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.