Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia | John Gray

Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia | John Gray | Enlightening

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Black Mass: Apocal...

	Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia John Gray Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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Best Book of 2008

Not often I give 5 stars to any book. But I have to give it to this one. Its good....I'm not sure that it compares with Niail Fergusson's latest Opus "The War of the World" in many ways... but from what he tries to do it is very good at analyzing apocalyptic politics - which I think no one has really done.

The danger is of course really only one that I can see... he does get reductionist at time. That and I think he savages Tony Blair a bit too much... but that's it... good contemporary analysis using the methodology of Cohn... his book is called "The Pursuit of Millenium." --- also a wonderful book!

His basic thesis is that people propounding ideas that are catagorically against commonly accepted explainations of what we know of human behaviour -- advocating ideas and theories -- these people have historically been millenialist, deluded, and very dangerous indeed.

Gray starts with a historical interpretation of apocalyptic ideas -- christianity, the crusades, and then advances into the twin scourges of 20th Century Naziism and Marxism. From this he comes right up to present day and argues the Bush League in the Whitehouse, along with Tony Blair and his compradours, are responsible for believing in and foisting an idealistic interpretation of Iraq and the results of war. He argues that it was never realistic to believe that Iraq would ever turn into a democracy, and that neocons deluded themselves into a sort of millenialist intepretation of the world. One unrealistic -- like marxism -- but one that was pushed to its limit with disasterous consequences for all: a war in a land waged for democracy, with no history of democracy, and no nuclear weapons.

It is a very dark interpretation of history in general and how History, writ large, has a way of reappearing in current times in ways that we may miss of interpret wrongly. Gray reminds us that history can slide backwards, darkness can invade the light of progress. That there is no guarantee that the US or all of the other Westminster style democracies will always be centres of liberal democracy. He sees the rise of illiberal democracies -- those that use the power of the majority to oppress the weak and minorities. This is trend he says in Russia, China and the logical outcome of the war in Iraq. That except for Britain and Canada, there has never really been a history of countries with multinational democracies.

Gray states that this has happenned in Iraq and will get worse. Moreover in most countries with no democratic tradition -- with almost the exception of Britain its commonwealths and the US, there has never been a country that did not, at some time engage in illiberal democracy. In fact he is worried about it coming back... since even the US has begun an official policy of intolerance.

He is a persuasive man indeed. Refreshing to see him savage the left and the right with an intellectual rigour unknown in the pale prose that passes as analysis from the right or the left. Along with Niail Fergusson he is one of the great minds writing cogent, rational analysis of the world around us.

In the end he advocates a sort of neo-realism to save the world. Areas of direct interest are worth dying for, but any intervention needs to be based upon a realistic assessment of the world, not ideology of the neo-cons or the power-based thought of the contemporary left - both merge into idealism, and idealism as a prop for foreign policy always has been, and will be, a path to the slaughter bench of disaster and human suffering.

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Enlightening

Like all books by John Gray, Black Mass is a compelling example of the power of an overwhelming and logical examination of vital events. At this point, I would classify Mr. Gray as one of the five top philosophers in the English language. In addition to the impeccable quality of his reasoning, he writes in an accessible and beautiful Englsih, without all the word-splitting typical of philosophers, particularly of the French breed. Kudos!

The trilogy. False Dawn - Straw Dogs - Black Mass

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.

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Difficult to know where to begin...

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 human hope (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, which explains why we live in the intellectual world we live in. Certainly, some ideas for all of us beget other ideas...but the deep, virtually pathological irrationality of humans, the inescapably context-sensitive nature of reasoning processes, our own need to believe that our ideas have some grounding in some more authoritative source than ourselves, which leads us to claim in sincerity though often incorrectly intellectual forefathers, makes me doubt such genealogies.

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). Or was he 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? Or is such impulse-driven mindlessness itself merely a logical outcome of a wholly scientific worldview? Maybe - but the more I try to make sense of all these issues, the more hopeless the task seems to grow.

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 always end up with total unreason anyway? And if so, what *meaning* does *reason* even have in the end, 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.

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A great read, but a lost opportunity

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.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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