Miscellaneous
Our age of anger
The Economist, usually conservative while praising public intellectuals, made a marked departure when labeling Pankaj Mishra “The Heir to Edward Said”; a high praise that understandably found its way to the masthead of Mishra’s remarkable new book Age of Anger:The Economist, usually conservative while praising public intellectuals, made a marked departure when labeling Pankaj Mishra “The Heir to Edward Said”; a high praise that understandably found its way to the masthead of Mishra’s remarkable new book Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Mishra, India’s home-grown public intellectual, rose to global prominence through the past two decades with his lucid writings and incisive commentary. An acclaimed author of six books of both fiction and non-fiction, he is among those few scholars who are uniquely fit to explore the hidden history of the many ongoing global crises in practically every crucial sphere of geopolitics and economics. Age of Anger is Mishra’s attempt to get to the roots of the undercurrents that have shaped the world—our age of anger.
The author makes no secret of the central questions that he is trying to find answers to with his latest book. Questions like, “Why do young men and women from the West join an extremist organisation like Islamic State? Why are we seeing the rise of aggressive right-wing politics in countries such as India, Turkey and the United States, the expansion of Islamic terror, massacres in Western metropolises, wars in the Middle East? And in what way are these diverse politics of anger and violence connected?” set the pace, not just because they are central to the book, but because they are questions that are relevant to all global citizens today.
Taking on these concerns, Mishra tackles them as a sharp polemicist and argues that the roots of our ‘age of anger’ lie in the great economic and political revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenths centuries—their promises of freedom, equality and dignity through growth, industrialisation and nation-building—and the traumatic social and political changes they paved in their way.
Mishra adds, “It is from among the ranks of the uprooted that the militants of the nineteenth century arose—angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, revolutionaries in Russia, chauvinists in Italy and anarchist terrorists in France and Spain. And it is in examining their fears, resentments and hatreds that we can truly understand our own age.”
As a book, Age of Anger with its wide canvas and intellectual range, appears to prove that as the world becomes modern and increasingly hegemonic, those who were unable to access the lofty promises of modernity—such as freedom, stability and prosperity—were increasingly susceptible to buy into the rhetoric of the growing number of demagogues around the world.
Further, the author makes the construct of ‘anger’ simpler by writing: “Age of Anger simply assumes a busy background of nation-building, the uneven transformation of regional and agricultural into industrial and global economies, and the rise of mass politics and media. For it primarily describes a pattern of mental and emotional behaviour as the landscape of modernity extended from the Atlantic West to Europe’s heartland, Russia and further east; it explains how the impending end of the old order—with all its economic, social, religious, political, ethnic and gender traditions—and the promise of order created, often near simultaneously, global structures of feeling and thinking.”
He adds on another crucial aspect of this new world is an ubiquitous feeling of resentment, “And it (the new order) has resentment as the defining feature of a world where the mimetic desire, or what Herzl called, approvingly, ‘Darwinian mimicry’, endlessly proliferates, and where the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership.”
Recently in an interview, Pankaj Mishra shared, “I wrote Age of Anger out of the conviction that history, far from ending, took a dangerous turn in the age of globalisation, and that we have to re-examine the modern world, this time from the perspective of those who in the previous two centuries came late to it, and felt, like so many do now, left, or pushed, behind.”
Among the vociferous Indian critics of the British Empire, Pankaj Mishra’s seminal work, A Great Clamour (Penguin), includes a significant commentary on contemporary China in an examination of the contradictions and potency that shape and define the country—challenging the burden of western influence in Asia. In an earlier work, titled From the Ruins of Empire (Penguin), Mishra had conducted an effective analysis of the western model of development and modernity and presented reasons to why he believes that Asia has a better chance in the new world, set free as it was from the complex constructs of its colonial past.
Mishra’s last two books had aimed to highlight the apathy of Asians towards their own history, and investigated why it is that the western model—ridden with it own crises of ideas and direction—is still being religiously adhered to in Asia. His latest book, Age of Anger, now is another substantial counter of the dubious western notion of modernity. And as the fear of de-globalisation becomes more real with every passing year, this book’s timing seems justified as well.
A valuable addition to the attempts at understanding the roots of the anger that manifests in the world today, Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger is a class act that aims to burrow deep inside the mass psyche and makes for a rattling good read.
Thakur is a New Delhi-based journalist and writer. He can be reached at [email protected]