Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How the World Feels

Identifying the fictions in which we live is an awkward matter, mainly because it involves creating an alternative fiction. And comparing the merits of competing stories is tricky. Each story carries with it its own criterion of verification and presents its facts accordingly: Jews are responsible for our financial problems; look at all the Jewish names in banking. Muslims are educated to hate us; proven by the Q’uran. Immigrants undermine society; drugs come from the same places they do.

‘Fact-checking’ these sorts of narratives is unproductive. The problem isn’t one of falsehood but of incompleteness. One way to judge such a narrative therefore is its inclusion of more facts than its competitors. Particularly telling is the inclusion of apparently contradictory facts which are otherwise unexplained: The Jewish names on the door might front largely Christian organizations. The Bible is as casually and inhumanely brutal as anything in the Q’uran. Immigrants and drugs come from the places that have been impoverished through globalization.

Mishra’s technique for creating a more ‘inclusive’ narrative is to start with an aesthetic judgement rather than a thesis: “... ressentiment as the defining feature of a world... where the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status, and property ownership.” He then lets rip on a journey through culture and its present discontents, drawing in as many facts as he can handle, and that’s quite a few. He considers himself a “stepchild of the West” as well as an Asian. Only a few are likely to have his breadth of cultural experience, so his choice of ressentiment as the key to global sentiment seems inspired to me.

Mishra’s opinion is that this pervasive feeling of disappointment and fear is the result of the collapse in the principle of “historic inevitability” that was the foundation of not just Marxism, but also of the liberal and neo-liberal believers in free market progress. Both socialism and capitalism have created societies in which material advantage has been offset by enormous economic, racial, and sexual inequities. What young, thinking, even vaguely aware, person could avoid the conclusion that those in charge are either frauds or crooks? The road to both ISIS and the Alt-right are paved with thwarted idealism. Contingency not fate rules the world.

It is the young especially who perceive the absurd gap between any ideology that suggests it knows the destination of human society and the obvious mess of reality. Neither proletarian nor consumer utopia has ever been in sight; the Second Coming has been unconscionably delayed. And if the narratives of ideology as well as religion are bust, then “Nothing less than this [Enlightenment] sense of expectation, central to modern political and economic thinking, has gone missing today, especially among those who have themselves never had it so good.” Neither body nor spirit provides a foothold for supporting intelligent life. A sort of negative idealism, a rampant nihilism, beckons. Mishra quotes Walter Benjamin for effect: the self alienation of humankind “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

Could there be a better confirmation of this claim than Trump, a man who fits Benjamin’s description exactly (although elected only after Age of Anger was already with the publisher)? If not, then it is essential to recognise Trump not as anomaly but as epitome. He is what we have become, in all his vileness. He is a symbol, one hopes not of the moral standards of modern society, but certainly of the existential deficiency of all of our conventional political and cultural narratives. As surely as Kant, Trump deserves the title of der alles Zermalmender, the All-destroyer.

It is fatuous to think that some sort of familiar normality will return with Trump’s departure, no matter when that takes place. The myths of the past - American democracy, indeed liberal democracy, as a natural end-state; increasingly rational international cooperation in the furtherance of mutual interest; the universality of human interests themselves; the possibility of global rule of common law - are no longer tenable and not worth the treaties they’re written in.

Ressentiment is a symptom of despair among populations who still long for the comforts these myths provide. Their loss makes us all sick, although it is generally the young (and the psychotic) who act out most readily. It is the young (and the psychotic) who first spot how facile and self-satisfied these myths are. The rest of us resist like the Boers resisted in South Africa, by doubling down on the myths. Hence the apparent paradox of simultaneously increasing secularisation and religious fundamentalism - in Alabama, and Moscow, as well as Aleppo; the economic dissatisfaction among those who are the wealthiest on the planet; the drive to roll back democratic institutions by those democratically elected to safeguard them.

Can we exist as cognitively gifted social animals without myths? Highly unlikely. Can we find better ones? Possibly, if we can only get past the kind of either/or dualisms that infest so much of our culture and are embedded in our institutions: Christianity defines itself essentially as ‘not-Jewish’; the monotheistic God is most fundamentally not his creation; the rational is that which is logical rather than that which is important; will, desire, and faith are personal possessions and not communally owned; European institutions (one thinks of the modern corporation) have proven themselves superior by their proliferation; wrongs must be righted, if necessary by employing more wrongs.

The Age of Anger is far too rich with historical, literary, and cultural facts to summarise easily. Its conclusions are less than precise and directive. But I find this both consistent and convincing rather than a flaw. It is a narrative which denies its own definitiveness and begs for additions and modifications and reversals. Perhaps it is a model for the kind of myth we now need to keep us from exterminating one another.

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