Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis Read Online Free PDF

Now as then it is believed that there is nothing to stop humans remaking themselves, and the world in which they live, as they please. This fantasy lies behind many aspects of contemporary culture, and in these circumstances it is
dystopian
thinking we most need. If we seek to understand our present condition we should turn to Huxley’s
Brave New World
or Orwell’s
1984
, Wells’s
Island of Dr Moreau
or Philip K. Dick’s
Do Androids Dreamof Electric Sheep?
, Zamiatin’s
We
or Nabokov’s
Bend Sinister
, Burroughs’
Naked Lunch
or Ballard’s
Super-Cannes
– prescient glimpses of the ugly reality that results from pursuing unrealizable dreams.
    The question remains how a utopia is to be recognized. How do we know when a project is unrealizable? Some of the greatest human advances were once believed to be impossible. The campaign to abolish slavery that began in the early nineteenth century was opposed on the ground that slavery will always be with us. Yet it was fortunately successful – the Slavery Abolition Act was passed in Britain in 1833 making slavery illegal throughout the British Empire, serfdom was abolished in Tsarist Russia in 1861 and in 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment was passed in the US making slavery illegal. These acts removed a barbarous practice and expanded human freedom. Does this not show the value of the utopian imagination? I think not. To seek to end slavery was not to pursue an unrealizable goal. Many societies have lacked slavery, and to abolish the institution was only to achieve a state of affairs others have taken for granted. At the same time, the condition of servitude was not abolished. During the twentieth century slave labour was used on a vast scale in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and Maoist China. 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. A project can also be utopian without being unrealizable under any circumstances – it is enough if it can be known to be impossible under any circumstances that can be brought about or foreseen. The project of engineering a western-style market economy in post-communist Russia fell into this category, and so did that of establishing liberal democracy in post-Saddam Iraq. In each case it was clear from the start that the necessary conditions of success werelacking and could not be created by any programme of action. A little insight into human nature and history was all that was needed to be able to know in advance that these experiments would end in a familiar mix of crime and farce.
    Disasters of this magnitude do not come about as a result of ignorance, error or disinformation – though doubtless all three were at work. They are consequences of a type of thinking that has lost any sense of reality. Defining a sense of reality is a tricky business, but it is not difficult to know when it is lacking. For the utopian mind the defects of every known society are not signs of flaws in human nature. They are marks of universal repression – which, however, will soon be ended. History is a nightmare from which we must awake, and when we do we will find that human possibilities are limitless. To assess utopian projects as merely flawed exercises in rational policy-making is to miss the point. Such adventures are products of a view of the world, once found only in religious cults and revolutionary sects but