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 enlarge | Author: John Gray
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 57083
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0374531528
Dewey Decimal Number: 320
EAN: 9780374531522
ASIN: 0374531528
Publication Date: September 30, 2008
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| Customer Reviews:
 Best Book of 2008 April 21, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Not often I give 5 stars to any book. But I have to give it to this one. Its good....I'm not sure that it compares with Niail Fergusson's latest Opus "The War of the World" in many ways... but from what he tries to do it is very good at analyzing apocalyptic politics - which I think no one has really done.
The danger is of course really only one that I can see... he does get reductionist at time. That and I think he savages Tony Blair a bit too much... but that's it... good contemporary analysis using the methodology of Cohn... his book is called "The Pursuit of Millenium." --- also a wonderful book!
His basic thesis is that people propounding ideas that are catagorically against commonly accepted explainations of what we know of human behaviour -- advocating ideas and theories -- these people have historically been millenialist, deluded, and very dangerous indeed.
Gray starts with a historical interpretation of apocalyptic ideas -- christianity, the crusades, and then advances into the twin scourges of 20th Century Naziism and Marxism. From this he comes right up to present day and argues the Bush League in the Whitehouse, along with Tony Blair and his compradours, are responsible for believing in and foisting an idealistic interpretation of Iraq and the results of war. He argues that it was never realistic to believe that Iraq would ever turn into a democracy, and that neocons deluded themselves into a sort of millenialist intepretation of the world. One unrealistic -- like marxism -- but one that was pushed to its limit with disasterous consequences for all: a war in a land waged for democracy, with no history of democracy, and no nuclear weapons.
It is a very dark interpretation of history in general and how History, writ large, has a way of reappearing in current times in ways that we may miss of interpret wrongly. Gray reminds us that history can slide backwards, darkness can invade the light of progress. That there is no guarantee that the US or all of the other Westminster style democracies will always be centres of liberal democracy. He sees the rise of illiberal democracies -- those that use the power of the majority to oppress the weak and minorities. This is trend he says in Russia, China and the logical outcome of the war in Iraq. That except for Britain and Canada, there has never really been a history of countries with multinational democracies.
Gray states that this has happenned in Iraq and will get worse. Moreover in most countries with no democratic tradition -- with almost the exception of Britain its commonwealths and the US, there has never been a country that did not, at some time engage in illiberal democracy. In fact he is worried about it coming back... since even the US has begun an official policy of intolerance.
He is a persuasive man indeed. Refreshing to see him savage the left and the right with an intellectual rigour unknown in the pale prose that passes as analysis from the right or the left. Along with Niail Fergusson he is one of the great minds writing cogent, rational analysis of the world around us.
In the end he advocates a sort of neo-realism to save the world. Areas of direct interest are worth dying for, but any intervention needs to be based upon a realistic assessment of the world, not ideology of the neo-cons or the power-based thought of the contemporary left - both merge into idealism, and idealism as a prop for foreign policy always has been, and will be, a path to the slaughter bench of disaster and human suffering.
 Will engage and enrage January 19, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Some arguments:
The modern neo-liberal project to impose Western style democracy around the world (most potently in the former secular leaning Iraq) is the successor ideology to Marxism.
The neo-cons (in Washington, and formerly the now fully fledged Catholic Tony Blair in Downing Street) are willing to mendaciously deceive the public in order to achieve their ultimate goals. In the UK, Blair might not have been able to mobilize religion behind him as Bush did in the USA, but for both men their project is essentially the same: the salvation of mankind.
The USA is a secular nation by constitution but is by far the most religious of all the developed democracies. Neo-conservatism, a mixture of crackpt realism and chiliastic fantasy, could only have emerged in such a nation, where millenarian thinking prevails very strongly.
US power is not nearly as secure as many believe it to be. The country is trillions of dollars in debt and depends on the economies of numerous other states, not necessarily democratic, to maintain its economic status. The emerging powers of the world such as China do not have to kowtow to America's hegemonic postition and they realise this.
End of History arguments - the Fukuyama thesis that liberal democracy is the final, unimprovable form government and changes in states are all moving towards this state - are ludicrous. Humans do not necessarily desire democracy, rather there are many different forms of organizing human societal affairs in a functioning manner.
Washington foreign policy makers would do well to heed the words of Maximilien Robspierre to the Jacobin Club, Paris, in 1792: 'The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. It is in the nature of things that the progress of reason is slow and no one loves armed missionaries.'
The humanism of modern secular ideologists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are versions of Christian concepts. For example, Dawkins assertion that humans, uniquely, can defy natural selection laws, the tyranny of the selfish replicatiors.
With natural resources likely to become scarce as the 21st Century progresses, we can expect a large amount of geo-political struggle as nations slug it out to control resources. The 21st Century will not necessarily be more peaceful than the first half of the 20th.
Sober, pragmatic realism is the only way to conduct international relations.
The last point, embodied in the last chapter of Black Mass, was a relief to me. After being engrossed in 200 pages of scare mongering, I was wondering what Gray's final conclusion would be - complete exchange of the world's nuclear arsenals, total unravelling of the institutions of international capitalism leading to God knows what. Black Mass is not the kind of political theory book you can read with a quiet reflection - broad consensus on this point, minor disagreement on that point. It is likely that readers will either worship Gray's thinking (along with the pseudo dark philosophers of Will Self, John Banville and J.G. Ballard in the 2007 reviews of the year sections) or be enraged by it (the right wing political commentators, the prosletysers of democracy, the international liberal thinkers who are enraged at the fact that women in Iran do not enjoy the same freedoms as their counterparts in the West).
In fact, with his revealing last point, a desire to reclaim the lost art of realism, Gray's book is revealed for the essentially modest argument he is making - essentially a call for clarity, for stepping back, for sober assessment of the situations on the ground before embarking on any great utopian projects. This used to be the hallmark of the Conservative party in the United Kingdom (as John Stuart Mill said, the 'Stupid Party' (meant as a compliment), the party Gray used to support. If we can escape the modern trend towards neo-con thinking (uncertain in the UK with the likes of Michael Gove gaining ascendancy in the Conservative Party), human affairs might not necessarily be doomed. The 21st Century might not necessarily be as much of a bloodbath as the last. See how things unfold.
To start with, 2008 will see a new President in the White House, and many in the US are fed up with their country's millenarian imperial pretensions. Coming assessments of how world affairs will unwrap in the coming years would do well to start with an awareness of these facts.
Secular utopias, neocons, the delusion of progress and more January 5, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book is a fascinating look at how utopianism permeates American political thought. Gray, a British political philosopher, does an excellent job connecting this to the higher degree of religiosity in America vs. Western Europe, amongst other things. He then grounds this in Western thinking in general.
That said, while lack of prescriptions don't bother me, as I'm not a system-builder, I disagree with him somewhat at the end of the book in his take the two subjects of modern science and New Atheism. Not totally, but somewhat. That's the only thing holding this back from a five-star review.
Anyway, he goes on to show that is religion is not at all a prerequisite for utopian thought, or political philosophy and action. Before focusing on the U.S., he devotes a chapter to Nazism and Communism and their obvious utopianisms. Nazism's utopianism may have been a more negative one than Communism; Gray witnesses Hitler's efforts to make a Nazi Ragnarok out of Germany after it was clear the war was lost. Nonetheless, it had its own utopian push.
An excellent part of the book is where Gray, in preparation for shooting down modern neoconservatism, clearly shows how the modern liberal capitalist state did NOT arise organically, but rather through massive government intervention. On page 77, for example, he refers to things like enclosures of commons that made formerly public land into private land.
He next applies that to Thatcherite Britain, showing that her political program required the same degree of muscle. In achieving the success it did, Thatcher at the same time, Gray says, wrecked the Tory Party, as it had been constituted since Churchill, as a bulwark of resistance to the social democratic state of traditional Labor.
He traces a more naturalistic utopianism back to Locke, Hume, Adam Smith and other philosophical architects of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Enlightenment in general, he notes, had a progressive view of human nature. In Smith, et al, this became embedded in their writings on what became known as economics. As I have long argued, Gray shows how Smith's "invisible hand" proceeds directly from his Enlightenment Deist beliefs. But Smith, like Hume, believed man governed by passions more than reason, an idea foreign to neoconservativism.
That said, Gray then spends a whole chapter on the development of neoconservatism, primarily in the U.S., but tracing its roots to Leo Strauss -- and others -- in their writings in Europe, whether or not they ever emigrated. He also argues that Blair is, in essence, a British neoconservative more than neoliberal, at least in foreign policy.
On Francis Fukuyama, Gray shows that the "end of history" idea, with all governments allegedly due to eventually become Western liberal democracies, is nothing less than utopianism of a secular millenialist bent. He then, referencing societies such as the Russia of Yeltsin, shows that liberal democracies are in no way teleologically bound to succeed, at least not succeed in a "Western" sense.
Much of the center of the chapter is a concise analysis of Strauss, including some degree of parallels with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Spengler and others. He faults Strauss for saying liberalism, due to its emphasis on freedom, will eventually end in nihilism. In the next chapter, he references Bush by name as showing that it is more likely to fall to some credulity-based authoritarianism. To a lesser degree, given differing economic successes, Putin's post-Yeltsin drive to authoritarianism would be another illustration.
Finally, did Strauss deliberately encourage the deception of the masses for their own good by political leaders? Gray says that is overreading him, but that it is a reading that could be tweaked out of him. And, regardless of neocons' veneration of him, Gray says that it is a political philosophy that would be anathema to him.
Starting on about page 164, Gray tackles the issue of whether the U.S. is an empire. His final answer is, in essence, "Yes, but unlike any the world has known before." He says that this is due to what countries such as Pakistan know from bitter experience: The only "alliances" we ever form (outside of NATO, and Israel) are short-term, coldly militarily based agreements, rather than long-range partnerships. Even if we keep troops in a country, he points out U.S. military bases, as are our embassies, are usually hermetically sealed against the native population. Beyond military might, dollar diplomacy is the other usual tool of U.S. empire.
Because of this, he says the U.S. simply cannot form empires in the sense of the British Raj, the Romans, the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs.
Finally, near the end of the book, Gray adds some comments on the New Atheism and utopianism. Here, I halfway disagree with him. I do agree that the New Atheism is a sort of "tar baby" reaction to Christianity in particular and Western religion in general. I also agree that it can have, as a result, some degree of utopianism itself. But, with less hubris and with modifications of the project, I don't think the goal of moving America into a more secular mindset is either unworthwhile or unachievable.
I give less credence than he does to the necessity of religion in life for many. Not no credence, but less credence. If Scandinavia, for example, can be argued to be not just secular but post-secular, it shows the project is doable. And, per the evolutionary psychology that Gray references in passing to shoot down New Atheism, a pre-religious homo sapiens once existed. There is no reason that a post-religious homo sapiens, in some way, shape or form, can't also develop.
Un-realising a "perfect" world December 29, 2007
21 out of 23 found this review helpful
It's not easy categorising John Gray. He's generally listed as a "philosopher", but he rarely delves into the roots of human behaviour. His philosophy is founded on recorded history. Like most modern "philosophers", his arena is the canon of Western European tradition and practice. That approach, at least in Gray's hands, makes him more political commentator than philosopher. The shift of emphasis doesn't erode his thinking prowess nor his ability in expressing what he has derived from it. His prose is clean and unpretentious, almost hiding the power of the thinking behind it. In this exciting little work, Gray examines the history of modern "utopian" ideas - their misconceptions and their persistence.
The idea of utopias has long diverted us from confronting realities, Gray suggests. This self-generated departure tends to hide consequences of our acts until it's too late to deal with them successfully. Naturally, one of his glaring examples of this situation is the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Gray demonstrates how it was planned intentionally long before the causes were manufactured for it. The planning was clearly utopian in that the intentions were delusionary and inappropriate. Both governments declared their intention - based on false pretenses - to "extend democracy into the Middle East". This ambition was expressed without any perception of whether it would be welcomed. It's an underlying principle of utopian thinking, Gray observes, that a society can be re-created from within or imposed from the outside. The failure of such thinking is readily apparent in Iraq - a war that has lasted longer for the US than WWII. Utopian ideas have been seeded on infertile soil.
In explaining how the utopian idea arrived in the Middle East by way of the US-UK "special relationship", Gray skips lightly over Thomas More's original idea to the Enlightenment era. There is a link, however, in that while we are generally taught that the Enlightenment thinkers were building a secular world, they were relying on Christian precepts to expound their ideas. "Improvement" was the means of overcoming disparities in the human condition, and the State could replace the Church in making beneficial change. Among other virtues of this thinking was that it seemed realisable within human timespans. In the 20th Century, a wide variety of such proposals were tried, and Gray brings Marxism, the hippie communes of the 1960s and the Fascist-Nazi movements into the same paddock. Once thought as a "Leftist" ideal, Gray is unsurprised that it is now the policy of choice of the "neo-cons" and their supporters on the "Christian Right". Yet, it seems that no matter where on the political spectrum utopians arise, they continue to commit similar blunders. The goal blinds them to the perils of trying to achieve it and utopia becomes tragedy.
It's easy to peg Gray as grim or dismal. That's a common label pinned on those who seek to have us confront reality and think more deeply about our decisions. In this sense, Gray takes a long view of the role of Christianity in Western thinking. The shift of utopia from heaven to Earth, while seeming to provide improvement, was just as likely to introduce anarchy. He compares two contemporary thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, in their approach to this problem. Modern liberals declare the unrestrained State as the greatest threat to freedom. Hobbes understood that anarchy was an even greater threat and government was needed to quell it. Spinoza, on the other hand, while unwilling to grant the state power to stomp on emerging anarchy, had a different proposal. Humans are part of the natural world, and turning to the state for salvation of any kind was erroneous. His realistic view was that disorder and peace are natural cycles of the human condition. We must approach this situation realistically, without any fixed or unattainable goals to repress the one to gain the other. Such simplistic thinking can never succeed. Gray has offered an exceptionally rational set of pointers on avoiding such single-mindedness. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
Save us from salvation December 3, 2007
Picking up where he left off in his genuinely iconoclastic book "Straw Dogs," John Gray turns his attention to the ineluctably human penchant for utopia and apocalyptic fantasy. His style here is less abrasive but no less bracing. A British commentator recently wrote of Gray, "He is so out of the box it is easy to forget there was ever any box" - which fairly describes the intellectual jolt he'll deliver to readers dulled by boxy thinking.
The previous reviewer has done a decent job of describing the argument, but any summary misses the electricity that hums in Gray's sentences. Gray's unsparing synopsis of the neo-conservative fantasy that led to the debacle in Iraq will have patriotic Americans grinding their teeth in fury at the waste of American and Iraqi lives and the betrayal of American ideals. He also lambasts liberals who delude themselves about "inalienable" human rights, and minces no words about born-again Christians who've sanctioned and supported the torture and carnage, which leads him to a grim conclusion: "Liberals have come to believe that human freedom can be secured by constitutional guarantees. They have failed to grasp the Hobbesian truth ... that constitutions change with regimes. A regime shift has occurred in the US, which now stands somewhere between the law-governed state it was during most of its history and a species of illiberal democracy. The US has undergone this change not as a result of its corrosion by relativism ... but through the capture of government by fundamentalism. If the American regime as it has been known in the past ceases to exist, it will be a result of the power of faith." (pp. 168-169)
Gray is explicit about the folly of religious myths, but he accepts that "the mass of humankind will never be able to do without them," just as he dismisses "militant atheism" as a "by-product of Christianity," mocking its pretensions at evading the conundrums of theology. He's equally clear on the ineradicable future of terrorism. "Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life." (p. 186) Following the bleak logic of these observations to their conclusion, he can only advocate a clear-eyed realism about the nature of human being - which he confesses may in turn be a self-deceiving hope: "a shift to realism may be a utopian ideal."
As I read "Black Mass," I couldn't help recalling the work of William Pfaff, who as a political analyst practices the realism Gray recommends, and whose fine study "The Bullet's Song" examines the "redemptive utopian violence" as it was envisioned by a rogue's gallery of 20th century artist-intellectuals. Neither of these books are comfortable reading; neither offer a panacea - because (as Gray puts it) "there are moral dilemmas, some of which occur fairly regularly, for which there is no solution."
It's December, the time of year when voracious readers start compiling their "best of" lists. "Black Mass" (despite its silly title) ranks at the top of my list for 2007.
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