Apocalypse Now?

Posted 11 January, 2008 in Book Reviews |

Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, by John Gray. Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cloth, 246 pp., ISBN:978-0-385-66265-9.

“The modern world began with wars of religion.” So states John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and author of the alternately frightening and enraging new volume, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Frightening, because of Gray’s considered analysis of how secular utopian projects are giving way in the post-9/11 era to a kind of apocalyptic thinking fuelled on both sides — East and West — by openly fundamentalist religion. Enraging, because his detailed and carefully constructed arguments underline how little humanity has learned from history, despite having its lessons hammered home again and again on bloody battlefields around the globe.

Exactly how little have we learned as a result of our unforgivable short-sightedness and ignorance of history? Gray provides a potent example by opening his discussion of the Iraq war, which he calls “the first utopian experiment of the new century,” with a quote reading in part: “It is in the nature of things that the progress of reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies. One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force.” The man who uttered those words was not an American general nor any of the policy advisers giving counsel to the American administration in the run-up to the disastrous invasion of March 2003. It was Maximilien Robespierre, in a 1792 speech to the Jacobin Club.

It is entirely appropriate that Gray invokes one of the key figures from the French Terror to give context to his discussion of Iraq, since he is able to draw a direct line from the Jacobin revolution in France through the secular revolutionary movements of the 20th century — Bolshevism in Russia and Nazism in Germany — to the current American imbroglio in the Middle East. What each movement has in common, Gray argues, is a secular utopian vision, a belief that humanity is perfectible and that a revolutionary conflict can lead to what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”: the point after which ideological, civilizational battles would cease and the world would exist in harmony.

The problem with this utopian ideal is that it is fantasy. In addition to eliding certain important aspects of human nature — the tendency towards opportunism, for example — in the specific case of Iraq, it assumes that the popular sentiment will run to the same kind of liberal democracy that exists in the West. If, however, the popular sentiment tends more towards a fundamentalist reading of the Koran, then certain groups that might have found some protection under a secular despotic regime — women, for example — will actually find themselves less well off when that regime is displaced. “No constitution,” Gray writes, “can impose freedom where it is not wanted or preserve it where it is no longer valued.”

Gray is by no means the first person to point out that the American supposition that it could export democracy to a region mired in thousands of years of tribal conflict is a delusion: Gwynne Dyer has made the same point in his books Future: Tense and The Mess They Made. What separates Gray’s analysis is his positioning the neo-conservative American ideology firmly within the context of repressed religion. Many people today forget that America had two founding groups. The first were the (relatively) secular individualists who authored The Federalist Papers and drafted the American Constitution. The second were the Puritans, and they’ve never gone away. As Gray saliently points out, “Where America differs from other nations is in the persistent vitality of messianic belief and the extent to which it continues to shape the public culture.”

In its utopian fervour, its notion of human perfectibility through violence, the current American administration is not sui generis, although its close links to Christian fundamentalist groups that believe the Rapture is imminent does tend to tie it more closely than other governments to the early Christians, who Gray refers to as an “eschatalogical cult.” However, as Gray rightly asserts, “The political ideologies of the last two hundred years were vehicles for a myth of salvation that is Christianity’s most dubious gift to humanity.” That myth found its secular outlet in the revolutionary movements of the Jacobins in France, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the Nazis in Germany. Clearly, the wanton violence that can be unleashed by an adherence to notions of earthly utopia is frightening to contemplate.

But if the era of faith in utopia is, as Gray suggests, coming to an end, only to be replaced by an adherence to eschatalogical religious thought based on notions of the end times, how are we to survive the coming sea change?

Gray’s answer is by returning to “the lost tradition of realism” championed by Machiavelli. In this endeavour, Gray argues, the “cardinal need is to change the prevailing view of human beings, which sees them as inherently good creatures unaccountably burdened with a history of violence and oppression. Here we reach the nub of realism and its chief stumbling-point for prevailing opinion: its assertion of the innate defects of human beings.”

I would quarrel with Gray on this point: the notion of humans as fallen creatures is not necessarily the great stumbling block to a Machiavellian realist way of thinking. Indeed, the great religions all take human fallibility and weakness as their starting points, so this mode of thinking is not confined to the realist camp. The chief stumbling block to a rigorous realist philosophy is the human need for myths, for stories and narratives that provide structure and hope for the future.

Gray is clear on the dangers of viewing history as an extended narrative: “this benefit is purchased at a high price: a price measured in the lives of others who are forced to act out a role in a script they have not read, still less written.” History, for Gray, is not a coherent narrative with a plot that can be followed in the way one would follow the plot of a novel. This idea is comforting to human beings who crave structure and meaning, who are most afraid of history that “is a meandering flux without purpose or direction.”

The “meandering flux” of history may indeed be the correct reading, but it is also clear that it will be inimical to humanity’s need to impose a coherent structure on historical events. If the idea of an earthly utopia is a secular political fantasy, so too is the notion that human beings can abandon their need to turn the events of their lives, and the world around them, into stories. That abandoning the comforts of historical narrative for the rockier shores of a history devoid of meaning or coherence may be humanity’s best hope for survival is a tough pill to swallow, and to his credit Gray doesn’t try to candy-coat it. Where he stumbles is in his assumption that such an intellectual sea-change may be possible given humanity’s need for hope and structure.

Gray’s analysis throughout is rigorously dispassionate and intellectual. No dogmatic academic liberal, he is equally critical of folly on the right and the left of the political spectrum. Liberals, with their knee-jerk adherence to “rights” as a political and social trump card, come in for just as much criticism as do their conservative (and neo-conservative) counterparts. This dispassion will prove difficult for readers used to Oprah and The View, but it is a welcome alternative to the liberal platitudes of the CBC on the left and the histrionic conservative screech of Fox News on the right.

The fact that Gray’s final prescription for humanity may be unachievable adds to the discomfort level inherent in his book. Black Mass is a difficult, discomfiting read, but nonetheless a necessary one.

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