Despite a sensationalist title that makes it seem like a Dennis Wheatley horror, this is a stimulating enquiry into the religious roots of present-day conflict. It is rare to come upon a philosophical work which underpins its theses with examples from the real world, like the errors of the neocon agenda for the "New American Century" to the western origins of Islamic fundamentalism.
It's a total page-turner from start to finish, written in accessible language free from academic jargon, with a expanding assertion on virtually every page that will sharpen up your wits, even if you end up disagreeing with his fundamental thesis.
This is that most belief systems, including Christianity and Islam (but not, interestingly, Judaism), communism, fascism, western-style democracy, Darwinism, and atheism, are all inadequate responses to the complexities of reality because they are all rooted in a one-size-fits-all eschatological view of the world which sees history leading inexorably to a conclusion, which could be the Last Times Armageddon of the American Christian right, or the communist solution to the evils and inefficiencies of crisis-torn capitalism.
Though given to sweeping side-wipes which dismiss, for instance, historical materialism as "cod-science", and a tendency to take on board cod-history (to coin a phrase) like the various contradictory estimates of the millions who allegedly died in the Soviet gulags or during Mao's Great Leap Forward, these minor blemishes do not invalidate his basic argument, which is that utopia is not only unattainable, but leads to worse inhumanities than the inhumanities it seeks to redress.
That this has happened is demonstrably true, from the Catholic Inquisition to the Moscow trials, though I am doubtful that it is inevitable, which it is, only if you share his pessimistic view of the unchangeability of human nature.
His image of the human condition is basically of a Hobbesian war of all against all. He dismisses the idea of a "primitive communism" in pre-history, asserting that there are no known examples of such economic communities in human history. However good a philosopher Gray may be, he is obviously no anthropologist, for his assertion is totally untrue.
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