In his 1953 essay, ‘Education for a Difficult World’, Bertrand Russell writes: “Young people ... are apt to find in the world of the present day that their impulses of good will are baffled by failure ... I will not pretend that there is any easy or simple answer to their bewilderment, but I do think that a suitable education could make young people feel more capable of understanding the problem ... There are several reasons which make our problems difficult ... The first of these is that modern society and modern politics are governed by difficult skills which very few people understand.”

While at university, I ran into this elusive thing called ‘the modern world’ repeatedly, whether while reading about underdevelopment, deteriorating traditional wisdom, increasing militancy and violence all over or environmental collapse. There was a sense that it was all connected, but I wanted to know with clarity how it all came together, or, in the words of Morpheus from The Matrix, how far the rabbit hole went. Although I was living in the overdeveloped world, I had the distinct advantage, at least when it comes to understanding modernity, of having grown up in the (perpetually) developing world — The Economist stated in 2014 that according to data from the International Monetary Fund, the developing world will spend the next 300 years in pursuit (of constantly evolving-to-who-knows-what-end cosmopolitan ideals of the developed world) before catching up with the West.

Pankaj Mishra’s book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, is — in more ways than I thought when I first picked it up — a response to Russell’s call for a difficult education and as such, a confluence of different conversations about the modern world. After noting a series of events, such as the rise of Hindu supremacists to power in India and Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, not to mention the election of Donald Trump and the rise of militant Islamic State groups, Mishra says in his preface that “the pages that follow try to make sense of bewildering, and often painful, experiences by re-examining a divided modern world, this time from the perspective of those who came late to it, and felt, as many people do now, left, or pushed, behind.”

Re-examining a divided world from the viewpoint of those who feel left, or pushed, behind

Pay particular attention to the words “those who came late to it” because, as with his earlier work From the Ruins of Empire, Mishra makes it quite plain that the world we inhabit today — with all its sound and self-righteous fury — did not emerge from a vacuum, nor was its construction ‘democratic’ by any means. This Technicolor modern world — that Mishra succinctly describes as “the world of mass politics and ceaseless social and economic change” — for all its priggish pervasiveness has a spatial and temporal origin. It is a product of technological and intellectual developments in western Europe in the 18th century, a shift from the old model of the universe as dictated by the Western Church to the new model where man and economics, and not God and church, are at the centre of life. In Europe, up until the 17th century, “man did not presume to make his world; he was rather made by it. The world itself was seen as unchanging. Thus, there was no such thing as politics as we understand it: an organised competition for power...”

Politics, as we know it today, emerges precisely because of that shift: as the Western Church — which itself became corrupted with power — loses moral authority, the educated and secular-minded men of the Enlightenment lead the revolution in the “post-religious notion that men make their own world.” All it takes is talent, a little bit of networking — that Mishra charts out between ideologues and philosophers in their projects of modernity or anti-modernity (be it through anarchism, romanticism or nationalism) with exquisite detail — and self-interest, driven essentially by amour propre, or self-love. To that end, it is no secret that “economic growth was posited as the end-all of political life and the chief marker of progress worldwide.”

Voltaire, the principal prophet of modernity who dreamed of “the stock exchange as the embodiment of humanity ... (vis-а-vis) the unifying language of money,” envisioned self-love as an “enlightened self-interest” (Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, would phrase it later thus too, in his Wealth of Nations), as being necessary for the preservation and perpetuation of the human race in and to modernity. ‘To’, because even though modernity purportedly breaks from traditional religion, its own absolutes, such as faith in progress, are merely replacements for older certainties and are chased with renewed zeal. It also has its own missionaries — marketing men — who implant in all a profound desire to imitate this forward march to realising heaven on earth. And if that fails, there’s always gunboat diplomacy to make sure that all are on-board.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, a rare exception to the learned men of the Enlightenment, was adamant that this project of the perfectibility of man — homo economicus — was simply unsustainable; that in the course of pursuing self-interest all bonds of brotherhood between people would be reduced to naught. He saw self-love as “a dangerous craving to secure recognition for one’s person from others, which tipped over easily into hatred and self-hatred.” This universal hatred of the self and the other, or ressentiment, says Mishra, is the quintessence of our age of anger. It is universal because all inhabitants of the modern world are caught in games of imitation (pre-rigged in favour of a minority) and are bound together by fascination, envy and rejection that play out endlessly. In turn, this inevitable sense of rejection and disconnectedness, our anomie, is manipulated by demagogues and mass media that create increasingly exclusivist notions of citizenship and belonging by adding to an already long list of virtual enemies.

Mishra’s Age of Anger is an important work especially because at least part of the rage we see around us is caused by a general inability to, as Russell says, understand the modern world. Entangled in mimetic games, we are forced by the fundamental logic of a materialistic civilisation to pursue self-interest and the illusion of happiness, even at the cost of others. While the birth of this materialistic civilisation, the modern world, can be rightly traced to the 18th century, I do believe, however, that its seeds were present much earlier. The Crusades starting in the 11th century, the opening of Constantinople in 1453, and a number of developments in the 16th century — including the expansion of the British Empire and Martin Luther’s publication of his 95 Theses that sparked the Protestant Reformation — all carried forward the germ of modernity, waiting for the right moment to serve as incubator. Even the Sophists — itinerant teachers at the time of Plato and Aristotle who believed that a man could be trained to win recognition by defeating his opponent in court, even at the cost of truth, hence allowing him social mobility — can be seen as antecedents to the men of talent in the 18th century. Nevertheless, all these pages of history come to a head in the 18th century and help form the institution that is the modern world. To anybody who wishes to understand modern politics and our modern society, I would highly recommend Mishra’s work as a necessary education.

The reviewer is visiting faculty of social sciences and liberal arts at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi

Age of Anger: A History
of the Present
By Pankaj Mishra
Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, US
ISBN: 978-0374274788
416pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 9th, 2017