Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
John Gray Allen Lane, 242pp, £18.99
ISBN 0713999152
Everything is getting worse, we are doomed and the only good news is that it scarcely matters because humanity is not worth saving anyway. John Gray's new book Black Mass is not cheery, and one might wonder how a work so deeply rooted in British conservative philosophy could end so far from Disraeli's dream of a "Merry England". Black Mass is a critique of human pretensions and the analytical rubric that underpins it will be broadly familiar to anyone interested in political philosophy. Gray draws on the works of Hume and Hayek, Popper and Berlin, yet uses them as sledgehammers, even against his closest allies. The result is the darkest possible assessment of our current situation and our hopes for the future.
Black Mass sets out by reaffirming the link between philosophical speculation and political totalitarianism: whenever we dream of a better world, we inexorably create something far more terrible. The intimate connection between utopianism and dictatorship was first formulated by Isaiah Berlin and Hayek, who attacked "rationalism", the Continental strand of philosophy associated with Voltaire and, especially, Hegel. Gray provides a compact restatement of this critique from Jeane Kirkpatrick, the one-time US ambassador to the UN. She argues that, "because it assumes that man and society can be brought to a preferred plan, the rationalist orientation tends powerfully to see everything as possible and prospects for progress as unlimited".
Gray accepts this argument, but rather than locate the birth of rationalism in the European Enlightenment, he heads backwards to the birth of Jesus Christ. According to Gray, it was Christianity which introduced the idea that the world can be redeemed and born anew. He rather curiously absolves Judaism of any responsibility for this concept, though all orthodox Judaic interpretations of the Torah have avowed that the world is broken and will only be redeemed and healed at the end of time. Yet his basic point has merit: at a certain point in history, we began to think in terms of "eschatology", a logic devoted to the end days. From this moment on, our eyes have been fixed on the horizon: we have been unable to think of the human situation outside of history, and incapable of thinking of history except in terms of progress towards this horizon.
Gray is schooled in the empirical, or anti-rationalist, tradition and rejects any search for transcendent principles that might define humanity. Instead, he looks to the historical record in order to trace the evolution of the concepts that have shaped us. The difficulty, though, is that the idea of "history" is so tainted by religious notions of progress, necessity and finality, that returning to history for explanations is always fraught with danger.
Any attempt to tackle "history" must be fuelled by suspicion. Gray's own approach draws on David Hume and Karl Popper in ways that are both original and, I feel, tendentious. In Gray's hands, Hume's idea of history focuses on chance and mishap. Popper, meanwhile, provides the concept of "falsifiability": for an event to be spoken of in a rigorous and analytical fashion, it must be capable of being shown to be false. Popper's point is that only fairy tales are incapable of being falsified, because they bypass the possibility of criticism. Yet when this thought is applied to history - in Gray's hands, at least - everything that happens does so only by chance, and every account of why it might have happened in such and such a fashion rather than another can always be shown to be false. The result is that history becomes a history of chaos and mistakes. Here, Gray's view recalls nothing so much as the Talmudic concept that the mirror of creation is broken and has been broken from the very first beat of time.
The bulk of Black Mass is taken up with an often rollicking, sometimes bone-crunching history of medieval barbarism, millennial cults, the rise of totalitarianism and the nadir of fascism, ending with a precise account of the lies and self-deceiving hopes that hurried on the invasion of Iraq. Without devaluing Gray's account of the religious inspiration behind these events, it is clear that his own work is also swept along by spiritual motifs: the "fallen" state of creation, the spirit of history as a force that aims towards destruction and the fallibility of mankind. Gray even states that man is essentially fallible - which rather jars with his stated view that humans are simply a peculiarly violent animal.
The idea that history is constructed through mishaps is the defining view of a conservative. Gray again quotes Kirkpatrick: "When we forget the intractability of human behaviour, the complexity of human institutions, and the probability of unanticipated consequences, we do so at great risk, and often immense cost." For a conservative, our institutions necessitate respect because they are a kind of sedimented wisdom of the ages: the storage blocks for everything that tends to work. They may become ossified, but it would be the height of folly to tear them down - society is too complex to be engineered from scratch. Kirkpatrick's phrase "unanticipated consequences" was coined by the American sociologist Robert King Merton, and it is telling that Gray uses it repeatedly: he believes only in "unintended" consequences. It is the essence of humanity to fail - our institutions are not repositories of wisdom, but of stupidity without end.
This is where Gray turns on the traditions that nourished him. In his view, there is no real difference between the two great philosophical schools of the Enlightenment. In his account, all western philosophy is tainted by a defining fall from grace: a belief in redemption and, often, redemption in a cleansing apocalypse. The Enlightenment philosophers who spent their lives hoping for a concert of understanding are as guilty as those who argued that a real and final settlement will be discovered through an inexorable historical process.
In Gray's world, there are nothing but moral equivalences: everything is like everything else, and everything is a mess. He has many interesting ideas - most of all, his insistence that there never was such a thing as a free market because the grounds of the market-place were always fashioned by government legislation. Yet from these moments of clarity, his world-view slips away in a morass of ignored differences and ends in an undifferentiated miasma of destruction. Perhaps the key, then, is his surprising claim to revere Marx's critique of capital. "Surprising" because Gray pointedly rejects dialectical materialism and once this framework is stripped away, "capital" is nothing but a poetic image of a subterranean black force, raging without end. Faced with this excessively gothic image, we might follow Gray's advice to read Huxley, Philip K Dick, Burroughs and Ballard. And, of course, I have done. But I wonder whether returning to the curtained blackout of my teenage bedroom is the best preparation for the challenges of our present world.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
