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Get real! It’s an antidote to these utopians
Strange bedfellows they may be, but they have all used a vision of a perfect society in their quest for power, says Chris Price
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia.
By John Gray. Penguin click here to buy
JOHN Gray is an Oxford professor of politics who cares little for orthodox academic specialties.
His book – Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia – is an encyclopedic exploration of the social behaviour of the human race, in which he deconstructs with happy abandon many previous attempts to explore his subject. It covers a wide canvas and as a result the book has already attracted a variety of epithets – from “brilliant” to a “load of bollocks”.
At its core is the proposition that politics and religion, so far from being separate human quests following different tracks, are involved in much the same activity – peddling an unattainable but highly seductive utopia, with myths of magical happiness at the end of its rainbow.
Secular politics and sacred religion both have timeline narratives to define their utopias. Secular is derived from the Latin word saeculum which came to mean a period of around 100 years – a historical stretch convenient for the self-esteem of politically minded messiahs and emperors who wanted their deeds recorded and remembered.
Priests were more vague about time but were clear that the world would come to an end pretty soon in a glorious apocalypse or revelation – each (Greek and Latin) word connoting the opening-up to mankind of absolute faith and belief which would be followed by the allocation of appropriate rewards and punishments – paradise in heaven for the righteous and damnation in hell for the wicked.
Gray does not mock this story; he compares it with the way in which politicians use their spectres of utopia to gather in their disciples. Then others get branded with the same utopian heresy.
Secular missionaries find themselves tainted with religious motives. John Locke was a “slave to protestant theology”. The atheists William Godwin and Thomas Paine were steeped in Methodism. The supposed separation of church and state in the US was always and is still today a sham, as Republican neo-conservatives use Jews and fundamental Christians to consolidate their political power base. Revolutionary politicians in France, Russia and England collaborated in offering apocalyptic promises of a better society, almost invariably filched from Christian texts. Even Fukuyama was, if not plagiarising, at least heavily influenced by religious texts.
There is nothing particularly new about a tract of this kind. What is impressive is Gray’s ability to give chapter and verse for every stage of his thesis and the surprising vigour with which he does so. Political revolutionaries from Cromwell to Marx were utopians. So is al- Qaeda today.
It is difficult not to get the feeling that Gray, in his anti-utopian crusade, has much emotionally in common with his adversaries. He is especially convincing on the self-destructive mechanisms of contemporary UK politics.
Mrs Thatcher was bent on destroying socialism in Britain; but once she was perceived to have done so, her party became irrelevant to the electorate and her successor as prime minister proved politically impotent. Blair has now put the Labour party through much the same pirouette. Having modernised Labour and routed traditional conservatism, both his party and his successor have become irrelevant, as the Conservatives find a nice new young leader to redefine a new conservatism. The result seems to be that political parties are only attractive to the electorate when they flirt with the voters as the exciting utopian mistress rather than the boring frumpy wife – a transformation which Gordon Brown is finding it difficult to undergo.
Both religious congregations and the populace in the voting booths seem to enjoy deserting their churches and throwing government ministers out of power from time to time, especially when they are not being offered utopia on a plate.
Politics is an addictive game which pulls down the mighty from their seats at regular intervals, in the same way the Bible insists that God does from time to time.
Gray distinguishes between utopias. He sees Adam Smith’s “hidden” hand as “a utopia suited for imperfect creatures”; it thus escapes censure and is accepted as a tolerable utopia. I half expected him to add his own utopian “hidden hand” theory alongside that of Adam Smith to his list of tolerable utopias – the self-destructive fate of political parties in modern democracies under which success always contains the seeds of failure to come, producing a benign political balance, in the same way as Adam Smith’s contributes to an economic one. But this might have been a scientific bridge too far.
The final section is entitled Living in an Intractable World: The Lost Tradition of Realism. He offers “realism” as an alternative to the false myth of utopia – which he fears will lead us all to destruction in a world overshadowed by global warming. It is a strangely abrupt and unlikely conclusion.
Realism is just one more “ism”, a less rigid and more sophisticated subset of rationalism, but still capable over time of morphing into utopian superstition was religion and politics have. But the strength of realism is in its associations with common sense and flexibility.
Many people live their lives happily juggling their own sense of realism with the external pomposities of religion and politics and understand the reality of the accidental, much as Harold Macmillan did when he encompassed his view of realistic politics in the phrase: “Events, dear boy.”
At one stage Gray quotes a suggestion that realism is “viewed with suspicion in the West”. Thankfully, this is only true of his cognoscenti colleagues. The book brilliantly exposes the shortcomings of the world’s political and religious cartels. Gray should leave it at that and let commonsense realism – a mixture of genuine desire for a better world and prudence in going about finding it – flourish in world free of both sacred and secular priestly cartels.
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