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.