PoliticsA biting attack on utopian thought, including that pertaining to American politics since 9/11, writes Bill McSweeney
John Gray is a radio pundit, a Guardian essayist, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and a noted contrarian. Just when you think you have his measure and have charted his course, he changes tack again. Unlike Christopher Hitchens, often cited in similar terms, Gray is the real thing, of whom a friend reputedly said: "Give him any collection of pigeons and he'll set a cat among them."
He has scattered several flights of pigeons in recent years in a series of hard-hitting essays and monographs attacking conventional ideas on the idea of progress, the Enlightenment, fundamentalism and a host of other -isms. His deeply pessimistic outlook on all human endeavours to construct a better world and his dissection of the greed and hubris on which they feed make for an absorbing, if depressing, encounter.
In this latest book, the pathology that is the human condition is again displayed for our edification, but this time as the subtext and framework of Gray's primary thesis on American foreign policy under the Bush administration. In fact, he gives us two short books in one - a biting attack on utopian thought and movements in the first three chapters, and an even more savage critique of the utopianism that, he argues, has driven American politics since the events of 9/11.
The book opens with a bold statement of the contentious: the world is "littered with the debris of utopian projects, which though they were framed in secular terms that denied the truth of religion were in fact vehicles for religious myths". While most social scientists lean towards the Weberian thesis that religion is in retreat from the forces of modernity, rationality and science, Gray argues the opposite. Politics is a form of faith, a chapter in the history of religion. The longing for faith is an irreducible human aspiration that cannot be explained away as a misplaced social need or psychological urge. When explicitly denied in times of secular triumphalism, religion bites back in distorted form - hence the "black mass" of the title.
The first chapters of the book contain much of interest in the author's discussion of the religious origins of utopianism and the purveyors of the millennial. Among the better known are Gnostics and the Manicheans, whose dualism was embraced by the more pious American presidents whenever they felt the need to rally their troops behind the forces of good against evil.
The great revolutionary movements - Marxism, communism, Nazism - are just secular versions of the founding religious myth that we are living in the last days, waiting for the apocalypse, which will end the old order and signal the coming of the new as promised in their different ways by Jesus, Marx, Blair and Bush. "Modern revolutionary movements are a continuation of religion by other means," for Gray. "The Bolshevik and Nazi seizures of power were faith-based upheavals just as much as the Ayatollah Khomeini's theocratic insurrection in Iran."
This is quite an astonishing claim by someone who inhabits the quintessential secular world of British academe, and who gives no hint of religious affiliation on his own part. But the claim is surprising also because the argument in support is not very compelling, not at the same level of his much-praised earlier work, Straw Dogs.
Gray makes a number of exaggerated claims. One is that all derives from religion - all our major institutions and political aspirations are a form of religion in disguise. But what does that mean? Of course our social norms, our law, our moral frameworks follow in an obvious sense from the religious ideas that once saturated human thought and its understanding of its environment. Our ideas about equality, freedom, democracy, even secularism, have roots in our religious past. But that doesn't licence the belief that they are today a perverted or disguised expression of Zoroastrianism or Christianity or a yearning for the spiritual and the numinous. Secularism sometimes does what it says on the tin: rejects religion.
A second claim relates to a favourite beast in the demonology of John Gray - the Enlightenment. It too was a perversion of religion and gave rise to the "scientific racism" of Hitler's utopianism. The causal linking of Enlightenment values that promoted the scientific method with the Nazi distortion of those same values is hardly credible.
The three chapters that form the second half of the book could better stand alone without the attempt to relate American foreign policy to religious and secular utopianism in history. The title of chapter four, "The Americanization of the Apocalypse", and the following chapter, "Armed Missionaries", point the reader in the direction intended by the author: the US under Bush is the political expression of ancient longings for the millennium.
HERE THE AUTHOR is on much firmer ground and his interpretation of US policy since 9/11 is based on more solid evidence. He wants to see the control of foreign policy by neoconservative ideologues as apocalyptic - and he is right to do so. Much of the material he cites in support of his claim is familiar, but the passion and clarity of his writing makes his argument here a compelling one.
This does not mean the US, from its birth, has always been apocalyptic, as the author states. Intensely religious? Yes, undoubtedly. Messianic, in the sense of seeing itself as a chosen people with a mission to save the world? This kind of moral exceptionalism holds for a large part of American history.
But it should not be confused with millennial beliefs in the end-times, in the Apocalypse. It cannot be claimed the US has been apocalyptic since its foundation, or millenarian since the Puritans, as the author contends. Only the sad man currently living out his own end times in the White House emerges clearly from presidential history as the prophet of the American apocalypse.
Bill McSweeney teaches international politics at the School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia By John Gray Allen Lane, 243pp. £18.99