Review article

The exorcist? John Gray, apocalyptic religion

and the return to realism in world politics

NICHOLAS RENGGER *

Black mass: apocalyptic religion and the death of utopia. By John Gray.
London: Allen Lane. 2007. 256pp. Index. 18.99. isbn 0 713 99915 0.

The times we live in appear to be increasingly hospitable to rather shrill partisan-

ships. This is visible in many areas of life in many countries and is spread equally
between various cultures of belief and those that are called (though often for no
good reason) secular. Such stridency is always wearying, when it is not positively
dangerous. But for many, in the last 50 years its antidote has always been supposed
to be the liberalism that had triumphed in conict with two extremely vociferous
ideologies, fascism and communism, and that led those who professed it to a
pinnacle of prosperity, peace and well-being unparalleled (it is often argued, at
least) in human history.
For such individuals, reading John Grays Black mass will be doubly dispiriting.
It will be dispiriting in the rst place because Gray pours scorn on the idea that
liberalism is a refuge from strident ideologies. Rather, he argues that liberalism
since the eighteenth century has been a vehicle for them; in the twentieth century
especially, a particularly powerful one. The point, he goes on to say, is that theories
of progress (or regress) are themselves myths and that liberals have fed such myths;
they too have believed in utopia and it is their project that lies in ruins, he suggests,
in the sands of Iraq.
But such readers will nd Grays book dispiriting for a second reason. They
might ask: was not Gray himself a leading liberal political theorist? The interpreter
and sympathetic critic of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek? The champion of
at least the liberal parts of the Thatcher revolution that swept through Britain in
the 1980s? What could have brought him to abandon the liberal claims his earlier
work had so eloquently championed?
The short answer is that Gray was always rather more complex than that picture
suggests. His earlier defence of certain forms of liberal thought and practice was
more qualied than some liked. Furthermore it is not wholly clear that Gray has
abandoned liberal thought entirely. For those of us who have been students of his
* I am grateful to a number of friends and colleagues for discussions surrounding the themes of this essay.
Michael Bentley, Chris Brown, Tony Lang, Andrew Linklater, Noel OSullivan and David Owen deserve
particular mention. As, especially, does John Gray for many stimulating conversations over the years.

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Nicholas Rengger
work for a while, the claims in his most recent book carry further a train of thought
that has been fairly clear for some time. And so in order to appreciate properly the
current argument it might be useful to revisit some of the earlier ones.
Taken as a whole, Black mass is Grays attempt to inoculate us against the evils
of political religion that he thinks will dominate the coming century and against
the consequences of the (otherwise positive) death of utopia. It is also his attempt
to exorcize the ghost of utopia once and for all. The question is: will the exorcism
be successful?
These questions shape the two parts of this review article. In the rst Grays
intellectual trajectory is traced, Black mass is situated in that context and a thumb-
nail sketch of Grays central claims in the book and their signicance for world
politics is drawn. In the second a critical assessment of both the current argument
and the more general position from which it springs is offered, reasons for being
sceptical about at least aspects of Grays diagnosis are suggested and two possible
trajectories for an argument like Grays are outlined.

From the new right to Black mass

As remarked above, Grays thought was, from the beginning, attached to liberal
ideas, but it was attached to them in ways that many contemporary liberals found
problematic. In particular, Gray has for at least 20 years been critical of the kind
of liberal thought increasingly dominant both in the academy and in the world,
the kind of liberal thought that assumed that liberalism is the ideal of a rational
consensus on the best way of life.1 This was so even when Gray was part of the
debates surrounding what was (in the 1980s and early 1990s) still called the new
right.
In the book that rst marked Grays increasing distance from that political
constellation,2 he both admitted the centrality of some of its ideas to his own
work and began to move beyond it. He makes the now familiar point (though it
was not so commonly asserted then) that the new right was, of course, a collage,
an eclectic mixture of themes and policies brought together more by contin-
gencies of circumstance than by logic or sustained reasoning.3 His claim was
that the common strand in the political thought of the new right which had the
deepest resonance, and which retains an enduring value, is that all of [the projects
of government that it criticized] ascribed to [government] an immunity from the
imperfections that we know to be characteristic of every other human institution.
This is the one lesson of permanent signicance that the political thought of the
New Right contains.4
Unfortunately, Gray argues, that lesson was combined from the rst with a
rationalist attachment, inherited from the enlightenment classical liberals to
systems and to projects of world improvement. The mark of imperfectability,
1
John Gray, Two faces of liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 1.
2
John Gray, Beyond the new right: markets, government and the common environment (London: Routledge, 1993).
3
Gray, Beyond the new right, p. ix.
4
Gray, Beyond the new right, p. xi.
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The exorcist?
rightly discerned in the institutions of government was not also recognized in
[for example] the institutions of the market.5 And it is this rationalist attach-
ment that much of Grays work in the ensuing years sought to engage, critique
and subvert. In the process, Grays criticism of the enlightenment becomes ever
sharper and his view of those liberals who remain enchanted by the rationalist
attachment ever more scornful. Enlightenments wake: politics and culture at the close
of the modern age (Routledge, 1995) argued that political life in the late modern
world should be understood in terms of an interplay between the enlighten-
ment project, powerful but forever self-undermining, and various fundamentalist
projects engaged in seeking to re-enchant the world. The manner in which it was
so intertwined was explored in many of the essays in Post liberalism: studies in polit-
ical thought (Routledge, 1993) and Endgames: questions in late modern political thought
(Polity, 1997), along with a good deal of acerbic and acute commentary on politics
itself. Gray turned his attention to the remaining chief repository (in his view) of
the rationalist attachmentthe belief in the marketin False dawn: the delusions
of global capitalism (Granta, 1998), which nishes with a stark warning that with
the end of laissez-fairean end he had spent the book foretellinga deepening
international anarchy is the human prospect.6
As well as continuing his critique of liberal rationalism, however, False dawn
marks a further development in Grays intellectual trajectory. To begin with, it
is the rst book in which Gray discusses international affairs in real depth and
so it marks his emergence as a powerful and stimulating analyst of international
relations, an area which increasingly absorbs him. At the same time it shows a
deepening hostility to aspects of the old new right consensus that, however much
he had criticized it, was still part of his own intellectual inheritance.
Grays fullest restatement of his relationship to liberal thought and practice is
contained in Two faces of liberalism (Polity, 2000). In this volume he returns to the
argument about there being different sidesor facesto liberal thought but this
time makes it the pivot of his analysis:
The Liberal State originated in a search for modus vivendi Contemporary liberal regimes
are late owerings of a project of toleration that began in Europe in the sixteenth century.
The task we inherit is refashioning liberal toleration so that it can guide the pursuit of
modus vivendi in a more plural world. Liberal toleration has contributed immeasurably to
human well being we cannot do without that early modern ideal; but it cannot be our
guide in late modern circumstances. For the ideal of toleration we have inherited embodies
two incompatible philosophies. Viewed from one side, liberal toleration is the ideal of a
rational consensus on the best way of life. From the other, it is the belief that human beings
can ourish in many ways of life In the former view, liberal institutions are seen as
applications of universal principles. In the latter they are means to peaceful co-existence.
In the rst liberalism is a prescription for a universal regime. In the second, it is a project
of co-existence that can be pursued in many regimes if liberalism has a future, it is in
giving up the search for a rational consensus on the best way of life.7
5
Gray, Beyond the new right, p. xi.
6
John Gray, False dawn: the delusions of global capitalism (London: Granta, 1998), p. 207.
7
Gray, Two faces of liberalism, pp. 12.
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Nicholas Rengger
It is clear that, for Gray, the reality of value pluralism and the impossibility of
achieving rational consensus means that liberal thought and practice must be based
around the notion of modus vivendi, both within states and between them. It is this
kind of assumption, he believes, that might help us to navigate the dangerous and
choppy seas that he suggestsat the end of False dawn, and even more so, as we
shall see, in Black massare likely to be our medium-term future. These arguments
are taken further in his most recent books, Al-Qaeda and what it means to be modern
(Faber & Faber, 2003), Heresies: against progress and other illusions (Granta, 2004) and
the book under review here, Black mass. Before describing Black mass, however, it
is important to say something about possibly Grays most controversial book, the
book which perhaps more than other sets the scene for the analysis in Black mass
and that is Straw dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals (Granta, 2002). When
it appeared reviewers were sharply divided. For some, like Jason Cowley in the
Observer:
Graywho the New Statesman has called the philosopher of pessimismis often carica-
tured as a sour misanthrope, a wilful catastrophist. He is nothing of the kind. In truth, he
is, like J. G. Ballard, about whom he writes so well in Straw dogs, a visionary. Modernity
is his urgent, dening subject, and here he attempts to articulate nothing less than what
the young Oxford philosopher Edward Skidelsky has called a total view of the world, a
Weltanschauung.8

In an online review of the book, however, Kenan Malik, while still recognizing the
provocative nature of Grays arguments, differed considerably in his assessment:
Gray has increasingly come to question the very value of the political process. Those who
struggle to change the world, he writes, are merely seeking consolation for a truth they
are too weak to bear. Their faith that the world can be transformed by human will is a
denial of their own mortality. Were all going to die anyway, seems to be the argument,
so why bother with grand schemes of social change? The freest human being, Gray
suggests, is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has
to choosea sentiment that might appear not simply anti-humanist but also disturbingly
authoritarian.9

In part the reaction to Straw dogs was to do with its style: epigrammatic,
aphoristic and often rather disjointed. Some clearly enjoyed that, others found it
grating. But there is no denying that the message was clear: a strong and uncom-
promising naturalism and anti-humanism; humans are no more in command of
their destiny than other animals and we should get used to that and abandon the
hopes that have dominated our philosophies and religions for centuries. It is in
Straw dogs that Gray rst gives vent to the powerful critique of religion that resur-
faces with a vengeance in Black mass. And it is in Straw dogs that the anti-humanist
realism that becomes still more pronounced in Black mass is heard.
So what about Black mass itself ? It unquestionably displays many of Grays
characteristic virtues. It is very well written, packs a considerable theoretical and
8
Jason Cowley, Observer, 15 September 2002.
9
See http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/pinker_gray.html.
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The exorcist?
rhetorical punch and is rooted in an erudition that is all the more effective for being
lightly worn. The overall argument can be stated briey enough:
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 faithmoments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise
of modern political religion. The world in which we nd ourselves at the start of the
new Millennium is littered with the debris of utopian projects, which though they were
framed in secular terms that denied the truth of religion were in fact vehicles for religious
myths [but] it is not only revolutionaries who have held to secular versions of religious
beliefs; so too have liberal humanists who see progress as a slow incremental struggle
(pp. 12).

Gray goes on to say:

Since the French Revolution a succession of utopian movements has transformed political
life. Entire societies have been destroyed and the world changed forever. The alteration
envisioned by utopian thinkers has not come about, and for the most part their projects have
produced results opposite to those they intended. That has not prevented similar projects
being launched again and again right up to the start of the twenty rst century, when the
worlds most powerful state launched a campaign to export democracy to the Middle East
and throughout the world when the project of a universal democracy ended in the blood
soaked streets of Iraq, this pattern began to be reversed. Utopianism suffered a heavy blow,
but politics and war have not ceased to be vehicles for myth. Instead primitive versions of
religion are replacing the secular faith that has been lost wherever it is happening the
revival of religion is mixed up with political conicts, including an intensifying struggle
over the Earths shrinking reserves of natural resources; but there can be no doubt that
religion is once again a power in its own right. With the death of utopia, apocalyptic
religion has re-emerged, naked and unadorned, as a force in world politics (p. 3).

The rest of the book tries to elaborate and expand on the argument announced
in the rst few pages. Chapter one further outlines Grays thesis concerning the
death of utopia; chapter two discusses the utopian myths surrounding enlight-
enment and terror in the twentieth century. Chapter three traces the manner in
which utopia enters the mainstream with a discussion of the utopia of the new
right and neo-liberalism (to which, as we have seen, the younger John Gray had
himself contributed). Chapter four traces the Americanization of the apocalypse,
especially the rise and character of neo-conservatism. Chapter ve offers Grays
reading of the task of the armed missionaries of the 1990s and early twenty-
rst century, given over to spreading the gospel of democracy and human rights,
culminating, of course, in Iraq.
The nal chapter, entitled Post apocalypse, then asks us to relearn the lessons
of a lost tradition of thought that Gray believes can help us to cope with this
reality: the tradition of realism. The pursuit of utopia, Gray tells us, must be
replaced by an attempt to cope with reality. We cannot return to the writings of
the realist thinkers of the past with the hope that they will resolve all our dilemmas
yet it is from realism more than from any other school that we can learn how
to think about current conicts. Realism is the only way of thinking about issues
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Nicholas Rengger
of tyranny and freedom, war and peace that can truly claim not to be based on
faith and, despite its reputation for amorality, the only one that is ethically serious.
That is no doubt why it is viewed with suspicion. But this is not an easy choice,
he thinks. Realism, he warns, requires a discipline of thought that may be too
austere for a culture that prizes psychological comfort above everything else, and
it is a reasonable question whether liberal societies are capable of the moral effort
that is involved in setting aside hopes of world transformation (pp. 1923). But we
need to do this, he thinks, if we are to have any hope of navigating the treacherous
shoals of our new century. The modern age, he says in his concluding paragraph,
has been a time of superstition no less than the medieval era, in some ways more
so wars as ferocious as those of early modern times are being fought against
a background of increased knowledge and power. Interacting with the struggle
for natural resources, the violence of faith looks set to shape the coming century
(p. 210).

Realism, pessimismand scepticism?

It hardly needs saying that Grays book, and the vision that inspires it, is not going
to appeal to everyone. Though there have been a fair number of enlightenment
bashers around in recent years, few of them are as relentlessly hostile to the enlight-
enment and all its works as Gray. Most of them, as Gray rather gleefully points
out, want to retain some version of enlightenment politics but drop enlighten-
ment metaphysics, ethics or whatever. Moreover, his critique of religion, begun
in Straw dogs and continued in Black mass, goes so far as to include gures like
Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, both of whom are dismissed as aesthetical
opponents of Christianity whose Darwinism is seen as a imsy mask for utopian
ideas merely taken over from Christianity with God removed.
And that, on reection, seems a good place to start an assessment of Grays
argument: his treatment of religion. There has been, as Gray rightly notes, a
growing urry of recent commentary on political religion.10 It is fair enough to
suggest that the political ideas of the last few centuries bore a distinct resemblance
to religious ideas with God replaced by something else; the party, the state, the
proletariat, etc. Of course, this is not an original claim and Gray is generous in
paying tribute to those, like Norman Cohn, whose work highlighted and explored
these issues long before they were picked up by others. But it is surprising that more
attention is not paid to, for example, Eric Voegelin, whose very astute reections
on the problem make up a goodly part of his The new science of politics (University
of Chicago Press, 1987). It is not that Gray ignores Voegelinhe pays tribute to
his work illuminating the subject of modern political religion (p. 68)but there
is only a very brief discussion. This is a pity because in some respects Voegelins
analysis and Grays would complement each other rather well, not least in being
10
Most obviously in Michael Burleighs two volumes on the topic. See Michael Burleigh, Earthly powers: the
clash of religion and politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York: HarperCollins, 2006),
and Sacred causes: the clash of religion and politics from the Great War to the war on terror (New York: HarperCollins,
2007).
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The exorcist?
able to distil the positive aspects of religion from the more negative ones.
Furthermore, Gray never really discusses the precise limits of how heand
therefore weare supposed to understand religion in his argument. For much
of Black mass, it is not really religion in general that is the target of Grays scorn
but rather one specic religionChristianity. Apocalyptic beliefs, we are told at
one point, go back to the origins of Christianity and beyond (p. 6). And again,
utopianism in Grays schema is a product not of religion as such but of the Christian
religion. As we understand it today, he says, utopianism began to develop with
the retreat of Christian belief. Yet the utopian belief in a condition of harmony is
a Christian inheritance, and so is the modern idea of progress (p. 21). And Gray is
clear, quoting the American historian Carl Beckers great book The heavenly city of
the eighteenth century philosophers (Yale University Press, 1932) in support of his case,
that the enlightenment sought to supplant Christianity but to do so by creating
a mirror image of it. In perhaps one of the boldest moves in the book Gray also
suggests that the founder of radical Islam Sayyid Qutb is himself an offshoot of
the belief in revolutionary violence one nds in the Jacobins rather than more
traditional Islamic groups like the Assassins, and that Qutbs basic orientation was
taken from western, not from Islamic, thought (this echoes Grays argument in
Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern).
But the problem here is surely that religion itself (whether Christian or any
other kind) is an incredibly diverse phenomenon. Much of what Gray argues is
extremely acutethough the account of Qutb offered by Youssef M. Choueiri11
suggests very strongly that inuential though certain western ideas were on
Qutb, Islamic ones, especially the already radical Islam of Al-Mawdudi, were also
very signicantbut one could also nd examples of religious thought that are
completely different in tone and temper from the apocalyptic ones that Gray is
condemning. There seems in Grays argument to be an elision of religion with
apocalyptic religion that is merely stipulative. Here a contrast with Voegelin is
instructive. Voegelins argument suggests that one version of Christianity, itself
colonized by a pre-Christian belief systemGnosticismbecomes hugely inu-
ential and shapes a good deal of modern politics, even expressly non-religious and
non-Christian politics. But Voegelin does not suggest that religion as such does
this, only that one version of it does. Those who are inclined to defend Gray on
this might point to a remark in the last paragraph of the book to the effect that
at its best religion has been an attempt to deal with mystery rather than hope that
mystery will be unveiled (p. 210) and suggest that Gray too accepts that there are
forms of religion that might be exempt from his strictures. Perhaps so, but for
most of the book they are pretty well hidden.
Notwithstanding these caveats, Grays case against the progressive and utopian
tendencies that (he is right) have dominated our age is a powerful one. But there
are two further reservations that should be briey outlined to close this assessment.

11
See especially Youssef M. Choueiri, Islamic fundamentalism (London: Pinter, 1997, revised edn). See also the
excellent discussion in Antony Black, The history of Islamic political thought: from the prophet to the present (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).
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Nicholas Rengger
The rst concerns Grays interpretation of realism. Gray is quite right to suggest
that realism is profoundly anti-utopian and right also to suggest that realism,
properly understood, does not have to be conservative. Hans Morgenthau, perhaps
the most inuential twentieth-century realist (and among the most persistently
misread authors in the contemporary literature of international relations), always
considered himself a man of the left. But the picture of realism that emerges in
Grays pages is very indistinct and, on occasion, simply wrong.
To begin with, Gray follows the oft repeated but in my view erroneous claim
that realism can be traced back to, for example, a Machiavelli or (in a different
cultural setting) a Sun Tzu or Kautilya. Other candidates frequently mentioned
would include Thucydides, Augustine, Hobbes and even Rousseau. The problem
is that this is simply anachronistic. While all these writers and many others were
tributaries that owed into what we can genuinely call a realist tradition, that
tradition is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century one, a tradition that arose in part
in opposition to many of the arguments and assumptions that Gray is himself
criticizing.
Second, neither Hedley Bull nor Martin Wight, both writers who Gray says
offer canonical statements of the Realist position (p. 228, fn. 9), would have
described themselves as realists, though the other two writers cited in the same
note, Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, certainly would have. But there is a
puzzle here beyond merely misidentifying how certain writers saw themselves.
Both Wight and Niebuhr were deeply religious men. Niebuhr was one of the most
inuential Protestant theologians of the twentieth century and was always careful
to call his version of realism Christian realism. Wight was, during the Second
World War, a Christian pacist and after it wrote extensively on religious themes,
especially eschatology, the very topic that, according to Gray, marks out apocaly-
ptic religion. Wights approach to politicsand to international politicswas
shaped by his religion more than anything else. And, as with Niebuhr, it was
because of his religious views that he was sceptical of the utopian imagination of his
fellows. Hope, Wight liked to say, was not a political virtue, a sentiment that Gray
would doubtless agree with. But Wight would have added that it is a theological
one.12
The point here is not merely to engage in some good old-fashioned footnote
scholarship (a blameless pastime academics occasionally enjoy); it is also to point
out that some of the strongest opposition to the utopian imagination in the modern
world has come from specically religious and Christian sources. The somewhat
monochrome character of Grays discussion of religion means that this aspect
of religion is invisible in his treatment of it and, as a result, his understanding
of realismmuch of which was certainly shaped by Christian pessimismis

12
For the best general account of Wights thought see Ian Hall, The international thought of Martin Wight (New
York: Palgrave, 2006). Niebuhrs inuence and self-understanding are best traced in Richard Wightman Fox,
Reinhold Niebuhr: a biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). For the origins and character of
Morgenthaus political allegiances, see Christoph Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: an intellectual biography (Baton
Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), and the nal chapter of William E. Scheuerman, Carl
Schmitt: the end of law (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleeld, 1999).
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The exorcist?
equally problematic. That is a pity because in broad terms Gray is correct to say
that we have much to learn from realism (and indeed from those like Wight and
Bull who, while not being realists, were certainly anti-utopians).
This brings me to my nal observation. As has already been said, I have a good
deal of sympathy with much of what Gray is doing, both in Black mass and in his
wider work. Like him, I would argue that the liberalism of rational consensus
is a chimera and we are better off without it. Like him, I think attempts to make
the world anew, to nd, as Michael Oakeshott put it, a short cut to heaven13
whether it be in the form of spreading democracy in the Middle East or recre-
ating the Caliphateto be a bizarre and very often disastrous display of hubris
(and we all know, of course, what follows hubris). Like him, I think various forms
of religionand its surrogatesare often to be found stoking the res of conict
around the world and that such forms of religion need to be resisted, though I
would argue that very often the best way to do this is to identify others aspects of
the relevant religious traditions, less susceptible to Gnostic or rationalist perver-
sion. And like him, I think there is a good deal we can learn from traditions such
as realism (there are others) that can help us understand and respond to the various
problems we will face. But I think that the manner most appropriate to such a task
is a scepticism that does not carry with it the cadences of the certainties it rightly
eschews. Grays voice, since Straw dogs, has hovered between a version of what one
might call sceptical pessimism and something rather darker, more deeply pessi-
mistic. Pessimism, by itself, is neither an ignoble nor an unattractive position, as
Joshua Dienstags ne recent book has reminded us,14 and Gray can be seen very
much as a modern pessimist in the sense that Dienstag suggests. But as Dienstags
book also reminds us there are different forms of pessimism, as there are of realism.
Gray quite often quotes the RomanianFrench pessimist E. M. Cioran and seems
sometimes to share his very deeply pessimistic outlook. But this form of pessimism
is ultimately self-defeating and if Gray follows it, the darker side, so to say, of
his pessimism may end up dominating the rest. Better surely to echo the sceptical
pessimism of someone else he likes to quote, and about whom he has written
illuminatingly in the past, George Santayana. In one of the best recent accounts
of Santayanas thought Noel OSullivan pointed out that Santayanas thought can
best be seen as a philosophy of modesty, composed of a rigorous scepticism on the
one hand, and a combination of naturalism, humour, piety, courtesy and detach-
ment on the other.15 This form of pessimism is indeed something we badly need in
order to confront those shrill partisanships mentioned at the outset of this review
article. And Gray is one of the few contemporary thinkers who comes close to it
(though piety would probably have to be dropped!). But the risk is that the more
darkly pessimistic aspect of his thought may take further hold. And that would be
a pity, for the likely consequences of too much dystopic thinking will be a return
to utopia, however inverted or misconceived.

13
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in politics and other essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991), p. 465.
14
Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: philosophy, ethic, spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
15
Noel OSullivan, Santayana (St Albans: Claridge Press, 1992), p. 104.
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