The disorders of faith and the death of utopia

John Gray
BLACK MASS
Apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia
256pp. Allen Lane. £18.99.
978 0 7139 9915 0

The London School of Economics is a much wilder and more interesting menagerie than most people imagine. Its reputation for bien pensant thinking and Blue Book reformism goes back to its Fabian, utilitarian and Liberal-Imperial origins, and it is just a few famous names that have fostered the popular idea of the LSE as a hive of “public intellectuals” of various stripes. Perhaps it was the pronouncements of Harold Laski, who, for example, praised the unique level of “perfection” found in the Soviet Union, that fed one side of its reputation. Perhaps William Beveridge and Richard Titmuss, as major promoters of social welfare, were most responsible for another side. Then there was R. H. Tawney, much revered as an economic historian, and someone writing in a Christian Socialist tradition.

In fact the LSE was home to a liberal-conservative form of economics represented by Lionel Robbins, with more radical economists like Joan Robinson being at Cambridge, while the School’s more intimate world contained persons who viewed politics as “a ship of fools” needing guileful guardians out of the public eye, more concerned to prevent it hitting the rocks than steering it to a better shore. Among such people the Social Administration Department was sometimes referred to as “the Department of Applied Righteousness”, while in the quieter recesses of the Government Department you could find people with a keen admiration for King Charles the Martyr, or expertise in latitudinarian Anglican divines of the early eighteenth century. One distinguished political scientist wrote a tract against the times which finished by asking the classic revolutionary question, “What is to be done?” only to answer, “Nothing”. So far as he was concerned the chief ill of our time was what another colleague called “crackpot activism”. Then there was Friedrich von Hayek, who believed the social world too complex for any putative social science, and Karl Popper, and various refugees from totalitarian horror, like the philosopher of science, Imre Lakatos. It was Lakatos who told me a machine-gun stationed in Connaught House would be the best way of dealing with the crowds of secular millennialists who besieged the School in 1968. This was a time when a Marxist colleague informed me, “We shall deal with these Bakuninites in due course”. John Gray knows a secular millennialist when he sees one, and is not afraid to say so. That is what Black Mass is all about.

The great advantage of John Gray is that his particular style of ferocious dissidence makes him a “public intellectual” by way of contrast to those rather private congregations of sceptics and cynics. This is partly because his defence of the doctrine of incorrigible sinfulness comes from no single point on the political spectrum. Indeed, I doubt whether Gray believes in the notion of a political spectrum at all. If at times it seems he is on the libertarian Right, his assault on President Bush and neo-conservatives as crass utopians seems to come from somewhere very different. What would someone like Norman Podhoretz make of the charge of utopianism? Probably John Gray’s macho North-Eastern style gives him a certain credibility with the media. Even his dismissal of Richard Dawkins as a self-contradictory evangelist, parasitic on Christianity, earns him no minus points, because, so far as I can make out, Gray is a fellow atheist. Christians would not get away with saying this kind of thing in the mass media, however accurate it may be. Will Self (son of another LSE academic), not best known for devotion to Augustinian atheism, describes him as “the most important living philosopher”.

Perhaps Self thinks the message of Black Mass is entirely novel rather than merely news to him. In fact it is part of a persistent theme in sociology and political science concerned with secular religion, or religious secularism, and is heir to a tradition of social thought responding to the violent excesses of the Enlightenment (and of modern secular nationalism) going back at least to Joseph de Maistre, who provides the epigraph of Gray’s book: “THE SENATOR: This is an abyss into which it is better not to look. THE COUNT: My friend, we are not free not to look”.

Gray acknowledges a clear debt to Norman Cohn’s pathbreaking The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), but obvious precursors like S. N. Eisenstadt, in his Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution (1999), subtitled The Jacobin dimension of modernity, and J. F. Talmon in his classic Political Messianism: The Romantic phase (1964), are at best buried in the endnotes. In important ways Gray is Reinhold Niebuhr, and perhaps Nikolai Berdyaev, brought up to date. Likewise Robert Nisbet: almost at random one opens The Social Philosophers (1974) and reads, “In the Jacobin effort to exterminate all hypocrisy, we have . . . one more instance of the profoundly religious element that lies in all genuinely revolutionary behaviour”. It was a Jew of Iraqi extraction, Elie Kedourie, who identified revolutionary nationalism as another outbreak of the secular millennial tradition, and another Jewish scholar, Anthony Smith, who recognized a secular doctrine of chosenness when he saw it. There is, however, one difference between the religious and the secular millennial traditions: that a belief in the renovation of the world in a time of troubles through the good providence of God, is – apart from one or two spectacular outbreaks – more often associated with pacifism when compared with the secularized version, which brings divine judgement into history through the exemplary violence of revolutionary heroes. Gray agrees with mainstream post-Augustinian Christianity at least in this, that pie of this kind is best left in the sky.

Gray believes passionately in two equal and opposite truths. His article in The Times of June 30 begins:

      "At a time when Islamist terrorism seems to have returned to the centre of London, it is easy to forget that during the 20th century terror was used on a vast scale by secular regimes. Today suicide attacks are automatically linked with a belief in martyrdom followed by paradise in the afterlife. Yet suicide bombing of the kind we now confront is a terrorist technique that was developed by people with no such beliefs . . . . The roots of contemporary terrorism are in radical Western ideology – especially Leninism – far more than in religion."

Yet in Black Mass he begins: “Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the past two centuries were episodes in the history of faith – moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion”. I happen to think the first truth has greater analytic power than the second, and the notion of the long dissolution of Christianity ignores what recent research has to show about the resilience of Christianity through most of the nineteenth century. But the power of Gray’s analysis does not depend on whether he has read deeply in the sociology of religion, or on the extent to which he gives a one-sided account of New Testament scholarship, as if much modern criticism had not challenged Albert Schweitzer’s eschatological emphasis in The Quest of the Historical Jesus a century ago. Rather, his analysis depends on revising the boundaries of categories like religion and politics: it is boundary changes that generate whole new vistas of argument. Once you revise your categories in a sufficiently radical way, the conferences of our contemporary Conservative and Labour parties in secular Britain, each of them singing Blake’s “Jerusalem” from a different hymn book, look like assemblies of votaries devoted to what Tennyson called the “one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves”. The French may think master-narratives are out, along with belief and morality, but in fact the language of politics, even in secularist France, is saturated in a teleological moralism. Political language is, as Georges Sorel eloquently showed, profoundly mythic.

Gray pours particular scorn on the idea that we have arrived at some “sunlit upland” where liberal democracy is in principle victorious: Francis Fukuyama eat your heart out. All the supposed signs of a secure and liberal future, such as the European Union and the United Nations, are founded on a contingent historical flux which can change direction at any time, and could just as easily usher in the hegemony of Chinese or Russian totalitarian capitalism. For Gray, the boasted achievements of the United States are equally precarious, as witness the reversal of its most solemn constitutional guarantees at the onset of a terrorist threat far less dangerous to its way of life than the actions taken to combat it. Our democratic order is not founded on some secular version of Christian Providence but a vulnerable local achievement, only exportable by violence on the mistaken assumption that, once you strike away the chains of history, tradition and culture, a New Man will emerge in the image and likeness of Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine.

Gray’s work, above all in Straw Dogs, Heresies and Black Mass, deploys his revised categories to upset contemporary consensual thinking, giving previous revisions of the same kind a provocative twist. In recent rhetorical practice the expansion of what we mean by religion to include all fanaticism (for example, secular utopianism) is a tactic normally deployed in order to discredit religion and assert the speaker’s own innocence – say, as a tolerant, objective, scientific fellow who has put away childish things. What Gray does in Black Mass and several earlier works is to reverse the thrust of this tactic. Instead of simply transferring the category of religion to cover the horrors of the twentieth century to avoid their being blamed on secular thinking, Gray holds to account the Enlightenment and its dependent ideologies, from Liberal Imperialism to Communism, as being simply what T. E. Hulme would have called “spilt religion”, malformed theology in an eschatological mode without the restraints still kept in place by mainstream Christianity. The Enlightenment fused the two cities of Augustine and the two kingdoms of Luther to create, not the heavenly city, but hell on earth. At least (so Gray seems to say) the Christian story is clearly a form of solid poetry, whereas its secular translation fails to recognize its own mythic character, including the utopias envisaged by contemporary scientism.

As for humankind, we are none of us innocent, no, not one, because we are all straw dogs, homo rapiens. That we think better of ourselves than we ought to do is yet another secularized Christian delusion about the image of God stamped on our foreheads, as opposed to the mark of Cain. What poor, hopeful Christianity got right was our inveterate enmity one against another, without exceptions for scientists, liberals, the high-minded and other preachers of secular salvation. This is Pascal’s misère de l’homme without a delusory grandeur de l’homme, or Hamlet’s soliloquy on man with a heavy emphasis on “this quintessence of dust”.

There is clearly a paradox here, which Gray shares with a forebear in this vein, Jonathan Swift. Gray points out that Swift put utopia out of reach by confining it to the noble world of horses. But disgust is parasitic on the idea that man (as Henry Vaughan put it in his poem, “Corruption”) still “shin’d a little”, and has simply betrayed whatever light has “lightened him” from his first entry into the world. It is not just that Enlightenment is parasitic on the Christian metaphor of light, but that disgust is parasitic on the idea of a chronic disjunction: “the evil that I would not that I do”, as St Paul put it. Lions do not throw up, shaken to the core, at not being adequately leonine. Elephants do not roll in the mud to vent their desolation at being so grossly elephantine. Whatever else does or does not separate us from animality, the potential to imagine and body forth transfiguration and to acknowledge disfiguration, is what makes us human. Our sense of indignity is the essence of our dignity. Non sum dignus. Even our contemporary filleted liturgies admit as much.

Moreover, there are two ways of approaching utopia. One of them invokes “the high that proved too high / The heroic for earth too hard”, and the other holds that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?”. Browning got it right both times. In practice, this tension between the imaginings donated to us by the idea of the peaceable kingdom and a stark realism about what can be done where we are here and now, cannot be securely maintained. In our own biographies as well as in politics we slide between them, though Gray is surely right in his realistic understanding of the nature of political action, national and international. He even goes so far as to argue that the realist approach to relations between nations (which he thinks will remain the essential actors on the global scene for the foreseeable future) is the only morally serious approach to policy. So I guess he’s a difficult man to surprise, for example by the squalor of today’s post-Mandela South African government. Yet the ferocity of his indignation suggests that, occasionally, what is so obvious simply takes his breath away. He is clearly convinced, as am I, that some problems are insoluble, and some paradoxes irresolvable, and the most we can hope for is what Hobbes called “commodious living”, and a commitment to at least some civilized restraints on the use of force.

Gray shows an insouciant indifference to the canons and nuances of social science. Black Mass is not exactly the kind of tentative hypothesis, put forward with appropriate disclaimers and carefully caught reservations about alternatives, that is supposed to characterize social science. Perhaps this is because Gray believes that a moral rhetoric is as inherent in our social scientific analyses as it is in our historical narratives. Yet he is clearly putting forward a social-scientific view of the nature of the real, and of the exigencies and costs governing every political and religious option.

All our options, including our best aspirations, incur enormous cost, and developed forms of human solidarity, whether universal and inclusive, or particular and exclusive, have been built on mountains of human skulls. Given that Gray’s focus is so much on the violence attending the secular mutations of Christianity in radical politics and modern nationalism, it is a pity that his account of Christianity is rather truncated. He could have probed further the implications of the paradoxical consequences of incorporating a non-violent faith into the fabric of empires and nations. The clues to so much about the marvellous and terrible aspects of human solidarity lie concentrated here, in what happens in history and society to a narrative of fraternal love set up in a peaceable kingdom, and of life laid down in the face of violence and violation, that life may be raised up. It was Harold Laski who pointed this out: the history of religion yields the crucial clues to social and political science. Only read the pamphlets of the Civil War which Laski donated to the LSE library, and you realize all human life is there.

I have no complaint about passion and denunciation in the cause of social understanding. I am interested in a genre, and in the necessary if not sufficient conditions of being a public intellectual today. When it comes to grabbing attention, W. H. Auden was right: “Thou shalt not commit a social science”. When Gray writes about “The End of Utopia”, he uses the same genre as those others who have written about “The End of History”, or “The End of Ideology”, or even “The Death of God”. The genre is, as the philosophers say, performative as well as descriptive.

Gray uses the phrase “the disorders of faith”. He also says “the utopias of the past two centuries were deformed versions of the myths they denied” (my emphasis). That implies some kind of judgement or reference point concerning the magnum mysterium of Christianity. It is as if there are luminous breaks which light up a ravaged landscape, provided we do not think we are poised to re-enter paradise. While at some moments John Gray reminds me of the nightmarish vision you find in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (commented on by André Gide, another inheritor of Calvinist culture), at other times he reminds me of the “terrible sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which the poet contends with God over the sheer waste of his supposedly good creation, and in particular contemplates Man as a shattered potsherd, only to ask how he could even have entertained the idea of a “beacon, an eternal beam” if such did not exist. How come a “straw dog” ever imagined a burning bush, even for a moment?

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David Martin is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University. His books include Pentecostalism: The world their parish, 2001, and Does Christianity Cause War?, 1997.