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Review of John Gray's *Black Mass*
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.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 17, 2008 at 03:21 PM in Books | Permalink
Comments
Thanks.
I couldn't get through Straw Dogs. I'm glad I don't have to even try Black Mass.
Posted by: tom s. at Jan 17, 2008 3:41:12 PM
From the review: "Religious faith saturates secular utopian thought about the future. Atheism is just a 'Christian heresy,' with Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens its priests."
Hitchens isn't a systematic thinker, so I'll put him aside, but I don't see how anyone can get anything utopian out of Dawkins or Dennett; evolution is adaptive, but not "progressive." If the reviewer's characterization of Gray's views is right, then Gray must think neo-Darwinism and evolutionary psychology are one with the naive progressivism of Herbert Spencer, who could never quite shake the conviction that evolution was destined to follow a certain path.
Posted by: Franklin Harris at Jan 17, 2008 6:35:46 PM
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.
Posted by: TGGP at Jan 18, 2008 12:56:17 AM
Tyler, nice synopsis. Review made me like Gray more also. Do you think that Chronicle of Higher Ed has a
syle guide that requires people to come off as jerks?
Posted by: Robert C at Jan 18, 2008 1:19:04 AM
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.
Posted by: J. at Jan 18, 2008 6:50:23 AM
"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."
Yea! Good quote.
Some of his earlier stuff was not crazy. I got some use out of "Liberalism" (1995 ed. with a bonus crazy postscript) and his choice of commentaries for "J.S. Mill On Liberty in Focus" (1991). I couldn't really make sense of "Postliberalism" (1993), though---heavy on suggestion, light on explanation and argument.
Posted by: Lee at Jan 18, 2008 10:13:41 AM
What does he have in common with Catholicism?
Posted by: 8 at Jan 18, 2008 11:49:49 AM
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.
You may have misread Straw Dogs. Gray doesn't thinks that man is better or worse than nature. Gray thinks that man is part of nature. I do too. Pretty uncontroversial for the non-religious.
Where Gray is controversial here is that he believes that man cannot overcome this being part of nature. Like the other animals, man is driven by impulses that have evolved over the eons. Reason itself arises from and is the tool of these impulses, not the master. Therefore, the impulses are what will dictate the future of humanity, not reason. I don't know if I'd take it as far as Gray does, but there is truth in this too.
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.
Like others have written, Romano comes off like a jerk. It's Allan Bloom, not Alan Bloom. The editor eff'd up. Big deal. As someone else wrote at another site, pointing out such things as misspellings is more embarrassing for the pointer than for the pointie even when people are arguing in the comments section of a blog.
Then there are the personal attacks about Gray's being a publicity whore. I don't see Romano's justifications for this assertion. Did he just pull it out of his backside?
Romano's presentation of Gray's views on progress is weird. Progress is used in two ways in the book. The examples Romano gives say as much. Where's the contradiction?
I could go on with the examples but I grow weary. I'll end with saying that I also disagree with Romano's implication that being 'green' or taking a Taoist perspective on life makes one a crank.
Is Romano really an academic? I see he teaches philosophy at UPenn. It's a sad comment on our society when even professors act like rude Bill O'Reillys in public these days.
On another note, the funniest thing I've noticed is how the Libertarians are blasting Gray. I know apostasy must be punished. But doing it in such a classless way as I've read is very unbecoming.
Blindly following ideology almost always makes people into thoughtless and mean a--holes. Do the benefits of ideology really make up for this?
Posted by: Ponzi Q. Globalization at Jan 24, 2008 12:56:40 PM
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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