{"id":3953,"date":"2017-03-04T04:48:30","date_gmt":"2017-03-04T11:48:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/?p=3953"},"modified":"2017-03-24T16:08:36","modified_gmt":"2017-03-24T23:08:36","slug":"age-of-anger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/age-of-anger\/","title":{"rendered":"Age of Anger"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pankaj Mishra (2017)<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a> Pankaj’s new book might well have been subtitled, ‘An Anthology of Terrorism’.\u00c2\u00a0 And at times it’s not the most cohesive one, reading more like a smattering attempt to capture every act of politically subversive violence, and a checkered description of the perpetrators and their inter-relationships, since the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n

But looking through this somewhat ramshackle layer of narrative exposes an uncut gem of substance.\u00c2\u00a0 Pankaj makes the case that the same fundamental processes that are giving rise to the likes of Brexit, Erdogan, Hofer, Le Pen, Orban, Trump and Wilders simultaneously explain ISIS.\u00c2\u00a0 Ressentiment<\/em>, in a nutshell:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 where individual dissatisfaction with the actually available degree of freedom<\/i> constantly collides with elaborate theories and promises of individual freedom and empowerment.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

To elaborate, qua Pankaj:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The palpable extremity of desire, speech and action in the world today \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 [springs from] the mismatch between personal expectations, heightened by a traumatic break with the past, and the cruelly unresponsive reality of slow change.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Indians and Chinese will never enjoy in their lifetime the condition of a civilized urban existence that a few millions in Europe and America enjoyed intermittently through the 19th and 20th Centuries.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It’s not quite clear to me whether Pankaj feels the modernisation project is moribund because it is materially unattainable<\/em> (ecology, inequality, etc.), or rather whether it is forever out of reach because of some kind of inner contradiction: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But self-assertion and mimesis [= imitation \u00c3\u00a0 la Veblen’s ‘conspicuous consumption’] in the absence of clear norms and ends prove to be self-defeating: they entangle human beings in open-ended processes that ceaselessly provoke anxious uncertainty.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

This, we are given to understand, creates a (the?) space for demagogues to fill, whose appeal \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lies in their ability to take generalized discontent, the mood of drift, resentment, disillusionment and economic shakiness, and transform it into a plan for doing<\/i> something.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

We globalized citizenry increasingly suffer, feels Pankaj, from “an extraordinary if largely imperceptible destruction of faith in the future \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the fundamental optimism that makes reality seem purposeful …\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.\u00c2\u00a0 This reminded me off something Pope Francis said recently about the contemporary European geist, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Europe is now a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcgrandmother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, no longer fertile and vibrant\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n

Now my first reaction on encountering this grande sweep of a nihilist brush was that, actually, many economically emergent folks currently walking about are positively buzzing with energy, innovation and hope.\u00c2\u00a0 But then this perhaps exactly plays into Pankaj’s argument, as these winners are coming to symbolise to many an increasingly unreachable cadre, desperate attempts at mimesis notwithstanding.\u00c2\u00a0 Or maybe he’s just too cynical?<\/p>\n

There’s one more thing that should be said for ‘Age of Anger’: it provides one of the most powerful antidotes to the sickeningly naive and simplistic Islamophobia, often perpetrated by otherwise well-informed people,\u00c2\u00a0 that seeks to anchor the roots of much modern violence in the Quran.\u00c2\u00a0 So if you have somehow come to conclude that there is something special about Islam, something that occupies an upstream causative bead in the chain towards modern trends of terror, then definitely read this!<\/p>\n

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Pankaj Mishra (2017) Pankaj’s new book might well have been subtitled, ‘An Anthology of Terrorism’.\u00c2\u00a0 And at times it’s not the most cohesive one, reading more like a smattering attempt to capture every act of politically subversive violence, and a checkered description of the perpetrators and their inter-relationships, since the Enlightenment. But looking through this … Continue reading Age of Anger<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-society","category-civilization","category-development"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3953"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3963,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3953\/revisions\/3963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}