Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis

By John Gray

Fascinating, enlightening, and epic in scope, Black Mass looks at the historic and modern faces of Utopian ideology: Society’s Holy Grail, but at what price?

During the last century global politics was shaped by Utopian projects. Pursuing a dream of a world without evil, powerful states waged war and practised terror on an unprecedented scale. From Germany to Russia to China to Afghanistan, entire societies were destroyed.

Utopian ideologies rejected traditional faiths and claimed to be based in science. They were actually secular versions of the myth of Apocalypse–the belief in a world-changing event that brings history, with all its conflicts, to an end. The war in Iraq was the last of these attempts at creating a secular Utopia, promising a new era of democracy and producing blood-soaked anarchy and an emerging theocracy instead.

John Gray’s powerful and frightening new book argues that the death of Utopia does not mean peace. Instead it portends the resurgence of ancient myths, now in openly fundamentalist forms. Obscurely mixed with geo-political struggles for the control of natural resources, apocalyptic religion has returned as a major force in global conflict.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307374936

John Gray

John Gray, Ph.D., is the author of the international phenomenon Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which sold over a staggering 15 million copies worldwide. An internationally-renowned authority on communication and relationships, he is also a psychologist, writer and lecturer who has been conducting seminars in major cities for over 20 years. John lives in California with his wife Bonnie.

Reviews for Black Mass

[lukeasrodgers_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Gray is a masterful debunker of all utopian projects for world transformation--of both the left and right varieties. In addition to demonstrating the debt owed by modern movements as varied as Communism, neo-liberalism, and Nazism to millenarian ideas present in "Western" society since the birth of Christianity and particularly prevalent since the middle ages, Gray also argues that there is an "illiberal" core of the Enlightenment, and that the periodic violence and repression that attends putatively enlightened movements and projects is thus not accidental but necessary. The main mistake made by all utopian projects, according to Gray, is that they believe the ends/needs of humans are harmonizable, not in fundamental conflict, and can thus be achieved by the one, same system everywhere (or almost everywhere). Gray takes this to be clearly an absurdity, linked not to any rational conclusion but to humanity's need for myth. The book is well-argued, though it becomes one-sided at certain points due to an overly polemical orientation. Another minor criticism is that the chapter on the American wars of the 2000s and the misinformation strategies feels a bit out of place in the book. In any case, I find much of what Gray writes to be convincing, in spite of my wish at certain points to disbelieve him. Nevertheless, Gray's underlying skepticism of our capacity to A) change things for the better, and B) live at least MORE if not TOTALLY satisfying societies is, I think, ultimately over-stated. Given that these are the main undercurrents of the book, I suppose that I take what Gray writes to heart, but am not totally persuaded.

[jonfaith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Samizdat selection, one that broached a rasher of interests. Inconclusive for sure, it was still provocative.