Black Mass is a satanic parody of the Catholic Mass, a central act of worship in the Roman Catholic Church that commemorates the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Using this deliberate and profane inversion of a holy rite, John Gray delivers a scathing critique of Western thought in broad strokes. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the book dismisses nearly all Western political ideologies—from utopianism and Marxism to liberalism—as mere heresies of Christianity.
Gray is well known for his skepticism about human progress. He has been on my radar for quite some time, but only after watching a recent debate between him and Francis Fukuyama was I finally convinced that his books were probably worth reading. My hunch was right. I thoroughly enjoyed Black Mass, the pessimistic—sometimes disheartening—message notwithstanding.
According to Gray, the ideological foundation of the West is the pursuit of the salvation of humanity, which gives rise to historical teleology—the belief that history has a purpose. This idea entered Western thought with Christianity. As Gray put it,
Christians believed history had an end in both senses: it has a pre-determined purpose, and when that was achieved it would come to a close.
In the broadest terms, historical teleology views human history as a struggle between good and evil that is destined to end with the triumph of good and the transformation of humanity. This idea, Gray notes, originated in Zoroastrianism, a proto-monotheistic religion of ancient Persia.
What is Gray against?
In short, almost everything, and it all began with millenarianism.
The Book of Revelation teaches that Christ will return to defeat Satan and establish a thousand-year kingdom of peace. Christian millenarianism, which Gray traces back to Joachim of Fiore (1132–1202), builds on this belief. Its novelty lies in the insistence that the return of Christ will usher in a transformation that is:
(i) imminent, because the present world is seen as irredeemably corrupt;
(ii) collective, in that it affects not just individuals but humanity as a whole;
(iii) terrestrial, meaning the kingdom is to be realized on earth, not in heaven or the afterlife; and
(iv) miraculous, since it depends on divine intervention.
In contrast, traditional Christian doctrine since St. Augustine has emphasized an unbridgeable gulf between the City of Man and the City of God, rooted in the belief that human life is hopelessly marred by original sin. Accordingly, it rejects the notion that evil can be defeated in this world. It is in this sense, Gray argues, that millenarianism represents a “heretical reversion to Christian origins”—hence the analogy to a Black Mass.
The central thesis of the book is that millenarianism is a highly contagious ideological virus that has deeply and repeatedly penetrated Western thought. As we shall see next, Gray argues that many of humanity’s self-inflicted disasters can ultimately be traced to this infection.
Utopianism
Humans have never stopped dreaming of a harmonious and prosperous society in which everyone lives happily ever after. However, such visions were initially located in a distant past, severed from the present by myth or rupture. Plato’s ideal republic, for instance, existed in a Golden Age before history; so too did Confucius’s legendary era of the “three generations” (三代).
Millenarianism is unique in its belief that a utopian society is achievable in the foreseeable future. Many Enlightenment thinkers inherited this belief but secularized it. Rejecting the possibility of divine intervention, they designated humans as the agents of transformation. Yet, humanistic as their ideology may appear, it “cannot do without demonology.” Utopia requires a struggle against evil forces—those said to have corrupted society or obstructed the path to perfection.
According to Gray, it was the French Revolution that first embraced violence as a legitimate tool for transforming society. Until then, he writes, “no one believed violence could perfect humanity”—not even in Medieval Europe. For the Jacobins, violence became not only a means of self-defense against internal and external enemies but also an instrument of civic education and social engineering. True revolutionaries, they believed, must show no mercy toward the enemies of human progress.
As Maximilien Robespierre put it eligantly, “pity is treason.” Chairman Mao understood this well, though his rhetoric was intentionally crude to resonate with his peasant base. “Revolution is not about wining and dining people,” he proclaimed. “It is the violence of one class against another.”(革命不是请客吃饭。革命是暴动，是一个阶级针对另一个阶级的暴力行动。)
Gray’s point is clear: there is a direct line between this secularized form of millenarianism and the most horrific political ideologies of the modern time.
Communism
Marxism holds that history will culminate in a classless society so prosperous that every person will be free—not just politically, but liberated from the tyranny of material necessity. However, the path to this ultimate freedom runs through the dictatorship of the proletariat and the abolition of private property.
Russia and China shed a tremendous amount of blood trying to turn this enticing blueprint into reality—only to arrive at demonstrably tragic outcomes. Gray argues that the failures of these regimes did not stem from the supposedly backward cultures or traditions of the host countries—so-called “oriental despotism.” Instead, he writes, Russia’s misfortune was due to her exposure to “the Enlightenment in one of its most virulent forms.”
In the same vein, Mao’s China was driven by “an Enlightenment ideal of universal emancipation” in its relentless effort to remake an Oriental tyranny in the image of Western ideals. Liberals often interpret post-Mao China as an experiment in re-westernization. Gray disagrees. Ideologically, he argues, post-Mao China has been moving toward de-westernization—and the belief that globalization and modernization would bring China closer to the West has always been, in his view, a pipe dream.
Judging by recent geopolitical developments, he may well have been right.
Nazism
Like communism, Nazism was also a brainchild of the modern West. The Nazis shared with secular millenarians a vision of a corrupt world spiraling toward catastrophe. Where Nazism differed was in its overwhelming negativity—a fixation not on the content of a future paradise but on the obstacles to it.
The Nazis were most notorious for their racism and superstitious hatred of Jews. Neither was new in the West. While racial prejudice may be rooted in human nature, Gray writes that “racism is a product of the Enlightenment.” He goes so far as to argue that liberal racism—unlike its tribal counterpart—left open “the possibility of the forcible destruction of other cultures, and even—if all else failed—genocide.”
Antisemitism, meanwhile, was a defining feature of medieval millenarianism, which often portrayed Jews as “devils with the horns of a goat… whose goal was the destruction of Christendom, even of the world.” When Hitler implemented his infamous Final Solution, it is conceivable that he believed he was doing the world a favor—ridding it of a mystical evil force, whose elimination was a necessary precondition for the ascension of the German Volk to a state of harmony.
Radical Islamism
I had always assumed that Islam must bear some—if not most—responsibility for the rise of “radical Islamism,” which has waged an asymmetric war against the West for decades. However, Gray has a different take. According to him, the intellectual founder of radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb, was deeply influenced by European thinkers, particularly Nietzsche.
Qutb’s conception of a revolutionary vanguard dedicated to the overthrow of corrupt Islamic regimes and the establishment of a society without formal power structures owes nothing to Islamic theology and a great deal to Lenin.
In this light, jihadists, in their pursuit of a world of faithful, have much in common with the Jacobins, who were inspired by Rousseau’s ideas of popular sovereignty and the general will. Like the Jacobins, they see revolutionary violence as a purifying force. Like the Jacobins, they blame the sorry state of their world on conspiracies—only the Jacobins targeted counterrevolutionaries, while the jihadists’ enemy is “the West.”
Perhaps the only major innovation of radical Islam is its theological justification for suicide attacks as acts of personal purity that guarantee one’s place in heaven.
What surprised me most was Gray’s reprimand of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism emerged as a reaction against communism and socialism. It was founded on the belief that the free market could do everything: organize the economy, foster trade, and promote peace—if only governments would leave it alone. Thanks to this immense power, the free market was seen as destined to win over the world, thus representing a logical and desirable end of economic history.
These beliefs, Gray contends, are closer to religious faith than to the results of scientific inquiry. According to him, Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” reflects a kind of faith-based political economy—but Smith himself never tried, as some of his 20th-century followers did, to “deduce free markets from dubious axioms of rational choice.” On the contrary, Smith understood the flaws of market societies and never entertained the illusion of an omnipotent market that naturally regulates, stabilizes, and corrects itself.
Therefore, it was not the religious Smith but his secular disciples—the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—who turned the free market into a religion. In his famous Road to Serfdom, Hayek argued that “a successfully planned economy is a Utopia.” And yet, Gray observes, “he failed to notice that the same is true of the self-regulating market.” Hence the irony: “the free market became a religion only when its basis in religion was denied.”
Like all fundamentalists, Gray quips, neoliberals ended up worshiping tenets that was “a caricature of the tradition they seek to revive.”
Neoconservatism
Like neoliberals, neoconservatives embraced a radicalized version of progressive thinking—the idea that humanity is gradually progressing toward a just, equal, and inclusive society in which everyone is entitled to, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Like neoliberals, neoconservatives claimed access to a universal truth. What sets them apart was their emphasis on aggressively proselytizing their truth around the world. This mission was often justified by the dubious claim that liberty could not be secure anywhere unless it was secured everywhere. As George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address:
The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.
Neoconservatives interpreted the West’s triumph in the Cold War as a vindication of their historical teleology. As Fukuyama famously wrote in The End of History:
What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Intoxicated by such utopian thinking, neoconservatives eagerly took up the project of preaching—and, in some cases, forcefully installing—this “final form of human government” across the globe. That their deeds bear the religious imprint of medieval millenarianism is evidenced by two convictions.
First, even preemptive wars are justifiable if they further “human progress,” echoing the Jacobin belief in violence as a purifying force.
Second, “truth is whatever serves the cause.”
On this second point, Gray’s tart commentary on the bogus casus belli for the Iraq War—fabricated and sold to the world under the watch of Tony Blair and George W. Bush—deserves full quotation:
It is not so much that he [Blair] is economical with the truth as that he lacks the normal understanding of it… When he engages in what is commonly judged to be deception he is only anticipating the new world that he is helping to bring about… When Bush and Cheney rejected intelligence that conflicted with the case for war they were not suppressing the truth… For these seers, victory was the same as truth—not truth of the ordinary kind, to be sure, but the esoteric truth that is concealed in the deceiving mirror of fact.
Of course, this notion of a “higher truth”—a truth not based on facts but on its utility to “the cause”—was a hallmark of modern totalitarian regimes. The Soviet Union’s infamous propaganda outlet was aptly named Pravda, the Russian word for “truth.”
What is Gray for?
As the long list above suggests, Gray’s cynicism can be overwhelming. While what he detests is laid bare in the book for all to see, it is harder to pinpoint what he supports. This is understandable, since Black Mass is written primarily as a critique of Western thought.
At his core, I believe Gray is a pacifist who sees human institutions as instruments for managing conflict. He condemns all violence, regardless of the moral justifications made in its name. This conviction leads him to embrace what can only be described as a morally relativist position. In the book, he quotes the Bulgarian-French historian Tzvetan Todorov to argue that there is little moral difference between America burning Japanese civilians alive with atomic bombs and Nazi Germany murdering millions of Jews in gas chambers. It is a revealing argument worth quoting in full:
Atomic bombs killed fewer people than the famine in the Ukraine, fewer than the Nazis slaughtered in the Ukraine and Poland. But what the bombs and the slaughters have in common is that their perpetrators all thought they were but a means to achieve a good. However, the bombs have another feature: they are a source of pride to those who made and dropped them … whereas totalitarian crimes, even if they were considered by their perpetrators to be useful and even praiseworthy political acts, were kept secret … Both the Soviet and the Nazi leadership knew that the world would damn them if it knew exactly what they had done. They were not wrong, because as soon as their crimes were revealed they were treated as the emblems of absolute evil. Things are quite different in the case of the atomic bombs, and for that very reason, even if the crime is less grave, the moral mistake of the people who killed in the name of democracy is greater.
It is this desire to preserve peace and minimize violence that compels Gray to reject the idea of progress itself. As the term has come to be understood in the postwar world, progress implies that human beings can improve society through reason, collective action, and moral development.
Case against progress
Progressives assume that ethics and politics follow discoverable laws, much like those in science, and that society improves cumulatively: each step forward enables further advances, and the elimination of one evil paves the way for eradicating others.
They believe that human beings are born with natural rights and that governments exist to protect them. Freedom, in this view, is a natural condition that emerges once tyranny is removed. These principles are treated as axiomatic in modern legal documents such as the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights.
Unlike Marxists, progressives don’t always promise a full-fledged utopia. Yet the logic of historical teleology is all the same: an infinite process of improvement implies a convergence to a world far better than the present, and human progress will continue until liberty and universal rights are secured for all.
Gray builds his case against progressivism on three core arguments.
First, universal human rights derived from Faith rather than Reason.
Thomas Aquinas laid the groundwork for natural law theory, which was later used to justify universal rights and moral standards. But Aquinas’s law was part of the “eternal law of God,” revealed to humans through Reason. Similarly, Locke’s notion of a state of nature is inextricable from his belief in divine creation: we are all equally free because we are all made by God, and harming oneself or others is wrong because it violates God’s property. Gray rejects this conception of freedom as a natural condition. To him, freedom is a product of the modern nation-state, whose formation often involved the violent integration or exclusion of “alien” groups.
Second, imperfection is a permanent feature of the human condition.
Humans are, as Gray puts it, “an extremely violent species,” for whom a conflict-free existence is impossible. We want incompatible things—excitement and tranquility, freedom and security, truth and vanity—and cannot agree on what morality or the ideal society should look like. There is no single moral truth, only visions of perfection inherited from religious tradition.
Liberal thinkers since Hobbes have placed their faith in rationality to resolve conflict. Because humans “dread violent death more than anything,” they would supposedly choose peace through mechanisms like the Leviathan (Hobbes), the social contract (Locke), or democratic institutions. But Gray argues this rationalization leaves out the most intractable human drive: the need for meaning. “Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”
Third, there is no guarantee that the “better angels of our nature” will prevail.
This view starkly contrasts with optimistic humanists like Steven Pinker, who argue that society has become progressively more peaceful. Gray disagrees. Knowledge may accumulate, but “humans do not become any more civilized as a result.” On the contrary, they remain prone to barbarism—especially “when it comes clothed in virtue.” Material prosperity has grown alongside technological and scientific progress, but so has the capacity for destruction.
Gray’s model of history
Gray concludes that the idea of ever-continuing progress is an illusion, as it presupposes a fundamental transformation in human behavior. Instead, he offers a model of history as a cyclical movement between order and anarchy:
Anarchy could be overcome as evolving patterns of social cooperation crystallized into civil institutions; but the order in society that resulted would regularly break down, and when this happened no social contract could restore order. States are at the mercy of events as much as any other human institution, and over the longer course of history all of them fail.
Gray’s model strikes me as a rather precise depiction of Chinese history between the founding of the first unified empire—the Qin Dynasty in 221 BCE—and the abdication of the last Qing emperor in 1911 CE. During those two millennia, China witnessed the rise and fall of twelve major dynasties and around 400 emperors. Each episode, regardless of its origin, followed a remarkably consistent script: a brief period of order and prosperity, followed by inevitable descent into corruption, rebellion, and collapse.
This historical regularity became so deeply embedded in Chinese consciousness that it gave rise to idioms like “Thirty years on the east bank, thirty years on the west bank” (三十年河东，三十年河西) and “That which is long divided will unite; that which is long united will divide” (分久必合，合久必分)—as well as poetry such as “When the state rises, the people suffer; when it falls, the people suffer” (兴，百姓苦；亡，百姓苦).
My history education in China was entirely shaped by Marxist historical materialism, which depicts history as a linear progression from primitive communal societies to utopian communism. The inherent contradiction between this teleological framework and the cyclical pattern of Chinese dynastic history was never acknowledged, let alone explained. According to my teachers, Chinese history was simply another data point confirming the greatness of Marxist theory.
After moving to the U.S., I began to view Chinese history from Qin to Qing as a profound anomaly in the supposed universal arc of progress. For whatever reason, China appeared locked by historical contingencies in a perpetual cycle of dynastic rise and fall. This trap stymied institutional innovation and long-term economic growth, subjecting generations of Chinese to recurring, man-made catastrophes.
The traumatic historical experience etched into the collective psyche a deep-seated urge to trade stability for anything, at any price. As a result, the ability to provide stability remains the most compelling justification for the rule of any Chinese regime—repressive or otherwise. It also explains why today’s Chinese state prioritizes “maintaining internal stability” (维稳) over nearly all other governmental functions.
I think Gray would understand this impulse. His rejection of progressivism reflects a similar longing for peace and security—not through utopian schemes, but through humility, restraint, and a sober understanding of human nature.
Final remarks
I don’t disagree with Gray’s analysis of the very real danger posed by progressive fervor. Progress and fanaticism may well have a symbiotic relationship, and violence may be the price humanity must pay to move forward. However, the hopelessness offered by Gray feels darker and more despondent than the evils he so dreadfully warns us about. If Chinese history is any guide, there is no reason to believe that subscribing to his worldview offers a greater prospect for peace and stability.
Of course, a good philosopher like Gray surely knows that some readers will find his view of human affairs “dispiriting.” He does offer a solution: God. Put bluntly, Gray suggests that if humans need to find meaning in life, they’d better get it from God than from any other nonsenses.
Gray regards religion as an indispensable human institution. He mocks modern atheists armed with Reason and Science—Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens come to mind— for trying to make religion disappear by simply “showing it is an illusion.” To Gray, religion persists because it serves genuine human needs, the most important of which are to “live with what cannot be known” and to “find meaning in the chances of life.” That’s why heavy-handed suppression of religious belief has never succeeded. Instead,
like repressed sexual desire, faith returns, often in grotesque forms, to govern the lives of those who deny it.
Gray’s solution is all the more remarkable considering that he himself is an atheist. But he does not see this as a contradiction. In Gray’s mind, he is simply prescribing medicine to soothe and pacify his fellow Homo sapiens who cannot help themselves. In doing so, he tells yet another version of Plato’s noble lie: that “while philosophers may know the truth, they also know that truth is deadly to the mass of humankind.”
Marco Nie, July 27 2025