Abstract

© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 30 August 2007, Friday, 2 October 2009

That Strauss was a great defender of democracy is laughable… Strauss disciples consider it a noble lie.

Shadia B Drury

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.

Neoliberal or Neocon?

In the middle of his book, Gray moves into the areas where he is good—in this book anyway—modern political analysis. Even an I-Speak-Your-Weight professor is good at something—speaking weights. Whether it is that Gray understands the Bush and Blair neocon lunacy better than most because he is one at heart, who knows? But he is exceptionally frank about it, much more so than most political correspondents. He begins by stating what few of them would have said, but which surely is true:

Blair was always closer to neoconservative thinking, and after the 9/11 attacks, he shifted decisively to neoconservatism.

Gray is fond of the modern habit of calling unreconstructed tories neoliberals, explaining that it is a desire for pure liberal values, namely rampant uncontrolled capitalism and strictly limited government. It is not liberals who want this. They learn form history and know that markets cannot be unrestricted if only because they then do not work. Governments must have the task of regulation and cannot be restricted in this regulatory role. The ones who want absolute freedom in the markets are the ones who think they will benefit at everyone else’s expense—the rich, the corporate bosses, and their servants, the managerial classes who know better but dare not risk offending their paymasters. Leo Strauss called them the Philosophers and the Gentlemen. Neoliberal means neocon and fascist in fact, not liberal, and the perpetual use of a term which has nothing to do with what it seems to mean, but is actually its opposite, looks like more Straussian obfuscation. No liberal will claim to be a neoliberal any more than a British socialist will claim to be New Labour, or even a one nation Tory would claim to be a neocon. It is disinformation meant to fool ignorant voters—hoi polloi.

Having identified Blair as a neoconservative, Gray reverts to using neoliberal, so it is plain enough that neoliberalism is neoconservatism, in fact. Now, political philosophers might have decided that neoliberalism is a return to the liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but liberals have evolved from whiggery so it cannot be right today to falsely imply that neoconservatism is in any way liberal. Maybe professors of political economics can write sensibly to each other knowing that by neo-black they mean white, but anyone intelligent among them must protest. Not the neoconservatives, though, because childish trickery and misinformation for the plebs is part of their stock in trade. Both Bush and Blair are liars in the common sense of the word, but lying is not lying to them. They are Christians and God ensures that they only speak truth!

Neoliberals, so-called, like F A Hayek and Milton Friedman, essentially wanted to return to a Golden Age before capitalism was spoilt by government regulation. All attempts to restore the past are by definition reactionary. The reason these old tories liked the idea they were new liberals was that they liked Adam Smith, the eighteenth century Scottish political economist, whom Gray says was driven primarily by religion, yet whose idea of free markets as a utopia did not imply any degree of perfection, but the best attainable economic system despite whatever flaws remained. It sounds fairly realistic, but actually modern mixed economies are better than unrestricted markets, purely motivated by capital accumulation. The reason is simply that important aspects of a modern economy would be ignored by get-richer capitalists because there was not enough profit in them. Examples are the health and education of the poor, people who cannot afford to pay much, and so there is little profit in them, yet without full health and education, the system suffers both a burden and a loss of talent.

Governments therefore have to ensure that these sorts of areas are adequately covered. In the last century, there has been a consensus that such interference by governments is beneficial, but the neoconservatives are nowhere as liberal or as intelligent as their conservative forebears, though Gray thinks otherwise—neoconservatives are more intelligent than neoliberals, though they are the same, a confession by someone, not intellectually modest, of where he stands. Neoconservatives want no interference, and that means dictatorship—fascism. If Adam Smith was influenced by religion, it was because it was difficult for anyone then not to be, but there is nothing in liberalism per se that is religious, and for most people, it is essential that political systems should not favour or ill-favour any religion. Religious freedom is at the heart of liberalism, and so it is quite irrelevant that it grew out of a religious society. It grew as a protest and a corrective to the wrongs and excesses that religion had favoured, or at least condoned.

In Britain, neoconservatism’s political vehicle was not the Conservative Party, but the new party that Blair created when he seized the Labour Party.

There is a book to be written on how the coup was effected, because it must have involved a lot of planning and resources behind it for it to have been done without anyone in the Labour Party noticing. Sure, many “old” Labour members realized that Blair was no socialist, but not enough, and none of the ones who obejected to the new leader saw how anti-socialist and even anti-liberal he was. Once in power, he did what all dictators do, changed the rules to consolidate his position, and hand picked candidates, most of whom were loyal to their sociopathic boss, but were far too stupid to run political departments and have left the party bereft of talent. The whole regime was a disaster except economically, where Brown, for ten years Chancellor of the Exchequer, claimed prudence, but benefitted from the global boom and particularly the absurd levels of lending. Blair was an opportunist, but his political beliefs were neoconservative:

His career in politics is testimony to the power of neoconservative ideas…

A role of government readily accepted by conservatives and more so by neoconservatives is policing. The right wing always emphasize discipline and punishment and religion, of course, as the basis of it all, religious people being obedient people who accept their lot on earth so as not to jeopardize their ticket to heaven. The traditional labour party was always chary of the Tory emphasis on “law and order” as a cover for oppressive measures. Blair seized on it, and pushed through a vast programme of largely oppressive laws, especially after 9/11, when the excuse of the “war on terror” was created. He also began openly supporting faith schools, some of which taught biblical creationism as science. Anyone who thinks creationism is to be preferred to science, or even equal to it, is either dim-witted or is motivated to destroy our society by returning it to religious obscurantism. No one who has any historical knowledge of religion could do it, but there is one thing that faith schools never teach and that is the true history of their own religion.

Blair is an American neoconservative and has been most of his political life.

He is not another neoliberal prophet of the free market, Gray says, and it is true, but he is closer to a biblical prophet. Like Bush, he is convinced God is on his side, so he can do and say no wrong. He deployed the British Army to dangerous and fruitless expeditions, even when it was participating in the slaughter of thousands of innocent people, convinced the outcome would be guaranteed. War is an instrument for good, and history is providence. He has done the innocent dead a favour because they go straight to heaven, and he brags that he is happy to meet his maker and be judged. He is incapable of self-doubt or criticism, or can cast any slight doubts off with a prayer. It is quite impossible to be wrong because he is convinced he is doing what God wants. In short, he is deranged! So is Bush, and he has his finger on the nuclear button, and has his missiles trained on Iran! We have reason to be scared, but no one is.

This is the most dangerous sort of insanity, the messianic insanity of Jesus himself, and of his imitators since, like Hitler. Jesus thought he knew that God was about to end history, and led his opposition to the authorities in that light, but he was wrong. Bush and Blair also think that their faith gives them a privileged knowledge of God’s design. The subjective confidence these deluded people have that they are right about history makes it objectively so. And when lying is necessary to further God’s providential plan, it is not lying. Surely no one, other than similar lunatics, can see anything but lunacy in this, yet we have allowed two of the most powerful countries in the world to be ruled by demented men. Surely, too, even the vast bulk of Christians accept that only God knows His plans, and anyone who thinks otherwise is in Satan’s grip. Any truly analytical Christian must see that the crucifixion of Jesus is a warning to us all that no man, even a supposed son of God, actually knows what God thinks. Christians, above all, should be protesting that madmen are operating in their name. Where are the protests, if they do?

And the madness of our neocon Christian leaders extended into serious matters of state, as is plain now, but it involved gross deception in senior government departments, and the subversion to personal whims of departments that ought to have been objective. The spying services called military intelligence are useless unless they are based on reality, but Bush, Blair and their neocon advisers believed in faith-based intelligence—intelligence based on telepathic messages from God—intelligence that fitted Christian delusions and particularly their own schemes. Bush decided to invade Iraq for reasons that had no connexion with 9/11. Supposed Iraqi involvement was for public consumption. Even in the US, millions did not buy it, but, once the war began, Bush depended on the mindless support of his army of Christians and the patriotism of the rest, and the protesting ended through a national wish not to undermine “our boys” however unjust, idiotic and unnecessary the venture. Never mind that Christian nutcases have sent our boys on another fool’s errand to suit corporate armaments manufacturers and oil theives. Better they should die with dubious honour than be demoralized by truth.

It was harder for Blair, but somehow he subverted the intelligence services, meant to be non-party political, and turned them into an arm of his demented fancies. Some future leader will have to try to restore the civil service to what it was, a conservatively inclined but generally independent servant of any and all governments whatever their complexion without compromising their own neutrality. British intelligence failed in this, evidently because its leaders too had gone neocon. Blair committed himself to Bush’s neocon tune on Iraq, even though Bush allowed him less than full invovement. All of this bypassed the UN. The posturing at the UN was again for hoi polloi and meant nothing. In the British parliament, Blair continued the posturing until the very end, pretending that war was avoidable even though he had already agreed it with Bush.

Truth is whatever serves the cause.

Our Christian leaders were not lying in their Christian world, but it is still lying in the real world. Gray seems to be absolving Bush and Blair on the grounds of insanity, for he says they did not think they were lying. They lacked the “normal understanding” of it, though it has been the Christian understanding since Christ told them they could say what they liked and God ensured it was true (Mt 10:19-20), a Christian encouragement to delusion. Either way, they should both be impeached for taking us to war on the basis of lies. Everyone complicit in the scheme should be jailed for conspiracy. Only this would send the right messages to future madmen and liars in senior government offices. The whole lying charade was cheerily called spin in the press, simply presentation, according to the liars themselves, and the chief architect of it in the UK was Alister Campbell, a tabloid journalist who cannot be expected to distinguish truth from mendacity.

Myths or Mendacity

Both Bush and Blair are utterly ignorant of history, particularly of Christian history. All practising Christians have to be, because they could not bear to be associated with the crimes of Christianity’s past, or they are perverts and sadists. Christ saw the end of time coming, and since then it has been a regular occurence among cracked Christian pots. So far, it has not come, but deranged people like Bush have the power to bring it about. That ought to worry us. American Christian fundamentalism has made it possible, a strand of Christianity with a self-righteously deep, but theologically shallow, indeed unsound, religiosity. Few of them know anything about Christianity other than what they are told, mainly by power hungry get-rich-quick pastors whose image of the life and teaching of Christ bears no relationship to what anyone not illiterate can read in their bibles. The fundamentalist Jesus is more like the murderous Joshua, who suits their gun-happy Rambo mentality much more than the parable-telling pacifist of the gospels. The US stands out among western democracies for its supposed religiosity, but it is a satanic religiosity. They worship a war god.

The reason is that the political right wing, the Republicans, are using Christianity for their own ends, and Bush would never have been elected or remained in power without the double whammy of Christian support and outrageous jerrymandering—further proof of the opportunistic dishonesty of the Christian tribe. It certainly never seems to occur to any of them why the poor old US of A is always under threat from evil empires. For seventy years, all bar the joint war against the nazis, communists were America’s demons. In 1991, the center of communist world power, the USSR, fell, and Americans could rest easy in their beds for the first time in three generations. Not so! The American right always needs an external threat to keep civilian attention from domestic ineptitude and callousness, and to justify industrial and military spending overseas that many US corporations depend on for their profitability.

For neocons, it was an item of their theology that the US must have an enemy, and what better than Christianity’s main rival in religion for the last 1300 years. The US had supported Saddam as a counter to the influence of Iran in the middle east for thirty years, but now he was the ideal scapegoat. The people behind 9/11 were mainly Saudi nationals, not Iraqis, and the head of the new demonic empire, Al Qaida, was Osama bin Laden, whose family had long had close ties with the US, as many rich Saudis had, and even with the Bush family. It excluded Saudi Arabia as a target of revenge, even though it was the obvious suspect, and had spread a militant and oppressive form of Islam for years. The US pays out tens of billions of dollars in “aid” to the incredibly rich Saudi ruling class to keep them sweet, not really aid, of course, but bribes, and, to do it, who pays but the American people? The corrupt leadership caste of the US openly robs its own people to keep them and their equally rich overseas friends in power. Religiosity helps to keep them submissive and resigned to this robbery. Anyway, the neocons portrayed Saddam as the latest devil, rather than the Saudis who had really nurtured Islamism. Saddam was an atheist or, no more than a token Moslem, but the real culprits were Bush favorites so could not be targetted, and Saddam could be with advantage, greedy men like Bush and Cheney thought. The ignorant Christian masses of the southern US would readily accept him as the new Satan, and Bush as a saviour, and so it proved. Gray cites Dick Clarke who served four presidents as an adviser on terrorism:

Paul Wolfowitz had urged a focus on an Iraqi sponsored terrorism against the US, even though there was no such thing.

Wolfowitz was a leading neocon, and they had taken to the philosophy of Leo Strauss which required myths—read lies—to feed to the masses, and religion as the vehicle of the myths-come-lies. Straussists are too clever to believe in religion themselves but they have to pretend to for the sake of the masses who cannot bear not to be religious. So, the neoconservatives of the Republican party’s Washington caste of politicos had natural allies in the fundamentalist evangelists of the deep south who were also Republicans:

They were the political base of the Bush administration, and the contemporary, Southernized Republican Party.

Michael Lind, Made in Texas, cited by Gray

Apparently paradoxical is that leading neoconservatives in the Washington political caste were ex-Trotskyites. Americans are supposedly sensitive in the extreme to communism, yet here they cheerfully accepted a bunch of former commies pulling the strings of government. The phenomenon of Trotskyites being on the right is however not peculiar. Trotsky was always anti-Stalin, and so Trotskyites were anti-USSR, and therefore perfect allies of the US. The US used them to divide the communists in countries within their sphere of influence thus preventing any build up of popular support for communism and thr USSR when the USA was indulging in the shockingly anti-democratic foreign policy it pursued after WWII, but especially at the time of Vietnam. When Reaganomics eventually did pull down the USSR, the Trots had nothing more to do, and nowhere to go, so they headed to their proper place, the far right.

Had they been sincerely anti-capitalist, they would have turned their full attention to creating a genuinely anti-Stalinist world wide communist movement. They did not and so that was never their real aim. They quite naturally turned to the branch of neo-fascism called neoconservatism, and found a welcome in the Republican Party’s Washington lobbies. Not a few of them were former students of Leo Strauss himself, and Strauss, following the Greek academies he admired, was one of the few modern academics to self-consciously create a school of followers. Strauss himself was a nazi sympathiser who had the misfortune to be a Jew at the same time, so he escaped from Germany in good time under the patronage of Carl Schmidt, a Catholic who became a leading nazi legalist.

Liberalism and Morality

Law is never permanent, despite the beliefs of Jews and Moslems, it is at the whim of time and political choice. Liberalism expresses the rights of the individual over the coercion of the lord or the state, but no liberal wants to dispense with the law all together. That might be an ideal of libertarianism or anarchy, but the liberal accepts the need for law to hold society together so that it does not spallate into every man for himself. The law, according to the liberal, always has to balance rights against duties or resposibilities, and freedom against virtue, where virtue is a moral obligation to others in society—morality. If one’s freedom or rights is exhalted way above duty and virtue, society becomes chaotic—every deed is as good as any other, there is no right and wrong nor good and bad. We have post-modernism.

So personal freedom, though especially valued, is not valued exclusively by liberals. It cannot be absolute as long as human beings remain social animals. Human beings live collectively like wolves, not separately like coyotes, so absolute freedom destroys society, destroys the collective, and leaves us all living separate lives with no thought for others. Solitary animals have no cause to want laws or morality, it is social animals that need laws and morality, and liberalism accepts that we all have duties to others as well as our individual rights. Liberals tilt towards the importance of rights, but recognize that we cannot avoid our duties to society in return for them.

Latterly, rights have been emphasized to the exclusion of duties. Every punk kid knows their rights but none of them are concerned about their duties. It has suited politicians grubbing for votes to emphasize rights and not duty, but society is getting chaotic and the consequence will be a reaction that might take a fascist shape. The neocons are on to this trend. If it is to be avoided, rights should not be divorced from duties, and school kids should be taught that they have a duty to society as well as rights within it. The anti-social neighbour from hell has no right to keep his home while neglecting his duty to be neighbourly. The drug baron has no rights when he is destroying society by selling anti-social, life wrecking drugs contrary to his social duty. The same is true of the gunrunner and all criminal activity. Society has itself the right to restrict any of its citizen’s human rights, if they neglect their duty to society, but the liberal is chary about society using its rights in this respect unless it is necessary. That is the meaning of liberal. It is not at all a difficult principle.

Gray wants to pin all the problems of modern liberal democracy on to liberalism, a product and synonym of the Enlightenment, again joining liberalism’s enemies. He has to use very dark glasses to shade out the light to “see” what he wants to see. Hitler was beaten but refused to make peace, making the German nation fight on to the bitter end. It was the “negative eschatology of pagan traditions” not the far more obvious traditional eschatology of the religion that espouses it, Christianity. Hitler is the prime example of the basis of Gray’s thesis that political utopias stem from Christian eschatology with no need to introduce intervening levels of propagation merely to denigrate them. Hitler was a Catholic, but admired Luther’s anti-Jewish bigotry, thought Germans were a type of chosen people, and believed himself to be a type of messiah. His eschatology was entirely of the pure Christian kind. The outcome could only be a victory for good—in Hitler’s view a nazi utopia—or evil—the utter destruction of the good! Hitler’s view might have been too incoherent to be nihilistic, as Gray thinks, but it was made in the perfect image of Christian belief.

That political order rests on the acceptance of moral contraints that lie outside the human sphere matched the creedal character of American public life. America has always been hospitable to the belief that its values are God-given…

So says Leo Strauss, Gray notes. For Strauss, morality had to have a metaphysical origin—ie God—and without it liberalism decayed into chaos. As there was no God, He had to be preserved mythically—ie by lies—because ordinary plebeians would cease to be moral once they realized that God did not exist to keep an eye on them. It is the ancient social purpose of religion. In truth, morality is entirely a human concept and is only “metaphysical” to the extent that it depends in some respects on our physical nature through evolution. As noted already, a race of solitary human beings would need no morality. It is imposed by society to regulate how we must behave in society if it is to be preserved. Even many intellectuals cannot seem to grasp this, and continue to see God reflected in social behaviour.

The contradiction in society is between society and the individual. Society required morals and so devised them as it developed. Chaos, what Gray calls anarchy and nihilism, is ignoring the social dimension and returning to solitary living. Liberals do not ignore society, fascism does, in that it favours a few individuals as an elite oppressing the rest who are üntermenschen. Strauss and his neoconservative followers are enemies of liberalism in its modern realistic form because they are liberal fundamentalists, for the elite class of philosophers are free to do as they like to the rest who are merely slaves and cannon fodder. H J Eysenck, the British psychologist, has shown decades ago that fascists are simply tough-minded liberals, meaning they are liberals convinced that they are right, and their views are more important than anyone else’s in society. This is the sense that neoconservatism equates with neoliberalism. Both are liberal for the few, the elite or the philosophers, but everyone else are slaves! For liberals everyone must be equally free.

Gray seems to be an admirer of Strauss though he ostensibly rejects neoconservatism—Strauss would not have been a neocon and cannot be blamed for his disciples. But his notion of coded meaning behind plain speaking is itself a license for nihilism and confusion—unless someone has the key to the supposed code—for it permits any interpretation to be made. It is just like biblical interpretation, which is true history except where it is barbaric and contrary to the mores of modern Christians when it suddenly becomes allegorical, and can then mean anything that a clever pastor can read into it. Of course, God’s ministers are guided by the Holy Ghost, God’s guide to the truth. It proves that post-modernism is not at all modern but a reversion to dark age methods. Strauss has now given a right wing cod philosophy to justify it.

Another name for the Enlightenment is science and Gray is always pleased to have an irrational go at it, something surprising for a realist, one might have thought, but entirely in line with Straussism:

Strauss’s attack on the belief that the study of society could be conducted by the methods of natural science was well founded.

All, right, this is not an attack on science, but it is an attack on the utility of its methods which, in the real world are general. Gray is just too fond of spouting in fields in which he is incompetent, doubtless a reason why Will Self, the writer and critic, eulogises him. Storm Jameson, novelist and critic of an earlier generation, sensibly wrote, “I cannot pretend to be competent to judge any but English fiction”. Literary critics, if they are necessary at all, when content is important and not merely made up, should confine themselves to style. Here we learn society cannot be studied by the scientific method because it is a mixture of fact, values, cultures and random processes, all of which can be studied scientifically, so why cannot the assembly of them? Gray simply does not understand science. The I-Speak-Your-Weight machine thinks he is a Cray computer. But the simple weighing machine has a value as a weighing machine—not as a computer. Sadly, Gray does not get it. Yet, to judge from this book, he is good on modern politics, but fails consistently as the renaissance man he thinks he is. Clever men today stick to their knitting.

Iraq and Faith Based Intelligence

Abram Shulsky, the Straussist put in charge of intelligence gathering at the Office of Special Plans (OSP) is a great believer in making it up as he goes along, otherwise known as “faith based intelligence”. Since 2006, he has been in the “Iranian Directorate”. Uh oh! It is a scary prospect, especially as Cheney’s daughter receives the reports from the State Deopartment’s Iran Desk. The fear is that these insane people are planning to nuke Iran. Cheney too was a firm believer in “faith based intelligence” in pushing for the war in Iraq, and fortunately it tied in precisely with Halliburton based intelligence.

The neocon analyst Michael Ledeen wrote that “creative destruction is our middle name”, reflecting the dictum of Bakunin, the Russian anarchist who had written, “The passion for destruction is a creative passion”. You have to admit, particularly if a conservative, that this is a dangerous principle to hold, if it is not another symptom of insanity. And it simply invites retaliation from those the neocons are out to destroy, creatively or otherwise. Liberal principles are peaceful coexistence of states with different governments, and non-interference. Moreover, neocons have brought back torture and terror. Their dim-witted supporters—dim-witted in the neocons own view—assume that anyone being tortured is guilty, though there is no evidence that the authorities are willing to put before a court of law that they are.

A reason for torture is to get evidence, but everyone knows that such evidence is the most unreliable evidence. Someone being tortured will confess to what they have not done and will name innocent people to get the torture stopped. It is what happened during the European inquisition and witch hunts, and myriads of innocent people cruelly died because of it. Anyone who had read Christian history would know it, and not want it repeating, but Christians do not know it, and so they repeat it, convinced that God wants it done. The victims deserve it, they say, as ever assuming guilt, and vomiting on our democratic principles. Monsters like Bush, Blair, Rumsfield, Cheney, Wolfowitz and so on should be subject to the punishments they have imposed on others. They should be themselves torured, but they know that no one with any humanity will do it. So, they should be locked up for life in their own prison, and with no privileges. Can a future president of the US undertake to do this? The evidence is uncontrovertible and is known world-wide, so they can be granted a fair trial. They know full well that they will never have to face God, because despite their crocodile piety, they couldn’t care a fig for God. So it is up to some just leader, in the near future, let us hope.

Beginning a discussion of the Bush armed mission to civilize Iraq, Gray gives a most apt quotation from Robespierre, a man hardly admired by conservatives, but who wrote…

…no one loves armed missionaries. The first lesson of nature and providence is to repulse them as enemies. One can encourage freedom, never create it by an invading force.

No political thinkers should imagine they can export their own laws and constitution. Marxists had a similar dictum, that you cannot export revolution, and Che Guevara learnt it as a fatal lesson. Bush and Blair knew nothing of history, only their disastrous religious fantasies. Sensible rulers will take sound advice in matters that they have no knowledge of, but not religious fanatics with a mental phone-line to God. A basic flaw in the US system is that each president appoints his own administrative and executive staff. Idiots can surround themselves with idiots, or fascists with fascists, leaving a take over all too easy should anyone be ruthless enough to want it. The time has come. The British system was that all governments had the same set of civil service mandarins, well educated and trained into the system, able to offer tried and tested advice to government ministers however green or undemocratic they were. Blair subverted it with the most astonishing ease, the top mandarins rolling over like cowardly puppies. So Blair got the American system instituted in the UK. It is difficult to see any future government restoring the system.

Robespierre’s dictum reflects history and psychology. People like to do things for themselves, and not to be dictated to or have things imposed by bullies. Just as a child trying to build a house of cards resents the adult who does it for him, thinking the child wants to see the finished house, so too people like to build their own freedoms. The child sulkily knocks over the house of cards his uncle built for him, and equally people will resent and destroy what is forced on to them. The child did not want a house of cards, it wanted to build one. People building a nation are the same. The US maintained Saddam in power for decades because it suited them. They could have gotten rid of him much more effectively than by invading, causing the deaths of myriads of innocent people many of whom would have been glad to see the back of him. But the bully is never interested in justice. They want their own way, just or not. When Christians have been in positions of power they have been the same, and, as Gray notes, “terror has always been a part of the modern west”.

Now Gray claims an ingredient of the US invasion of Iraq was “liberal imperialism”, and oxymoron if there ever was one. He means the declaration that the war was over human rights. He admits it is not a realistic objective, but nor has it anything to do with liberalism, and is only another attempt by Gray to besmirch it. The real question is to what extent Straussists and neocons espouse any principle they claim. They are atheists but profess Christianity to control and manipulate. They espouse liberal and humane objectives when their aims are anything but these. They openly espouse a policy of deception. To pretend they are sending troops to fight for human rights gets popular support when to admit they were really sent to get oilfields for Halliburton would not. Surely Gray can see this, or is he adding his own tenpennyworth to the obfuscation?—that it is not the fault of fascists but the fault of liberals the neocons claimed the war was over human rights. Liberalism does not favour tyranny, and its values cannot be excluded from any section of humanity. Only a fascist can justify the imposition of supposed liberal values by force. For the fascist, there is no contradiction here. They lie on principle, and use force on principle, liberals do neither. Liberals know that no one forced to do something is free. Societies accept laws suitable for themselves, at their own phase of maturity. Only fascists impose laws, and then pretend they are democrats really.

The very basis of liberality is people’s soverieign rights, and that is why it is absurd to force people to be free. It can only be anti-liberal propaganda to maintain it is a liberal duty to do it. People must liberate themselves, and it usually means they have to free themselves from some tyranny. Europe had to free itself from the tyranny of the church, and the US is now trying to force a Christian tyranny on to others again. Certainly, free countries can help to free people, but invasion and mass murder by carpet bombing, or even by precision bombing, is not included, and the US has consistently helped tyrannies since it became a neo-imperialist power after the world war.

Leo Strauss rejected the Enlightenment, and it takes some swallowing that his neocon disciples committed to a doctrine of lying have suddenly adopted it, for the Enlightenment is the basis of modern democratic government. The policies of their puppet president belie it, as do those of his puppet, Blair. The Senate has abrogated its own responsibilities, allowing even the basic right of habeas corpus to be decided by a president who wants to perpetuate a war on terror as a matter of Republican Party policy. No evidence or even any crime is needed to lock someone up indefinitely. He has also been given the right to decide what constitutes torture, allowing him to order the torture of captives while pretending that it is not torture. The Patriot Act leaves everyone open to any accusation of terrorism. Anyone can now be locked up and tortured with no access to any legal procedures. An official witch hunt is on the cards. The US has plunged into the inquisition, and only a few have the courage to speak out about it for fear of militaristic and Christian pickets blockading them wherever they go. The US government is no longer subject to the rule of law. The president and his neocon cronies have absolute power, and it is just a question of when it will be used. Another manufactured crisis is all that is needed for Bush to suspend the constitution and rule by diktat, all in the interest of democracy and homeland security, you understand. Hail to emperor Bush, the Nero of the new imperium.

Only an I-Speak-Your-Weight professor can put any of this at the door of liberals. Liberals are among the few who are speaking out against all this state terrorism. It is entirely Straussist to blame victims for the crimes they suffer, and then accuse those who protest of supporting terror. Yet it is precisely what Christians perfected with the inquisition. Until Bush and Blair took power with their insane fancies, most of us must have thought all that was behind us. It shows how thin our veneer of civilization is, and it seems entirely appropriate that it is Christianity that is pulling it off in wide strips.

Gray supports the British attitude to terrorism in northern Ireland, though errors were made. It was to consistently treat terrorists as criminals not as they wanted to be seen, as an army opposing injustice, seeking to bring them to justice as often as possible, and having a great deal of patience and persistence doing it. Speaking of war gives the terrorist just what he wants. He wants to think he is fighting injustice, and his enemy admits it is a war! Military tactics simply enoble terrorists as freedom fighters, and an invasion justifies them from the outset. Only brave men can stand up to a bully, and they automatically have public sympathy and justice on their side as underdogs. But freedom fighters that fail to achieve their aim inevitably transmute into criminal gangs, and though all the media attention was on the IRA, the opposing Protestant gangs were criminals all along. The corollary of this approach is to encourage terrorists to use legitimate political expression, conceding to them a “political wing” as open representatives of the movement with whom some dialogue could always be had. Electoral failure isolates the “army”—the active terrorists—and demonstrates their lack of popular legitimacy, while any degree of success shows them that political aims can be achieved without violence.

Evil is not just a word meaning bad, it has the religious implication—that the act is part of the cosmic war against God. US leaders for decades have seen international affairs as part of this cosmic war. The US is God’s own country and Americans the chosen people. The rest are the evil empire whose people are “gooks” or otherwise üntermenschen with a supernaturally induced hatred of the master race and their Holy Land, the USA. Now the “evil empire” has become the “war on terror”—prophesied by Terry Gilliam in his filmed dystopia Brazil a quarter century ago—but the cosmic religious overtones are retained as part of the myth devised for consumption by Christian woodentops.

For much of the twentieth century, far from hating American culture and lifestyle, most people in the world aspired to it, and millions sought to get to the US or the west generally to join the American dream. Millions are still coming, so their is something plainly wrong with the assessments made by US politicians and media. Increasingly, though, the truth in it grows, for US foreign policy has been based on the ridiculous fundamentalist Christian conception of cosmic warfare for far too long, and has succeeded in offending everyone intelligent everywhere. Now there is indeed a deep resentment that such a gifted nation chooses to be obnoxious to everyone else in the world, except their most obsequious allies. If the yanks had adopted a foreign policy that could conceivable have been advocated by Christ rather than Pontius Pilate, the whole world would have been pro-American. The evil empire, so-called, would have been converting to the American way by example, not having to fight off US stormtroopers invading their own country allegedly “to export democracy”. What Americans are too self-righteous to notice is that they are the anti-Christ, they are the ones who do Satan’s work in the name of Christ. Now the Bush neocon administration is posturing against Iran. Bush seems determined to bring about the apocalypse convinced of his heavenly seat to view the spectacle, but, if he succeeds as he might, it will not be God’s apocalypse but the Devil’s, history will not end, and Americans just as much as anyone else will suffer, and be scarred and deformed by radiation. Christianity will have succeeded in roasting more flesh than it has ever done in its whole gory history.

Christianity and Chaos

Against this background, Gray amazingly sees his particular imaginary demon, secular utopianism, finally defeated with the emergence of old time religion, can you believe? Presumably, now our utopianism will no longer be the ersatz secular type but the genuine religious article. It does not bode well:

What presents itself as the secularization of theological concepts will have to be understood, in the last analysis, as an adaptation of traditional theology…

Leo Strauss

Gray cites this in his last chapter showing that Strauss’s idea was the basis of this book with its phony identification of secular dreams with religious delusions. And he persists, having finished the useful core of the book, in justifying his false thesis to the end. Now he turns to Hobbes as proof that liberalism leads to anarchy. As a political observer, one assumes he means “anarchy”, an extreme form of liberalism in that people govern themselves, so there is no government, but he seems to intend “chaos”, a total breakdown of society. Anarchy is not realistic because it is unlikely to be stable, if it is possible at all. Some co-operative or social amalgam in the putative anarchic state will inevitably gain an advantage, force itself on to weaker ones, eventually dominating, and anarchy is over. The minimally governed liberal society cannot be anarchy. The state cannot be abolished, because law and a state to administer it will be necessary in the foreseeable future, but the law must be one that permits freedom of its individual citizens, while preventing its abuse whether by a lawless minority of criminals, or by an elite outside the law. In the UK and doubtless the US too, we might have lived through the the optimally liberal society in the post war years when capitalism was fettered by the fear of a spreading world communist revolution. The defeat of communism lifted that fear and immediately capitalism headed towards fascism under the guidance of the crypto-Trotskyite neocons. The victory of old fashioned religion looks to have just ended liberal society under Bush and Blair. The ancien regime is feeling its way back.

Now we can look forward not to anarchy but to unmitigated chaos in a new dark age. Gray points out himself that when religion dominates, so do religious wars. In the European Thirty Years’ War, as many as a third of people in some places died. We are seeing the same now in Iraq, with Shias bombing Sunnis, and Americans and Sunnis bombing Shias. Curious that Saddam, the fomenter of Islamic terror, according to Bush and the neocons, was a Sunni, and that the people Saddam, under US protection, had previously oppressed were the Shias. The reason is that the Shias are of the same Islamic sect as the Iranians, and it is the Iranians that the American ruling elite cannot stand. Maybe it is because the evidence that the Iranians founded Judaism is still to be found in Iran.

Gray is correct that in well governed societies, the power of religion is curbed. It is the reason why the founders of the US constitution were so keen to keep religion out of it, and set up a secular state. It was meant to save America from repeating what had happened in Europe. Christians refused to learn the lesson, and always tried to undermine the Constitution in this respect. Now they have seized power, and will succeed in overturning the constitution unless some future president, under popular pressure, curtails the political power of the Christian right wing. As Gray says, no law has any strength in itself, for any determined administration can find a pretext for repealing it. A system of laws has to be accepted by all to work. It is a voluntary standard, and that is why tinkering with them should be resisted by democrats, for the tinkerers do it to find ways of using the law against the people it should protect. That is what Bush and Blair have done. Chaos can only be prevented if people seek to restore what doctrinaire Christians have deliberately spoiled. Unless they do, fascism will emerge openly, and before long religion will become a reason for internecine strife again. It is better to think life has no purpose than to murder each other over what different religions think it is.

Gray reiterates that the belief human beings have that they can transcend their natural condition is Christian. It is nonsense however many times it is repeated. Christianity itself has the idea because human beings felt it could be done. People yearn for self-improvement quite naturally and quite independently of religion. When we imagine things can be better than they are, we do not think it because Christianity has influenced us. People thought it long before Christianity was invented, and Christianity has always served to hold back progress. Christianity teaches that the order of creation is ordained by God, and to try to change it is contrary to God’s will. So, employers like to encourage Christianity among their employees because they are less likely to strike for better pay and conditions. They accept their lot in life. Progressives do not. They fight for improvement. Progress preceded Christianity, and all religion, and the Christian hypothesis of a fall and a restoration of paradise is a Christian attempt to explain the human yearning for progress. Nor is there anything impossible about the dream of progress, even if the Christian explanation is fantastic. Humans transcended their natural condition long ago. When some ape invented tools, the process began, the human controlled fire, built dwellings, invented agriculture, developed villages, towns, cities, until we got where we are now—far removed from any “natural condition”. The comfortable life of most of us in the west must seem like paradise to most earlier human beings, unnatural as it is. We have transcended the natural condition and already live in paradise. Indeed, our aim now is to preserve what we have while trying to restore as much of the pristine earth as possible. It will mean we have to stop breeding like rabbits, exploiting the earth like vandals, and blowing each other to smithereens.

Gray gets more absurd. Atheism and humanism are both Christian, dontcha know, even though everyone was necessarily atheistic before gods were invented to enslave us, and we are all human irrespective of whatever fancies we adopt as our religion. Society is independent of Christianity, but Christianity is not independent of society. Humanism is using your head instead of thinking we must not use it for fear of offending God. It is liberalism. Humans among all animals are rationally conscious and so aware of our own motives. According to Gray, this is a Christian world view, even though Christians are forbidden to use their heads in case it leads them into infidelity. Free will, dontcha know is Christian, even though the Christians got it from the Jews and the Greek philosophers, and they got it from the Persian dualistic religion of Zoroaster, where the individual’s role in the cosmic conflict was entirely and nothing more than what side they personally chose to live by.

Gray tells us we should not assume we have attributes that other creatures do not, apparently merely a religious view, yet what animals other than humans can write, paint pictures, or talk incessantly on mobile phones? Perhaps it shows too clearly for him that we have stepped outside of our natural condition, and it is progress and dreaming that brought us here. Truth is closer to religion than science, dontcha know, and is inconsistent with Darwinism. Yet rational minds can distinguish truth from falsehood given the chance to enquire about it, and that counts out religion. As science is designed for testing for falseness, and evolution necessitates the adaptation of organisms to their environment, meaning the reality of the world they inhabit, the rest of his point is as usual empty and incomprehensible. If reality is what is true, then Darwinism is the natural and automatic means whereby organisms fit themselves to it. Darwinism is the scientific method in Nature.

The US is a model secular regime, says Gray, but religion is too closely entwined with politics in the US for this to be true, and it is secularists who are to blame, dontcha know. They are the ones ignorant of history and responsible for making religion emerge in grotesque forms—presumably US Christian fundamentalism—by suppressing it constitutionally. Gray knows that the US is unique among advanced democracies in being imbued with a cloying religiosity, yet it is his typically secular state. Where has religion emerged in grotesque form elsewhere among secular democracies? Gray is the one who ignores history in refusing to see that the US was a model secular state, but is not now, and it is the machinations of the Christian right that have changed things, not any secularists. The secularists have not been willing to defend the constitution they treasure, but, if it was out of cowardice in the face of Christian aggression, it is time they stood together and upheld what has stood them in good stead for 200 years. Though Gray claims to be a realist, he too often seems unable to distinguish reality from intent.

Despite 200 pages denigrating the Enlightenment and all it stands for, humanism, science and liberalism, by painting them in the dingy colours of Christianity, Gray incoherently produces with a sentence of faint praise:

Liberal societies are worth defending, for the embody a kind of civilized life in which rival beliefs can coexist in peace.

It is generous of him, but what then was the purpose of the 200 pages of denigration—an indulgent, selfish venting of the spleen? If liberal societies are worth defending then any honourable man would defend them, and the principle of them, when they are under attack!

The Fundamentalist Realist

Gray ends with a plea for realism, and liberals will go along with it except that Gray is himself a fundamentalist—a realist fundamentalist—a utopian one! The utopian realist cannot allow ideals to pollute the pristine purity of their philosophy—a fundamental realism excludes all ideals and dreaming is verboten. He is right that dreams of perfection are not realistic, and so not realizable, but why is the dream to blame? What is wrong is not the dream of a better society, but that it is realizable absolutely or quickly in practice. Dreams are to be worked towards, and they change in the effort involved. That is the realism coming in. Even revolution cannot be universally condemned. How can Americans condemn revolution when they began with one, yet US foreign policy has constantly opposed democratic revolutions around the world? The reason is plain. They do not like other people’s democracy because they do not elect the right candidates! It means they are not democrats at all. In Iraq, they forced elections, then did not like who was elected. Vietnam was the same. They did not want communists elected, so they killed two million Vietnamese to stop it. They do not seem to realize that revolutions are needed to clear the obstacles to the reform that follows when societies are allowed to evolve. Revolution is followed by evolution, and the two cannot be separated. The evolution brings the progress, not natural if unrealizable fancies of Great Leaps Forward, or insane supernatural interventions by that supreme being who never shows any signs of doing anything useful, especially when it is needed.

Realism can never be pure because human beings dream everything they do, but, as Gray points out, such dreaming is practical and often known from experience to be realistic. It is utterly unrealistic to think that God will do what you, as an individual, dream. It is so unreal that it is insane, but the US colonists were realistic in dreaming of independence, though it meant a struggle, and now Americans will have to struggle again to wrest it from the grip of the Christian fundies!

Realism, Gray adds, recognizes that problems might not be soluble at all, at least in the sense of smoothing out every bump, but that is just what is true of dreams, so the dreamer who appreciates it is just as realistic. It shows the importance of compromise, of consensus, the liberal and humanistic outlook. Those for whom God is a personal chum, delude themselves that their God-given ideas are absolutely right and they will accept no compromise. God can square the circle—eveything is possible for God. Always we return to insanity, when we meet Christianity. If it is not insanity, it is the next padded cell to it. Faith is too unrealistic to be trusted in any practical endeavour. It is entirely for individual motivation, not for practical solutions, and Christians should confine their faith to themselves and their God. Heads of state who begin acting on the basis of God-given instructions, however received, must be put in the padded cell before we all suffer the consequences.

There is a good deal of regularity in the behaviour of states that can be identified by a study of history, but these regularities cannot be formulated as universal laws.

It is bold to claim any law as universal, so is not something that any realist should do, no doubt the reason he adds the impossible adjective “universal” at all, but as soon as some phenomenon is regular, it can be expressed as a law. The main job of the scientist is to formulate laws that work when tested against reality. Gray hates science, though he claims it is scientism he hates, like most of its critics, because science is too obviously successful, and it is successful because it is based entirely on reality.

He says the world does not become more uniform as it becomes more modern, surely more manifest nonsense. States obviously have different ends, but globalization, driven by capitalism, technology and science is making the world more uniform in most practical ways—real ways, one might say—and the states, or economic units and trade cartels are encompassing more and more different people making them live more and more similar lives.

A few pages from the end, just as he did with liberalism, he concedes that humanity has universal values, but claims they are “discordant”. It is a puzzle to see how discordant values are universal. Perhaps the discordance is not in the values but that everyone has not come to see them yet. Well, until everyone holds them they are not universal, so their universality remains a dream and a utopian one, but one worth having! The task is to persuade others of these universal values—not to shove them down their throats—and immediately we see they cannot be universal, because the aims of the powerful and rich are not those of the weak and poor. The acceptance of universal values means the acceptance of sub-optimum conditions for many, particularly the most powerful people. The rich and powerful in the west will have to concede fair trade agreements that will help poor Third World countries improve themselves, and will have to accept curbs on their usage of energy to stop the world from overheating. What sign is there that Bush and Cheney even understand this?

Gray is fond of restricting apparent generalities that would be untrue to make them true. A regularity did not imply a universal law even though it imples a law. Here, towards the end, “no change in human institutions can resolve the contradictions of human needs”. Indeed, nothing can resolve inherent contradictions, but his implication is that any attempt to resolve them is a waste of time. It is not so! The attempt can ameliorate the differences, and then, with good will on all sides, though the contradictions might not be resolved, a compromise can be reached. The idea of a fixed solution is certainly utopian and religious, and it has been a mark of US foreign policy that compromise is out, because the Americans are always right. It can only be symptomatic of their God delusion. No liberal will take such a view, or at least will not unless one party is constantly moving the goal posts in an unfair attempt to gain the advantage. Liberals oppose crookery and unfairness. For Christians, and Christian driven people, it is a badge of honour to be immovable, and if a move is needed, to keep trying to revert to the old position.

Gray’s ignorance of science has him advocating nuclear power and GM crops as not offering any “further destruction of the biosphere”. The point about GM crops, scientifically speaking, is that adding genes to organisms artificially then releasing them into Nature is to do an utterly uncontrolled and uncontrollable experiment on the world. Once the alien gene is in the genetic mix in the wild, no one knows what can happen. Scientists are not against GM per se, it is a great scientific achievement, but sensible ones are against universal experiments with unforeseeable consequences. Simply moving an animal or plant species from one environment to another has been disastrous in several instances, but the scope in GM is far greater. Big corporations see vast profits in GM crops, and do not want to be held back, but the most rigorous and extensive checking of possible consequences of cross hybridization carefully peer reviewed should be done before anything is released into the wild. It would take a long time and be hugely expensive and that is what the corprations want to avoid.

As for nuclear energy not destroying the biosphere, nothing could be more stupid. Nuclear wastes accumulate in proportion to the energy produced. These wastes are radioactive, and much of it will remain radioactive for thousands of years. These wastes can only be safe as long as society is willing and able to keep them safe, and it is certain that they will be still dangerous centuries after they have been forgotten. Once released into the biosphere, the consequences can only be guessed, but cannot be good for the people alive at the time. Maybe Gray has some knowledge the rest of us have not on how these wastes can safely be disposed of. What bunker can remain intact for maybe ten thousand years? If human beings survive that long, civilizations will have grown and collapsed several times, who is to know what the bunkers contain. If there were war in this time, they could easily be broken open and the world polluted. Perhaps Gray doesn’t care because he will be long forgotten. Bugger the future world, eh?

In his final section, he returns to slagging off secularism. History is a meandering flux with no purpose or direction, so there is no point in trying to interfere with it, dontcha know. The messianic force in secular apocalypse is humanity battling ignorance and superstition, so we should just yield to them. Millennial movements are purely random, so religion, Christianity, is absolved from responsibility for them. We should avoid the need for narrative, that is trying to see any sense in history, and instead value mystics, poets and hedonists. Whatever the merits of sticking to poetry and hedonism, Gray has to be perverse in recommending mystics as any sort of guide. Mystics are the maniacs who have visions of the End, the very fantasy that Gray puts at the root of what he hates, enlightened dreams. Yet despite his flailing at everything to do with the Enlightenment, he again contradicts his thesis by unexpectedly defending science! It is not merely an arbitrary belief system he tells us, but offers reliable belief in the world, whereas religion is arbitrary and untestable. Science is a method of securing agreement by offering evidence, testing it and making predictions. Religion has nothing to do with any of this except as a lure for unsuspecting victims. Even so, religion is a necessity of being human, Gray decides, as necessary as food and sex. Having spouted on about not building false narratives, he defends religion as being necessary so that people can find meaning in the randomness of life. He uses the apologist’s trick of beginning a prescription with a condition which is immediately ignored or assumed to be met:

If religion is a primary human need, it should not be suppressed or relegated to a netherworld of private life.

If it were a primary need, we might be obliged to agree with him, but it is not something he has shown to be so, despite his assertions of it being like food and sex. Plenty of people can get through life very well without religion, but Gray thinks it should be integrated into the “public realm”. He means it should be forced on to us all, like it or not, because, for him, it is a primary need. Now we see that his absurd and utterly monstrous attacks on the Enlightenment are childish attempts to put the blame of religious wickedness on to secularism. He is nothing but a crude apologist for Christianity, in fact.

In the USA, it is certain that many people pay lip-service to Christianity because of the oppressive Christian religiosity of the country. In most of Europe and many of the advanced Asian countries, religion is unimportant to the majority. Only apologists or I-Speak-Your-Voice professors could argue that religion is a primary need of humanity, yet be a supplier of lying narratives that uncritical people are led to believe are true, and these are the narratives responsible for what this incoherent man has railed at for 200 pages. He prescribes religion rather than secularism, though religion is at the root of what he sees as dangerous secular constructions. If secular constructions are dangerous, they are not a fraction as dangerous as the narratives or, let us by-pass the Straussism and be frank—lies—at the heart of religion. To avoid a dangerous secularism, Gray’s answer is for governments to enforce religion!

Gray is incoherent every time he tries to philosophize, or even simply discourse on anything outside of his central field, which on the evidence of this book is contemporary political analysis. For its treatment of the neoconservative take over of the UK and the US by Blair and Bush, this book, The Black Mass, is worth reading, but on everything else, he is simply embarrassing.

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