Book Report: John Gray's Black Mass

Here is a genuinely conservative book by an English political philosopher. John Grey is profoundly conservative, not in the sense of rabid defense of property rights or traditional custom, but because he's hostile to the whole idea of progress. For him, history went wrong about 3,000 years ago, when Zoroaster the Persian prophet first posited the inevitability of a final battle between good and evil. Just about every obnoxious trend in today's world, he contends, derives from the mentality Zoroaster introduced. Gray sums this up as teleology, the belief that history is a progressive process with a predetermined end, combined with the notion that bad habits of mind can be purged from humanity, resulting in the perfection of society. In the most basic terms, its the final defeat of evil at the time of the last judgment. But it can also be the communists' attempt to purge greed or selfishness, or the atheists' hope of eliminating the need for religion. The conservative core of Gray's philosophy is that human nature is unalterable. His theme is that any utopian, messianic or apocalyptic project that depends on altering human nature must fail.

In an epigraph, Gray explains that a Black Mass is nothing more than a backward recitation of the Catholic Mass. His argument for the first part of his book is that many of the forces that portray themselves as opposites today are really basically the same. For instance, even though Islamic terrorists and their enemies see a conflict between Islam and "the West," Gray argues that al-Qaeda and other Islamist movements are based on Western ideological models. He differs from neocons in equating al-Qaeda with "Islamo-Leninism" rather than "Islamofascism." Meanwhile, militant atheists' aspiration to rid the world of dogmatic faith is a by-product of the very tradition they despise, since only those raised on myths of a final triumph over evil could imagine that something like man's need for religion could be permanently purged from people's minds. At the same time, a strong tendency in modern Anglo-American conservatism has inherited the revolutionary fervor of their defeated Marxist foes, who themselves were indisputably products of that same Christian culture on the evidence of their belief of a revolutionary perfection of man and society.

In Gray's view, mankind is stuck with irreconcilably contradictory desires that make utopian ideas of social harmony impossible. The world will never be rid of conflict, he contends, and no prudent statesman would ever try to rid the world of "evil," as George W. Bush and the neocons proposed, and the Bolsheviks before them, and the Jacobins in France even earlier. History is not a sequence of progressive improvements culminating in perfection; to assume that leads to imposing your will by violent force on other people. Thus Gray explains the Iraq debacle, which he attributes as much to utopian fanaticism as to greed or lust for power. He also takes time to explicate the neocon worldview and its rationalization of deception in the buildup to war. Here's a sample:

Above all, neo-conservatives are unwilling to rely on social evolution. Commonly more intelligent than neo-liberals [i.e., the people who trust the market to take care of everything], they understand that while capitalism is a revolutionary force that overturns established social structures and topples regimes this does not happen by itself -- state power and sometimes military force are needed to expedite the process. In its enthusiasm for revolutionary change, neo-conservatism has more in common with Jacobinism and Leninism than with neo-liberalism or traditional conservatism

One of the oddities of the book, reflecting its British origin, is that Gray presents Tony Blair, rather than any American, as the archetypical neocon. While he has some interesting insights on the neocon mentality, he has an uncertain grip on American history. He tends to overstate the Puritan influence on our national character, as if he doesn't know that mere money-grubbing was a major colonial objective from Jamestown forward. A larger flaw, in my reading, is Gray's characterization of all today's dangerous movements as basically aggressive, missionary or revolutionary in nature. He underrates the extent to which nearly every force he describes perceives itself to be on the defensive. Muslim and Christian fundamentalists see themselves under attack by secular culture,not to mention Western imperialism in the Muslim case. So-called militant atheists see a hard-fought secular consensus under attack by a resurgence of barbaric faith. American leaders see the country under attack by an ambitious, aggressive Islam bent on conquest. None of this contradicts Gray's main point about the prevalent apocalyptic mentality, but failing to emphasize the importance of "existential threats," to use a neocon term, leaves Black Mass slightly off-key.

Obviously something should be done about current conditions, but does Gray think anything can be done? He does believe that society can be and has been changed for the better, and cites the global campaign against slavery as an example. Abolition was not a utopian idea, he claims, because you could point to societies that had no slavery to prove that any society could do without. Overall, however, he's pessimistic about setting a single standard for all the world's societies. Rather than impose a single standard on all countries, Gray thinks we should endorse whatever system best secures peace in any given country. If that means dictatorship in some places, theocracy in others, we'll have to hold our noses and learn to live with it. Gray seems to think that each of us would be better off seeking philosophical detachment, contemplating infinity, or reveling in the moment than trying to remake the world to our specifications.

Oddly for a book mostly devoted to dissecting and demolishing the neocon worldview, Black Mass wraps up with a defense of religion. Naturally, Gray wants a religion liberated from teleology and apocalyptic thinking, and in his opinion secularists need to liberate themselves from the same flaws. He wants us to concede that religion fills a need for "meaning" that people will never be rid of. It addresses "the need to accept what cannot be remedied and find meaning in the chances of life," and since it has a different purpose from science, religion should not be held to scientific standards of knowledge. He admits that religion will always be vulnerable to fanaticism and hucksterism, but here as everywhere else, all he can recommend is vigilance and a determination to prevent the worst outcomes by whatever means work best at the time.

I've gone on for a while, but I've only skimmed the surface of a densely packed but clearly written book of only 210 pages. You'll learn a lot about the neocons here, even if Grey, like everyone else, has a hard time getting a grip on the slippery influence of Leo Strauss and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. I learned stuff I didn't know about a proto-neocon "Team B" created as a rival to the CIA back in 1976, just as G.H.W. Bush took over the agency, that rejected the former agency's fact-based approach to intelligence in favor of intuitions based on assumptions of Soviet evil. You get everything from apocalyptic Protestant cults in the 1500s to a learned demolition of free-market ideology to Joseph Stalin's patronage of experiments mating men and apes. In some ways Black Mass is a demoralizing book because it's constant refrain is, "don't get your hopes up," but in the end it's more of an invigorating challenge, because Gray seems to believe that we can do better than worst as long as we use our heads. It may prove to be the most entertaining non-fiction book I've read all year.