Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia,
John Gray
Allen Lane, 5.99 pounds

The arresting cover design — masses of ants rendered in red and black — almost makes you miss the promos. “The most important living philosopher” and “bestselling author of Straw Dogs”. The first description is unwise in that it is fiercely contestable. The reference to a past “bestseller” is standard marketing tool but in this case useful for the reader. Straw Dogs sets out a thesis that finds bizarre and apocalyptic finality in Black Mass.

Gray, who is in the London School of Economics faculty, argued in Straw Dogs that “those who struggle to change the world" are a pathetic bunch, trying to find “consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear”. That “truth”, simply put, is that secular, rational, Western liberalism-informed politics cannot change mankind’s lot, indeed by hypothesising that it can, this kind of politics has brought the world close to what Gray foresees as religious fundamentalism-led warmongering. Secular ideas of enlightenment are a religion in disguise, Gray argues, and not just because they can be traced back to Christianity. Liberal politics, as much as Stalin’s or Hitler’s Weltanschung, is a utopian project and by definition it corrodes, corrupts, distorts and disfigures, all of this because of a hopeless assumption that human will has genuine transformational capacity.

There are so many problems — almost as many as the number of ants on the jacket — with this argument that a thorough review will produce a book fatter than Gray’s thankfully slim volume. Let’s therefore take what seems to be the central problem.

... contd.