Date 05-12-2008
GMTime 03:33:43
War and Propaganda
Black Mass by John Gray
Part 1 of a book review and criticism
© 2007 Dr M D Magee, Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 30 August 2007
That Strauss was a great defender of democracy is laughable… Strauss disciples consider it a noble lie.Shadia B Drury
- The Meaning of Apocalypse
- Infelicities
- Secular Dreamers
- Enlightenment as Apocalypse
- Faith as a Political Movement
- Nazis
- Racialism
The Meaning of Apocalypse
John Gray, the I-Speak-Your-Weight professor of faddy twaddle has published a book called Black Mass—Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia that is at core well worth reading, because its core consists of a perceptive analysis of the disasters of the Bush-Blair Christian axis, and the apocalyptic mindset behind them. The trouble is that Gray puts everything else he does not like much into the same pot. Anything he cannot stand is “utopian”, his new word for idealistic, and utopianism is Christian apocalyptic under any guise that you can imagine. A legitimate criticism of religious madmen is extended into every dimension of politics and purpose. Indeed, merely having a purpose is utopian.
From the outset, Gray tars every political “project”, his pejorative word for anything purposeful, with being based on religious myths however secular they purported to be. There is no arguing against him. Almost every European for over a thousand years was obliged to be a Christian. It was the only option, and nothing else could be considered without possibly fatal consequences. Every subsequent idea could therefore be said to have come from Christian roots, and Christian apologists are fond of saying it. What is also true, and incontrovertible, is that humanity must at some stage in the past have been areligious, and 2000 years ago was not Christian. Religious thoughts at first came from secular thinkers, and Christian thoughts from non-Christians. Specific religious ideas must themselves reflect certain basic human ideals.
Religion was a pre-scientific way of “explaining” Nature and society. In an uncertain and insecure life, dreams of certainty and security are natural. Religions explained this dream as the desire for God’s perfection, and the primitive hypothesis was that God had made the world perfect, but then it had “fallen” from perfection for one reason or another. It was a depressing thought, resolved by the assurance that God would restore His original perfection at the end of history—at the eschaton—when all good people would live again. It was a rational explanation, but the hypothesis was untestable. Today we like our hypotheses to be testable, meaning scientific—based on observation and prediction. What is not testable is not scientific but merely someone’s opinion, and opinions that are not testable are as likely to be true as seems likely. That is why people say “pigs might fly”!
What is observable is that the world is evolving and that evolution sometimes is for the better—it is sometimes progressive. So there is nothing necessarily religious about the dream of progress. Yet, Gray classes all progress with dreams of apocalypse and the end of the world, the ancient religious view of things. He even tars science with the same brush, because some demagogues have claimed their ideas were scientific. It was pseudo-science and cod-science, Gray admits, but the association has done its damage, and Gray is not one to labour the innocence of science in madmen’s schemes. The implication is sufficient to tarnish science. Science is simply the use of sound testing to arrive at reliable knowledge, and can never be the reason why mobs follow rabble rousers and otherwise sane people believe the untested and mainly impossible ideas of this or that prophet claiming supernatural “knowledge”—or even falsely scientific knowledge. Prophets and demagogues in history have often used religion for their earthly schemes, and, in the west, that means they have been keen readers of the bible. Even Stalin was training to be an orthodox priest, so was well grounded in the same Christian ideas, but the apocalyptic dreams of men like him and Hitler are universally called atheistic by people indoctrinated with Christian lies. Gray, as a professor, ought not to be among these deceived masses.
Gray wants to paint everyone the same dark shade. All western thought is apocalyptic, and the End of Time is necessarily violent because it is when God destroys evil. The theory has to ensure good people are saved in this purge, so those still alive are immune to it, and those who have already died are restored to the full bloom of life. They are willing to die confident in their illusion that they will wake up in paradise. It is the mad dream of Islamic suicide bombers. And Bush will press the nuclear button, when Cheney tells him to, convinced he will not die, or will be born again into eternal life. They never stop to think that they are giving away the only life they have, and that the very idea of paradise is a lie meant to induce innocents into giving their lives for no certain reward.
In the hands of extremist religious fundamentalists, these ideas are obviously likely to be deadly to everyone else, but Gray and most Americans are more concerned by a few ragheads 6000 miles away than the dunce whose finger can launch their own nuclear megadeath. Religion was, is and will be the danger until they bring about what they dreamt of in a self-fulfilling prophecy, and most of us will be out of it forever! It is the illusion that religion gives unbalanced people of their own invulnerability that has been the cause of recent troubles, as Gray explains all too well, but he will not put the weight of the blame where it belongs, instead spreading it out so that everyone is guilty, and no one. Evolution to a better society has never been apocalyptic, and everyone sensible likes to keep it that way. Revolutions might be the only way to release people from a stagnant and oppressive order—as they were in Europe in releasing our ancestors from a thousand years of misery and despond under the absolute rule of the church—but revolutions need not be that violent. The Soviet system collapsed in 1991 without much violence. The rapacity of the get-rich-quick capitalists, the mafia criminals, released by the collapse, that was violent.
The thinkers of the European Enlightenment came out of revolution. The British liberating revolution was in the seventeenth century, the Americans and the French had theirs in the eighteenth century, and Napoleon effectively brought the revolution to most of the rest of Europe except Russia. Russia had its revolution in the twentieth century, triggering a century of revolutions of former colonies world wide with the former colony, the USA, doing its utmost to stop it all with its hypocritical foreign policy of do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do. All of this was a secularisation of the Christian dream of paradise, according to Gray’s one-size-fits-all philosophy. Misery, injustice and oppression had nothing to do with it, just as now, Arabs want to destroy God’s own country out of envy, not because they are sick of being exploited by odious dictators imposed and supported by the US to keep the oil flowing for Halliburton and their like. Liberal secularists believe in non-intervention in the internal affairs of others. Try to restrain a man from beating his wife, and you might well find she starts handbagging you for your concern. People like to settle their own affairs, a lesson that no Christian will accept.
Towards the end of his book, Gray reveals he is a realist, even though his philosophizing is all together simplistic, and therefore anything but realistic. There is a sound case against fundamentalist religion, especially the Christian religion, well supported by history but Gray wants to cover everything else in modern society with the same ordure. It is not even that there is nothing in his wider case, as noted above, Christianity necessarily has had a pervasive influence in our societies, but liberals and secularists can hardly be blamed for the massive influence of religion, yet that is Gray’s message. Essentially madmen with apocalyptic ideas are dangerous, true enough, but the apocalyptic ideas are Christian, and are still mainly held by Christians, and are not generally held by secularists and liberals. Religious ideas are the most dangerous and the most unrealistic, and not Enlightenment ideas. If Enlightenment thinkers have a dream of a better world, they are tempered with reality, not with unreality as dreams of supernatural events necessarily are. Religious dreamers are unworldly and boast about it. By defining any dream of improvement as “religion by other means”, Gray defines secularism as religion.
Gray might be right to say that some non-religious dreamers are just as faith driven as religious dreamers. The Russian revolution was pushed home by Lenin, who was doubtless a dreamer but was supremely practical, supremely realist, in his aim of fulfilling his dream. Faith is not necessarily religious even though by far most often it is. Faith replaces evidence. To have to appeal to it means there is no compelling evidence, and anyone who simply believes is deceived or demented. Yet some faith is needed for most endeavours simply because humanity is not gifted with foresight. Any degree of confidence therefore must imply faith, self-belief, faith in one’s abilities, but all too often it is unjustified, certainly for those of us with humble abilities. Christians are deluded that their faith will move mountains and so they still claim, infecting young people with the false notion that they can do anything merely by belief. Those with great natural talent, or more often good luck, are apt to get this God delusion, becoming insufferable and dangerous. There is a qualitative differencve between the idea of progress and religion. It is the belief that God is behind religion. That is what makes it more fanatical. Notwithstanding Gray’s biased arguments, the Enlightenment is based on realism not religion, and the fact, if it is a fact, that some lost touch with it is no valid general criticism of it.
Infelicities
In making his case, Gray has his usual tranche of infelicities including contradicting himself on different pages. He absolves Judaism of any responsibility for apocalypticism:
Ancient Judaism contained nothing resembling the idea that the world was about to come to an end.
He might mean modern Judaism, or perhaps he means by “ancient Judaism” the religion of the ancient Canaanites, some of whom were Judahites before the Persians turned them into Jews. It seems fair to say that the Canaanites had no apocalyptic ideas, their heavenly battles being more immediate than the end of time. They happened every year, and at the outside every seven years—probably the interval between fallow periods in the fields which carried over into Judaism—but not over thousands of years until the idea was brought to them by the Persians. Judaism had no apocalyptic idea, says Gray, but for Jesus “eschatology was central”. Christ must have been truly a revelation by God, because he thought the world was soon to end. Realistically, Jesus had the idea of the end of the world and was a Jew, so Judaism had it! There is, in fact a whole Jewish apocalyptic literature—it was no novelty. Well, it was nothing to do with Judaism, Gray maintains, but a reflexion of “other traditions”. What Gray cannot get is that Judaism was a reflexion of other traditions—Persian ones! Gray now tells us that:
The radically dualist view of the world that goes with apocalyptic beliefs is nowhere found in Judaism.
It seems to be a change of tune but he is still out of key. His determination to absolve Judaism of complicity in the propagation of apocalyptic belief is oddly dogged in the face of the evidence. Perhaps it is because he is a Jew, in which case he ought to be able to see Jesus not bearing novel revelations from God but emerging from his own milieu of Judaic belief among the Essenes who were most distinctly dualistic. Again Gray finds a let out—it is the “later Jewish apocalyptic tradition”. What is it later than? Presumably the so-called “exile”, but no one now, except people who will believe anything on grounds of religion, thinks there was any Judaism before the exile. Judaism began after the supposed exile, and apocalyptic traditions came with it. To imagine that any Jews of 500 BC had the Jewish scriptural books they now have, other than the odd variation, is infantile. Books then were not bound together as they now are but were written on scrolls, and the earliest scrolls we have come from Qumran, dated to a couple of centuries before the time of Christ. They include many books that never found their way into the bound collection called the Jewish scriptures, or the Old Testament to Christians, but were evidently considered as “scriptures” by the Jews of the time. They included thoroughly apocalyptic books.
Gray constantly shows his ignorance in trying to build up his untenable thesis. He recognizes the source of the idea of time ending is Zoroastrian, and his religion is entirely dualistic—a good god is opposed by a wicked one, their battleground being history which ends when one of them wins. Gray points out that the victor was in doubt even though the supposition was that it would be the good god who would win, and the reason was that he had an advantage over the wicked god—he had foresight. Well, if Christianity is anything to go by, religions do not have to be at all coherent, though Zoroastrianism seems a lot more coherent than either Judaism or Christianity. Regrettably, most of the books of this ancient religion were burnt up by Alexander the Great when he torched Persepolis, so we cannot presume that what remains is coherent, but Zoroaster’s teaching was that each individual contributed to the cosmic battle by choosing to be righteous or wicked. If enough made the right choice then the good god was assured victory. So mothers could comfort their children with the thought that, if they were good, then God would win over the devil. What moral value would the religion have if the good were certain to win? Christians think that and have remained wicked for 2000 years. What they cannot appreciate is what the Zoroastrians did appreciate, that the cosmic battle was entirely spiritual, as far as the individual person was concerned—entirely internal! It was purely the choice they made about how to behave in human societies. The individual did not win the battle for good by killing wicked people—that, curiously enough, is itself wicked—but by choosing honesty and fairness, something Bush, Cheney, Blair and the cohorts of neoconservative Christians who rule the world at present simply do not get.
Gray tells us that “Manichaean dualism entered into Gnosticism” though Gnosticism was dualistic before Mani was born, it having come directly from the Persian religion. Alexander’s defeat of Persia left a large number of Magi destitute. Besides the official Magi, every noble and wealthy Persian family had a magus as part of the family unit, and many Persians had latifundia in Anatolia and Syria. The Magi were a priestly caste, like the Jewish Levites who were based on them. Under Greek rule, many became wandering holy men and eventually travelling mountebanks. That is where our word magician comes from. Dualism was the main characteristic of Gnosticism, and it was closely associated with Judaism, perhaps via the Essenes or because Judaism was much more Essenic in nature, from the outset. Under the influence of Christianity, then Rabbinism, modern scholars have never properly examined the profound effect the Persians had on the world. Gray tips his head slightly towards it.
Secular Dreamers
Moving on to the origins of the utopian idea, Gray explains it was the belief that the world and humanity had fallen from an original perfection, or from a previous Golden Age, as Plato saw it. Maintaining his defence of Judaism, now by omission, Gray makes no mention of the Garden of Eden myth and the Fall of Man in the Jewish scriptures, surely the most common myth of an ancient utopia at all well known in the west. Nor is there any mention here of the Persian religion—Ahuramazda making the world perfect and Ahriman spoiling it.
The Greeks fought off the Persians under Darius, and then Xerxes, and saved Europe from being swamped by easterners. That is the modern myth, but Darius had already incorporated Asian Greece into his empire, and much of the land north of Greece including Macedonia, Thrace and Thessaly. He was unable to overcome the disciplined and heavily armoured Greeks in their mountainous peninsula, and the wild and swiftly moving Scythians in their swamps and forests around the shores of the Black Sea. Darius seems to have decided to cut his losses rather than persist, because the goal was not worth the effort. Xerxes made another attempt but with little conviction that he thought it worth it, though he brought immense resources to the task. Thereafter, the Persians were happy to encourage the Greeks to fight among themselves until they were an exhausted race.
Such a powerful and cultured enemy occupying the most progressive Greek cities, which were then on the mainland not on the peninsula, could not fail to have influenced them. Persian religion provided all the novel and interesting ideas that stimulated the Greeks to philosophize, as Plato demonstrates with the notion of a Golden Age. Elsewhere, the Persians were entirely responsibnle for the Jews and the Jewish religion. Even if you believe there were Jews before the Persians colonized the city of Jerusalem and its surrounding villages, as Gray seems to, their religion was Canaanite and not the distinctive religion that it became.
Although this section of Black Mass is about the birth of utopia, it is not. It is not the author’s purpose to discuss historical origins, but it is important to his theme in that utopia can be traced to Zoroastrianism via Jews and Greeks, thence Christianity. But Gray is concerned with modern utopias, so just a couple of paragraphs covers previous history before Isaiah Berlin is being cited on what a utopia is—universal harmony is possible. Humanity’s problems are the same ones recurring, but are soluble. It is the basis of all reformist and revolutionary optimism. Christian utopias based on faith do not need to consider human problems as soluble in any real way. God can do anything, even the impossible. The human condition can be hopeless but there is always hope in God, or rather in their faith in God. So faith gives rise, not only to unrealistic dreams, but ones that are out of human hands even as imagined, so to plan human objectives based on imaginary non-human acts can be nothing but folly. In this we can agree, and Christ proves it. It is Gray’s extension of it to all forms of reform and progress that is grotesque.
Following Berlin, it is the belief that human beings can live in harmony that defines utopia and “discloses its basic unreality”. Gray adds that conflict is universal in human life. He does not seem to mean that human beings are constantly fighting, but that they desire contradictory things and so utopian harmony is impossible. It is, but this is itself the religious dream of perfection—the perfection of paradise. Even so, people much prefer to avoid aggression and brutality. They will put up with their own contradictory desires as long as no one is trying to kill or torture them, and sociaty is run harmoniously. Most of us have lived much of our lives under exactly such harmony. What is scary and irritating is seeing one religious lunatic after another taking it upon themselves to mend what others have built at great sacrifice to themselves and which is still functioning well enough not to need mending. In the best part of his book, Gray superbly observes and dissects the madness of the Bush and Blair administrations with their Straussist and neocon underpinnings. He shows maniacs with an openly religious base to their insanity causing immense trouble from their apocalyptic notions. There is nothing secular about them.
A tolerable, even enjoyable natural harmony is demonstrable. It is achieved by practical dreams of progress through reform, or revolution when it is necessary—as it is when religious bigotry has removed every prospect of reform. Human life would be much more harmonious if we were saved from religions and the madmen who think God sent them, but it is mainly secularists with the dream of encouraging this natural harmony that have brought us to it, as history shows. Gray can only disparage them. He suggests these dreamers defend themselves saying:
To remain within the boundaries of what is believed to be practicable is to abdicate hope and adopt an attitude of passive acceptance that amounts to complicity with oppression.
Presumably the realist would never step outside the boundaries of the practicable, but sometimes this defence is correct and it has to be done. We ought to be grateful that we do not have to do it because braver people have done it already, but to Gray they have just caused trouble through their dreams. Impracticable dreams are not impossible ones. Dreams of supernatural intervention are.
The point about realism is that it keeps our feet on the ground. It would be mania if everyone thought it right to persue unrealistic dreams, and particularly unnecessary ones. So, Grays asks how a utopia is recognized. How can you tell a dream is unrealizable? A few hundred years ago only, the modern world would have seemed fantastic. When Constantine favoured the Christians, he could never have dreamed that the mighty Roman empire and civilization with it in less than two centuries would have collapsed and Europe would have entered a Christian dark age that would last more than a thousand years. Some dreams succeed and some fail, but success is much harder in the face of religion because nothing is more unrealistic than merely believing.
Gray highlights slavery which was abolished in the face of much opposition by Christians who argued slavery would always be with us because God had ordained it to be so. Abolishing it was just not achievable and so not realistic. Is it achievable? It still exists in parts of the world, and examples keep popping up of people being treated as slaves even in advanced societies. Gray himself observes that human trafficking is growing. That is slavery. Abolition of slavery might well be utopian—especially if the sort of absolute criterion that Gray demands must be used, and then Gray becomes utopian in thinking it is achievable, but it is his absurd criterion that is utopian. Maybe the total abolition of slavery will never be achievable outside of paradise but it should not stop us from doing the best we can, from getting the best approximation to it. Surely realism discounts absolute perfection in anything.
Dreams of perfection are utopian, and when overwhelmingly destructive power is to be used to pursue such an illusory perfection, then caution is essential. The attempt of Bush and Blair to enforce a western style liberal demcracy in Iraq ia in this category of dream. The dream was not absolutely impossible, but it was without proper groundwork being done. It was not, because the two Christian leaders of the western world thought that a lot of Christian “shock and awe” would intimidate the devilish terrorists into instance submission. Groundwork was not necessary in their dream, but it could never have been a realistic dream because it is Christian—it is based on supernatural fancy, and that is necessarily unrealistic. The neocon plan was utopian in the circumstances, and they had no patient plans to change the circumstances other than unpleasant ones involving massive firepower. It is now much less possible than it ever was.
Gray thinks it was always impossible because even the conditions could not be created. Maybe he means that Islam is not conducive to democracy, and perhaps that is true, but the US has never wanted to educate people into democracy, at least since the few years after WWII. For Americans, the support of oppressive dictators and the overthrow of all independence movements has been their consistent foreign policy. It is the policy and the attitude behind it that makes world wide democracy impossible. To promote a dictator for 30 years then on a whim to decide he must go, and almost overnight, be replaced by a harmonious democracy is not realistic in any terms. But Bush and Blair seem to think that they can induce God to change the world, to bring about the apocalypse simply because they have Christian intentions—or worse perhaps—they think they are God! In summary, the point is that these neocon policies are not the secular dreams that Gray prefers to denigrate, they are the full-blooded Christians dreams of God’s perfection that he is trying to transfer to enlightened, non-religious reformers.
Having defined any desire for improvement, if it is not immediately achievable, as utopian, Gray can speak of the “utopian mind”. Anyone whose desire is for a better world has a utopian mind, and no improvement happens by magic, so all reformers must have it, but now the utopian mind becomes the apocalyptic mind, for such people think they can end history. Unquestionably, the Christian notion of the eschaton is this, and loony leaders like Bush and Blair have it, but it is a calumny to transfer it to anyone who wants to improve the world. No rational man can think that objective history, as opposed to our subjective experience of it, will ever end. The end of history is a religious conception and has become, for some, a religious aim. It is a supernatural end brought about supernaturally by God to end the cosmic battle with evil that the patriarchal religions, if no others, believe in. And there would not be much to bother about if these Christian cracked pots could leave it to God, but they all come to think they can give God a hand! Even in religious terms, any human being who thinks like this is mad. Any such person thinks they are God, or at least the archangel Michael, and that must be insanity if nothing else is. It is a very good reason why no Christian should ever have their finger anywhere near the nuclear button.
But Gray’s argument is all encompassing. The belief that “political action can bring about an alteration in the human condition” is flawed, yet is firmly established in western governments. It is, but you have to wonder what the purpose of politics, especially in a democracy, is, if this is an error. Moreover, it is impossible to think that the human condition in Europe has not changed for the better in the last few hundred years. Perhaps Gray means human nature, not the human condition, but even human nature must continue to evolve, and it will evolve to suit the conditions. Political action is too short term to affect it, but any political change that is lasting might do, whether for good or ill. Yet progress for Gray is that Christian apocalyptic dream secularized, and so no better than the original insanities. For him, the belief in a supernaturally induced apocalypse helped along by human religious maniacs is no different from humane, liberal, realists looking for solutions to humanity’s problems! Besides the impossibility of the supernatural, apocalypse is a catastrophic immediate end, whereas progress is a patient stepwise improvement which, when successful, removes a distressing problem, like that which conditioned the wish for an end to happen.
One might more legitimately turn to religion for the source of the idea of progress in the law of Moses, which was seen by Jews as God’s ruler for measuring their progress towards righteousness. It was frustration that the Jews experienced under the Hasmonaeans that made them turn towards apocalyptic as God’s immediate answer to wickedness rather than progress. Christianity came out of this apocalyptic Judaic tradition not the more patient Mosaic one, but the failure of the parousia to manifest forced gradualism back onto the agenda. The trouble is that Christianity is now infected with the apocalyptic virus, and it keeps producing a fever at each millennial anniversary of Christ’s death. The US is currently in one such epidemic, and the rest of us hope that an autoimmunity will build up in US society before Bush, or some equivalent presidential madman to him, decides they like the idea of the suicide bomber, but on a world scale.
Gray pooh-poohs the patriarchal religious notion of the battle between good and evil forces, even when all supernatural connotations are removed. For him, society has no problems in that respect. No one’s personal greed exceeds their duty to society at large, for that is what the battle is about in secular terms. The battle is always about changing society—whether it is to be better for most of us or just for an elite minority—and the extent to which society should control the individual within it. We must have a society because we are social animals, but the liberal wants social restrictions to be the least compatible with its survival. Facing certain types of society, excessively equal or excessively unequal, dreamers are certain to dream of a change towards the opposite. Liberalism is objectively and realistically the best system for all, and as long as disagreements are confined within a liberal framework, most people can realistically remain happy. Christians consider the world, in whatever social form it takes, to be inferior to the better one they will get when they are dead. Nothing could be root and branch more destructive, yet is the favoured tool for conning the no-brained body of Christians, and always has been.
Gray cites Eric Hobsbawm, the communist historian, as saying that millennialism is a profitable phenomenon for political movements to use, trying to imply it is a confession of communist roguery when it is an historian’s analysis of historical fact. Hobsbawm is observing that unscrupulous men throughout history have used the millennial magnet to move the masses, just as the US right wing neocons do now, through the half-witted president Bush whose strings they pull. The other half-wits at the grass roots ultimately suffer, but they can never see it themselves, their eyes being so misted by religious sentiment. Gray sees the political manipulators as the dupes of religious myths, when they are the ones who are cynically using the myths. In the same context of rabble rousers using the millennial hopes of the masses to move them to action or violence, Gray cites another Marxist historian, E P Thompson, as saying:
There was a millennial instability at the heart of methodism itself.
The fact is that there is a millennial instability at the heart of Christianity that the Catholic church strived for centuries to keep in balance. Christ was expecting the end of the world, but all that happened was that his world ended, and it has remained the case ever since through generation after generation of fire and brimstone preaching. But fools will never be stopped from following lunatics, and Christians boast about how foolish they are!
Enlightenment as Apocalypse
Continuing his aim of tarring the Enlightenment with the Christian brush, Gray says Enlightenment thinkers still saw history as a struggle between light and dark. All that changed was that the light ceased to be goodness and became knowledge, and darkness ceased to be wickedness and became ignorance. It seems to be meant as an identification of the Enlightenment with its preceeding religious hegemony, but surely it is true! And not what Gray thinks. Light and dark can be metaphors of any opposites you choose. It is probably the earliest, or among the earliest metaphors of humanity. This metaphor might have preceded religion, and was seized by religion for its own purposes when it finally emerged.
Be that as it may, history consists of real life, and real life consists of just this type of struggle of opposites, something noted even by primitive people as they try to find regularities in and explanations of the world. It seems entirely realistic to see the world in terms of such polarities, and to want to resolve or reconcile them where it is possible. It led to the dualistic perception of the world being a battle ground of opposite forces, good and evil, and was a perfectly sensible thought posed as a personal battle between these choices as Zoroaster did. The “good” is simply what makes for an harmonious and trouble free life, while evil is what disrupts it. Sadly, it was quickly superseded by the notion that good and wicked forces were really at war in the world, and that is far more useful to political rogues.
We can do little or nothing about acts of God, random disasters, but we can control what we do ourselves, and we can collectively control those who refuse to live harmoniously with us—we call them criminals. All of this is entirely realistic and practical, and it is realistic too to want social controls to be as limited and unobtrusive as is compatible with the aims of social harmony. Social harmony is not paradise or perfection, but it is still a worthwhile goal—it is a dream, but for Gray, such things are utopian. No one is clever enough to notice there are no evil forces—no one, at any rate, until Gray. All revolutionists, Jacobins, and enlightened reformers have not caught on to this.
Gray says, in the Christian dark ages, though war was continued, no one thought violence would perfect humanity. So the crusades, the Cathar genocide and the inquisition were all just gratuitous violence then? Gray can manufacture such nonsense because he wants to blame the desire for perfection on to the Enlightenment. It is all the fault of people like Robespierre and the Jacobins. Every stuggle for justice since the Enlightenment Gray brackets with their opposites, facistic attempts to impose injustice, and the Enlightenment is to blame for them all. Even though in his thesis, a secular form of the Christian notion of apocalypse constitutes Enlightened thought and deeds, Christianity is absolved because medieval Christians had no idea of perfecting humanity by violence! Oh, and Christianity had given people a hope they never had in classical times. Oh, and Judaism never had anything to do with the idea of apocalyptic. Ergo, in Gray’s tin brain, the Enlightenment is to blame. Just a tad of special pleading—dontcha think?—from “the most important living philosopher”.
Faith as a Political Movement
In politics, it is the left that is characterized as progressive or revolutionary whereas the right is conservative or reactionary. The Enlightenment was a rejection of the thousand year darkness of Christian and feudal elitism, so is considered a left wing phenomenon. Gray impresses on us that the Enlightenment was utopian, and the utopianism of the twentieth century was on the left.
His first example of this is the nazis, though to point out they wanted to commit humanity to “enslavement or extermination”, scarcely left wing objectives in anyone’s book. Nor is Gray saying so, but his referring to them in this context makes it seem that they are an example of left wing utopianism. The acronym NAZI comes from the initials of Hitler’s national socialist party, so the post war right did what Hitler intended—fooled uncritical people into thinking nazis were lefties. Naziism was never socialist.
The same happened more recently in Britain. Tony Blair engineered a neocon coup within the Labour Party, Britain’s socialist party, calling it New Labour. But New Labour was Not Labour, and no one inside or out of the party noticed except his critics on the far left who pointed out that he was the first socialist leader to sell-out before he even got into power! Blair, sucking up to Bush and the Washington neocons, turned Labour into a nazi party by bringing in a monstrous plethora of anti-democratic legislation, which mainly until now has merely resided on the statute book unused. But such legislation always is used eventually, and it is used not for the purpose it was supposed to be for. The neocons have done the same in the USA. Gordon Brown was Blair’s partner and co-conspirator in this scheme, and it remains to be seen how he will further the plot.
The point is that the right wing, neocons and Straussists in the US and New Labour in the UK have taken on their own utopian schemes. Gray notes that “in many ways the Bush administration behaved like a revolutionary regime”, yet the Bush administration is meretriciously Christian, and Blair is a doctrinaire Christian too. The outcome was the “war on terror” in which the neocons launched a “pre-emptive” attack on Iraq, “pre-emptive” meaning that the US were the aggressors. Besides the lies about WMD, the putative purpose was to make Iraq democratic and free, thereby freeing the people. Bush is simple, and certainly knows no history. “They create a desert and call it peace”. The Roman empire is the constant model of right wing demagogues whose knowledge of history is from Janet and John books.
The right wing has revived faith as a political movement contrary to the US constitution. This modern disaster can be laid at the feet of the God of the political right in the US as well as the Christians—faith—and the end of faith is apocalypse! Because of this truth, Gray wants to associate the Enlightenment with Christianity, thereby absolving Christianity and its right wing manipulators from absolute blame and simultaneously projecting Christianity’s faults on to progress, thereby equating fantasy with realizable improvement. The Enlightenment is his target throughout not the real criminal. He seeks to pin every disaster on to the Enlightenment even when they are plainly religiously motivated and fascist. So, besides his hallucination that every idea of progress is a type of apocalyptic thought, any degree of optimism is proof of Enlightenment thinking.
Now optimism is not the great quality that Christianity has made it out to be, and tagging it on to the Enlightenment is pure trickery. Not that Enlightened thinkers are not as inclined to optimism as any other human being, but progressives seek improvement because they are pessimistic about the future without it. A good dose of pessimism might be salutary these days. Christianity thinks the cosmic war of good and evil is a real war going on around them in the real world, and that they must take up arms, literally as Christian soldiers to add to the destruction and murder. The central tenets of the bible, according to theologians, deny this, but it does not impress the gun-toting redneck cowboy “Christians” of the US who do not know what theology is. They get their theology, without knowing it, from right wing haranguers with TV stations and suitcases of dollars freely given because “Jesus Saves”, and unprincipled politicians who readily kill to remain rich and powerful.
Elites get richer out of wars but the poor get killed. The great social commandment of God that people should not kill is not qualified, whatever has been added elsewhere in the Holy Word. One would imagine that those who believe the bible ought to believe particularly what God’s agent, Moses, brought from a mountain directly inscribed by God, above what might have been added by unscrupulous temple priests and dubious prophets. Similarly, they ought to prefer what the bible reports God Himself to have said when he appeared on earth incarnated as a man. Instead, they prefer what a self-appointed apostle says. These people obviously just do not read their own bibles, or they willingly ignore it for what their pastors tell them it really means.
God in old sacred books prescibes what is good for society. The books were law books and constitutions before such things had been formalized and they were shown as coming from God to give them authority. The battle is the battle of the rights of a person as an individual against the duties of a person as a member of society. If they are able, people do what they want quite selfishly. They do not need to be told it. But what is desirable to the one is not necessarily desirable to the many, and the many have to control the individual if society is not to splinter and break. Morality is what suits society as a whole, and people have moral codes to keep them social, not to keep them selfish. So, each person is taught from an early age that they have duties to others, and killing them is not one of them.
The person has a choice of behaviour, to be selfish and greedy and do what suits yourself, or to be a citizen and uphold the rules of society. The choice is wickedness or uprightness, helping others for the good of all, or harming them in one’s own self interest. The conviction that it is right and proper to kill other people to help God in a supposed battle of good and evil is so plainly a satanic delusion it ought not to need saying, but Christians are all too easily duped by smooth talkers who feed their prejudices and save them from inspecting their own souls. According to God’s own act of inscribing the tablets of Moses, abstaining from killing is one of the ten prime commandments of God. According to the bible, God personally wrote these ten commandments, yet what Jew or Christians bothers when the US military kill myriads of Iraqi schoolkids? It is just collateral damage.
Well, this collateral damage is dead people whom God gave the right to life, even if they are Arabs! To think you know through faith that you can recognize a human devil when you see one, and have a Christian obligation to kill it is not right or just and cannot be Christian, if uprightness and justice are what Christianity stands for. But for the grace of God, the boot could have been on the other foot, or so Christians once used to believe. It means revenge is not one of God’s recommendations, and so must be the opposite. It must be Satan’s. Those who think otherwise have been duped, not only by a cowboy president, doubtless a dupe himself, but by all their lunatic ministers and pastors whose motivation is personal greed and power over people. Evil is not defeated by evil. Christ had to defend himself against the accusation of being an agent of the devil, and this was his own answer. He had been defeating evil through his doctrine of love, so how then could he have been evil himself as Satan’s agent. This Christ is unknown to fundamentalist Christians.
The utopian right achieved ascendancy by remobilizing some of humanity’s most ancient and dangerous myths.John Gray
Gray is correct here, but these are Christian myths and most dangerous when Christians believe them to be true. They are not Enlightenment myths even if some Enlightenment thinkers were influenced by them in the bizarre way Gray proposes. He continues:
In the early 1990s, neoconservatives joined forces in a strategic alliance with Christian fundamentalists…
Gray coins the clever neologism for this alliance—the “theoconservatives”. All the conspiracy theories about 9/11 stem from those aware of this alliance and its apocalyptic meaning for us all. 9/11 was astonishingly convenient for this alliance and fitted their notions so well and so opportunely that it looks planned, and not by Al Qaida. Bush’s response was:
Our responsibility to history is clear—to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.
That he thinks he can rid the world of evil shows Bush thinks he is God. If God had wanted, he could have made the world free of evil. The trouble for our new God was that he lacked omniscience so had no idea where the culprit, if it is Osama Bin Laden, was. So he decided that murdering Iraqis was just as good a revenge and and had the advantage of allowing US corporations to steal Iraqi oil assets. Murder is against God’s commandments, but, for Bush and his theocon plebs, not if you are murdering Arabs.
He has now announced that, if he’d been able to have his way, he’d have stayed in Vietnam where the American Holy Joes murdered 2 million people, and that can be doubled, if their responsibility for bringing chaos to Cambodia is included. This good Christian leader thinks killing people he does not like is fighting evil, not causing it, and millions of redneck Christians still support him! If Bush thinks he is helping God in some way, he has the same delusion as Hitler, and that is because he has the same apocalyptic Christian mentality, not because he is in any way a product of the Enlightenment.
Nazis
Which brings us back to Gray’s wish to blame everything on to free thinkers and reformers. The nazis grew out of the Enlightenment even though “many nazis thought of themselves as its enemies”. Again he shows how perverse his “thinking” is. One of his principles is post hoc propter hoc, so as the nazis came after the Enlightenment, they must have been caused by it. Great paradigm changes in society obviously have widespread ramifications, but blaming them is like blaming the air we all breathe for the nazi atrocities. The air we breathe is not responsibility for good either. The Christians like to claim everthing progressive simply because the whole of Europe was once Christian, so Christianity takes the credit for everything.
Gray uses this himself, in the negative sense, in transferring Christian apocalyptic to the Enlightenment post hoc propter hoc to tar all progressives with Christian lunacy. It is true that they could not avoid Christian influence even though they were looking for new ways forwards rather than remaining in the slough of despond Europe had been in for over a thousand years. Those who came later were less influenced, and today Christianity is a throwback to more primitive times. No one intelligent wants to be one, though we have the same in the US as we had all those dark age years in Europe—fear! People are again scared of being openly against Christianity, or even uncommitted. Christian pickets threaten murder of their own compatriots, and have murdered them! Opponents really have to find strength together and stop the new inquisition, or they will suffer under it! That is Enlightenment thinking—dreaming to Gray—the thought that the world would be better if the Christians were faced down.
The Enlightenment was not born perfectly formed, any more than any other new concept or social institution is. Gray cannot grasp, or ignores, that everything is born then develops—evolves, although soon Gray admits that early Enlightenment thinkers naturally “voiced the prejudices of their age”. Ideas have to lose the appendages of time past when they perhaps served a function but no longer do. Eventually the true form adapted to the new conditions emerges. If there is anything in Gray’s criticism, it is that the Enlightenment has not yet fully emerged from the darkness of Christianity. And because it has not done well enough, it ought to be suffocated, in Gray’s view, leaving a dark hole for Christianity to take us into again. Christians think similarly. Science cannot explain life so we are better returning to Christian belief which explains nothing at all!
Anyway, the nazis came after the Enlightenment true enough, but aimed to turn the clock back to pre-Enlightenment times. It is the aim of all fascism because fascism is the political wing of the ancien régime. What better way than to move hoi polloi than with messianic visions of a Golden Age? Restoring something, however wonderfully new and progressive it is painted by propagandists, is turning the clock back, and that is fascism. It is reaction not progress. Gray makes heroes out of reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre and J G Herder—not Enlightenment thinkers but among the counter-Enlightenment, according to Isaiah Berlin—but again he perversely claims the nazis were opposed to these men “at the most important points”. Here is the professor of special pleading again at work. As examples, he says Herder did not think any races superior or inferior. No, it is just that they ought not to mix, and Germans were right to ensure racial purity! De Maistre too would have been horrified by nazi atheism! So, the I-speak-your-weight professor of thinking thinks the nazis were atheists.
Either Gray is ignorant or he is a propagandist whose lies are as big as Goebbel’s. Only Christians now still deny that the top nazis were all brought up as Christians, and some, like Hitler himself, never lost their Christian beliefs. It is hardly surprising because Germany was more profoundly Christian before the war than the USA is now. Hitler’s messianism did not need any Enlightenment devil intervening between it and his original Christianity. Christians try to blame it on to Nietzsche, but his alleged naziism was propagated by his nazi sister after his death. Nietzsche had the idea of the Übermensch, the Superman, but it had no implication of racial superiority, and if the nazis took it that way, it is no fault of Nietzsche’s. The Übermensch was the new man, the renaissance man, the morally upright and culturally superior man, not any man who is superior by virtue of his parents. The nazi attempt to claim a national superiority for the Germans was meant to be the Aryan version of the chosen people of the Jewish scriptures, but people who make any such claims seem doomed by history to belie them.
Another technique Gray likes, and has in common with Christian apologists, is to attack science and thereby the Enlightenment with the wisdom of hindsight. He gloats that some Enlightenment supporters were phrenologists, a nineteenrh century pseudo-science, he tells us, as if he would have known that in the nineteenth century. He would have been feeling bumps convinced they militated against the Enlightenment. In the nineteenth century, phrenology was not a pseudo science, it was a proto-science. Who could know whether it might become a proper science until they had tested it, but in this case it only came through as a science in a small way. The brain does leave bumps and recesses in the skull, and they are useful in judging abilities and behaviour in fossilized animals. A mark in a skull impression of an hominid in the Broca area might indicate that speech is developing. With hindsight even dolts seem clever, and Gray suggests that phrenology and such failed sciences are not far from nazi racial “science”. The point about these wise-after-the-event gurus, philosophical or theological, is that they use later scientific knowledge to criticize those who were building from scratch. Pioneers of psychology and sociology like Francis Galton are designated as crypto-nazis, though the clever dicks who do it can only do it sixty tears after the nazis have been defeated. Gray is using hindsight to judge, but modern men who gloat over the ignorance of these pioneers, even if they proved to have backed the wrong horse, are pathetic in comparison. They know the outcome. Doubtless their readers are impressed because they cannot tell the difference, but it remains a trick that shows its author to be unscrupulous and unprincipled.
Racialism
In a similar way, Gray blames Aristotle, who thought slavery was a natural condition, for the western notion of racial superiority. It not in the least clever or fruitful to blame the ancients for not having modern values, and it is not the sort of thing to expect from a professor of thought. But if it must be done, then it should be done fairly. Aristotle lived in the fourth century BC, but a far more influential man, Jews and Christians tell us, was Moses who popularly wrote the Jewish Torah, a thousand years earlier, and claimed in it that God favoured a particular race, the Jews. Now, surely that is a nost directly racialist teaching, and one that is quite impossible for any God of all the universe. It is certainly the example that Hitler had in mind when he declared Germans as the master race and did his best to expunge the chosen people from memory. Surely Gray should have used this as a far better instance of the ancients teaching us wrong things than Aristotle whom most of the members of any racist mob will scarcely have heard of.
Moreover, Moses in Genesis describes how the human race was divided into categories which have been ever since used by Jews and Christians as the basis of racialism. Christians add the deicide of God by His Chosen Ones as another reason to hate Jews, despite God having picked them originally, indeed adding their ingratitude as another reason for it. Now He has picked Christians instead, and, Lo! they are superior to everyone else because they fight on the side of God in His battle against evil, meaning everyone else in the world. They can mass murder anyone they wish with god’s approval. Is that not a tad similar to naziism?
He ends up blaming naziism on to the Enlightenment, along with everything else he can think of unpleasant, even though he admits that racial prejudice is immemorial. He also pointedly refuses to note that science has removed much of the basis of racism in that we are all comprised of the same gene pool and have more in common with apes than the differences between us. Science is the product of the Enlightenment, if it is not just another name for it. So, why not have a go at science too?
Mass murder could be justified by faux-Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest…
…and genocide was therefore given the “blessing of science and civilization”. Except, of course, that what is faux-science is not science, so it never had any such blessing. Unless it must be condemned because others use it falsely. Again Gray has common ground with Christian apologists. Even though the scientific baby is clean, and Gray knows it, he prefers to tip it out with the dirty bathwater.
The nazis were not to blame, but the Enlightenment that went several hundred years before them was. Yet, the Enlightenment was a reaction against centuries of Christian oppression, and Hitler saw himself as a saviour, a latter-day Christ, but so much better for being German and not Jewish. His nazis drew upon Christian indoctrination—their expectation of the second coming of the saviour when the world would be forcibly purified. It was the apocalypse, the end of history and the beginning of perfection. The theme of Christian apocalypse was how Gray started, but by distortion, dishonesty and demi-truths, he contrived to use Christian insanity to denigrate its opposite, the tradition of thinking that shone light into the Christian gloom to produce the modern world. On the principle of who is my enemy’s enemy is my friend, he allies himself with the Christian fundamentalists by projecting their lunacies on to their critics. This is Straussianism at work!
And, if “‘racial science’ opened the way for the nazis’ supreme crime” where did it come from. The quizzical marks denote it as not being science—do they not?—but it most certainly is religion. The nazi “master race” is Hitler’s adaptation of the “chosen people” of Judaism, and “the elect” of Christianity. Nazi ideas of the pollution of racial purity by sub-men is no different from Ezra’s biblical purging of non-Jews when the Jewish temple state was established. Nor would Nehemiah let the native Judahites and Samarians participate in the project that defined what Judaism was—the building of the city and its temple. Gray even admits that anti-Semitism is co-eval with the appearance of Christianity as a distinct religion, and was pursued throughout the Christian middle ages and intensified by Luther at the Reformation.
But do not bother Gray with evidence. The Enlightenment was to blame because after it the racialists could claim their prejudice was “scientific”, and “the project of exterminating Jews is modern”, and “the holocaust required modern technology, and the modern state”. Gray seems not to like the modern world, and hates the Enlightenment as its cause. Well, that is up to him, but to produce false and lying arguments for his own demented fancies is not philosophy, unless it is of the Leo Strauss variety. Exterminating Jews is not modern, and nor is genocide.
The earlier allusion to Tacitus is to the Roman practice of wiping out troublesome people. Carthaginians, Jews, Druids and Dacians were all wiped out or scattered. The Spanish Inquisition was directed against Jews. Jews were a target of European pogroms for centuries. The Mongols used genocide to subdue troublesome people, as the Romans did. Certainly modern technology made it feasible to kill millions of people efficiently, but ten times more people were killed in the war against the nazis than they killed as a matter of their racial policy, more people died to defend freedom than the nazis killed to uphold their supposed Enlightenment belief in racism. If the racism was Enlightenment induced, then the determination to stop it was too, and the sacrifices made show it. Gray might prefer the middle ages to modern times but 55 million people died in just a few years to preserve the freedoms that the Enlightenment won for us. It is utter perversity to pretend it was the Enlightenment that was fascist.
Nazi anti-Semitism was a fusion of modern racist ideology with a Christian tradition of demonology.
The racist ideology was “perverted science” and “of demonology” can be dropped from this sentence with advantage. It leaves Christianity responsible. In religious traditions men can be evil without being demons, however attractive the metaphor might be. Rather the notion of a “master race”, a “chosen people” and an “elect” emphasises an entirely human superiority over the rest. The real point is the eschatological myth that posits salvation for the superior type and hell fire for the others. As history shows, Christians have never stopped being willing to start burning people on God’s behalf. This sad habit has nothing to do with Enlightenment thinkers, and everything to do with Christian thought. Gray keeps offering and even citing evidence that shows it, yet obstinately and mischievously takes a different view. Michael Burleigh (The Third Reich—a New History) is cited as saying that the first world war…
…created the emotional effervescence which Emil Durkheim regarded as integral to religious experience… an intensified revival of this pseudo religious strain in politics which exerted its maximum appeal in times of extreme crisis, just as medieval millenarianism, or the belief that the thousand year interval before the Day of Judgement was at hand, had thrived before in times of sudden change and social dislocation.
Hitler was seen, even before the war, as messianic—a modern day John of Leyden—but Gray identifies with a journalist, F A Voight, who seemed among the ones that sought to distance nazism from religion by claiming it was secular. The religious madmen can dream of the end of the world, but the secular madman cannot, so he…
…projects into the past a vision of what never was, conceives what is in terms of what is not, and the future in terms of what can never be. The remoter past becomes a mystical or mythical Age of Innocence, a Golden or Heroic Age, an Age of Primitive Communism or of replendent manly Virtue. The Future is the Classless Society, Eternal Peace or Salvation by Race—the kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
This, in two sentences, summarises what is true in Gray’s argument. The religious myth has had a baneful influence, not least because it seems to tie in with the widespread psychological impression that things were better when we were younger ourselves, and our limited conception of the future. If religion is not the origin of the myth of the Golden Age in the past, and one to come in the future, then it is itself a reflexion of human psychology. We are all taught that God created perfection in the paradise of Adam and Eve, and that we have been in freefall ever since, but Christ will return on a cloud to judge the world and destroy all evil, and restore the promised paradise. Like the sun signs of astrology, it plucks psychological chords. If it gives humanity something to look forward to, it is God’s act, not our own. The religious fanatic wants to help God out by bringing forward the catastrophe, but nor can the secularist accept an arbitrary intervention by an imaginary being as the end of the question of human betterment. They feel a duty to improve the conditions of human life, but no secularist can imagine an end to history, except as an end to humanity in it, but that is something they hope to avoid. Rather, they have visions of a better world than now, but never of an ultimate perfection. If anyone does seriously entertain such a view, Gray’s urging on to them of some realism is right, but to condemn all visions of improvement is defeatist, nihilistic, or reactionary when it implies the opposite.
Gray calls naziism a “modern political religion”, detracting from the fact that religion is itself political. Naziism was a modern religion in that it was a modern version of Christian chiliasm. It drew upon the psychology and mythology of Christianity, and modernised it by expressing it in pseudo scientific terms. It was religion but it was not science. It pandered to religion, had the tacit support of Christian churches including the pope, and most of its members were practising or professed Christians. They did not generally think they had anything in common with Robespierre or even Voltaire, so to the extent that they in fact had, it was merely because the modern world was modern and scientific, consequent upon the Enlightenment creating the conditions for modernity. The trouble for most of us who enjoy it is that it has also put terrible weapons into the hands of religious madmen who think God approves of their use.
Gray says apocalyptic secularism is all the fault of the Enlightenment, even though it comes from Christianity. Yet, liberal democracy, science and human rights are pillers of the modern west, or were until the neocons took over America. The west defines itself in terms of liberal democracy and human rights. So, the west is, or was, founded on the Enlightenment, but the counter-Enlightenment keeps trying to re-establish the ancien regime, or its modern equivalent, and Gray thinks it proper to fire off a few salvoes alongsides the fascists. Now we discover that there is nothing peculiarly western about mass murder, though he has spent pages and pages blaming it on to the Enlightenment. For several centuries, the west has adopted Enlightenment principles. Generally, especially in the scientific and technological advances they have permitted, the survivors have benefitted, but millions have died in defending them, and more will doubtless have to. The counter-Enlightenment is strong, currently ascendant, but other countries around the world are adopting western ways—enlightened ways! Meanwhile the US has turned nazi, but it no longer dominates the world the way the American right thought they would when communism fell, and now other more enlightened countries will end up having to defend their enlightened governments against American self-righteous religiosity. Gray attacks both sides, hedging his bets or hoping for a middle way, a return to the dark ages.
