John Gray - Gray’s Anatomy

Praise for Black Mass

Penetratingly lucid. Gray operates best in political-historical mode. Black Mass is particularly distinguished in the way it addresses how academic and Beltway neo-conservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Francis Fukuyama and Paul Wolfowitz constructed the ideological framework for the war on terror. One of the more incisive overviews of the origins and nature of the modern neoconservative movement.

The Gazette (Montreal)

[Gray] is a master of intellectual history. He has a sharp eye and a vivid writing style. And best of all, he dissects the pieties of others without regard for party, ideology, faith or faction.

Ottawa Citizen

A challenging, unsettling book Grays polemic is of great value, and the resulting fury may just be what is needed to agitate some genuine action against the pernicious effects of the current status quo.

The Guardian (UK)

Steely-eyed, powerful, unhinging and insightful.

The Globe and Mail

This is Grays most powerful argument yet against the scientific idealists who think they can blueprint a benevolent end-state utopia. Their attempt, Gray argues, has led to the ruined utopias we see around us, and the return of repressed religious belief in its most frightening form. A brilliant polemic, probably best read on the steps of St. Peters.

JG Ballard, The Observer

One of John Grays supreme qualities as a thinker is that he is bereft of illusions. Stripping away the meaningless verbiage which swaddles so much analysis, Gray discerns an underlying structure of thought (or lack of thought) in the political landscape. He is a compelling writer, dismembering his targets with surgical irony.

The Independent (UK)

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

False Dawn: Delusions of Global Capitalism
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern
Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Copyright 2009 John Gray

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisheror in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agencyis an infringement of the copyright law.

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v3.1

The law of chaos is the law of ideas, Of improvisations and seasons of belief.

Wallace Stevens, Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas

The world changed out of all recognition during the period in which the writings that are collected here were written. When the earliest of them appeared, over thirty years ago, the international scene was shaped by a struggle between two power blocs a geopolitical freeze that was mirrored in the realm of ideas. Europe was divided along the boundaries established during the Second World War, Russia was a Communist state and China ruled by Mao. The recent wave of globalization had hardly begun. The rise of Asia was yet to come, and America was by far the most powerful country. In Britain Labour was negotiating a bailout from national bankruptcy with the International Monetary Fund, and Margaret Thatcher was leader of the Opposition. The political classes took it as given that some version of the post-war consensus on the mixed economy would remain in place, while the intelligentsia were occupied in languid disputes over the varieties of Marxism.

Behind this shadow play there were beliefs no one doubted. Liberal democracy was spreading inexorably; the advance of science would enable the affluence of some countries to be enjoyed by all; religion was in irreversible retreat. The path might not be straight or easy, but humanity was moving towards a common destination. Nothing could stand in the way of a future in which Western liberal values were accepted everywhere.

Not much more than thirty years later all these certainties have melted away. The Soviet state has ceased to exist and Europe has been reunified; but Russia has not adopted liberal democracy. In the years after his death in 1976 China shook off Maos inheritance and adopted a type of capitalism without accepting any Western model of government or society. The advance of globalization continued, with the result that America has lost its central position. The US is in steep decline, its system of finance capitalism in a condition of collapse and its vast military machine effectively paid for by Chinese funding of the federal deficit. All mainstream parties in democratic countries converged on a free-market model at just the moment in history when that model definitively ceased to be viable. With the worlds financial system facing a crisis deeper than any since the 1930s, the advancing states are now authoritarian regimes. The bipolar world has not been followed by one ruled by the last superpower. Instead we have a world that nobody rules.

The growth of knowledge has continued and accelerated. At the same time economic expansion has come up against finite resources, with peaking energy supplies and accelerating climate change threatening industrial growth. Rival claims on scarce resources are inflaming wars around the world, and these resource wars are intertwined with wars of faith. Far from fading away religion is once again at the heart of human conflict.

If the global scene at the start of the twenty-first century is different from any that was commonly anticipated, this was only to be expected. A weakness for uplifting illusions has shaped opinion throughout this period. No doubt intolerance of reality is innate in the human mind. Every age has a hallucinatory image of itself, which persists until it is dispelled by events. Secular thinkers imagined they had left religion behind, when in truth they had only exchanged religion for a humanist faith in progress that was further from reality. There is nothing wrong in taking refuge in a comforting fantasy. Why deny rationalists the consolations of faith however childish their faith may be? The pretence of reason is part of the human comedy. But the decline of religion that occurred in the twentieth century was accompanied by the rise of faith-based politics, a continuation of religion by other means that has proved as destructive as religion at its worst.

Lenins embalmed body and the saviour-cult orchestrated around Hitler are examples of the twentieth-century sanctification of power. Nazism and Communism were political religions, each with its ersatz shrines and rituals. The Nazi paradise was confined to a small section of the species, with the rest consigned to slavery or extermination, while that of the Bolsheviks was open to everyone apart from those marked down for liquidation as remnants of the past, such as peasants and bourgeois intellectuals. In both cases terror was part of the programme from the start. Humans are violent animals; there is nothing new in their fondness for killing. The peculiar flavour of modern mass murder comes from the fact that it has so often been committed with the aim of creating a new world.