Straw Dogs

by John Gray

240pp, Granta Books, £12.99

John Gray's political vision has been steadily darkening. Once a swashbuckling free-marketeer, he has, in his recent studies, become increasingly despondent about the state of the world. With the crankish, unbalanced Straw Dogs, he emerges as a full-blooded apocalyptic nihilist. He has passed from Thatcherite zest to virulent misanthropy.

Not that nihilism is a term he would endorse. His book is so remorselessly, monotonously negative that even nihilism implies too much hope. Nihilism for Gray suggests the world needs to be redeemed from meaninglessness, a claim he regards as meaningless. Instead, we must just accept that progress is a myth, freedom a fantasy, selfhood a delusion, morality a kind of sickness, justice a mere matter of custom and illusion our natural condition. Technology cannot be controlled, and human beings are entirely helpless. Political tyrannies will be the norm for the future, if we have any future at all. It isn't the best motivation for getting out of bed.

Like all tunnel vision, Gray's extravagant pessimism is lugubriously amusing. As with his great mentor Arthur Schopenhauer, the gloomiest philosopher who ever lived, it takes a degree of heroic perversity to overlook every apparent flicker of human value. Straw Dogs is based on a keen, crucial insight - the fact that if men and women really did behave like wild animals, their existence would be a lot less bloody and precarious than it is. Indeed, one might go further and claim that ethics are an animal affair - a matter of our fleshy, compassionate bodies, not of some high-minded moral law. In believing itself infinitely superior to its fellow creatures, humanity overreaches itself and risks bringing itself to nothing. What the ancient Greeks knew as hubris is shaping up at this moment to maim the people of Iraq.

It is just that Gray cannot resist mixing these vital truths with half-truths, plain falsehoods, lurid hyperbole, dyspeptic middle-aged grousing and the sort of recklessly one-sided rhetoric he would surely mark down in a student's essay. He despises post-modernism but shares a remarkable number of its beliefs. He claims morality is a fiction, but has a good line in morally denouncing everything from Socrates to science. In rightly stressing the affinities between humans and other animals, he slides shiftily over some key differences. A creature like Gray can fulminate against genocide but we have yet to meet the giraffe that can do so.

But Gray is right to see it is humans who commit genocide, not giraffes. It is just that he fails to see that the capabilities that allow us to annihilate each other are closely linked to those which allow us to die for one another, tell magnificent jokes and compose symphonies somewhat beyond the capacity of a snail. The Fall from Eden was a fall up, not down - a creative, catastrophic swerve upwards into culture, comradeship and concentration camps.

This is a tragic condition, but not a nihilistic one. But Gray does not want to hear of human value, which would wreck his sensationalist case. He wants to hear that human beings are garbage, plague and poison, a rapacious species that is "not obviously worth preserving". Straw Dogs, like all the ugly rightwing ecology for which humanity is just an excrescence, is shot through with a kind of intellectual equivalent of genocide. It is a dangerous, despairing book, which in a crass polarity thinks humans are either entirely distinct from bacteria (the sin of humanism) or hardly different at all.

Mixing nihilism and New Ageism in equal measure, Gray scoffs at the notion of progress for 150 pages before conceding that there is something to be said for anaesthetics. The enemy in his sights is not so much a Straw Dog as a Straw Man: the kind of starry-eyed rationalist who passed away with John Stuart Mill, but who he has to pretend still rules the world.

The globe is indeed a grim place. But the blistering eccentricity of this polemic feels more like a symptom than a solution. Gray, the gloom-ridden guru, is just the free-marketeer fallen on hard times. The iron determinism of this book is the flipside of its author's previous love affair with freedom. In its histrionic desperation, Straw Dogs is a latter-day version of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and just as one-dimensional.

· Terry Eagleton's latest book is Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Blackwell).