In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, John Gray explains how Utopian thought recurs throughout human history and is as powerful a force today as it was in the Middle Ages.
After tracing the history of Utopianism though the ages via Sir Thomas More, John of Leyden, the Jacobins of the French Revolution and many others, Gray turns to the 20th century, where Utopianism dominated the main ideologies of Communism, Nazism and Maoism, leading to unparalleled disasters for humanity. Gray quotes Leon Trotsky, “the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks shall rise”, amply demonstrating the belief common to all Utopians that there is no limit to human advance.
Gray demonstrates that Utopians never shrink from violence and deceit to achieve their goals. It is not enough to reform social institutions for society as it exists is beyond redemption: the old order must be overthrown. Peope who seem to be embedded in the old stability are seen as the enemy, and are treated with terror tactics each of which seems to go further in its viciousness (e.g. Stalin’s treatment of the peasant class, as so ably demonstrated by Orlando Figes in The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia ).
The Utopian mindset was all too visible in Nazism, with its vision of impending disaster, to be quickly followe by a new world. Hitler’s “Volk” was a mystical entity, conferring immortality on its participants, and the potent mixture of beliefs bears comparison with any of the mediaeval millenarian movements. Even militant Islam is shown to be Utopian in nature, with its intellectual founder, Sayyid Qutb being heavily influenced by European thinkers, particularly Nietzsche, and ideas lifted from the Bolshevik traditions.
Of course, the thrust of this book is to illustrate how the same tendencies have infected the political movements currently surrounding us. Gray shows how the post-war settlement broke down through the 1980s leading in Britain to the rise of Margaret Thatcher, who believed that the unleashing the free-market would transform the economic state of Britain, restore bourgeois “Victorian” values, and also result in enrichment for all via the “trickle down” effect of wealth (which never happened!) – a Utopian philosophy indeed!
Gray’s fifth chapter “Armed Missionaries”, is where his book comes together in showing that the Iraq adventure, launched by the Americans and the British, was shot through from beginning to end with Utopian or millenarian thought. George Bush actually believed that there was a fledgeling Iraqi government waiting in the wings, which only needed the liberating “shock and awe” of American force to release it into establishing a new age of democracy and pro-Western thinking. The Americans expressed a faith in paper constitutions which belies the USA’s own history which achieved national unity only via years of struggle and a Civil War.
When writing under the heading, “An American Neo-Con in Downing Street”, Gray bring his analysis to bear on Tony Blair, who was so infected with his belief in the rightness of his “doctrine of international community” that he took Britain into war five times over the span of six years. It mattered little whether the hoped-for outcome of these wars was Britain’s self-interest or not, because for Tony Blair, there was a far wider goal, the establishment of global institutions based on an American/British understanding of the ideal society. Blair’s wars were not about neutralising threats, but about promoting the new world order which was just around the corner.
Gray writes a devastating critique of Blair’s mindset: possessing an objective certainty, deception could be used to bring about his aims. Every stage of the Iraq war was deceptive; the compilation of “intelligence”, the pretence that a United Nations resolution would be obtained before the conflict, the secret planning for war which was always denied. Blair’s complicity in deception came about because he “lacks the normal understanding” of truth. For him, “truth is whatever serves the cause” and in concealing uncomfortable facts, Blair was only “anticipating the new world that he is helping to bring about”
John Gray has written an immensely valuable book in Black Mass, providing not just a historical analysis, but a philosophical context which helps us understand and judge the political forces which surround us today. I would recommend it to anyone who knows that something is amiss with the way politicians think but can’t quite put their finger on what it is. My own response was to long for the days when politicians will once again be concerned with national interest, housekeeping the economy, and reducing leglislation – in other words, the deconstruction of political ambition.
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