There’s lots of piling on in this one. Fifteen years ago I predicted to Jim Buchanan that Gray would end up a Catholic; I stand by that claim, as he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. The final step is when you challenge whether man is any better than nature at all, and that’s what happened in his previous book Straw Dogs. I’ve long enjoyed Gray’s anti-utopianism, his ability to challenge conventional views, and his willingness to change his mind, but this review does score some telling points.
Thanks.
I couldn’t get through Straw Dogs. I’m glad I don’t have to even try Black Mass.
That review made me like Gray more and want to read Black Mass. I briefly discussed some other what’s-wrong-with-the-world-today books from England that I haven’t read here.
Gray is one of those rare thinkers to whom the meanest thing one can do in a review is quote him. Reading the review, one might think that the reviewer comes off as a snide jerk who treats Grey as a cartoon. But when one actually reads Gray’s recent work, one discovers that the reviewer was being charitable.
What does he have in common with Catholicism?
I started reading the book, it sounded really interesting, but the first chapter pretty much put me off. He seems to be one of these guys with an all-encompassing theory. Wherever Gray looks, he finds utopian thinking that is really just an expressian of Christian eschatology. Almost any attempt at making society better can be subsumed under the heading “utopianism”. The problem is, he has no real criteria to nail down what distinguishes utopianism from striving for progress. One definition he comes up with that utopianism must have impossible goals, but he immediately weakens that to say that even if the goals are not impossible in principal but it looks like they can’t be achieved under current circumstances, it is utopianism. Huh???
At one point, he cites the abolition of slavery as a non-utopian counter-example but it is utterly unconvinging. What about women suffrage, or universal health care? niversal health care is obviously not impossible but it may be argued that it is impossible “in the US under current circumstances”. What about changing the circumstances, then?
Women suffrage looked impossible to most people (men and women) in the 19th century. They argued it was against human nature. Gray’s own arguments about the impossibility of overcoming what he calls the “flaws” in “human nature” echo the arguments that reactionaries of all times have used against *any* notion of progressive social change. They usually turned out to be wrong and are long forgotten.
Gray really annoyed me when he cited the peasants’ revolts in the 16th century as doomed religious utopianism. Probably some of these peasants were inspired by millenarian religious visions but most of them simply stood up against massive injustice and the miserable conditions that were imposed on them by the ruling class. That their revolt failed, and many of them paid with their lives (Gray makes it almost sound like they got what they deserved), is no proof that their cause was hopeless a priori, or that their hope for a better, juster society was wrong.
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