Age of Anger - Pankaj Mishra(2016)

The prologue of the book captures the essence of bewilderment felt by the modern man. The slow but all too certain steady march of mankind into everlasting prosperity and freedom riding on the back of liberal capitalism and democracy, Pankaj Mishra says, seems to have come to a grinding halt. The party is over. This is the Age of Anger.

The author paints a pretty picture of the hopeful period of the sepia tinted 80s and 90s,  which in retrospect appears to be an unbelievable period of stability and optimism, as the the world now seems to be slipping back into its default mode of being on the brink of chaos and mayhem.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and collapse of communism, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured. Free markets and human rights appeared to be the right formula for the billions trying to overcome degrading poverty and political oppression; the words globalisation and Internet, inspired in the age of innocence, more hope than anxiety as they entered common speech.

The author sums up this hopeful period in history when the world seemed to be moving in the right direction:

"American advisers rushed to Moscow to facilitate Russia's makeover into a liberal democracy; China and India began to open their economies to trade and investment; new nation states and democracies blossomed across a broad swathe of Europe, Asia and Africa; the enlarged European Union came into being; peace was declared in Northern Ireland; Nelson Mandela ended his long Walk to freedom; the Dalai Lama appeared in Apple’s ‘Think Different’ advertisements; and it seemed only a matter of time before Tibet, too, would be free."

  

But the promised Utopian world that the author believed was just round the corner was simply a mirage which quickly faded, as Pankaj Mishra believes that today:

"Demagogues of all kinds, from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to India’s Narendra Modi, France’s Marine Le Pen and America’s Donald Trump, have tapped into the simmering reservoirs of cynicism, boredom and discontent. China, though market-friendly, seems further from democracy than before, and closer to expansionist nationalism. The experiment with free market capitalism in Russia spawned a kleptocratic and messianic regime. It has brought to power explicitly anti-Semitic regimes in Poland and Hungary. A revolt against globalization and its beneficiaries has resulted in Britain’s departure from the European Union, sentencing the latter to deeper disarray, perhaps even death. Authoritarian leaders, anti-democratic backlashes and right-wing extremism define the politics of Austria, France and the United States as well as India, Israel, Thailand, the Philippines and Turkey.”

The root cause of the anger

So what changed? Why has the optimism and the belief in promised universal civilization-one harmonized by a combination of universal suffrage, broad educational opportunities, steady economic growth, and personal advancement - not apparently materialized?

Pankaj Mishra says that its actually nothing new. What the world is experiencing toady is a continuation of the chaos and turmoil the world experienced with its first brush with modernity way back in the eighteenth/nineteenth century Europe. The author states that the unprecedented political, economic and social disorder that accompanied the rise of the industrial capitalist economy in nineteenth-century Europe, and led to world wars, totalitarian regimes and genocide in the first half of the twentieth century, is now infecting much vaster regions and bigger populations. The rest of the world is now plunging deeper into the West’s own fateful experience of that modernity.

The apparent crisis that the World witnesses today had its roots in the age of enlightenment- the age of Voltaire and Rousseau- says Pankaj Mishra. Yes- true that the French Revolution had indeed introduced the world to revolutionary ideas of equality, fraternity and liberty. World politics thus long monopolized by absolutist elites, began to open up to commoners with talent and skill. The world was introduced to the earth-shaking idea that human beings could use their own reason to fundamentally reshape their circumstances. Intellectuals and artists rose as a class for the first time to lend a hand in the making of history, and locate the meaning of life in politics and art rather than traditional religion.

But the author says the new society, though free of irrational old hierarchies wasn’t meant to be democratic or bring in social equality. On the contrary, access to power and prestige still required money, property, connections and talents.These educated men of the Enlightenment who led the revolution with the post-religious notion that men make their own world - belonged to a tiny minority of the literate and secular-minded. The image of the new elite as summed up by Voltaire was: worldly, witty, freethinking, devoted to reason, and especially contemptuous of the Church.

The new society, was primarily meant- as Rousseau bluntly stated-to provide freedom and social mobility for the man of talent, and provide him the means, of ‘acquiring without obstacle and possessing with security’. Hierarchy would still mark the new society: the mass of the people would remain necessarily subordinate to the authentically enlightened at the top. A powerful ruler was thus  not only needed to check the power of churches, estates and corporations; he was required to repress the ignorant and superstitious mass of people who threatened civilization.

Voltaire, who the author characterizes as the one who represented the modern elite, had disdain for the common people- “the ignoble masses who respect only force and never think”.  “We have never claimed," Voltaire wrote, “to enlighten shoe-makers and servant girls.” What Voltaire wanted was hardly a revolution or even representative govt but a wise monarchy that would sideline aristocrats and clergy and create space for people like himself.

Mishra’s thesis is that our contemporary misery and hyper-nationalism can be traced to Rousseau’s romantic reaction to Voltaire’s Enlightenment -a callow elitism that produced Rousseau’s romantic search for old-fashioned community. Today's oppressive elite are Voltaire’s children and Trump and Brexit voters are Rousseau’s new peasant hordes, terrified of losing cultural continuity and clan comfort.

Democracy and Communism

The idea of a future rational and enlightened society in which all men are equal, however caught fire and had radically egalitarian implications. The program of reform by a tiny literate minority escalated into a ferocious assault on all social inequality, culminating in the public execution of  the French monarch and later his consort, Marie Antoinette.

The two concepts, ‘nationalism’ and ‘communism’, were invented to define the aspirations for fraternity and equality and ‘Democracy’ came into vogue around 1830s. Almost as soon as they came into circulation in the West, the ideas traveled, with varying interpretations, to Russia and further East. Western imperialism, spread of literacy and improved communications spread the ideas to the remotest corners of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The world plays ‘catch up’

Germany, Russia and Japan set out to catch up with Britain and France in the nineteenth century. Two world wars eventually resulted from nations desiring the same objects and preventing others from trying to appropriate them. But by 1945 the new nation states of Asia and Africa also started on their own bumpy road to modernity.

Non-Western men and women educated in Europe or in Western-style institutions despaired of their traditionalist elites as much as they resented European dominance over their societies. In this quest to give their peoples a fair chance at strength, equality and dignity in the white man’s world, China’s Mao Zedong and Turkey’s Ataturk as much as Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddeq followed the Western model of mass-mobilization, state-building and industrialization.

A world adrift

One aim united all these ideologically divergent regimes. Socialist as well as capitalist modernists envisaged an exponential increase in the number of people owning cars, houses, electronic goods and gadgets, and driving the tourist and luxury industry worldwide.A consumerist society, with the world moving to a slow but steady progress towards increasing equality.

By the 1970s, however, it had become clear that Western prescriptions were not working. On the contrary, the Colombian anthropologist Escobar put it, ‘instead of the kingdom of abundance promised by theorists and politicians in the 1950s, the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression.’ Truth dawned on the in-applicability of the communist mode and the growing awareness that the Western history of modernization is just one of several possible courses.

In 1992, a year after the Soviet Union imploded, The Economist editorialized ‘that there was no serious alternative to free-market capitalism as the way to organize economic life’. Today, however, the early post-Cold War consensus- that a global capitalist economy would alleviate ethnic and religious differences and usher in worldwide prosperity and peace-lies in tatters. The era of ‘free-market triumphalism’, The Economist now admits, ‘has come to a juddering halt’. But no plausible alternatives of political and economic organization are in sight.

In 2014 The Economist said that, on the basis of IMF data, emerging economies - or, most of the human population - might have to wait for three centuries in order to catch up with the West. In this assessment, the last decade of high growth was an ‘aberration’ and ‘billions of people will be poorer for a lot longer than they might have expected just a few years.'

The implications are sobering: the non-West not only finds itself replicating the West’s trauma on an infinitely larger scale and also that the non-West have no real prospects of catching up with the West.

But it is not just the Non-west that have been left disenchanted. For the American middle class, after a series of economic crises from the 1970s onward, the American Dream, seemed less and less credible. Jobs commensurate with their sense of dignity seemed hard to find.  Brought up by a culture of individualism to consider themselves unique, the middle class began to suffer from a sense of diminishment and they felt that the vast political and economic forces were working against them.

This is the how the support for Donald Trump’s white nationalism connects with middle-aged working-class men, who feel left behind in the race for prosperity.

The media hype of success stories of a few young graduates and dropouts turned billionaires overnight, and users of Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp briefly appeared to be toppling authoritarian regimes worldwide. But the drivers of Uber cars, toiling for abysmally low fares, represent the actual fate of many self-employed ‘entrepreneurs’. Today defeat, humiliation and resentment are more commonplace experiences than success and contentment.

The root cause of modern day troubles thus arises from the individual dissatisfaction with the actually available degree of freedom which becomes explosive as inequalities rise and no political redress appears to be in sight.

  

Katherine Boo in Behind the Beautiful Forever: (2012) talks of the stark inequality of Mumbai which brings its attendant problems:

“Mumbai was a place of festering grievance and ambient envy. Was there a soul in this enriching, unequal city who didn’t blame his dissatisfaction on someone else? Wealthy citizens accused the slum-dwellers of making the city filthy and unlivable, even as an oversupply of human capital kept the wages of their maids and chauffeurs low. Slum-dwellers complained about the obstacles the powerful erected to prevent them from sharing in new profit. Everyone, everywhere, complained about their neighbours.”

The author states that in the age of digitization today, individuals find themselves herded by capitalism and technology into a common present, where grossly unequal distributions of wealth and power have created humiliating new hierarchies. This proximity, is rendered more claustrophobic by digital communications, the improved capacity for envious and resentful comparison. An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, and as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism. 

The age of anger

Mishra says that the people most disaffected are not the poorest of the poor, or members of the peasantry and the urban underclass. They are educated youth, often unemployed, rural-urban migrants, or others from the lower middle class: 

"Regardless of their national origins and locally attuned rhetoric, these disenfranchised men target those they regard as venal, callous and mendacious elites. Donald Trump led an upsurge of white nationalists enraged at being duped by globalized liberals. A similar loathing of London technocrats and cosmopolitans led to Brexit. Hindu nationalists,who tend to belong to lower middle classes with education and some experience of mobility, aim at ‘pseudo-secularist’ English-speaking Indians, accusing them of disdain for Hinduism and vernacular traditions. Chinese nationalists despise the small minority of their West-oriented technocratic compatriots. Radical Islamists spend much time parsing differences between who they decide are genuine Muslims and nominal ones, those who have surrendered to the hedonism and rootlessness of consumer society."

The book is thought provoking, but does not provide a suggested alternative. If not liberal democracy and free market capitalism then what model should one follow? 

Should it be Rousseau’s(who the author obviously admires) ideal society that world should adopt, which was  essentially the Spartan society: small, harsh, self-sufficient, fiercely patriotic and defiantly uncosmopolitan and uncommercial. In this society at least, the corrupting urge to promote oneself over others, and the deceiving of the poor by the rich could be counterpoised by the surrender of individuality to public service, and the desire to seek pride for community and country.

One hopes not. The root cause of the modern world is the ever widening chasm of inequality between the elites and the toiling masses. It is hoped that society evolves to address this pressing issue and humanity continues to move to a liberal world sans borders, where narrow parochialism and stark lines being drawn across different races, communities and cultures are wiped out slowly but surely.