[ExI] LA Times Book Review: 'Black Mass' and 'Straw Dogs'

[PJ Manney]

"Read in sequence, they perform an almost surgical feat: "Straw Dogs"
reconstructs popular notions of the relationships among science,
religion and politics. This revisionist landscape of modern thought is
further explored in "Black Mass," which presents utopian politics from
the French Revolution through America's project of spreading democracy
in the Middle East as "mutant version[s]" of an ancient, apocalyptic
Christian belief that God will transform the world and evil will pass
away... These are works of intellectual cartography, clarifying
boundaries among disciplines, with one primary goal: naming the ways
that what we call secularism unknowingly and stubbornly promotes a
crudely religious way of looking at the world."

Apparently, realizing we are Darwin's animals and not God's children
could go a long way in disabusing us of the unfortunate notion, laden
with unintended consequences and collateral damage, that we can create
utopia.

PJ

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-gross28oct28,0,4633619.story?coll=la-books-headlines

>From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'Black Mass' and 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray
Britain's intellectual provocateur tells how religion drives politics.
By Michael Joseph Gross

October 28, 2007

Black Mass

Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

John Gray

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 244 pp., $24

Straw Dogs

Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

John Gray

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 248 pp., $16 paper

This might be the most important question you can ask about the
presidential candidates: Can they talk to the animals?

Bizarre as it may sound, the desire for an affirmative answer to that
question (which we'll get back to) acquires a nagging gravity while
reading two books by the English writer John Gray. "Straw Dogs:
Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals," a bestseller upon publication
in Britain in 2002, is being released here, along with his new "Black
Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia." Each book is
slender and sharp as a scalpel.

Read in sequence, they perform an almost surgical feat: "Straw Dogs"
reconstructs popular notions of the relationships among science,
religion and politics. This revisionist landscape of modern thought is
further explored in "Black Mass," which presents utopian politics from
the French Revolution through America's project of spreading democracy
in the Middle East as "mutant version[s]" of an ancient, apocalyptic
Christian belief that God will transform the world and evil will pass
away.

"When the project of universal democracy ended in the blood-soaked
streets of Iraq," Gray writes, " . . . 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."

And yet, oddly, as "Black Mass" hints, other religious myths offer
hope for dispelling the superstitionshovering over global politics
today.

Gray, a professor of European thought at the London School of
Economics, has written or edited 19 books, including academic studies
of Isaiah Berlin and John Stuart Mill. Though relatively unknown in
the United States, he is a controversial public intellectual in
Britain, where he has evolved from a Thatcherite conservative into an
ideologically unclassifiable provocateur.

Though typically shelved as political philosophy, "Straw Dogs" and
"Black Mass" offer a reading experience less like Locke and more like
the joyful, quasi-academic synopses of Alain de Botton (though Gray is
more erudite and less sentimental) or the mirthfully sober,
brain-wandering novels of W.G. Sebald (though Gray is prouder and more
rhetorical). With excursions into Conrad, Plato, Bruce Chatwin,
Schopenhauer and Lao Tzu, among many others, Gray's books have the
delighting, frightening, distracting and focusing qualities of a
mist-to-dusk drive on the Pacific Coast Highway.

These are works of intellectual cartography, clarifying boundaries
among disciplines, with one primary goal: naming the ways that what we
call secularism unknowingly and stubbornly promotes a crudely
religious way of looking at the world.

Explaining that the "very idea of revolution as a transforming event
in history is owed to religion," Gray announces near the beginning of
"Black Mass" that the "Enlightenment ideologies of the past centuries
were very largely spilt theology." (The aperçu is no less electrifying
for being an uncredited allusion to the critic T.E. Hulme, who
dismissed Romanticism as "spilt religion.")

The view of politics described by "Black Mass" is grounded in the
argument of "Straw Dogs." That book details the ways that science has
become a vessel for old religious hopes: "sickness and ageing will be
abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will
become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of
science lives on the hope of miracles."

By contrast, "Straw Dogs" considers what politics might be like if we
took science seriously -- if we accepted the full ramifications of
Darwin's finding that Homo sapiens is merely another kind of animal.
If, as Gray writes, "species are only assemblies of genes, interacting
at random with each other and their shifting environments," then
humanity's ambition to master fate is absurd. Those who speak of "
'the progress of mankind,' " Gray contends, "have put their faith in
an abstraction that no one would think of taking seriously if it were
not formed from cast-off Christian hopes."

In the long run, Gray suggests, people are as helpless to control
their destinies as pigeons. Thus Western politics (as practiced since
Louis XVI lost his head) is vanity. "Good politics," he writes, "is
shabby and makeshift, but at the start of the twenty-first century the
world is strewn with the grandiose ruins of failed utopias. With the
Left moribund, the Right has become the home to the utopian
imagination. Global communism has been followed by global capitalism.
The two visions of the future have much in common. Both are hideous
and fortunately chimerical." The best that we can hope for is
government that manages the tragic contingencies of life.

The other purpose of the liberal state, "Black Mass" explains, is to
protect "a type of civilized life in which rival beliefs can coexist
in peace." In this view, government has no place doing missionary work
to spread democracy.

"In waging war to promote their values actually existing liberal
societies are corrupted. This is what happened when torture, whose
prohibition was the result of an Enlightenment campaign that began in
the eighteenth century, was used at the start of the twenty-first as a
weapon in an Enlightenment crusade for universal democracy. Preserving
the hard-won restraints of civilization is less exciting than throwing
them away in order to achieve impossible ideals," Gray writes, ending
with a gravely donnish joust: "Barbarism has a certain charm,
particularly when it comes clothed in virtue."

Gray's analysis of religion's influence in politics, especially as
applied in "Black Mass" to the Iraq war, is uncommon. He writes about
religion not as most do -- in a rational sense, considering it as a
system of propositional truths -- but in a manner that's both older
and more contemporary: as a symbolic phenomenon, like a culture or
language, that people use to make sense of ultimate concerns.

So when Gray considers the missionary project of this war, he
describes insiders' decisions with deep understanding. Former British
Prime Minister Tony Blair's complicity in planning the war despite
knowing it was based on faulty intelligence, he writes, was not
mendacious: "It is not so much that he is economical with the truth as
that he lacks the normal understanding of it. . . Blair's untruths are
not true lies. They are prophetic glimpses of the future course of
history."

Passages like this reveal apocalyptic patterns of thought and belief
that shaped the utopian project of the war. The Greek word that we
translate as "apocalypse" does not refer directly to the end of the
world: It means "the lifting of the veil," conveying secret knowledge
to a group of privileged people set apart from the rest of humanity.
This is why the Book of Revelation is full of inscrutable symbols.
This is why John's Gospel opens with that knotty passage about the
Word. These texts carried secret knowledge, meant to baffle outsiders
and to protect insiders' exclusive claim on truth.

Though Gray argues that the tragedy of Iraq will end secular utopian
hope, he also thinks that climate change and resource scarcity are
inspiring new devotion to violent apocalyptic dreams. His vision of
the future, and of religion's role in shaping humanity's fate, is
mostly bleak.

Yet on the last page of "Black Mass," he grants that "at its best
religion has been an attempt to deal with mystery rather than the hope
that mystery will be unveiled." Moreover, he notes that some religious
myths can help humanity see more clearly. "In the Genesis story humans
were banished from paradise after eating from the Tree of Knowledge
and had to survive by their labours ever after. There is no promise
here of any return to a state of primordial innocence. Once the fruit
has been eaten there is no going back." Genesis also tells the story
of Noah and the Flood, which Gray does not mention, though it's a
clear rebuke of apocalypticism: God promises to wreak no more violent
transformation of the world, and that the routine of "seed-time and
harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not
cease."

Perhaps remembering such myths could make it easier to learn to see
ourselves as animals. Yet for this to happen, we would need leaders
with the courage to see themselves, and treat the rest of us, as
creatures and not as little saviors or little stars. That's almost as
unlikely as it is imperative, in a YouTubed culture of relentless
video recycling and commentary that pressures public figures to speak
and behave with inhuman consistency, which routs ingredients of
realism -- uncertainty, subtlety, patience -- from public debate.

It would take a presidential candidate as wisely daft as Doctor
Dolittle to engage a world where each of us now shares the fate of
pushmi-pullyu: that cute, sad two-headed creature, paralyzed by
freakish scope of sight. *

Michael Joseph Gross is the author of "Starstruck: When a Fan Gets
Close to Fame."