Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis

by John Gray

  The collision between science and religion comes from the mistake that both have to do with belief. It is only in some strands of Christianity and Islam that belief has been placed at the heart of religion. In other traditions, religion has to do with the acceptance of mystery rather than catechisms or creeds. Science and religion serve different needs, which though they pull in different directions are equally human. In the contemporary world science has authority because of the power it confers. That is why fundamentalists ape its claims to literal truth – as in the cartoon science of creationism. Yet creationism is hardly more ridiculous than Social Darwinism, dialectical materialism or the theory that as societies become more modern they become more free or peaceful. These secular creeds are more unreasonable than any traditional faith, if only because they make a more elaborate show of being rational.

  The most necessary task of the present time is to accept the irreducible reality of religion. In the Enlightenment philosophies that shaped the last two centuries, religion was a secondary or derivative aspect of human life that will disappear, or cease to be important, when its causes are removed. Once poverty is eradicated and education universal, social inequality has been overcome and political repression is a thing of the past, religion will have no more importance than a personal hobby. Underlying this article of Enlightenment faith is a denial of the fact that the need for religion is generically human. It is true that religions are hugely diverse and serve many social functions – most obviously, as welfare institutions. At times they have also served the needs of power. But beyond these socio-political purposes, religions express human needs that no change in society can remove – for example the need to accept what cannot be remedied and find meaning in the chances of life. Human beings will no more cease to be religious than they will stop being sexual, playful or violent.

  If religion is a primary human need it should not be suppressed or relegated to a netherworld of private life. It ought to be fully integrated into the public realm, but that does not mean establishing any one religion as public doctrine. Late modern societies harbour a diversity of world-views. There is little agreement on the worth of human life, the uses of sexuality, the claims of non-human animals or the value of the natural environment. Rather than tending towards a secular monoculture, the late modern period is unalterably hybrid and plural. There is no prospect of a morally homogeneous society, still less a homogenized world. In the future, as in the past, there will be authoritarian states and liberal republics, theocratic democracies and secular tyrannies, empires, city-states and many mixed regimes. No one type of government or economy will be accepted everywhere, nor will any single version of civilization be embraced by all of humanity.

  It is time the diversity of religions was accepted and the attempt to build a secular monolith abandoned. Accepting that we have moved into a post-secular era does not mean religions can be freed of the restraints that are necessary for civilized coexistence. A central task of government is to work out and enforce a framework whereby they can live together. A framework of this kind cannot be the same for every society, or fixed for ever. It embodies a type of toleration whose goal is not truth but peace. When the goal of tolerance is truth it is a strategy that aims for harmony. It would be better to accept that harmony will never be reached. Better yet, give up the demand for harmony and welcome the varieties of human experience. The modus vivendi between religions that has flourished intermittently in the past might then be renewed.20

  The chief intellectual obstacle to coexistence among religions is a lack not of mutual understanding, but of self-knowledge. Matthew Arnold’s once-famous Dover Beach (1867) speaks of the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of Christianity – as if that meant the end of religion. The Victorian poet underestimated the urgency of the demand for myth. The Utopias of the past two centuries were deformed versions of the myths they denied, and if the last of them has perished in the deserts of Iraq it need not be mourned. The hope of Utopia spilt blood on a scale that traditional creeds cannot match, and the world is well rid of it.

  The danger that goes with the death of secular hope is the rebirth of something like the faith-based wars of an older past. A renewal of apocalyptic belief is underway, which is unlikely to be confined to familiar sorts of fundamentalism. Along with evangelical revivals, there is likely to be a profusion of designer religions, mixing science and science fiction, racketeering and psychobabble, which will spread like internet viruses. Most will be harmless, but doomsday cults like those that led to the mass suicide in Jonestown and the attacks on the Tokyo subway may proliferate as ecological crisis deepens.

  If the scientific consensus is accurate, the Earth may soon be different from the way it has been for millions of years, certainly since the appearance of humans. In one sense this is a genuinely apocalyptic prospect: while humans are unlikely to become extinct, the world in which they evolved is vanishing. In another sense the prospect is not apocalyptic at all. In wrecking the planetary environment humans are only doing what they have done innumerable times before on a local level. The global heating that is underway is one of several fevers the Earth has suffered, and survived, during its history. Though humans have triggered this episode, they lack the power to stop it. It may mean disaster for them and other species, but in planetary terms it is normal. This is likely to be too much reality for most people to bear, and as climate change runs its course we can expect a rash of cults in which it is interpreted as a human narrative of catastrophe and redemption. Apocalypse is, after all, an anthropocentric myth.

  Happily, humanity has other myths, which can help it 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. The same truth is preserved in the Greek story of Prometheus, and in many other traditions. These ancient legends are better guides to the present than modern myths of progress and Utopia.

  The myth of the End has caused untold suffering and is now as dangerous as it has ever been. In becoming a site for projects of world-transformation political life became a battleground. The secular religions of the last two centuries, which imagined that the cycle of anarchy and tyranny could be ended, succeeded only in making it more violent. At its best, politics is not a vehicle for universal projects but the art of responding to the flux of circumstances. This requires no grand vision of human advance, only the courage to cope with recurring evils. The opaque state of war into which we have stumbled is one such evil.

  The modern age has been a time of superstition no less than the medieval era, in some ways more so. Transcendental religions have many flaws and in the case of Christianity gave birth to savage violence, but at its best religion has been an attempt to deal with mystery rather than the hope that mystery will be unveiled. In the clash of fundamentalisms this civilizing perception has been lost. 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.

  Notes

  EPIGRAPH

  1. Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues, or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence, translated by Richard A. Lebrun, Montreal and Kingston, London and Buffalo, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993, p. 145.

  1 THE DEATH OF UTOPIA

  1. E. M. Cioran, History and Utopia, London, Quartet Books, 1996, p. 81.

  2. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, London, Secker and Warburg, 1957; completely revised edition, London, Paladin, 1970. Cohn’s interpretation of medieval millenarianism has been criticized by David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 3–4.


  3. R. H. Crossman (ed.), The God that Failed, New York and Chichester, Sussex, Columbia University Press, 2001; first published by Hamish Hamilton, London, 1950. The book contained essays by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fischer and Stephen Spender.

  4. See the brilliant study by Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdomof Hong Xiuquan, London, HarperCollins, 1996, p. xix.

  5. ibid., p. xxi.

  6. See Michael Barkun, Disaster and Millennium, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974, for a study of millenarian movements as responses to a breakdown in normal patterns of perception.

  7. The literature on Christian origins is vast and highly controversial. However, a profoundly learned and authoritative picture of Jesus as a Jewish charismatic teacher can be found in Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels, London, William Collins, 1973, republished by the Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1981. For an examination of Jesus’ birth, see Vermes, The Nativity: History and Legend, London, Penguin, 2006. A. N. Wilson presents a view of Jesus similar to that of Vermes in his excellent book, Jesus, London, Pimlico, 2003. The central role of eschatological beliefs in the teaching of Jesus is shown in Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, 2nd edn, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995, Chapter 11.

  8. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, New York, Dover, 2006, p. 369. This passage from Schweitzer is cited by Philip Rieff in his brilliant posthumously published Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How it Has Been Taken Away from Us, New York, Pantheon Books, 2007, p. 69.

  9. For the possibility that Zoroaster may have believed the outcome of the struggle between light and dark to be uncertain, see R. C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976.

  10. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd edn, Boston, Beacon Press, 1963, Chapter 13, pp. 320–40. For other authoritative views of Gnosticism, see Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1987; and Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, New York, Random House, 1989.

  11. For an overview of the heresy of the Free Spirit, see Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, especially Chapters 8 and 9. Cohn’s account of the Free Spirit has been criticized in Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.

  12. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 13.

  13. F. Dostoyevsky, ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, in A Gentle Creature and Other Stories, trans. Alan Myers, Oxford, Oxford University Press World’s Classics, 1995, p. 125.

  14. I. Berlin, ‘The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will’, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, London, John Murray, 1990, pp. 211–12.

  15. David Hume, ‘The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in Henry D. Aitken (ed.), Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy, London and New York, Macmillan, 1948, p. 374.

  16. See Gustavo Goritti, The Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru, Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

  17. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 6–7.

  18. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, London, Temple Smith, 1972, p. 77.

  19. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 150.

  20. David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium, London, Allen Lane, 1999, p. 71.

  21. For a profound analysis of the Russian Revolution as the continuation of a western tradition of religious revolt that included the English Civil War, see Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolution and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Terence Emmons, New Jersey, Yale University Press, 2006, especially Chapters 6 and 11.

  22. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1959.

  23. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn, London, Penguin, 1968, p. 52.

  24. ibid., pp. 419, 423–4.

  25. Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1932, p.123.

  26. For a systematic exploration of millenarianism and utopianism, see Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millenniumand Utopia, New York, Harper and Row, 1964.

  27. S. N. Eisenstadt, in his Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, has presented an illuminating interpretation of modern politics in which Jacobinism is central.

  28. Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War, HarperCollins, London, 2005, p. 101.

  29. See Paul Wood, ‘Hunting “Satan” in Falluja hell’, BBC News, 23 November 2004.

  30. Claes G. Ryn explores the affinities of neo-conservatism with Jacobinism, in America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire, Somerset NJ, Transaction Publishers, 2003.

  31. George W. Bush, Presidential remarks, National Cathedral, 14 September 2002.

  2 ENLIGHTENMENT AND TERROR IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  1. Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, The Politics of Hysteria: The Sources of Twentieth-Century Conflict, London, Victor Gollancz, 1964, p. 29.

  2. On genocide in the Belgian Congo, see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

  3. For Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, see her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), new edition published by Harcourt, New York, 1973. Arendt’s view of Eichmann is presented in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York, Penguin, 1963.

  4. For Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust, see David Cesarani, Adolf Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, London, Heinemann, 2004.

  5. Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, London, Unwin Books, 1920, p.55.

  6. Leon Trotsky, ‘Literature and Revolution’, www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1924/lit-revo/ch08

  7. For a discussion of Enlightenment thinking in contemporary transhumanism, see Bryan Appleyard, How to Live Forever or Die Trying: On the New Immortality, London and New York, Simon and Schuster, 2007, Chapter 8.

  8. For an authoritative account of the assault on science in the USSR and Soviet experiments on human subjects, see Vadim J. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science, Cambridge MA, Westview Press, 2001, pp. 127–31.

  9. For a discussion of Ivanov’s role, see Kirill Rossiianov, ‘Beyond Species: Ilya Ivanov and his Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anthropoid Apes’, Science in Context, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, Issue 15, pp. 277–316.

  10. I am not sure who coined the expression ‘the Enlightenment project’, but it came into currency with Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal study, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London, Duckworth, 1981, where it is defined and discussed in Chapters 4–6.

  11. See Journey of Our Time: The Journal of the Marquis de Custine, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001.

  12. See Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, New York, Random House, 1981.

  13. A. Nekrich and M. Heller, Utopia in Power: A History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, London, Hutchison, 1986, p. 10.

  14. N. Berdyaev, The Origin of Communism, London, Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1937, p.228.

  15. On Lunacharsky and the Russian messianist tradition, see David G. Rowley, ‘Redeemer Empire: Russian Millenarianism’, The American Historical Review, vol. 104, no. 5, 1999.

  16. Lenin’s statement is quoted by Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Study of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870–1970, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2004, p.251.

  17. V. I. Len
in, A Contribution to the History of the Question of Dictatorship, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920

  18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, www.marxists.org/marx/works/communist-league/1850/

  19. L. Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours, www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1938

  20. L. Trotsky, Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt, www.marxists.org/archive/trostsky/works/1938/1938-kronstadt.htm

  21. See George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 178.

  22. See Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, London and New York, Allen Lane, 2003, p.17.

  23. For the relative sizes of Tsarist and Soviet security apparatuses, see John J. Dziak, Chekisty: A History of the KGB, New York, Ivy Books, 1988, pp. 35–6. For numbers of executions in late Tsarist and early Soviet times, see ibid., pp. 191–3.

  24. On links between German South-West Africa and the Nazis, see Applebaum, Gulag, pp. 18–20.