D:Ream couldn’t have got it more wrong. Human nature being what it is – irredeemably flawed and essentially no different from our animal cousins – things can only stay the same, or possibly get worse. Modern politics is an exercise in self-delusion, having adopted the baseless hopes of progress and redemption from the decaying remnants of Christianity, and using them to construct castles in the air. It’s time to wake up and face the abyss.
That, in a nutshell, is the political theory of John Gray, articulated with customary verve and bravado in Black Mass, and picked over in rather more sober detail in Horton and Newey’s collection of essays.
Black Mass will not surprise anyone who has read Gray writing in the New Statesmen over recent years. The idea that history is linear, society can be transformed and that revolution will effect that transformation is the Christian legacy to modern politics.
And it is, according to Gray, a wholly unwelcome one. At least Christians expected someone else (i.e. God) to do the transforming – and they didn’t even expect that once their initial apocalyptic fervour died calmed down and Augustine took over the intellectual reins. Modern politicians, from the Jacobins to the Communists, and less gruesomely, from liberal humanists to neo-cons, have tried to reshape history itself, with often catastrophic results.
Much of Black Mass is dedicated to a savage critique of the
Gray is, evidently, extremely erudite and there is much to be enjoyed in his intellectual pyrotechnics. But the theology, which forms the basis of his thesis and heads up the book, is not always convincing. There is considerably more connecting the Old Testament and the New than he recognises. Biblical ‘Judaism’ was, particularly in some later forms, more concerned with the transformation of the world than he acknowledges. Jesus’ execution was not seen by his disciples as the failure, from which they had to recover. To describe the history of Christianity as ‘a series of attempts to cope with this founding experience of eschatological disappointment’ is somewhat contentious (to put it generously).The fact that Gray cites A.N. Wilson’s ‘excellent’ biography of Jesus as one of his main sources helps explains some of these misreadings and does not inspire confidence.
That said, there is much with which Christians will sympathise in his thought, not least, as he writes in his reply to his critics in Horton and Newey’s dense but rewarding collection, ‘much of the human good lies outside politics… Politics is not a path to salvation, but a learnt practice of mutual accommodation.’
The overall impression, however, of Black Mass, and of his recent work as a whole, is of an intellectual gunslinger, shooting every creed that dares to move. It’s entertaining stuff but sometime you wish he would lay down his weapons and enter into some more productive peace negotiations.
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray is published by Penguin (2007).
The Political Theory of John Gray, eds. John Horton and Glen Newey is published by Routledge (2006)
This review first appeared in Third Way.
