Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017)
Pankaj Mishra (1969)
406 pages
Those who perceive themselves as left or pushed behind by a selfish conspiratorial minority can be susceptible to political seducers from any point on the ideological spectrum, for they are not driven by material inequality alone. (112)
With the conclusion of the Cold War in the early 1990’s, Western nations celebrated an end of history moment, believing that liberal democracy and free market economics had prevailed, and would inexorably expand across the globe. The celebration was short-lived, however, as since the turn of the century the West has come to face seemingly existential threats, including externally from a violent strain of Islamic fundamentalism, and internally from aggressive far-right nationalists pursuing political power.
These two specific threats have triggered myriad theories as to their origins – including, for example, religious fanaticism or colonial anger for the former, and cultural or social frustrations for the latter. And such an attribution of separate, particular motivations to each can seem natural; it certainly reflects a general tendency to do so for myriad similar uprisings historically. In his thought-provoking book Age of Anger, however, Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra dismisses this identification of distinct causes for these and other eruptions of mass violence.
He postulates instead a more comprehensive explanation, arguing that the motivation for these kinds of events originates out of a frustration felt by large segments of the global population who find that a successful elite has rigged the system against them. Referring to this frustration as ressentiment (a term coined by Nietzsche), Mishra describes its present-day incarnation as arising because
[People’s] evidently natural rights to life, liberty and security, already challenged by deep-rooted inequality, are [now further] threatened by political dysfunction and economic stagnation …. The result is, as [Hannah] Arendt feared, a ‘tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else’ …. An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, … [which] poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism. (14)
Mishra traces the origins of this ressentiment to the transformation initiated during the 18th century age of Enlightenment, which led to
the most fateful event of human history: the rise of an industrial and materialist civilization, which, emerging in Britain and France, spread itself over the old world of Asia and Africa and the new world of America and Oceania …. The changes brought about by two coalescing revolutions, the French and the industrial, marked a sharp break in historical continuity; they ushered in a new era of global consciousness. (50-51)
Certainly, one can acknowledge that these changes provided many with new opportunities to improve their position in society and, as has been argued by Steven Pinker and others, have led to a significant reduction in global poverty over the past several centuries. Mishra argues that during this same period however, it has also become clear that the systems that replaced the earlier aristocracies have led to “grossly unequal distributions of wealth and power [which] have created humiliating new hierarchies,” (13) leading to deeply felt frustration due to the “intensely competitive human desire for convergence.” The result has been his age of anger – a nearly continuous string of populist uprisings over the past several centuries, which are best explained as motivated by ressentiment, “rather than [the traditional focus on] religious, cultural, theological and ideological difference." (50)
Having established his thesis, Mishra spends the balance of the book exploring its origins in Enlightenment philosophy, and its subsequent evolution and implications. His tracing of both the arguments among philosophers of the Enlightenment period, and later the reaction of the German Romanticists to the Enlightenment transformation, can require a careful reading to follow the plot he lays out – in part because of the nature of the topic, but also because his sentences can at times be dense and wandering; but the reader’s reward is a coherent and convincing interpretation of the history of the past few centuries that explains much about our present-day social, economic, and political challenges.
Strikingly – though perhaps not surprisingly – people’s fundamental inability to anticipate the full impact of their policy prescriptions plays a central role in the narrative. From the Enlightenment on, one group would propose a way to change society, in the hope of improving it, only to have their counterparts a generation or two later experience, and have to react to, the unintended consequences of the application of the earlier proposals in the real world – blowback on a civilizational scale, as each period’s attempts to fix or adapt to the problems they have inherited only creates new problems for the future.
Thus, for example, the shift from an aristocratic to a meritocratic society championed by the Enlightenment philosophers was intended to allow people to flourish socially and economically, outside of the rigid constraints of nobility and royalty. Mishra notes, however, that
[their] new society, though free of irrational old hierarchies, wasn’t meant to be democratic. Liberty primarily meant freedom for social mobility for the man of talent [and] means. … Hierarchy would still mark the new society: the mass of the people would remain necessarily subordinate to the authentically enlightened at the top. (59)
Not surprisingly, the mass of the people, once they became aware of the possibility of political, social and economic liberty outside the context of the aristocracy, were unwilling to simply cede such rights, and attendant benefits, to some small group of men of talent and means. And the likelihood of this resulting in anger was, Mishra points out, already recognized during the Enlightenment period. He describes how the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau challenged the Enlightenment philosophers on the point, predicting the unrest to come:
[He] understood the moral and spiritual implications of the rise of an international commercial society, and … the deep contradictions in a predominantly materialist ethic and a society founded on individuals enviously emulating the rich and craving their privileges. … [He] pointed out that … while promising freedom and equality, [it] did much to hinder them … [and] that the individual assertion mandated by modern egalitarian society could amount in practice to domination of other individuals; he foresaw its pathologies, flaws and blind spots, which made certain negative historical outcomes likely in practice. (110)
The problems Rousseau described have, in fact, played out over the past several centuries since the Enlightenment, resulting in a series of revolutions by masses of people reacting to the divergence between their expectations and their day-to-day experience.
The first, and perhaps most transformative of these was, according to Mishra, the French Revolution. Beyond overthrowing the monarchy, it evolved into a populist uprising that led to the development and widespread propagation beyond France of democratic ideals based on the concept that liberty and equality were rights for all, rather than only the elite few.
The revolutionary tradition with its concepts of democracy, the pursuit of liberty, and equality moved quickly from the economically developed and politically complex ancien régimes of the Atlantic West to the simpler ancien régimes of Prussia, Austria and Russia, before taking root in Asia and Africa. The late eighteenth-century plea for constitutional monarchy from a small minority of property-owning bourgeois escalated into mass movements for republican democracy and universal suffrage, and, eventually, into demands for the abolition of private property and full collectivization. (51)
Mishra dedicates a significant part of the text to the work of one of the earliest groups to offer a countervailing view to the rational, scientific view of the Enlightenment, the German Romantic philosophers. In reaction to people “feeling marginalized by the sophisticated socio-economic order emerging in Western Europe, and its aggressive rationalization and individualism” (169), the German Romanticists advocated instead for a focus on individual cultural heritage.
But, just as the Enlightenment philosophers failed to imagine how their prescription for a meritocratic society could become an expectation of broad liberty and equality for the masses, Mishra describes how the Romantic movement failed to anticipate that their focus on national cultural heritage could transform into an aggressive nationalism. Leaders eager to cement their power quickly learned how to turn celebration of national identity into a hatred of the other, rallying populations around a visceral antagonism toward other nations and cultures. Mishra points out that “an early critic of nationalism noticed its malign dependencies on various enemies for [its] self-definition.” (206) In fact, in rallying people around this hatred of outsiders:
demagogues were helped by the repeated failure of liberal-bourgeois democracy to respond to the masses of people struggling with the fear and uncertainty provoked by the vast and opaque process of modernization. From the 1870s onwards … a suspicion intensified across Europe that parliamentary democracy, easily manipulated by elites with sectarian interests, was deceitful, or at least incapable of achieving general well-being. (235)
Not surprisingly, the hatred these demagogues fomented led to a series of increasingly destructive and deadly wars.
The ramifications of the deep-seated frustration that has inevitably followed in the wake of the shift to a meritocratic society have continued into the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, including in the communist revolutions in Russia, China and elsewhere, in the religious ferment that led to revolution in Iran and the development of ISIS and al Qaeda, and in the rise of white nationalists in the US, as well as other hyper-nationalist groups globally. However different their particular paths, the motivations for each of these can be more profitably understood, in Mishra’s analysis, as founded on the ressentiment of the masses of people who support them. (An interesting point to note is that, even as one can celebrate the abatement of global poverty and so of inequality in some global sense, most individuals end up focusing on and reacting to the increasing inequality in their particular country.)
Thus, according to Mishra, “the repellant rhetoric of ISIS” (81) and their claims that their fight is all about religious differences with the West should not be taken at face value. Rather, the leaders of Islamic fundamentalist movements have mimicked past demagogues who, while espousing a convincing narrative about the others to be hated, in reality have simply played off the fundamental social and economic frustrations of their populations. And this explains, as well, how seemingly successful Islamist college graduates become terrorists – the key is to not assume that some level of material success trumps deep-seated social and cultural frustrations.
In a similar manner, the fertile ground for explosive anger provided by these frustrations can be seen in the particular narratives spun by leaders of both fascist and communist movements in the 20th century. In Mishra’s view, the rise of communism becomes a natural outgrowth of this anger, an attempted path forward to resolve the visible shortcomings of the liberal democratic, meritocratic system. Again, Mishra does not defend communism, any more than he does Islamic Fundamentalism or other such responses to the liberal democratic political and economic order; his point here is to demonstrate how the appearance of these revolutions is inevitable given the apparent, ever-present failures of the system that grew out of the Enlightenment in Western Europe.
Mishra’s vision of ressentiment as an inherent outcome of the industrial and materialist civilization also changes the nature of the present-day discourse over the sustainability of capitalism, or whether sufficiently regulated capitalism can be made to work; such questions suddenly become moot. Instead, in his analysis, it is the fundamental existence of a system based on rational, meritocratic competition that inherently lays the groundwork for its own failure. Referencing again the thinking of Rousseau, Mishra notes that
a power lacking theological foundations or transcendent authority, and conceived as power over other competing individuals, [is] inherently unstable. It could only be possessed temporarily; and it condemned the rich and poor alike to a constant state of ressentiment and anxiety. (327)
With the Enlightenment, society became unmoored, and the many and varied attempts to-date to find an alternative path to a stable, sustainable social, political and economic structure have failed to establish a workable solution.
Admittedly, Mishra doesn’t bring forth any easy answers in his book. Certainly, he’s not advocating a return to aristocracy; he’s simply pointing out that the shift away from a stable, ordered society with a strict social and religious hierarchy, into a world order in which it was claimed that everyone had the possibility of being free and equal, combined with a highly competitive, zero-sum economic system, has led to a profound frustration, and generated an anger that has inevitably, and repeatedly, boiled over. One can certainly wish that he came with solutions; but a useful service can be simply to make everyone clear on the nature of the problem. This Mishra does quite effectively.
Other notes and information:
As a specific example of how the Enlightenment proposition on equality reached far beyond its intended audience of <i>men of means</i>, as described above, a quote from Thomas Piketty's <u>A Brief History of Equality</u>:
At the end of the 1780s, the colony [of Saint-Domingue, modern-day Haiti] had more than 470,000 slaves (90 percent of the population), 28,000 Whites (5 percent), and 25,000 <i>métis</i> and free Blacks (5 percent). ...
The system [of slavery] was in a phase of accelerated expansion when the French Revolution broke out. In 1789-1790, free Blacks claimed the right to vote and to participate in assemblies. This seemed logical, given the resounding proclamations regarding equal rights that were being made in Paris, but they were refused that right. The slave uprising began in August 1791, after a meeting ... in which thousands of maroons took part.... (70-71)
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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