What does it take to be billed as 'the most important living philosopher' by Will Self? Or lauded by J.G. Ballard for challenging 'all our assumptions about what it is to be human'? Surely a fine line in pessimism, a flamboyant style and a bulldozer approach to conventional pieties. And not a tendency for leisurely academic mind-games. To put it bluntly, John Gray thinks we're doomed. His latest book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, argues that creeds that presume we can remake society are holdovers of Christian apocalyptic thinking - the illusion that a harmonious world will follow an event of mass destruction that eliminates conflict. With the Enlightenment, the yearning to see human history as progressing towards a goal became secular rather than religious. Gray says secular ideologies - from Marxism and Nazism to extreme forms of liberalism and conservatism - contain this repressed religious inheritance. By believing that paradise on Earth can be created by force, the utopian mind justifies mass bloodshed. An emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, Gray speaks as a reformed ideologue. He won a mainstream audience with False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), in which he denounced the neoliberal ideology he once promoted as an early champion of Thatcherism. British commentator Francis Wheen has criticised Gray for his ideological flip-flops. In Hayek on Liberty (1984), Gray surveyed the work of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher 's hero, Friedrich von Hayek, and won accolades from its subject, whom Gray later dismissed as a 'neoliberal ideologue'. In Beyond the New Right (1993), Gray wrote: 'It is by returning to the homely truths of traditional conservatism that we are best protected from the illusions of ideology.' But with Endgames (1997), Gray declared: 'Tory politics has reached a dead end.' Yet Gray, 60, doesn't see himself as having thrown ideological curve-balls. 'My anti-utopian stance has been completely consistent. But in the meantime there have been huge geopolitical changes.' Gray says when communism collapsed, utopianism migrated to the right. Political economist Francis Fukuyama announced 'the end of history' and the birth of an era of worldwide 'democratic capitalism'. Gray retorted that history would resume with ethno-nationalist, religious and resource-based wars. He advised a pragmatic and 'non-ideological' approach to post-cold war conflicts. Instead, the right followed Fukuyama by envisaging global market capitalism as an unstoppable force of nature and a panacea. 'The characteristics which had been features of communist thinking came about on the right - the militant progressivism, indifference to the casualties of progress and the belief that the whole world was moving towards some single model that should be accelerated by force,' Gray says. After breaking with the Tories, Gray became a supporter of Tony Blair's New Labour. But when Blair continued Thatcher's economic project and later became a neo-con, Gray willed a plague on both houses. History doesn't necessarily bear out Gray's belief that utopianism is inevitably destructive. He says campaigns are not utopian if potentially they can be realised. But many historical strides, like abolishing slavery, would at one time have seemed as implausible as making Iraq democratic. The attempt to bring democracy to Iraq was utopian, Gray says, because even with better planning it would still have failed. In Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (2003), Gray challenges the clich? that the September 11 attacks were an assault on modernity by medieval throwbacks. The idea of using terror to refashion the world was absent in medieval times, Gray says, emerging only with the French Revolution. He suggests the invasion of Iraq sounded the death knell for secular utopianism. 'Iraq practically precludes another large-scale experiment along those lines. No one now, except a few post-Trotskyite neo-conservatives in bunkers, talks about overturning all the regimes in the Middle East and replacing them with democracy.' Gray says his harshest detractors are 'evangelical humanists', hostile to his beliefs that secular movements renew Christian patterns of thought and that 20th-century tyrannies were byproducts of Enlightenment ideology. 'They've said things like, 'Well, the Enlightenment can't have any role in these episodes because the Enlightenment is pluralistic and tolerant,' which reminds me of those gormless Christians who say, 'Christianity couldn't have any role in the Inquisition because it's a religion of love.'' The role of atheism in Maoist and Stalinist totalitarianism is rarely acknowledged, says Gray. 'Religion was relentlessly persecuted. Mao launched his attack on Tibet with the slogan, 'Religion is poison'.' Gray excoriates the recent fad for books attacking religion by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Michel Onfray and Richard Dawkins. 'The difference between religious believers and secular rationalists is that religious believers are used to questioning their myths, whereas secular rationalists think their myths are literally true.' Asked if he is a nihilist, Gray laughs. 'Conventional, respectable thinkers always think that anyone who steps outside their mythology is nihilistic,' he says. 'The belief in progress in the west, as a cumulative advance in ethics and politics, is only two or three centuries old. Was Augustine a nihilist? Was the Buddha? Was Maimonides? Were the great Hindu philosophers? Were the ancient Greeks?' Gray doesn't think philosophy should generate ambitious programmes for society. He sees its role as infusing political debate with 'a degree of historical understanding and scepticism'. His work mixes philosophy, political science, history and theology, an approach he inherited from his mentor, Isaiah Berlin. In their final conversation, Berlin told his prot?g? his foremost influence was not another philosopher but Russian memoirist, novelist and essayist Alexander Herzen. Gray also believes the most penetrating books about society have come from writers rather than political theorists, noting: 'Berlin is an exception.' Gray met Berlin at Oxford, where he won a scholarship to study politics, philosophy and economics in 1968. What made a working-class student become a proselytiser of Thatcherism? One can only speculate because Gray refuses to discuss his childhood or personal life. The few available facts say he grew up poor in northern England and his father was a shipyard joiner. He's now an enemy of the right, but no leftie. Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton attacked his Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002) as a 'dangerous, despairing book [that] like all the ugly right-wing ecology for which humanity is just an excrescence, is shot through with a kind of intellectual equivalent of genocide'. Gray says philosophers who believe humans are distinct from animals and masters of their own destiny are prisoners of the Christian fallacy of human uniqueness. He dismisses the Kyoto Treaty as 'irrelevant' and sees greens as motivated by the same folly of world transformation as neo-cons, free marketeers and radical Islamists. 'The idea that we can resolve issues of climate change by switching to an economy based on windmills and solar power when you have 9 or 10 billion human beings who want the comfort and security the richer parts of the world have is a fantasy.' Gray says ecological degradation is caused by overpopulation rather than industrialisation or global capitalism. Instead of looking to reform human institutions, he sees environmental destruction as inevitable. It is a view perhaps as deterministic as the neoliberal notion of inexorable global 'market democracy' that Gray rails against. 'The modern myth of progress is that what is gained in one part of history can be retained in subsequent periods,' he says. 'But whereas knowledge grows, humans don't change much.' Writer's notes Name: John Gray Age: 60 Genres: political philosophy, intellectual history, theology, political science Home: Oxford Latest book: Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Allen Lane) Current projects: collecting his best articles from three decades in a single volume; planning a book on the early Bolshevik era and another on the place of science in contemporary thought Other works: False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998); Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002); Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (2003); Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (2004) Other jobs: professor at Oxford University and the London School of Economics; political columnist; book reviewer What the papers say: 'The most lucid and compelling writer about political theory since Isaiah Berlin.' The Independent on Sunday 'As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs. In Kant's time the creed of conventional people was Christian, now it is humanist. Nor are these two faiths so different from one another.' - From Straw Dogs
