"The more I see of men," said Mme de Staël, "the more I like dogs." Always excepting the pit bulls and rottweilers that slather and snap at the heels of yobs, I agree with her. So does John Gray, who introduces this anti-humanist tract with a quote in which Arthur Koestler imagines some undescended apes swinging playfully through the trees while a brutish prehistoric man plods along the ground below, clubbing innocent creatures and gorging on their raw flesh. Rather than promoting evolutionary progress, our uncouth ancestor represents "a barbaric relapse of history".

Gray later brings that primal scene up to date. Starving Neapolitans in 1944 hunt and consume alley cats, or feed on tropical fish scavenged from the city aquarium; Soviet prisoners interned by the Nazis gobble the corpses of other inmates like ravening hounds. This is what happens when the pretences of civilisation and humanism fall away  for in Gray's view they were never more than a conceit given sanctimonious support by religion. In Eden, God flattered man by electing him to lordship over the other animals; the truth is that our rational capacity has actually licensed us to behave like beasts.

"Barbarism," Gray believes, "is a disease of civilisation." All our institutions  "families and churches, police forces"  are incriminated by "human nastiness". It's absurd to place faith in the evolution of our species or in the progressive amelioration of society: in the Belgian Congo or Stalinist Russia or in contemporary Iraq, Iran and Syria, ideologues who rave about the regeneration of the world rely on mass slaughter to establish their personal version of heaven on Earth. In Gray's reading of history, men are the playthings of a blind and amoral fate, which decrees that the same mistakes will be made over and over again. The fictions and myths we elaborate in order to feel at home in this inimical or indifferent universe are at best "a scattering of dust", easily dispersed by the chilly blasts of Gray's invective.

So what should a wise man do? Kill himself, probably. Gray admires the stoicism of Socrates who uncomplainingly swallowed his dose of hemlock, and he finds the same bracing despair in the cancer-stricken Freud, who refused to stop smoking the cigars that were killing him and waited for a friendly doctor to administer morphine and terminate his misery. Otherwise the only nostrum recommended here is to take up ornithology. One of Gray's heroes is the birdwatcher JA Baker, who rejected human company and spent a decade studying peregrine falcons in Essex.

As befits a book that scorns progress, Gray's polemic is bluntly repetitive. He has expounded his theories often before, though this time there are a few asides that acutely target aspects of our current malaise. His mockery of our desperate belief in a better future recalls to me Obama's victory speech last November, which ended, despite the evidence of economic collapse and social breakdown, by asserting that for the United States "the best is yet to come"; and his remark that "the idea of self-realisation is one of the most destructive of modern fictions" sums up the cultural catastrophe of The X Factor and explains why Simon Cowell is the antichrist. Too much else is secondhand: the book is an anthology of misanthropy, amplified with endless quotes from Orwell and Ballard, Herzen and Borges, Ford Madox Ford and Llewelyn Powys. The citations start with an opening section on Joseph Conrad's stories about the inhumanity of imperialists in the Congo. Gray mentions Heart of Darkness in passing, and later he takes up the dying lament of its hero. "The horror, the horror," moans Kurtz, haunted by his reversion to cannibalism; echoing him, Gray says that the human world was "the horror from which JA Baker was fleeing".

Horror, however, is Gray's meat and drink, and he often seems to be rerunning horror movies in his gloomy head. He entitled a previous book Straw Dogs, alluding to Sam Peckinpah's film about a pack of feral thugs who maraud through a village in the West Country, and at first I thought that The Silence of Animals might be a riff on The Silence of the Lambs, in which Jodie Foster tells the lip-licking man-eater Anthony Hopkins about a pack of squealing sheep bound for the abattoir. As it turns out, the phrase is taken from the Swiss Catholic theologian Max Picard, who bafflingly remarks that "The silence of animals is different from the silence of men".

I'm puzzled by the Franciscan sentimentality Picard's comment provokes in Gray. Despite his contempt for his own species, he's a softie when it comes to our feathered or four-legged friends. Hasn't he ever been kept awake by a barking dog or the rutting yelps of urban foxes? Quoting page after page of Baker's rhapsodies about the peregrine falcon, he forgets that hawks are birds of prey, treading air while they prepare to pinion hapless rabbits and dismember them with their scything beaks. Whenever I see the black, balefully squawking crows in my London street shred garbage bags to gobble kitchen refuse, I find myself feeling better about human beings. Gray, I fear, may end up like Swift's dotty Gulliver, who was so disgusted by his fellow men that he went to live in the stables with his horses.

Every couple of years or so John Gray presents a new book in which he imparts to us many wise things we seem incapable of heeding. He is like an anchorite who at irregular intervals comes in from the desert to stand in the market square holding aloft a banner on which is writ in stark letters THE END OF THE WORLD IS NOT NIGH. He bides there for a time, monitory, silent, ignored by all but the few, then trudges away again to his solitary pillar, shaking the dust of the city from his heels.

Gray, who among other eminences has occupied the professorships of Politics at Oxford and of European Thought at the LSE, is now a full-time writer, philosopher and public intellectual. His books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, and a selection of his writings, Gray's Anatomy, are at once dire execrations of humanity's numerous idiocies and lyrical celebrations of the joys of his own particular brand of quietism.

For Gray, the rot really got going with the enlightenment, progressed through romanticism, and, in the form of delusions such as globalisation and the religion of science, is still eating away at the foundations of what could be our happiness. He was among the first to point out that our notion of the end of history  remember Francis Fukuyama?  was just another resurgence of old-style millenarianism, and that Islamic fundamentalism is really a continuation of the Jacobin rage for destruction and resurrection.

He offers a negative dialectics that is wonderfully bracing if one is prepared to entertain it. "Accepting that the world is without meaning," he writes, "we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the inexhaustible world that exists beyond ourselves."

The key words in this passage are "the meaning we have made". He quotes with approval TE Hulme's verdict on romanticism as "spilt religion", but he would apply it far more broadly  "rationalism", he writes, "is also spilt religion". For Gray, the so-called modern world has never managed to cast off the yoke of organised religion and its doctrine of means and ends. Most of us in the west imagine ourselves to be living in secularised societies, but the religious impetus towards the manufacture of meaning for human affairs underlies most of our assumptions about what we are, where we came from and, most significantly, where we are going. As Gray insists, we are going precisely nowhere  and a good thing, too. The world is not a teleology, there is no grand end in view, just round the next revolutionary corner, just over the next mound of heaped-up corpses.

Gray has nothing against religion  indeed, he has far more contempt for latter-day positivists such as Richard Dawkins than he has for congregations of the hushed faithful leaning in prayer before the image of their deity. Religion he sees, rightly, as a poetic response to the world and our predicament in it. He quotes with approval from one of his favourite obscure authors  Gray is a great recuperator of lost reputations  the cheerful unbeliever Llewelyn Powys, who confessed that when he visits "an old grey church" and kneels amid the "curious peace of the place" he feels half inclined to believe: "Why not?"

"The power of myth," Gray writes, "is in making meaning from the wreckage of meaning." His version of myth, however, is, like his version of so many things, specialised and carefully limited. "Myths are not eternal archetypes frozen somewhere out of time. They are more like snatches of music that play in the mind. Seeming to come from nowhere, they stay with us for a while and then are gone." As you see, Professor Gray takes the long view.

There are, he points out, different kinds of myth, some good, some not so good, and some that are positively pernicious. He is fascinated, in an appalled sort of way, by the smoothness with which seemingly opposing mythologies are blended together by the self-congratulatory savants of our day. This is especially apparent when it comes to the idea of progress, Gray's abiding bugbear. "When contemporary humanists invoke the idea of progress they are mixing together two different myths: a Socratic myth of reason and a Christian myth of salvation."

This is both acute and timely. It is a peculiar kind of modern arrogance that has led us to imagine that at some point in the evolutionary process humankind took a miraculous step up out of its animal state and became a kind of demigod holding dominion not only over all the earth but over fate as well. The disaster that is our forgetting of our animality led on to further disasters, in particular the conviction of human perfectibility, the belief that we are on a long march towards what will be a heaven on earth. This dream, at once pathetic and highly damaging, is subscribed to alike by global capitalists, religious fundamentalists and the high priests of modern science. "Like cheap music," Gray writes, "the myth of progress lifts the spirits as it numbs the brain."

Of course, arguments can and will be adduced against his position on this matter. The myth of progress is probably deluded and certainly dangerous, but Gray himself admits the necessity of myth  of "supreme fictions", in his admired Wallace Stevens's celebrated formulation. And without this particular myth, where would we be? Crick and Watson had to believe in the grand end of their investigations in order to crack the DNA code, and if chemists had not persisted in their quest for a local anaesthetic our visits to the dentist would be far more memorable than they are today. Gray would retort that he does not gainsay progress in technology, but technology is progressed by technologists who, beady-eyed though they may be, are, after all, human.

Gray, like his friend and mentor Isaiah Berlin, sets himself against all proponents of the grand idea  of progress, of perfectibility, of the right and only way to live. He would, one suspects, champion the bureaucrat over the ideologue any day. We love to castigate bureaucracies  look what a hate-word "Brussels" has become for our latter-day Jacobins of right and left  but consider the alternative. People who kiss their spouses goodbye in the morning, stick from nine-to-five at their humdrum desks, and come home in the evening looking forward to a nice dinner and something on the telly, are surely to be preferred to those cold-eyed demagogues, "the prophets with armies at their backs", as Isaiah Berlin has it, who conceive a burning vision of exactly how the world should work and are prepared to spill the blood of millions to ensure the imposition of their system.

The Silence of Animals is a new kind of book from Gray, a sort of poetic reverie on the human state, on the state, that is, of the human animal, as observed by the author himself and others of a like and unlike mind. As much as a third of the text is taken up with quotations, some of them a page-long, from writers as various as George Orwell and Georges Simenon, Wallace Stevens and Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Roth and Curzio Malaparte. Gray's own, almost Nietzschean, gift for aphorism is much in evidence: "If belief in human rationality were a scientific theory it would long since have been falsified and abandoned"; "If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience"; "Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science." He blends lyricism with wisdom, humour with admonition, nay-saying with affirmation, making in the process a marvellous statement of what it is to be both an animal and a human in the strange, terrifying and exquisite world into which we straw dogs find ourselves thrown.

 John Banville's Ancient Light is published by Viking.