Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Hardcover)

~ John Gray (Author)
Key Phrases: armed missionaries, medieval millenarians, modern revolutionary movements, United States, Cold War, Soviet Union (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Some readers will see pessimism where others see sober appraisal in Gray's antiutopian argument that we must reconcile ourselves to a world of multiple truths and incompatible freedoms, where there is no overarching meaning and human values and desires can never be fully harmonized. The views that history progresses toward perfection and the millenarian faith in human salvation—both rooted in abiding Christian myths—are as tenacious as they have proven destructive, the renowned British political theorist and critic argues. Building succinctly on arguments developed in his previous work (including Two Faces of Liberalism and Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern), Gray traces the course of apocalyptic-utopian politics from early Christianity through its secular variant in the Enlightenment and into modern political thought from Marx to Francis Fukuyama, the French Revolution to radical Islamism. Centrally, he assails the contemporary American right (and staunch neoconservative fellow traveler Tony Blair), which after 9/11 advanced into the mainstream the utopianism previously confined to the extreme right and left. His eloquent and illuminating attack also challenges a notion common to the liberal establishment: that history moves inexorably toward the universal application of U.S.-style liberal democracy. He calls it a delusional article of faith that, like the utopian variants before it, easily justifies violence in the name of a greater destiny. (Oct.)
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From 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, but he tries to fit too much into his model of utopianism with too little argument.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (October 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374105987
• ISBN-13: 978-0374105983
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #570,471 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Un-realising a "perfect" world, December 29, 2007

By	Stephen A. Haines (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

It's not easy categorising John Gray. He's generally listed as a "philosopher", but he rarely delves into the roots of human behaviour. His philosophy is founded on recorded history. Like most modern "philosophers", his arena is the canon of Western European tradition and practice. That approach, at least in Gray's hands, makes him more political commentator than philosopher. The shift of emphasis doesn't erode his thinking prowess nor his ability in expressing what he has derived from it. His prose is clean and unpretentious, almost hiding the power of the thinking behind it. In this exciting little work, Gray examines the history of modern "utopian" ideas - their misconceptions and their persistence.

The idea of utopias has long diverted us from confronting realities, Gray suggests. This self-generated departure tends to hide consequences of our acts until it's too late to deal with them successfully. Naturally, one of his glaring examples of this situation is the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Gray demonstrates how it was planned intentionally long before the causes were manufactured for it. The planning was clearly utopian in that the intentions were delusionary and inappropriate. Both governments declared their intention - based on false pretenses - to "extend democracy into the Middle East". This ambition was expressed without any perception of whether it would be welcomed. It's an underlying principle of utopian thinking, Gray observes, that a society can be re-created from within or imposed from the outside. The failure of such thinking is readily apparent in Iraq - a war that has lasted longer for the US than WWII. Utopian ideas have been seeded on infertile soil.

In explaining how the utopian idea arrived in the Middle East by way of the US-UK "special relationship", Gray skips lightly over Thomas More's original idea to the Enlightenment era. There is a link, however, in that while we are generally taught that the Enlightenment thinkers were building a secular world, they were relying on Christian precepts to expound their ideas. "Improvement" was the means of overcoming disparities in the human condition, and the State could replace the Church in making beneficial change. Among other virtues of this thinking was that it seemed realisable within human timespans. In the 20th Century, a wide variety of such proposals were tried, and Gray brings Marxism, the hippie communes of the 1960s and the Fascist-Nazi movements into the same paddock. Once thought as a "Leftist" ideal, Gray is unsurprised that it is now the policy of choice of the "neo-cons" and their supporters on the "Christian Right". Yet, it seems that no matter where on the political spectrum utopians arise, they continue to commit similar blunders. The goal blinds them to the perils of trying to achieve it and utopia becomes tragedy.

It's easy to peg Gray as grim or dismal. That's a common label pinned on those who seek to have us confront reality and think more deeply about our decisions. In this sense, Gray takes a long view of the role of Christianity in Western thinking. The shift of utopia from heaven to Earth, while seeming to provide improvement, was just as likely to introduce anarchy. He compares two contemporary thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, in their approach to this problem. Modern liberals declare the unrestrained State as the greatest threat to freedom. Hobbes understood that anarchy was an even greater threat and government was needed to quell it. Spinoza, on the other hand, while unwilling to grant the state power to stomp on emerging anarchy, had a different proposal. Humans are part of the natural world, and turning to the state for salvation of any kind was erroneous. His realistic view was that disorder and peace are natural cycles of the human condition. We must approach this situation realistically, without any fixed or unattainable goals to repress the one to gain the other. Such simplistic thinking can never succeed. Gray has offered an exceptionally rational set of pointers on avoiding such single-mindedness. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Delusion and Danger of Utopia, November 23, 2007

By	S. J. Hall (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Gray's work traces the origins, and shows the evolution of the two ideas that have intertwined together to spawn the modern horrors of the French Revolution, Nazism, Communism, and which have now infiltrated the U.S. and are guiding American foreign policy, with absolutely disastrous results.

The genesis of these two ideas is due to Christianity. The first of them is that the world was soon coming to an end, and with its end, all evil would be forever banished, and a new world would emerge that was utterly good and harmonious. The second of these ideas is that history is a teleological process - it has a goal, an end point, it is moving towards something, progress is possible. This idea is derived from the Book of Revelation, which depicts the world as eventually becoming a better place with the continual destruction of evil forces.

These ideas got secularized during The Enlightenment, and give rise to the idea of a Utopia - a place where all human conflicts have washed away and everyone lives in perpetual peace. Such a place is possible because with enough knowledge will can set up a society that will not give rise to any conflicts. In other words, a perfect society is an obtainable goal, one that involves eradicating the maladies that have continually plagued our societies. Gray contends this is impossible, and this type of thinking is the danger inherent in pursuing, any and all, utopian projects.

Utopian thinking views the world/society, as the source of ills and conflicts, and not humans, and by doing so, makes human life expendable; ultimately compels the people who are under it spell to engage in violence as a means to attempt to achieve their goal. After all, what's a little bloodshed if it leads to the world becoming a heaven on Earth?

This line of thinking also precludes them from grasping the fatal flaw in their thinking - that human beings are not capable of becoming conflict-less beings; they will always possess conflicting and competing needs and values. No amount of knowledge will ever be able to make humans that mutable. And as such, people will resist having their lives radically altered by someone else's utopian scheme, and if nothing else this would prevent utopias from working, even if they were viable.

Gray goes on to explain how a left wing idea, a utopia, became embedded in right wing thinking. And also to show this utopian brand in thinking in action in the Bush administration in particular in foreign policy ventures. Instead of viewing terrorist as a security threat, he instead saw them as evil forces, whose complete annihilation would make the world a better place. Since making the world a better place is the right thing to do, anything that advances that goal is also good, it is imperative that various torture methods be adopted to achieve this end. Moreover, democracy and human rights are a good thing, so a world that has more places with these things in them, would be better, so the right thing to do would be to invade Iraq, by any means necessary (lying about the WMDs) and liberate it by force.

Overall, this is a thought, wide ranging, insightful, and interesting book about the well intentioned, but exceedingly dangerous mind set that is currently guiding U.S. foreign policy.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Will engage and enrage, January 18, 2008

By	Sirin (London, UK) - See all my reviews

Some arguments:

The modern neo-liberal project to impose Western style democracy around the world (most potently in the former secular leaning Iraq) is the successor ideology to Marxism.

The neo-cons (in Washington, and formerly the now fully fledged Catholic Tony Blair in Downing Street) are willing to mendaciously deceive the public in order to achieve their ultimate goals. In the UK, Blair might not have been able to mobilize religion behind him as Bush did in the USA, but for both men their project is essentially the same: the salvation of mankind.

The USA is a secular nation by constitution but is by far the most religious of all the developed democracies. Neo-conservatism, a mixture of crackpt realism and chiliastic fantasy, could only have emerged in such a nation, where millenarian thinking prevails very strongly.

US power is not nearly as secure as many believe it to be. The country is trillions of dollars in debt and depends on the economies of numerous other states, not necessarily democratic, to maintain its economic status. The emerging powers of the world such as China do not have to kowtow to America's hegemonic postition and they realise this.

End of History arguments - the Fukuyama thesis that liberal democracy is the final, unimprovable form government and changes in states are all moving towards this state - are ludicrous. Humans do not necessarily desire democracy, rather there are many different forms of organizing human societal affairs in a functioning manner.

Washington foreign policy makers would do well to heed the words of Maximilien Robspierre to the Jacobin Club, Paris, in 1792: 'The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. It is in the nature of things that the progress of reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries.'

The humanism of modern secular ideologists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are versions of Christian concepts. For example, Dawkins assertion that humans, uniquely, can defy natural selection laws, the tyranny of the selfish replicatiors.

With natural resources likely to become scarce as the 21st Century progresses, we can expect a large amount of geo-political struggle as nations slug it out to control resources. The 21st Century will not necessarily be more peaceful than the first half of the 20th.

Sober, pragmatic realism is the only way to conduct international relations.


The last point, embodied in the last chapter of Black Mass, was a relief to me. After being engrossed in 200 pages of scare mongering, I was wondering what Gray's final conclusion would be - complete exchange of the world's nuclear arsenals, total unravelling of the institutions of international capitalism leading to God knows what. Black Mass is not the kind of political theory book you can read with a quiet reflection - broad consensus on this point, minor disagreement on that point. It is likely that readers will either worship Gray's thinking (along with the pseudo dark philosophers of Will Self, John Banville and J.G. Ballard in the 2007 reviews of the year sections) or be enraged by it (the right wing political commentators, the prosletysers of democracy, the international liberal thinkers who are enraged at the fact that women in Iran do not enjoy the same freedoms as their counterparts in the West).

In fact, with his revealing last point, a desire to reclaim the lost art of realism, Gray's book is revealed for the essentially modest argument he is making - essentially a call for clarity, for stepping back, for sober assessment of the situations on the ground before embarking on any great utopian projects. This used to be the hallmark of the Conservative party in the United Kingdom (as John Stuart Mill said, the 'Stupid Party' (meant as a compliment), the party Gray used to support. If we can escape the modern trend towards neo-con thinking (uncertain in the UK with the likes of Michael Gove gaining ascendancy in the Conservative Party), human affairs might not necessarily be doomed. The 21st Century might not necessarily be as much of a bloodbath as the last. See how things unfold.

To start with, 2008 will see a new President in the White House, and many in the US are fed up with their country's millenarian imperial pretensions. Coming assessments of how world affairs will unwrap in the coming years would do well to start with an awareness of these facts.