John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion And The Death Of Utopia, (Allan Lane, £18.99) is more than just another obituary of Utopia. It condemns all forms of future-oriented and experimentative thought. Gray argues that the many problems that afflict humanity continue to be the outcome of a deathly combination of utopian and apocalyptic thinking. Gray diagnoses this disease not just in the usual suspects - communism and Nazism - but in a bewildering variety of movements; apparently millenarian thinking also drove post-Augustan Christianity, the Enlightenment, 19th century Liberals and American modernizers.
Today it appears that Utopianism has been appropriated by the right. Bush and Blair, and even poor old Francis Fukuyama, are recast as utopian villains. According to this worldview, Iraq is a 21st century utopian experiment. In a world blighted by utopias, Gray believes that it is 'dystopian thinking that we most need'.
It is paradoxical that an author so critical of ideologies that claim to explain too much
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has embraced a master-concept with such formidable explanatory powers. Yet at times Gray grasps that important events are not the intended or even unintended consequences of a utopian logic. "To some extent the origins of the Iraq war will always be obscure", he notes. He points to "disparate and competing objectives" and observes that "in practice the Bush administration was clueless".
Unfortunately, Gray cannot resist the temptation of the kind of history that he decries: the war is characterised as an utopian experiment by missionaries under the influence of a neo-conservative cabal.
Gray's most interesting contribution is to underline the influence of apocalyptic thinking on the western imagination. Regrettably, though, he associates this form of thought with a belief in human progress. His alternative is to seek refuge in the present since "humanity cannot advance or retreat". He proposes realism, but without meaning this is an impoverished message to offer. 
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FIRST POSTED JULY 5, 2007
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