'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).