In defence of his questionable belief that man is a moron, Gray quotes the Buddhist meditation teacher Gunaratana, who said: 'Our human perceptual habits are remarkably stupid. We tune out 99 per cent of the sensory stimuli we actually receive, and we solidify the remainder into discrete mental objects. Then we react to those mental objects in programmed habitual ways.' All the vices mentioned have an equivalent in the animal kingdom, including drug addiction (one breed of baboons uses intoxicants to disrupt tedium) and bloodlust (another breed of baboons would supposedly demolish the world in a week if they had nuclear weapons). Rather than nuking the world, our great project is wrecking the balance of life. We have already succeeded in exterminating numerous species. Blame humanism. This vainly anthropocentric doctrine assumes a gulf between ourselves and nature, giving us a licence to abuse. Instead, we should supposedly favour animism, which hinges on a sense of belonging with nature. Although we persist in our humanist hubris, we are no better than straw dogs used in ancient Chinese rituals as offerings to the gods. Despite being ardently worshipped during the ritual, afterwards they were trampled on and tossed aside. Gray claims that unless we learn to work with nature, we too will be ruined. If global warming does not get us, then genetically engineered, compassion-free armies could. Or we may just be upstaged by the Internet. Failing that, we may discover the new economy services we perform are 'useless'. Gray's capacity for fatalism appears limitless. Some readers may find his doom-mongering and contempt for mankind upsetting. Others may accuse him of ignoring the value of art, and attack some of his wilder claims, such as that consciousness 'may be the human attribute that machines can most easily reproduce'. But Straw Dogs deserves respect for forcing us to re-evaluate the dated supposition that homo sapiens matter more than anything else. Perhaps we should adopt Gray's neologism, 'homo rapiens' (rapacious man). How neatly the term conveys the nastiness of the plague animal he judges 'not obviously worth preserving'. Straw Dogs by John Gray Granta $170