Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis

by John Gray

  While realists have accepted that the world of states will remain an arena of conflict, most have worked within schools of social science that rest on principles of rational choice. This Enlightenment tradition can help explain behaviour such as suicide bombing, but it has definite limits. Theories of rational choice assume human beings have reasonable goals – if people seem to behave irrationally it is because they are frustrated. The implication of this benignly reductive analysis is that if the causes of frustration could be removed, harmony would follow. But not all reasonable objectives are compatible, and rational choices can lead to horribly destructive conflicts. Such is often the case in asymmetric warfare. Though the insurgents usually win, occupying powers also have interests that compel them to fight. Both parties may have reason to engage in a mutually damaging conflict.

  Above all, human beings have needs that cannot be satisfied by any rational means. The Aum cult that tried to obtain the ebola virus had few achievable goals. Its activities were shaped by classical chiliastic fantasies: the end of the world followed by a post-apocalyptic paradise. A portion of the terrorist violence of al-Qaeda follows a similar pattern. It is no use seeking the causes of this brand of terrorism in unresolved political conflicts. The disorder that is at work is a derangement of the need for meaning like that which energized millenarian movements and totalitarian regimes. This is a disease that may afflict marginal groups more than others, but it may also be endemic in late modern societies. As the means of mass destruction become more accessible to small groups and individuals, anomic terrorism may come to pose a larger threat than the use of terrorist techniques in asymmetric warfare.

  The complex phenomenon of terrorism implies a shift in realist thinking away from an exclusive focus on states. States remain pivotal, but they are no longer the sole or always the most important arena for war. Classical warfare – sometimes called Clausewitzian war after the early nineteenth-century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz – was armed conflict between forces controlled by states. It inflicted huge casualties in the twentieth century as it expanded to include the targeting of civilian populations. Though many assume this kind of warfare lies in the past, armed conflicts between great powers could still recur. Classical warfare remains a major evil, but even when it is total it can be ended by agreement – diplomats can meet, negotiate a settlement and declare peace. No such agreement can be reached with global terrorist networks, which may be internally divided and lack negotiable goals. Armed conflict now involves highly dispersed groups and even entire societies acting beyond the control of any government. If realist thinking is to be productive it must accept that warfare has ceased to be the prerogative of states and become the privilege of Everyman.

  Realist thinking cannot avoid the threats posed by environmental crisis. Peaking oil reserves and global warming are the other face of globalization – the worldwide spread of the mode of industrial production based on fossil fuels that has enabled the economic and population growth of the past two centuries. This process is not far from reaching its limits, which are not so much political as ecological. Industrial expansion has triggered a shift in global climate that is larger, faster and more irreversible than anyone imagined, while the non-renewable fuels that power industry are becoming scarcer as demand for them continues to rise.12 These facts have implications for war and peace, some of which I have touched on in earlier chapters. Yet the military-strategic implications of ecological crisis have rarely been examined, and the subject remains taboo. When a Pentagon group issued a report on ‘An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for US National Security’ in October 2003, its analysis and proposals were uncongenial to the Bush administration and it was shelved.

  The report considered the geo-political consequences of abrupt climate change, and identified food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production, decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions and disrupted access to energy supplies. The overall effect of these changes would be ‘a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth’s environment’ – in other words, a reduction in the human population the planet can support. The report went on:

  As global and local carrying capacities are reduced, tensions could mount around the world, leading to two fundamental strategies: defensive and offensive. Nations with the resources to do so may build virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves. Less fortunate nations, especially those with ancient enmities with their neighbours, may initiate struggles for access to food, clean water, or energy. Unlikely alliances could be formed, as defence priorities shift and the goal is resources for survival rather than religion, ideology or national honour.13

  The Pentagon report was pioneering in accepting that abrupt climate change could lead to a drop in the planet’s capacity to support human life. Its account of the types of conflict that could follow is plausible, though it may have underestimated their intensity. The analysis assumed they would be rational-strategic conflicts with religion playing no part in them, but much of the planet’s remaining patrimony of oil lies in Muslim lands, and conflict over resources could be intensified by antagonisms surrounding the ‘war on terror’. The risk is that resource war will be mixed with wars of religion and the otherwise far-fetched theory of clashing civilizations become self-fulfilling.

  Unless they can find alternatives to oil, industrial states will be locked in conflict for the foreseeable future. The process of diversifying out of oil will be a good deal harder than most environmentalists believe. If world oil production is near its peak – as seems likely – the shift to other types of energy is an urgent necessity; but there may be no easily available alternatives that will support the world’s present human population. It has become conventional wisdom that the basic environmental problem is not human numbers but their per capita resource uses – in other words, the way humans live. In fact, humanity has probably already overshot the carrying capacity of the planet. Current human numbers depend on petroleum-based agriculture, which hastens global warming. Population growth is not always highest in developing countries – it is around twice as fast in the United States as in China, for example – but it is much too high overall for a worldwide switch to alternative technologies to be practicable. A mix of solar power, wind farms and organic farming cannot support six to nine billion people.

  If there is a way through the bottleneck, it involves making the most of high-tech fixes. The best prospects may lie with the technologies to which Greens are most hostile, such as nuclear power and GM crops, which despite their hazards do not require further destruction of the biosphere.14 The alternative is not a low-tech Utopia, as many Greens like to think. As James Lovelock has written, it is ‘global decline into a chaotic world ruled by brutal war lords on a devastated Earth.’15

  Many of those who grasp the scale of the crisis continue to believe it can be overcome by changes in human behaviour. Jared Diamond has presented a powerful argument that contemporary societies could self-destruct by disregarding environmental limits. He suggests that catastrophe can be averted by enhanced cooperation, and cites the Dutch system of polders – areas of land that have been reclaimed from the sea in the Netherlands – as a model that can be adopted throughout the world. Diamond writes:

  Our whole world has become one polder … When distant Somalia collapsed, in went American troops; when the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union collapsed, out went streams of refugees over all of Europe and the rest of the world; and when changed conditions of society, settlement and lifestyle spread new diseases in Africa and Asia, those diseases moved over the globe. The whole world today is a self-contained and isolated unit.16

  Diamond is right that the world is more interdependent than in the past, but that is no reason for thinking that it is going to become more cooperative. The Pentagon report suggests a likelier scenario. Where states remain strong and effective, they will act to secure the resources und
er their control. Where states are weak or collapsed, the struggle will devolve to other groups. The overall result is intensified conflict rather than global cooperation. The Kyoto Treaty illustrates the difficulty. The treaty may have been inherently flawed inasmuch as the targets it set did not apply to emerging countries, but its basic weakness was that it contained no mechanism of enforcement. States could sign up or not as they pleased, and the US and a number of others refused. There is no way round this difficulty. In an anarchical world, global environmental problems are politically insoluble.

  Environmental crisis is a fate humans can temper but not overcome. Its origins are in the power to grow knowledge that distinguishes humans from other animals. The advance of knowledge has enabled humans to multiply their numbers, extend their lifespans and create wealth on a scale that has no precedent. But global warming and energy shortage are results of advancing industrialism, which is also a by-product of scientific progress. The proliferation of means of mass destruction, not only to states but also to forces states do not control, is another of its effects. Today the worry is that nuclear materials may slip into terrorist hands, but tomorrow the fear may be of biological weapons doing so. Genetic science enables humans to intervene in the creation of life, but it will surely be used to wreak mass death as well. It cannot be long before genetically selective devices are feasible that can act as tools of genocide, and when this happens there may be no means of preventing them being diffused across the world. Future threats to security may not come mainly from terrorism as conventionally understood. Instead they may come in outbreaks of disease whose origins are never known. The paradigm of future terror may be an inexplicable breakdown in the structures of everyday life.

  The increase of knowledge magnifies human power while it creates insoluble dilemmas. We need to accept that the gravest human disorders cannot be remedied, only treated day by day. But can we live with this fact? Ditching the myths of historical teleology and ultimate harmony is highly desirable, but it is also extremely difficult. The western belief that salvation can be found in history has renewed itself again and again. The migration of utopianism from Left to Right testifies to its vitality. An irrational faith in the future is encrypted into contemporary life, and a shift to realism may be a utopian ideal.

  THE END, AGAIN

  Apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd.

  Frank Kermode17

  The dominant western myths have been historical narratives, and it has become fashionable to view narrative as a basic human need. Humans are tellers of tales, we have come to think, who cannot be happy unless they can see the world as a story. Over the past two centuries the dominant story line has been one of human progress, but it has also included a tale of a world besieged by dark forces and destined for destruction. The two plots were interwoven – as when Marx and his followers believed that humanity advanced through a series of catastrophic revolutions and the Nazis that demonic powers were conspiring against the Volk and its ascension to a state of semi-divine immortal harmony. In a different idiom, liberal humanists have talked of humanity advancing, inch by inch, in a gradual process of improvement. In all these accounts history is told as a coherent narrative, and nothing is more threatening than the idea that it is a meandering flux without purpose or direction.

  The belief that history has an underlying plot is central to the millenarian movements, secular and religious, that have been examined in this book. All who belong to these movements believe they are acting out a script that is already partly written. In versions of apocalyptic belief that are avowedly religious, the author of the script is God, with the Devil and assorted demons writing their own lines but finally submitting to the authority of the divine narrator. In secular apocalyptic, the author is that equally elusive figure humanity, battling the forces of ignorance and superstition. Either way, the demand for meaning is met by narratives in which each individual life is part of an all-encompassing story.

  The dangers of the need for an overarching human narrative are clear. To feel oneself the target of a global conspiracy as the Nazis did may not seem a positive state of mind, but it banishes the lack of meaning, which is a worse threat. Paranoia is often a protest against insignificance, and collective delusions of persecution bolster a fragile sense of agency. The problem is that this benefit is purchased at a high price: a price measured in the lives of others who are forced to act out a role in a script they have not read, still less written. Those who are crushed or broken in order to create a higher humanity, who are killed or mutilated in acts of spectacular terror or ravaged in wars for universal freedom may have ideas about their place in the world altogether different from those they are assigned in the dramas that are being enacted. If universal narratives create meaning for those who live by them, they also destroy it in the lives of others.

  The sense of having a part in such a narrative is delusive, of course. John of Leyden believed God had called him to rule over the New Jerusalem. Lenin was sure he was expediting the laws of history. Hitler was certain the corrupt world of liberal democracy was doomed. True believers in the free market interpreted the collapse of communism as a sign of an inexorable trend, and neo-conservatives greeted the few years of American supremacy that seemed to follow as a new epoch in history. All of these prophets imagined they had grasped the plot of history and were completing a preordained pattern. In fact, their rise to power was accidental, and only the non-arrival of the Millennium was preordained. Millenarian movements come about as the result of a combination of random events, and when they fall from grace it is as a result of features of human life whose permanence they deny. The history of these movements is scarcely tragic, for those who belong to them rarely perceive the fateful contingencies by which their lives are ruled. They are actors in a theatre of the absurd whose lines are given by chance.

  Seeing one’s life as an episode in a universal narrative is a fantasy, and while it is supported by powerful western traditions it has not always been regarded as a good thing. Many of the world’s mystics have aimed to achieve a state of contemplation in which the succession of happenings from which we construct the story of our lives is absent. Plato and his disciples prized an eventless eternity over any process of change, and here they were close to Hindu and Buddhist thinkers. In a different tradition, Taoists taught that freedom lies in freeing oneself from personal narratives by identifying with cosmic processes of death and renewal. Within Christianity, the temptation to construct a narrative from the accidents of history has been extremely strong. But in the orthodoxy that was created by Augustine the temptation has been curbed by the idea that meaning is to be found in a timeless realm, whose intimations may appear at any moment.

  Freedom from narrative is not a condition of which only mystics dream. Poets and epicureans have cultivated a condition of spontaneity in which they could enjoy each moment for its own sake. Spending one’s life looking to the future means inhabiting a world fashioned from memory. Yet memory has also been used as a means of freeing oneself from narrative. Marcel Proust writes of the sensation he experienced when drinking tea mixed with crumbs of petites madeleines, the small cakes given him by his mother, that it ‘had immediately made the vicissitudes of life unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased to feel I was mediocre, contingent, mortal.’18 Here Proust turned to the past in a search for a way out of time. It was a search that could only be partly successful, since memories that carry intimations of immortality cannot be summoned at will.

  The need for narrative can be a burden, and if we want to be rid of it we should seek the company of mystics, poets and pleasure-lovers rather than utopian dreamers. Though they look to the future these dreamers nearly always recall an idealized period of innocence –Marx’s primitive communism, or the lost world of bourgeois virtue cherished by neo-conservatives. As the writer and
psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, ‘Clearly, apocalyptic thinking is nostalgia at its very worst.’19 The effect of seeking refuge in an imaginary future harmony is to bind us to the conflicts of the past.

  Myths are not true or false in the way scientific theories are true or false, but they can be more or less truthful in reflecting the enduring realities of human life. Most of the myths by which humans have lived have not been historical narratives of the sort that govern Christian and post-Christian cultures. The promise of liberation from time in Plato and eastern religions is also a myth, but one that dispels the hope of a final triumph of good of the kind that has had such a baleful impact on the modern West.

  Secular myths reproduce the narrative form of Christian apocalyptic, and if there is a way of tempering the violence of faith it must begin by questioning these myths. In secular thought science has come to be viewed as a vehicle of revelation, a repository of truth rather than a system of symbols that serves the human need to understand and control. Post-modern philosophies that view science as just one belief-system among many are too silly to be worth refuting at length – the utility of scientific knowledge is a brute fact that is shown in the increase of human power. Science is an instrument for forming reliable beliefs about the world. Religions are also human instruments, but they have other goals. The ideal goal of scientific inquiry may be an end-point at which human beliefs mirror the world in an all-embracing theory, and in science this ideal may be useful (even if it is also illusive). But why should religions aim for consensus? While true beliefs may be useful in our everyday dealings, doubts are more to the point in the life of the spirit. Religions are not claims to knowledge but ways of living with what cannot be known.