Gray’s Anti-Utopian Screed

While George W. Bush’s fervent and explicit Christianity may well be his defining personal feature, critic and professor John Gray reminds us that Bush is not the defining manifestation of political Christianity. According to Gray’s newest book, “Black Mass,” the results of mixing religion and civic life can range from utopian aspirations to apocalyptic predictions of doom.

Gray’s entertaining but flawed argument posits that the common theme of early Christian believers, Enlightenment thinkers, and modern politicians is a faulty belief in society’s continual progress and its evolution toward a new world without ills or faults. This trend, Gray claims, is both utopian and apocalyptic.

Gray traces the origin of utopian ideals to Jesus’ apocalyptic anticipation of a new kingdom where all evil is eliminated. Gray convincingly asserts that early Christianity was founded upon efforts to make up for Jesus’ failure to fulfill his promise of a Second Coming. As Christianity’s influence declined, Enlightenment thinkers picked up the apocalyptic idea of a perfect end in sight, but discarded God’s role in transforming society and handed humans the materials to catalyze progress.

Gray details both the demise of Enlightenment thought and its resurrection in “modern revolutionary movements” while tearing apart the banners of present-day neoconservatives, Islamic terrorists, and liberal humanists alike.

It may seem counterintuitive to portray Hitler as a child of the Enlightenment, but Gray traces a connection between Hitler’s attempt to remake Germany by force and eliminate Jews who would hinder the triumphal arrival of the Third Reich and Enlightenment-era utopian thinking.

Gray also argues that radical Islam follows in the same utopian tradition, uniting modern revolutionary idealism with Islamic roots. Indeed, because both encourage the use of force to achieve universal goals, Gray sees striking parallels between Christian millenialism and Islamic radicalism.

Paradoxically, Gray also places secularism within the “legacy of Christianity.” He argues that, although secular thinking subdues religion, “grotesque” alterations to religion reappear to influence humanity. Gray praises the peaceful coexistence of “polytheism” and “mystical philosophies” in China and Japan, which he claims help explain why Darwinism failed to ignite a religious clash there.

But despite his strident diagnosis of this supposedly universal ill, Gray fails to prescribe a cure. He terms his response to utopia “realism,” which he defines as the recognition that history is full of spontaneity and will never come to convergence. However, his ambition to do away with a desire for universal answers to humanity’s problems is as unrealistic as the utopian philosophies he criticizes. A meta-narrative characterizing utopian thought as the ultimate source of the world’s greatest ills is both unsatisfying and unconvincing.

Gray’s outlook is bleak: peace and harmony are dreams we will never realize, and more wars of religion and utopia loom overhead as we outstrip the world’s available resources.

Gray offers some comfort in his praise of science, an area constantly making new breakthroughs and rewriting human ignorance, but “Black Mass” ultimately fails to answer how realism will empower us. Gray’s advice to take up “stoical determination and intellectual detachment” is vague and leaves us wondering how it would be better if President Bush were a well-oiled automaton instead of an ardent neo-conservative utopian. Gray offers a convincing and incisive critique of utopian thought, but his solution is hardly any better.