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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.… (more)
User reviews
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.