By John Gray
Attention-grabbing, enlightening, and epic in scope, Black Mass appears to be like on the ancient and glossy faces of Utopian ideology: Society’s Holy Grail, yet at what price?
During the final century international politics was once formed by way of Utopian tasks. Pursuing a dream of a global with out evil, strong states waged conflict and practised terror on an unparalleled scale. From Germany to Russia to China to Afghanistan, whole societies have been destroyed.
Utopian ideologies rejected conventional faiths and claimed to be established in technology. They have been truly secular types of the parable of Apocalypse–the trust in a world-changing occasion that brings historical past, with all its conflicts, to an finish. The warfare in Iraq used to be the final of those makes an attempt at making a secular Utopia, promising a brand new period of democracy and generating blood-soaked anarchy and an rising theocracy instead.
John Gray’s robust and scary new booklet argues that the demise of Utopia doesn't suggest peace. as a substitute it portends the resurgence of old myths, now in brazenly fundamentalist varieties. Obscurely combined with geo-political struggles for the keep an eye on of usual assets, apocalyptic faith has back as an immense strength in worldwide conflict.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Attention-grabbing, enlightening, and epic in scope, Black Mass appears to be like on the old and sleek faces of Utopian ideology: Society’s Holy Grail, yet at what cost? over the past century international politics used to be formed via Utopian initiatives. Pursuing a dream of an international with no evil, strong states waged warfare and practised terror on an exceptional scale.
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Additional info for Black Mass: How Religion Led The World Into Crisis
Sample text
Humans were not the tradable commodities they had been in chattel slavery; but they were resources that could be used at will, and exploited until they died. Slavery was reinvented in new forms, as horrible as any in the past. At the start of the twenty-first century, a form of chattel slavery has re-emerged in the form of human trafficking. A project is utopian if there are no circumstances under which it can be realized. All the dreams of a society from which coercion and power have been for ever removed – Marxist or anarchist, liberal or technocratic – are utopian in the strong sense that they can never be achieved because they break down on the enduring contradictions of human needs.
If there is anything resembling a perfect society it is located in the past – it was never envisioned that the cosmic struggle could end in victory for light. Even Zoroaster may not have believed its triumph was preordained. Rather than announcing the end of the world, Zoroastrian texts call followers of the prophet to a struggle whose outcome remains in doubt. 9 This dualistic view of the world was inherited by the religion of Mani – the later Iranian prophet born around AD 216 in Babylonia and martyred as a heretic by the Zoroastrian authorities in 277, whose teaching had such a deep influence on Augustine.
The term Gnosticism comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means ‘knowledge’, and in the turbulent world of early Christianity, when nearly every aspect of Christian belief was intensely contested, Gnostics embodied the belief that salvation comes to those – perhaps only a few – who possess a type of esoteric spiritual insight and consists not in physical immortality in this world but in liberation from the human body and the material world. Though this set of beliefs had little in common with those of Jesus and was condemned by the early Church, it remained a strand in Christianity.