The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sentimental Rage?

Mark Lilla published The Shipwrecked Mind just four months before Pankaj Mishra published his views on the state of the world in The Age of Anger (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Near enough to call them contemporaneous. Both are first-rate intellects and intellectual writers. So I find the differences in their conclusions at least as interesting as their individual analyses.

Lilla presents his point succinctly: “Hopes can be disappointed. Nostalgia is irrefutable.” Nostalgia, the sentimental longing for a previous state of affairs, is his key for understanding the global reactionary trend in popular culture and politics. Historically, he traces such reaction to the residual but continuing trauma of the French Revolution and documents his case through some extremely interesting intellectual biographies.

Mishra has a different starting point. He sees “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 has his own historical rationale for this feeling, what he calls the failure of the principle of “historic inevitability,” that is the dissipation of the comfort provided by the dominant ideologies of the 20th century. Confidence in historic inevitability was the foundation of not just Marxism, but also of the liberal and neo-liberal believers in free market progress. It is generally recognised that this confidence was misplaced, he says. Hence the unfocused but pervasive disillusion.

Nostalgia or ressentiment? Are they the same thing? Are they complementary sides of a coin? Both appear to be plausible elements of political reaction. Are they cumulative, like allergic reactions?

One might expect nostalgia to be a condition of the old. Surprisingly it isn’t. It is often the young who long for the return of a fictional past which never existed but offers a life without the tedious concerns of the present. The Lord of the Rings is successful not because it is an edifying narrative of unexpected challenge and courageous response (or any kind of coherent narrative) but because it is a rambling description of an ur-world of simple motivations and temptations in which good and evil are entirely distinct and adventure abounds.

The old know better than the young that cultural memory is selective, and like memory of childbirth, tends to obscure the worst bits and present them as quaint. The old have heard the stories before, and their counter-stories. A certain skepticism is inevitable but the principle emotion is one of fatigue. One loses the energy to either object or even to acquiesce. The young will learn eventually without the advice of the old. It has always been so.

So reactionary nostalgia tends to be a young person’s game. I’m not so sure the same holds for the anger of ressentiment. Ressentiment requires disappointment in order to exist, and therefore experience, probably consistently bad experience. Ressentiment does not rely on some fictional account of the old days or of a golden age. Ressentiment has no such memories. The fact that others might is reason enough for the anger.

This is not to say that a coalition, either cultural or political, between the nostalgic and the resentful is not possible. Dissatisfaction attracts the dissatisfied. But the stability of such a coalition must be suspect. Young nostalgia is likely to tire quickly of angry whining. And anger generally has little tolerance for the optimism inherent in nostalgic fiction. Without some other unifying complaint, it is therefore unlike that the young and old can stick it with one another.

Ultimately therefore reaction is not a long-term winner in the wars of either culture or politics. It doesn’t know what it wants: yesterday or an overturning of yesterday? Regardless of the source of its existential reality, reactionary dissatisfaction is neurotic. It desires the achievement of the impossible: something not just past but never having existed, a sort of negative ideal. This is only likely to increase the dissatisfactions experienced.

Both Mishra and Lilla have important things to say. What they each have to say may be even more important in the context of the other.

View all my reviews