Alan Ryan
THE DANGERS OF UTOPIA
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
By John Gray (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 243pp £18.99)

For a book that consists so largely of summary accounts of political madness and murder, Black Mass is surprisingly exhilarating. That may be the result of its almost equally surprising organisation. Two or three very large and very general claims frame the book: that politics is a form of religion, that apocalyptic fantasies have been the stuff of Western politics since the Middle Ages and continue to be so now, that the restoration of peace requires a combination of political realism on the one hand, and on the other an acceptance of the need to accommodate in public life the non-rational needs that religion satisfies.

Within that framework, Gray takes aim at a wide range of targets. By no means everything he says is plausible, but even at his most unpersuasive, he is invigorating. Readers of a certain age will be reminded of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium, but where Cohn wrote in detail about the Anabaptist revolt led by Thomas Müntzer to draw parallels with Communist totalitarianism, Gray skates lightly over not only medieval millenarianism but also twentieth-century Communism and Nazism in order to concentrate on our present discontents. Not the madness of George III, but the utopian follies of Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld provide the main focus of the book.

The proposition that human beings have always been prone to kill large numbers of other human beings in pursuit of a vision that can broadly be described as 'religious' is one that invites several pinches of salt. The Old Testament certainly describes a good deal of ethnic and religious cleansing on the direct instructions of God, but the massacres that were a common feature of intercity strife among the Greeks seem mostly to have resulted from the exasperation of the victors at the intransigence or treachery of the defeated. Gray's interest lies in two other places.

First, he thinks it is a characteristic of 'Western' political attitudes to engage in fantasies of a utopian reconstruction of earthly life, though he readily admits that 'Western' is a somewhat loose term, embracing as it does Judaic, Islamic and Christian modes of thought. It is therefore not always easy to see whether the case is that Islamic political thought, say, was for most of its history non-utopian and quietist, and only in the past sixty or so years has been infected by Western ideas picked up in the United States by Sayyid Qut'b, or that all children of the Book are vulnerable to utopian aspirations. The point is not desperately important, since the deeper point is that utopias are dangerous.

Gray is by no means the first person to observe this. The thought is simple enough. If we are going to achieve the earthly heaven, it is permissible to inflict a few casualties on the way. Indeed, things may well be more lethal than that; one of the apparent oddities of Stalin's show trials was the prosecution's passion for extracting confessions from the Old Bolshevik victims that they had conspired in impossible ways to do inconceivable amounts of damage to the Soviet Union. Why did it matter to Stalin and his henchmen? The obvious thought is that if the utopian impulse is essentially religious - in some sense of that slippery term - the political opponent embodies pure evil, and in much the same way that the Inquisition sought to have the heretic condemn himself out of his own mouth, so Stalin's prosecutors sought confessions with about the same evidential likelihood as a confession to sexual congress with the Devil.

What Gray brings to this familiar story is tremendous narrative verve. But narrative verve is not the only thing he brings. His second concern is to raise the stakes yet again in his long argument with the Enlightenment. One might think that whatever else Hitler stood for, it was not the values of the Enlightenment. Gray says (though it is not clear how far he really means it) that Hitler was the product of the Enlightenment; 'scientific racism' was, to the extent that it borrowed the prestige of science, an Enlightenment doctrine.

To square the obvious fact that many Enlightenment writers were decidedly cool towards religion in any established form with his insistence that the natural condition of politics is religious, Gray has to borrow from Carl Becker's wonderful essay The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers to argue that the Enlightenment was a religious movement. There is perhaps too much dazzle for real illumination in this claim; and in any case, it is a somewhat roundabout route by which to launch the assault he really has in mind - on the follies of the war on Iraq.

This, of course, has all the hallmarks of a utopian project. Gray fastidiously observes that it was not, as many have claimed, a 'Manichean' project in the shape of a war between good and evil in which good was to triumph; Manicheanism has no room for the triumph of good on earth, and even as a piece of Christian utopianism, it was heretical - God's reign on earth is to come at a time of His choosing, not that of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. If there is anything to be said against Gray's attack on the so-called neo-conservatives - so-called because, as he says, there is nothing conservative about their millenarian aspirations - it is that it is too easy with hindsight to see that the combination of an intoxication with American military power and an astonishing innocence about the realities of utterly different societies was a recipe for the disasters we have seen.

Still, one ends Black Mass with the anxiety that works of this sort always induce. Why should we think that all the disasters of the world stem from one flaw in human nature? Human beings all end up dead, but they do not all die of a fatal something called death; the world is sadly full of political disasters, as also of larger and smaller successes, but it is not obvious that they all stem from the taste for apocalypse, as distinct from assorted miscalculations. Nor can Gray himself quite believe some of his larger claims; after all, if we were such hapless victims of the utopian - or dystopian - impulse as he sometimes implies, we would be hard put to it to follow the eminently sensible advice he offers about how to avoid the disasters he describes.