|
|
Religious Book Store > Religious books beginning with B
|
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia |
Author: John Gray
Published: 2008-09-30 |
List price: $15.00
Our price: $10.20
|
Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: January 08th, 2009 07:18:31 PM
|
|
|
Customer comments on this selection.
 Inconsistent and self-contradictory
"With the death of Utopia, apocalyptic religion has re-emerged, naked and unadorned, as a force in world politics." (p. 3) Among the few errors by Mr. Gray is his identification of only the Christian millennialists as apocalyptic. In orthodox Christianity all the exchatologies, premillennial, postmillennial, and amillennial, await the consummation of human history in the return of Christ. There are two differences. The first difference is how the series of events that take place around His return are structured. The second difference is whether the kingdom is established (either initially [amillennial] or completely [postmillennial]) before or after (premillennial) His return.
When it comes to current events this work should definitely be taken with a grain of salt. His perspective on current issues, esp. the character of U.S. involvement in Iraq, reads like a partisan talking points paper instead of an objective analysis of the greater situation. (p. 100-104)
For Mr. Gray there is no consistent end. His case is not a simple one. He makes very clear the failure of our liberal world to accomplish its utopian goals, the mutual failure of nation-states to fully encompass the needs of the whole society, and the lack of freedom within totalitarian systems. But his solution does not yield a fruitful result. His appeal is a Randian reach to reason and science, and that is his sense of realism. What remains is the physical world; there is nothing transcendental. His realism is without ontology or teleology, reflecting his abandonment of any apocalyptic ends. This is a position of ultimate naturalism that ends with a high level of frightening consistency. By excluding anything metaphysical he excludes ethical considerations from the political process. In this he reads more like coherent Nietzsche.
The matter of ethics brings out a serious contradiction in Mr. Gray's thoughts. One the one hand he sounds like the teleological Christians whom he criticizes when he promotes the best virtues of societies that help the needy and minorities. On the other hand, he sounds like just another despotic scientific atheist as he promotes a system driven by reason and science. The result is that Mr. Gray is not only unable to escape the enlightenment liberalism that he maintains has failed but he is also unable to escape the Christian character and ethic that clearly affects his position.
It is works such as this which present the greatest philosophic dangers to political and social systems. It is a system without an ethic but pretends to appeal to an ethic for the benefit of society. Such is the arbitrariness of proposed totalitarian solutions, and a fundamental motivation for the Christian, especially the evangelical, to pursue a place for the Christian ethic in civic life.
Without a view toward the future, without some sort of apocalypse or similar terminus, there is no possibility for progress. There is no political solution to the human condition.
***
In short, this is a *useful* book for its history but a *poor* work for its tendency to use history and theology for his own covenience.
 Difficult to know where to begin...
First I want to get something off my chest: who, over at the publishing company, came up with the godawful cover for this edition of the book? It looks like something out of a 1940's sci-fi comic book, or taken from one of those Bobby Sands graffiti pictorials you might see on an old Belfast brick wall - totally lame.
And it's a shame, too, because there is nothing lame about Gray's dour, penetrating, sobering book. It is an unsparing critique of not only utopianism, but the very idea of progress (in human terms) itself.
Gray in effect argues that the Enlightenment project, in a profound sense, is a sort of fraud, in that it has largely occupied the "framework of thought" created by Christian theology, while claiming to have escaped that framework altogether by the relatively trivial act of substituting other ideals for a god figure. Characteristics of that framework include ideas of a linear march of human history towards some end or final culmination (apocalypse), the possibility of moral or ethical progress, and belief based not on any sort of evidence or precedent, but on nothing more than blind faith. Gray along the way devotes quite a bit of time to the Iraq War...but it's hard to do a book this dense any real justice in a review. Suffice to say, I find many of his arguments distressingly compelling (perhaps partly because of his terse, clear prose).
The only concern I have with this book, and with all other books like it, is that it attempts to establish what I might call genealogies of ideas - one (or more) ideas begat other ideas, and those ideas in turn begat these ideas, and these ideas begat those others, and "this is how X people got to Point Y, and how Point Y came to influence the world", with the whole description being suffused with the implication that *logic* was something of the main spur of generation (Idea A logically follows from Idea B)...as though a genealogy of ideas was conceivably as tidy and clear-cut as a biological reproductive chain.
But I always get the sense that such genealogies themselves are more the products of our own need to believe that there was some kind of *rational order*, or even just any intelligible process...
So, for example, was Hitler a child of the Enlightenment? Well, notes Gray, he was inspired by science - Darwinism in particular - and his racism and race policies were amply justified by leading scientific authorities of his day (all over the West). But could it not be as easily argued that he was a child of outrageous romanticism, of Nietzchean Dionysianism, where *to feel* and *to act* and to *impose will* is far more important than to think or contemplate or argue or justify?
Gray argues that Marxism too was but another Enlightenment fruit; but again...when the egalitarianism impulse is so deeply rooted in our psyches, so far beneath any reach of mere rationality, so at its root *religious*, how can we say that it was more the product of reason, than unreason? Maybe another way of putting this all is: Whether we begin with religion/revelation, or science/reason, don't we tend to end up at the same sorts of places anyway?
From what I can see, intellectual milieus tend to owe more to chance, and ultimately to non-rational responses to the world's vicissitudes, and to a need to belong to a group whatever its fashions intellectual or otherwise, and to a tangled, virtually infinite mess of ideas, superstitions, dogmas, and lusts, than to any identifiable series of pure intellectual streams propelled along by *logical extension*. But intellectual histories (including Gray's book) always seem to presume the opposite, and I just don't see how or why. (Once again, I'm starting to feel sort of lonely :P).
Anyway, despite that misgiving, I think Gray's book is challenging, really thought-provoking, and disturbing in the best sort of way.
The trilogy. False Dawn - Straw Dogs - Black Mass
The other reviews say it all.
If you had to pick 3 books from john Gray, (I've read all of them) I'd place The three mensioned above as must have top 10, all times reference books in political science/economy/philosophy, among the hundreds i have.
 A great read, but a lost opportunity
Gray's basic argument that modern political movements are based on or disguised as religions is not really new. But, if you think you've heard it all, don't let that stop you from reading this book. Even if the arguments are rather familiar, I found reading Grey's exposition of these ideas an enjoyable experience.
While some reviewers seemed to think that the author crowned his achievement in the final chapter, "Post-Apocalypse", I found he over-reached himself and fell into glibness too often. I wondered if one reason the hyperbole fell a bit flat was the evanescence of the movements he cited earlier, including Communists, Nazis, and now the neocons.
I noted that the New Yorker magazine reviewer observed that Gray tried "to fit too much into his model of utopianism with too little argument". To the contrary, I thought that Gray's argument was persuasive enough, and that there was much more that he should have fitted into his model; in other words, he failed to adequately discuss all of the available modern utopias. Gray seems unaware of any genuine research into the 9/11 events, therefore shapes his arguments to fit the received mythology about Islamofascism (which he calls Islamo-Jacobinism -- fair enough) and the phony war on terror, which is actually a war *of* terror. His analysis of the neocons is therefore unfortunately stunted, as he misses out on the true implications of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and the New Pearl Harbor that was called for by PNAC. If these ideas are unfamiliar, I suggest searching both Amazon and the web using the terms "PNAC" and "New Pearl Harbor". In any event, his emphases on religio-political movements that have either been eclipsed (Nazism, Communism) or are in the process of being eclipsed (neocons and Islamofascism) will soon make the book seem unfortunately dated. The neocons are now being replaced by the Trilateralists in anticipation of an Obama presidency and the Islamofascists will eventually cease to be regarded as Enemy Number One, as happened with the Communists.
There is another perhaps less well-known but no less dangerous utopian project that Gray missed out on, and that is the Anglo-American elitist cabal that is behind the current food and fuel shortages. Utopia, according to the world's power elite, consists of a world with a greatly reduced population, a goal they have been working towards in a patient, methodical fashion for over a century. The belief system that drives them is no less dangerous and crackpot than Nazism or neoconservatism, and needs to be exposed and skewered by talented writers like John Gray. I refer readers to F. William Engdahl's latest book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation for a gripping up-to-date analysis of this utopian dream that endangers the lives of all of us in its pursuit.
While I thought "Black Mass" was an excellent book as far as it went, I consider it a lost opportunity due to its failure to mention the most persistent and insidious utopian movement of the past one hundred years. This utopia had an early manifestation in the eugenics movement, which was very popular among elite Americans in the early to mid-20th century. Eugenics was soon adopted by the Nazis, who featured prominently in "Black Mass". This thread of discussion would have enhanced Gray's arguments against unachievable utopias, and given it even more relevance to our time. For, while Nazis, Communists and neocons may come and go, the elitist utopian dream of population reduction has outlasted all of them.
Enlightening
Like all books by John Gray, Black Mass is a compelling example of the power of an overwhelming and logical examination of vital events. At this point, I would classify Mr. Gray as one of the five top philosophers in the English language. In addition to the impeccable quality of his reasoning, he writes in an accessible and beautiful Englsih, without all the word-splitting typical of philosophers, particularly of the French breed. Kudos!
|
Similar Listings
|
|
Our Religious book picks:
|
|
Search the Religious Products Store
LCS Amazon Store 2.5 © 2009
|
|
|
