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For the decade that followed the end of the cold war, the world was lulled into a sense that a consumerist, globalized, peaceful future beckoned. The beginning of the twenty-first century has rudely disposed of such ideas—most obviously through 9/11and its aftermath. But just as damaging has been the rise in the West of a belief that a single model of political behavior will become a worldwide norm and that, if necessary, it will be enforced at gunpoint. In Black Mass, celebrated philosopher and critic John Gray explains how utopian ideals have taken on a dangerous significance in the hands of right-wing conservatives and religious zealots. He charts the history of utopianism, from the Reformation through the French Revolution and into the present. And most urgently, he describes how utopian politics have moved from the extremes of the political spectrum into mainstream politics, dominating the administrations of both George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and indeed coming to define the political center. Far from having shaken off discredited ideology, Gray suggests, we are more than ever in its clutches. Black Mass is a truly frightening and challenging work by one of Britain’s leading political thinkers. John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including Straw Dogs and Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he is a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. Winner of the Lannan Notable Book Award In the decade that followed the end of the Cold War, the world was lulled into a sense that a peaceful, consumerist, globalized future was ahead. The beginning of the twenty-first century has rudely disposed of such ideas—most obviously through 9/11 and its aftermath. Just as damaging has been the rise in the West of a belief that a single model of political behavior will become a worldwide norm and that, if necessary, it will be enforced at gunpoint. In Black Mass, philosopher and critic John Gray explains how utopian ideals have taken on a dangerous significance in the hands of right-wing conservatives and religious zealots. He charts the history of utopianism, from the Reformation through the French Revolution and into the present. He describes how utopian politics have moved from the extremes of the political spectrum into mainstream politics, dominating the administrations of both George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and coming to define the political center. Gray suggests that we have not shaken off discredited ideology, but we are more than ever in its clutches. "'Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion,' Gray, a British philosopher, insists in this outspoken attack on utopianism and the `faith-based violence’ it has inspired. History, Gray writes, offers no new dawns or sharp breaks, and, from the French Revolution to the war on terror, he is as critical of the humanist belief in progress as of the `belligerent optimism’ of neoconservatives. Sketching the roots of utopianism, he emphasizes the similarities between seemingly disparate movements: radical Islam, he suggests, might best be thought of as `Islamo-Jacobinism.’ Taking the Iraq war as an object lesson, he argues for an acknowledgment that the `local pieties of Atlantic democracy’ are not the only way to govern. Gray’s writing has a bracing clarity."—The New Yorker "'Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion,' Gray, a British philosopher, insists in this outspoken attack on utopianism and the `faith-based violence’ it has inspired. History, Gray writes, offers no new dawns or sharp breaks, and, from the French Revolution to the war on terror, he is as critical of the humanist belief in progress as of the `belligerent optimism’ of neoconservatives. Sketching the roots of utopianism, he emphasizes the similarities between seemingly disparate movements: radical Islam, he suggests, might best be thought of as `Islamo-Jacobinism.’ Taking the Iraq war as an object lesson, he argues for an acknowledgment that the `local pieties of Atlantic democracy’ are not the only way to govern. Gray’s writing has a bracing clarity."—The New Yorker“Gray's Black Mass is a little Molotov cocktail of a book, blowing up the categories in which we usually discuss matters like the war in Iraq and the direction of history. Any book that herds Robespierre, Lenin, radical Islamists and neoconservatives into one conceptual corral doesn't lack for audacity. While Gray covers a lot of ground, tracing millenarian thinking from early Christianity to the present, he mainly sets his sights on the American neoconservative project to export free-market capitalism and liberal democracy—at the point of a gun if necessary . . . The story line of Black Mass goes like this: Christianity bequeathed to the West the idea of apocalypse, a violent event in history that transforms everything and remakes the world. That idea wormed its way into our DNA, so to speak, and has been there ever since . . . Gray is not the first to see the Iraq War as rooted in a naive right-wing utopianism. What's impressive is the way he embeds present political trends in a larger framework going back to the beginnings of Western culture . . . [T]he book challenges and provokes. For most readers, I suspect, it will tell them things they didn't know.” —Fritz Lanham, Houston Chronicle"A limpidly argued and finely written synthesis of Gray's thinking over the decade or so since False Dawn, his highly regarded and influential study of globalisation. It is not a cheering work, to say the least, and Gray's conclusions, though never exaggerated or overstated, are bleak . . . Yet the right expression of even the bleakest truths is always invigorating, and any half-sensible reader will come away from the book soberer and even, perhaps, wiser." —John Banville, The Guardian (U.K.)"Gray is right to scoff at the misplaced faith in progress propounded by Enlightenment philosophers . . . Gray reminds us about more ancient and truthful myths, which predicted that our reckless pursuit of knowledge and power would lead to disaster." —Peter Conrad, The Observer (London)"When the fashionable pundits of the age of globalization are as forgotten as those who, in the run-up to World War I, predicted globalization had rendered war obsolete, John Gray's work will still matter. It is at once a reproof and an antidote to the reigning wishful thinking that makes Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss look like a realist. Gray's work has always been about separating reality and delusion. In Black Mass, Gray dissects the greatest of all political delusions—utopianism—and maps the way in which, against all expectations, it has migrated from left to right, from communism to neo-conservatism. This is that rarest of things, a necessary book." —David Rieff“Seeing history as a progressive narrative, especially one with a utopian ending, is a practice that has doomed earlier civilizations and threatens our own, argues Gray. Having dealt with the concept of human progress in such previous books as Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, the author sees no reason to revise his core belief: `Human knowledge tends to increase, but humans do not become any more civilized as a result.’ He urges Western powers to adopt a political philosophy of realism. Look, he says, not at the Middle East you want to see—a cluster of none-too-peaceable kingdoms transformed by force into little democracies whose oil wells gurgle merrily to supply the West—but as it really is, a volatile place whose populations have always hated one another and probably always will. Gray spends lots of time painting the historical and philosophical background. He examines the apocalyptical aspects of Christianity and other religions, all of which in his view share a number of traits, most significantly the notion that the end is near. He takes a look at utopian communities of earlier times and notes that inhumane means have almost always been used to attempt to achieve humane ends. In a troubling chapter about the 20th century, Gray characterizes both Communists and Nazis as `children of the Enlightenment,’ employing the `scientific’ principles of economics and eugenics to justify their political goals. The English author has some harsh words for both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair (equally deluded, in his view), but he bashes Bush continually for reliance on `faith-based intelligence’—with Iraq serving as a compelling argument for the pitfalls of this approach. Throughout his impassioned text, Gray's prose is thick with allusion and quotation, but even thicker with erudition and provocation. Makes a discomfiting case that Western liberal democracy just is not suitable for much of the world.” —Kirkus Reviews"'The violence of faith,' philosopher John Gray warns his readers, 'looks set to shape the coming century.' Himself a skeptic, Gray identifies the early Christian vision of Apocalypse as the wellspring of violent passions threatening the globe. True, St. Augustine defused these passions by interpreting end-time scriptures allegorically. But the savage beasts of scripture burst through Augustinian restraints, in Gray’s view, when unbelievers transformed the Christian hope of salvation into the secular dream of an earthly utopia. For when severed fro...
Product Details
- Author: John Gray
- Publication Date: 2008-09-30
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Product Group: Book
- Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Binding: Paperback, 256 pages
- Package Dimensions:
- Dimensions: 820L x 550W x 80H
- Weight: 50
- List Price: $15.00
- ISBN: 0374531528
- ASIN: 0374531528
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Customer Reviews
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More Eurocentric leftism
2009-06-21
Reviewer:
The problem with Gray's books is that of many Western intellectuals, the persistent slanting of any moral responsibility in history from Europe to America. (America is doing nothing that Europe hasn't done continuously for 3,000 years.) These slanted British histories are presented as a "world" perspective--the American "intellectual" thinks anything pro-European and anti-American is a world perspective. As an Asian-American who has traveled in Africa let me tell you--nobody distinguishes between Western countries. The fact that European and Euro-American leftists no longer use the term "the West" in order to shield Europeans from blame doesn't fly in the developing world.
Inconsistent and self-contradictory
2008-12-25
Reviewer: Collin Brendemuehl
"With the death of Utopia, apocalyptic religion has re-emerged, naked and unadorned, as a force in world politics." (p. 3) Among the few errors by Mr. Gray is his identification of only the Christian millennialists as apocalyptic. In orthodox Christianity all the exchatologies, premillennial, postmillennial, and amillennial, await the consummation of human history in the return of Christ. There are two differences. The first difference is how the series of events that take place around His return are structured. The second difference is whether the kingdom is established (either initially [amillennial] or completely [postmillennial]) before or after (premillennial) His return.
When it comes to current events this work should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. His perspective on current issues, esp. the character of U.S. involvement in Iraq, reads like a partisan talking points paper instead of an objective analysis of the greater situation. (p. 100-104)
For Mr. Gray there is no consistent end. His case is not a simple one. He makes very clear the failure of our liberal world to accomplish its utopian goals, the mutual failure of nation-states to fully encompass the needs of the whole society, and the lack of freedom within totalitarian systems. But his solution does not yield a fruitful result. His appeal is a Randian reach to reason and science, and that is his sense of realism. What remains is the physical world; there is nothing transcendental. His realism is without ontology or teleology, reflecting his abandonment of any apocalyptic ends. This is a position of ultimate naturalism that ends with a high level of frightening consistency. By excluding anything metaphysical he excludes ethical considerations from the political process. In this he reads more like coherent Nietzsche.
The matter of ethics brings out a serious contradiction in Mr. Gray's thoughts. One the one hand he sounds like the teleological Christians whom he criticizes when he promotes the best virtues of societies that help the needy and minorities. On the other hand, he sounds like just another despotic scientific atheist as he promotes a system driven by reason and science. The result is that Mr. Gray is not only unable to escape the enlightenment liberalism that he maintains has failed but he is also unable to escape the Christian character and ethic that clearly affects his position.
It is works such as this which present the greatest philosophic dangers to political and social systems. It is a system without an ethic but pretends to appeal to an ethic for the benefit of society. Such is the arbitrariness of proposed totalitarian solutions, and a fundamental motivation for the Christian, especially the evangelical, to pursue a place for the Christian ethic in civic life.
Without a view toward the future, without some sort of apocalypse or similar terminus, there is no possibility for progress. There is no political solution to the human condition.
***
In short, this is a *useful* book for its history but a *poor* work for its tendency to use history and theology for his own covenience.
Difficult to know where to begin...
2008-09-05
Reviewer: T. Bachman
First I want to get something off my chest: who, over at the publishing company, came up with the godawful cover for this edition of the book? It looks like something out of a 1940's sci-fi comic book, or taken from one of those Bobby Sands graffiti pictorials you might see on an old Belfast brick wall - totally lame.
And it's a shame, too, because there is nothing lame about Gray's dour, penetrating, sobering book. It is an unsparing critique of not only utopianism, but the very idea of progress (in human terms) itself.
Gray in effect argues that the Enlightenment project, in a profound sense, is a sort of fraud, in that it has largely occupied the "framework of thought" created by Christian theology, while claiming to have escaped that framework altogether by the relatively trivial act of substituting other ideals for a god figure. Characteristics of that framework include ideas of a linear march of human history towards some end or final culmination (apocalypse), the possibility of moral or ethical progress, and belief based not on any sort of evidence or precedent, but on nothing more than blind faith. Gray along the way devotes quite a bit of time to the Iraq War...but it's hard to do a book this dense any real justice in a review. Suffice to say, I find many of his arguments distressingly compelling (perhaps partly because of his terse, clear prose).
The only concern I have with this book, and with all other books like it, is that it attempts to establish what I might call genealogies of ideas - one (or more) ideas begat other ideas, and those ideas in turn begat these ideas, and these ideas begat those others, and "this is how X people got to Point Y, and how Point Y came to influence the world", with the whole description being suffused with the implication that *logic* was something of the main spur of generation (Idea A logically follows from Idea B)...as though a genealogy of ideas was conceivably as tidy and clear-cut as a biological reproductive chain.
But I always get the sense that such genealogies themselves are more the products of our own need to believe that there was some kind of *rational order*, or even just any intelligible process...
So, for example, was Hitler a child of the Enlightenment? Well, notes Gray, he was inspired by science - Darwinism in particular - and his racism and race policies were amply justified by leading scientific authorities of his day (all over the West). But could it not be as easily argued that he was a child of outrageous romanticism, of Nietzchean Dionysianism, where *to feel* and *to act* and to *impose will* is far more important than to think or contemplate or argue or justify?
Gray argues that Marxism too was but another Enlightenment fruit; but again...when the egalitarianism impulse is so deeply rooted in our psyches, so far beneath any reach of mere rationality, so at its root *religious*, how can we say that it was more the product of reason, than unreason? Maybe another way of putting this all is: Whether we begin with religion/revelation, or science/reason, don't we tend to end up at the same sorts of places anyway?
From what I can see, intellectual milieus tend to owe more to chance, and ultimately to non-rational responses to the world's vicissitudes, and to a need to belong to a group whatever its fashions intellectual or otherwise, and to a tangled, virtually infinite mess of ideas, superstitions, dogmas, and lusts, than to any identifiable series of pure intellectual streams propelled along by *logical extension*. But intellectual histories (including Gray's book) always seem to presume the opposite, and I just don't see how or why. (Once again, I'm starting to feel sort of lonely :P).
Anyway, despite that misgiving, I think Gray's book is challenging, really thought-provoking, and disturbing in the best sort of way.
The trilogy. False Dawn - Straw Dogs - Black Mass
2008-07-05
Reviewer: L. Jean
The other reviews say it all.
If you had to pick 3 books from john Gray, (I've read all of them) I'd place The three mensioned above as must have top 10, all times reference books in political science/economy/philosophy, among the hundreds i have.
A great read, but a lost opportunity
2008-06-14
Reviewer: Phillip M. Rose
Gray's basic argument that modern political movements are based on or disguised as religions is not really new. But, if you think you've heard it all, don't let that stop you from reading this book. Even if the arguments are rather familiar, I found reading Grey's exposition of these ideas an enjoyable experience.
While some reviewers seemed to think that the author crowned his achievement in the final chapter, "Post-Apocalypse", I found he over-reached himself and fell into glibness too often. I wondered if one reason the hyperbole fell a bit flat was the evanescence of the movements he cited earlier, including Communists, Nazis, and now the neocons.
I noted that the New Yorker magazine reviewer observed that Gray tried "to fit too much into his model of utopianism with too little argument". To the contrary, I thought that Gray's argument was persuasive enough, and that there was much more that he should have fitted into his model; in other words, he failed to adequately discuss all of the available modern utopias. Gray seems unaware of any genuine research into the 9/11 events, therefore shapes his arguments to fit the received mythology about Islamofascism (which he calls Islamo-Jacobinism -- fair enough) and the phony war on terror, which is actually a war *of* terror. His analysis of the neocons is therefore unfortunately stunted, as he misses out on the true implications of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and the New Pearl Harbor that was called for by PNAC. If these ideas are unfamiliar, I suggest searching both Amazon and the web using the terms "PNAC" and "New Pearl Harbor". In any event, his emphases on religio-political movements that have either been eclipsed (Nazism, Communism) or are in the process of being eclipsed (neocons and Islamofascism) will soon make the book seem unfortunately dated. The neocons are now being replaced by the Trilateralists in anticipation of an Obama presidency and the Islamofascists will eventually cease to be regarded as Enemy Number One, as happened with the Communists.
There is another perhaps less well-known but no less dangerous utopian project that Gray missed out on, and that is the Anglo-American elitist cabal that is behind the current food and fuel shortages. Utopia, according to the world's power elite, consists of a world with a greatly reduced population, a goal they have been working towards in a patient, methodical fashion for over a century. The belief system that drives them is no less dangerous and crackpot than Nazism or neoconservatism, and needs to be exposed and skewered by talented writers like John Gray. I refer readers to F. William Engdahl's latest book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation for a gripping up-to-date analysis of this utopian dream that endangers the lives of all of us in its pursuit.
While I thought "Black Mass" was an excellent book as far as it went, I consider it a lost opportunity due to its failure to mention the most persistent and insidious utopian movement of the past one hundred years. This utopia had an early manifestation in the eugenics movement, which was very popular among elite Americans in the early to mid-20th century. Eugenics was soon adopted by the Nazis, who featured prominently in "Black Mass". This thread of discussion would have enhanced Gray's arguments against unachievable utopias, and given it even more relevance to our time. For, while Nazis, Communists and neocons may come and go, the elitist utopian dream of population reduction has outlasted all of them.
