Black Mass: a review

Modern politics, says John Gray in Black Mass, "is a chapter in the history of religion." This is true of communism as well as liberalism, revolutionary politics as well as gradualism: "Whether they stress piecemeal change or revolutionary transformation, theories of progress are not scientific hypotheses. They are myths which answer the need for human meaning." The collapse of these secularized myths of utopia - seen, says Gray in the blood-soaked streets of Iraq - has led to the re-emergence of religious politics.
It's a bold premise. And I've five problems with it.
1. He's too keen to intellectualize his readers' prejudices. His long critique of neo-conservatism, with its alleged roots in the Christian right, will play well to north London dinner tables, just as Gray's earlier work in the 1980s intellectualized the "new right." This pandering to dominant opinion leads him to embrace a gloomy version of the climate change proposition, in contradiction to his general scepticism about scientific hypotheses.
2. He fails to address the fact that "liberal interventionism" has sometimes worked - for example in Sierra Leone. It's not wholly hubristic utopianism.   
3. He's too desperate to fit all thinkers into the "utopian" box. To accuse Hayek of having a "delusive vision" and Rawlsian liberalism of being "another utopia" is surely a stretch.
4. He's too dismissive of the possibility of progress. He mocks Trotsky's claim that under communism, "man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler". But he fails to see that this happened even without revolution. Anyone who opened their eyes in a northern town in the 1970s will have seen countless very short old people with bandy legs and hunchbacks - the results of childhood malnutrition that we have largely banished in the west. The Flynn effect says we're getting smarter. And we are, in many ways wiser: no-one now has the optimism about government control that the Fabians, Keynes or Crosland had. And just ask any woman, gay or black Briton whether there's been progress in the last 50-100 years.
5. He's too quick to identify a desire for progress with optimism about human morality:

Human knowledge tends to increase, but humans do not become any more civilized as a result. They remain prone to every kind of barbarism...no theory of politics can be credible that assumes that human impulses are naturally benign.

I agree. But this is why it's so important to build liberal institutions - because these (in particular the market) harness and control men's evil. Hedge fund managers do not cut off people's hands, commit genocide or murder people for having the wrong god. This is not because they are nice people, but because they have better things to do.
Gray's pessimism - which is better expressed in Straw Dogs or Heresies - contains some truth. But dogmatic pessimism can be as much a myth as utopianism.

Comments

[Sean of Sheffield]

I too have problems with the neocons as an ideology argument.

Ideology to me means you are claiming absolute knowledge, something that probably exists but we cant really have, as we live with quantum uncertainty (note to historicist Marxists, this means you cannot predict with scientific certainty what the future will be :0) )

Thus we have todays set of bolshovics, the Islamists, who claim they have an absolute knowledge, that gives them special rights over all others, not unlike Marx claiming special rights for the workers, as he had the special knowledge "theory of exploitation." and the National Socialist claiming special rights for the Aryan nation.

Gray claims that the Neocons are doing the same thing with "liberal secular democracy", imposing it as an ideology. But its not it an idealism.

I dont come from a nuclear family or live in one but I do think it is an ideal that the state should support, but many readers might not and vote accordingly.

Thus if you are prepared to subject your beliefs to constant testing of democracy then you are accepting the possibility that your beliefs might not constitute absolute truth, and could be wrong, thus they cannot be ideological. If you have truth why would you need democracy?

[Bob B]

"He mocks Trotsky's claim that under communism, 'man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler'."

In which phase was Trotsky located when he articulated that expectation?

It matters because one likely reason for Trotsky's apparently enduring popularity as a quotable ideologue in serious discourse was the remarkable flexibility he displayed in his successive ideological commitments. At one time or another, with the single exception of Nazism, he virtually covered the ideological waterfront.

He first came to international prominence as a supporter of the Menshevik faction at the 1905 conference in London of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In the next manifestation, he was a Bolshevik and the hugely successful commander of the Soviet Red Army during the Civil War in Russia after the 1917 October revolution. He became a World Socialist, espousing permanent revolution, during his power struggle with Stalin and finally, in exile in Mexico, he was eloquently expounding on the benefits of markets as a means for allocating scarce resources in terms that would have done credit to Von Mises and Milton Friedman writing in concert:

"If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace—a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions—such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/10/sovecon.htm

At some stage, Trotsky was bound to be on the correct tack because he almost exhausted the possibilities.

As always, the challenging question is: Which?

[jameshigham]

Slight correction:

He mocks Trotsky's Great Lie and standing joke on the Russian people that under communism, "man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler".

[dearieme]

"he fails to see that this happened even without revolution": EVEN? More like "especially". As for neo-cons and the Christian right: I have read that neo-cons are/were mainly Jewish ex-Trots. Have I been misled?

[Matt Munro]

"Hedge fund managers do not cut off people's hands, commit genocide or murder people for having the wrong god. This is not because they are nice people, but because they have better things to do."

Maybe not but they do get rich on the back of others efforts, undercut wages, shed jobs and put large holes in social structures which they themselves have no connection with.
And the Flynn effect does not mean we are "getting smarter", that's one interpretation, the other is that IQ actually measures "western thinking" and that as western society peaked, towards the end of the last century, it levelled off as refelected in the flattening of average IQ scores from the mid 1990s onwards.

[Hilary Wade]

"And just ask any woman, gay or black Briton whether there's been progress in the last 50-100 years" - well, the Jehovah's Witnesses who come round to my house from time to time fall into at least two of these three categories, and they certainly believe things are getting worse. I disagree with them on this and other points, however.