While we find ourselves agreeing with many of the astute political comments that John Gray’s Black Mass proposes, we are left questioning many of the author’s philosophical conclusions. His comprehensible and persuasive belief that religion and American foreign policy should not mix is something we can only concur with, and his assertion that Christianity and a Christian concept of utopia have harmfully influenced the USA’s stance towards the world in recent decades seems equally attractive. We must also agree with Gray that “liberal societies are worth defending [but] in waging war to promote their values liberal societies are corrupted”. His astute suggestion that “no one type of regime can be everywhere the best”1 is also appealing, as is his view that climate change and terrorism are not issues that mankind is tackling effectively.

However, many of the central themes running throughout the book represent injustices, often to the extent of complete misrepresentation, to important issues and concepts. Gray wants to convince his reader that history, and belief in the progress of human history, is a myth that harms the future of human life. He attempts to convey his ideas on this issue on three fronts. Firstly, he tells us that humanity cannot tackle problems as a species and cannot form united attitudes to progress in a cohesive manner. Secondly, Gray tells us that the belief that history is coming to an end is an apocalyptic absurdity originating in a mythical Christianity. Thirdly, besides presenting a confused attitude to progress, he claims that because humans can never control their own destiny, progress will never be a good thing. I believe all three beliefs to be, at the very least, questionable.

Let us start by breaking these propositions down. Gray’s first claim is that humanity “cannot act as there is no collective entity with intentions and purposes” [my italics. While it is certainly the case that humanity is not possessed of one great mind that develops united attitudes towards problems, it is also the case that developments in communication have allowed humanity, as a species, to share knowledge, technological advancements and philosophies throughout the world, leading to a greater understanding of what is seen to be right and good. It is also the case that while the species cannot act, individual humans can act with the belief that they are acting on behalf of humanity. This belief that a human can commit an action because of an accepted outlook or attitude shared by humanity can lead to what would be seen as a human species response.

Gray claims that humans are simply “struggling animals each with its own passions and illusions”. This seems to me a needlessly pessimistic opinion of humans, but even if we ignore parts of human life involved in caring for others (through benevolent acts, love and generosity) Gray must still admit that we as humans all share common passions and illusions - passions and illusions which, once established as common, can be built upon to achieve a peaceful society in the same way that Hobbes’ Leviathan uses the human ‘passion’ for self-preservation and builds on it to create a stable and peaceful society.

Gray’s second claim condemns the apocalyptic belief that history is coming to an end as an absurdity rooted in a Christian myth. For this to be true, however, we must first make sure that Christianity is a myth, something that no living philosopher is able to do. Even if we do take a leap of ‘faith’ and assume that Christianity is a myth, Gray, because of his belief that it has been responsible for many of the world’s ills (surely a problem with the application of a religion, not the faith itself), is too eager to lay problems at its door. For example, Gray believes that it is a “Christian belief that humans can transcend their natural condition”: a factor he thinks has contributed to the damaging and misguided opinion that humanity can gain control over its own destiny. However, I think it is easy to see that human improvement is present in Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam, suggesting that the belief that humans can transcend their natural condition is a problem innate in humans who simply create religions as guides for achieving their betterment or increasing their purpose, rather than a belief unique to Christianity.

It is worth noting too that despite criticising doomsday theories that predict either the extinction of the human race or the end of time, Gray does not alter his own opinion that the “environmental crisis is one that humans can temper but not overcome”.
Thirdly we must deconstruct Gray’s confused assertion that because humans will never be able to control their own destiny, progress will never be a good thing. In some places Gray appears to forget himself and claim that there is no such thing as progress at all as “humanity cannot advance or retreat” but his most common attitude to progress is that it is not beneficial to mankind. In short, GreyGray claims that progress is what gave us Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, brought humanity to the brink of nuclear extinction and created biological weapons. Gray agrees with Spinoza that there is no reason to think that progress allows humanity to escape its cycle of order and anarchy and master its own destiny.

However I believe this is quite simply not the case. Gray’s assertion that “the growth of scientific knowledge cannot advance and improve the human condition” is mistaken. Medicine has made human lives longer, government has made our lives more secure, education has made our lives richer and communication has made our lives more informed. Humans are not, as GreyGray would have us believe, witless beasts.

Gray wants to call progress a chronologic journey but progress is far from this. ‘Progress’ is not Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia; progress is the defeat of both those regimes. To call nuclear war progress is a misuse of the word – what would be progress would be general world disarmament. Progress is not one random event after another; it is a course of distinct events that leads, perhaps slowly, to the improvement of the human condition.

Even Gray, at some points, seems to admit that progress for the good of the human species can be made. On page 194 Gray praises Kennan’s recommendations that averted a cold war crisis; it seems clear to me that Kennan’s views are progress in the sense that they advance humanity towards a world of peace, albeit nearly after a horrific detour towards nuclear war. Later Gray claims that to temper the destruction of climate change humans must “make the most of high-tech fixes”:, fixes that can only be obtained through scientific progress.

Finally we must tackle Gray’s most dangerous proposition. Because, Gray argues, humans cannot act in a united way and because the advantages of ‘progress’ are a myth, humanity will never master its own destiny. This is both pessimistic and illogical. Simply because humans have never mastered their own destiny we cannot safely predict that they never will. I may as well depress a man who has spent his life searching for black swans by telling him that there are no black swans simply because I have not seen any.

We can never predict future events with any degree of certainty and so we can never, with any strong degree of persuasiveness, predict what will happen to humanity. From this we can turn one of two ways: surrender, as Gray seems to want, to the opinion that we are disillusioned beasts who cannot meaningfully advance our knowledge or our condition. Or, as I think, we can live in the hope that we can make real and applicable progress to the improvement of the condition of the human species.