Free Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis by John Gray

human action, and – though why this was so was never explained – they would be found to be harmonious. This was the archetypal utopian idea in a modern guise, and it was vastly influential. In the late nineteenth century it shaped Marx’s view that under communism the government of men would be replaced by the administration of things. It inspired Herbert Spencer’s dream of a future society based on
laissez-faire
industrialism, and in a later version it inspired Hayek’s delusive vision of a spontaneous social order created by the free market.
    In the early twentieth century Positivist ideas were embraced by the far Right. Charles Maurras, the anti-Semitic ideologue of the Vichy regime, was a lifelong admirer of Comte. The Positivists were committed to developing a science of society and invented the term ‘sociology’; but they were insistent that such a science must be based in human physiology. Like many Enlightenment thinkers at the time, Comte was a devotee of phrenology – the nineteenth-century pseudo-science that claimed to be able to identify the mental and moral faculties of people and their tendency to criminality by studying the shape of their skulls – and believed that physiological characteristicscan explain much of human behaviour. This was also the view of the founder of modern psychology, Francis Galton, who was a strong supporter of positive eugenics. In criminology, similar views were advanced by Cesare Lombroso, who developed a pseudo-science of ‘craniometry’ based on skull and facial contours to assist courts in their deliberations about guilt and innocence At this point we are not far from Nazi ‘racial science’.
    Ideas of natural human inequality are not aberrations in the western tradition. A general, though not specifically racist, belief that humans are divided into distinct groups with innately unequal abilities goes back to Aristotle, who defended slavery on the ground that some humans are born natural slaves. For Aristotle hierarchy in society was not – as the ancient Greek Sophists argued – a product of power and convention. Every living thing had a natural purpose that dictated what it needed to flourish. The natural end of humanity was philosophical inquiry, but only a very few humans – male property-owning Greeks – were suited to this activity, and the mass of humanity –women, slaves and barbarians – would flourish as their instruments. The best life was for the few and the rest were ‘living tools’.
    If the belief in innate human inequality reaches back to classical Greek philosophy, it was revived in the Enlightenment, when it began to take on some of the qualities of racism. John Locke was a Christian committed to the idea that humans are created equal, but he devoted a good deal of intellectual energy to justifying the seizure of the lands of indigenous people in America. Richard Popkin writes:
    Locke, who was one of the architects of English colonial policy – he drafted the Constitution of the Carolinas, for example – saw Indians and Africans as failing to mix their labours with the land. As a result of this failing they had no right to property. They had lost their liberty ‘by some Act that deserves Death’ (opposing the Europeans) and hence could be enslaved. 46
    A number of Enlightenment luminaries were explicit in expressing their belief in natural inequality, with some claiming that humanity actually comprised several different species. Voltaire subscribed to a secular version of the pre-Adamite theory advanced by some Christian theologians that suggested that Jews were pre-Adamites, remnants of an older species that existed before Adam was created. It wasImmanuel Kant – after Voltaire the supreme Enlightenment figure and, unlike Voltaire, a great philosopher – who more than any other thinker gave intellectual legitimacy to the concept of race. Kant was in the forefront of the science of anthropology that was emerging in Europe and