Looking Again at the Age of Anger

IPC–MERCATOR ANALYSIS April 2021 LOOKING AGAIN AT THE AGE OF ANGER Pankaj Mishra LOOKING AGAIN AT THE AGE OF ANGER About the Istanbul Policy Center-Sabancı University-Stiftung Mercator Initiative The Istanbul Policy Center–Sabancı University–Stiftung Mercator Initiative aims to strengthen the academic, political, and social ties between Turkey and Germany as well as Turkey and Europe. The Initiative is based on the premise that the acquisition of knowledge and the exchange of people and ideas are preconditions for meeting the challenges of an increasingly globalized world in the 21st century. The Initiative focuses on two areas of cooperation, EU/German-Turkish relations and climate change, which are of essential importance for the future of Turkey and Germany within a larger European and global context. 2 | APRIL 2021 | IPC–MERCATOR ANALYSIS My book Age of Anger was widely reviewed upon alist ideology through a refurbished program of its publication in January 2017. Most of the reviews cultural nationalism, with some new values, ideals, in the mainstream media, however, were more use- historical myths, and symbols. In this venture, Modi fully read as defiant assertions of the West’s en- and his toadies have succeeded beyond meas- dangered ideological orthodoxy. The anchor of ure—almost as well as the Italian fascists who took the BBC’s prime-time current affairs show was over Italy’s failed modernization and nation-build- openly incredulous that I would question the uni- ing projects from liberal democrats. They have versal progress signaled so clearly by the lifting not only made the state reassert its sovereignty of hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese out through violence and ruthless discriminations; they of poverty. The New York Times’ reviewer accused have also made society an exuberant participant in me of issuing “angry bromides” about the “West- this sovereign power by granting the power of life ern model,” adding, “let’s say a few kind words for and death to lynch mobs and by encouraging hate- neoliberalism.” The critic at the Economist won- filled trolls on social media to go after “traitorous” dered why I was complaining about the West since minorities and liberal elites. I “sup at the tables of the Western intelligentsia.” This state-directed vitalist barbarism is a formida- An acolyte of Isaiah Berlin, who reviewed my book ble new power in a country full of angry and frus- in the New York Review of Books, was scandalized trated young men; and, boosted by Silicon Valley’s by my alleged sympathy for Daesh. A luminary of innovations, it has already blown away all old po- the Murdoch-owned London Times accused me of litical and ethical criteria. But Modi, shockingly ex- favoring headhunters in Borneo over Western civi- treme to many members of the Indian elite, induced lization. déjà vu in me. This was not only because of Hindu Only a couple of reviews noticed the book’s prov- supremacism’s openly avowed and easily recog- enance in an experience of India. I started to nizable pedigree in Europe’s far-right movements. write Age of Anger not long after May 2014, when For someone with my social background—dispos- a Hindu supremacist accused of presiding over the sessed Brahmin gentry with natural affinities to re- mass murder of Muslims became India’s most pow- actionary politics—Modi was someone profoundly erful prime minister in decades. Hindu suprema- and unnervingly intimate. Adolf Hitler features in cism under Narendra Modi had surged on the back Thomas Mann’s incandescent 1939 essay “That Man is My Brother” as a semblable, “a man possessed of of failed promises. The country’s first postcolonial a bottomless resentment and a desire for revenge,” elite had scantily delivered on the country’s found- who “rouses the populace with images of his own ing promise of democracy and development, and a insulted grandeur, deafens with promises, makes more recent guarantee, underwritten by the coun- out of the people’s sufferings a vehicle for his own try’s neoliberal ruling class, of general prosperity greatness,” but who is nevertheless “a brother—a through stout fidelity to the principles of the mar- rather unpleasant and mortifying brother.” Modi ket, had flopped more spectacularly. In fact, recent sparked this same appalled self-recognition in me. years in India had witnessed the proliferation of a social jungle, marked by exploitation and inequali- The question of what resentment is was never ab- ty, in which a state stigmatized by corruption scan- stract or remote for me. As a child I had imbibed dals and weakened by global crises increasingly the prejudices of semi-rural upper-caste Hindus appeared to lack authority and legitimacy. Not for who believed themselves to be under threat from the first time had a failed experiment in economic all quarters: from an ostensibly secular and super- liberalism, which benefitted the few at great ex- cilious English-speaking elite as well as politically pense to the many, created a reservoir of frustra- assertive low-caste Hindus. At college in a declin- tion and resentment, and an opening for fascistic ing provincial city, I encountered people whose and semi-fascistic movements and demagogues. sense of an inimical world and feelings of person- al inadequacy were much greater and politically Modi, backed by India’s richest people and even more volatile than my own. some self-proclaimed “liberal” intellectuals, was at- tempting to rebuild a weakened state and nation- With this formative experience of minds and bod- | 3 LOOKING AGAIN AT THE AGE OF ANGER ies consumed by resentment, I was drawn to ex- Prussia to postcolonial Indonesia, this enlisting into ploring the “climate of ideas, a structure of feeling, the march of history took the form of an ideologi- and cognitive disposition” rather than (re) writing a cal mobilization—the construction of a nationality history of ideas or cataloguing their content. Perry or “people,” the centralization of the state’s pow- Anderson acutely remarked of Ernest Gellner’s the- ers, rapid-fire industrialization and militarization, ory of nationalism that “whereas [Max] Weber was and often many radical and calamitous shortcuts, so bewitched by the spell of nationalism that he such as China’s Great Leap Forward, all in an effort was never able to theorize it, Gellner has theorized not to be left behind. nationalism without detecting the spell.” Writing after Modi’s enthronement, a moment of great per- Of course, this large-scale national mobilization sonal trauma (suffered again with his recent ree- and ferocious international competition was not lection), I became obsessed with understanding what a universalizing ideology of progress first ar- the seemingly ever-renewable spell of nationalism ticulated during the late eighteenth century had or ethnic-religious chauvinism, on writers and in- envisaged. While not excluding the possibility of tellectuals as much as the masses. I was interested conflict, it posited a far more benign outcome to specifically in some contagious states of minds and the global diffusion of individual reason and com- mentalities. Hence, the centrality of Rousseau to petitive commerce. So did the prophets of neolib- Age of Anger as a figure whose revulsion against eral globalization in our own time as they recon- the mores of metropolitan Paris finds a global reso- figured society into a marketplace, encouraging nance, from the German-speaking peoples to the human beings to think of themselves as entrepre- ideologues of the Iran’s Islamic Revolution. neurs. I had been taking notes in the years before 2014 for Indeed, a naïve vision of enlightened universalism a book on the shared experience of belatedness: became hegemonic again during the age of capi- starting with Germany, and then Russia and Italy, talist exuberance that began in 1989 and ended in before radiating out to Japan and the postcolonial 2007. During this intellectually and artistically re- world. I hoped to examine the intellectual affinities gressive fin de siècle, many Steven Pinkers came (and political pathologies) that bound people in to flourish at all levels of the government, the me- these countries as they entered the (very deeply dia, and the knowledge industry in general. Busy rigged) race for wealth and power (and how a re- prescribing how the “Muslim world” or other back- markable number of them became the most acute ward societies should progress, hardly any of them diagnosticians of modern maladies). Age of An- reckoned with the possibility of a political and eco- ger, though written in response to an emergency, nomic breakdown in the heart of the fully modern is largely a product of this endeavor to write an West. emotional history of uneven development: how the It became clearer as I was writing Age of An- appearance of relentless forward movement pro- ger that the remorseless logic of uneven capitalist vokes anxieties about being left behind rival na- development had not only shaped the trajectory of tions or ideologies, races or religions. a majority of the world’s population—the so-called It seemed to me that the early political, econom- latecomers to modernity—but also generated such ic, and technological revolutions had privileged “catch-up” and apparently “aberrant” ideologies as certain countries—Britain, France, and the United Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Japanese militarism. States—in the race for wealth and power, forcing With China turning the economic tables, it was the rest into a reaction that was ambivalent at best also starting to have devastating political conse- and treacherously confused at worst: loathing of quences, as the phenomena of Brexit and Trump the new imperial hierarchy of nations and peoples, and Le Pen underlined, for the apparent winners of and resentment of economic and cultural superior- modern history.

Load more