Age of Anger: A History of the Present

Pankaj Mishra

Allen Lane, £20

Review by Julie McDowall

WHATEVER happened to 1989? The Wall fell, people danced, and masses of jubilant, smoking Trabants poured into West Berlin. The collapse of communism seemed proof that the West’s way of life was the right one, that there was no alternative to capitalism, and that everyone else would soon follow and share the rewards.

So why, instead of the promised world of growth, wealth and equality, do we have Brexit, Trump, ISIS and the rise of the far-right; lorry massacres in Berlin and gunmen in Paris? Why is there such anger?

Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra's book offers the unfashionable thesis that you can’t simply blame militant Islam. The roots of the current rage are to be found in the Enlightenment.

But first, a warning. This book is an intellectual history which surveys the great Western thinkers and applies their philosophy to the present anger of the young male immigrant or the rust belt voter yelling for Trump. Just as Ulysses or Hamlet can’t be fully grasped without supplementary reading, this book requires a basic grasp of the philosophies of Rousseau, Voltaire and Nietzsche. A quick jog to the memory is all that’s needed but is essential before embarking on this vast and ambitious book.

The author reminds us that bloody revolutions and bomb attacks have not always been confined to the developing world. As modernity made itself felt in Europe, the continent responded with waves of anarchy, revolt and terrorism because many felt alienated and could not adapt. Dostoevsky spoke for those people left behind, the men snubbed and humiliated by the fast new world.

Mishra sees their present-day equivalents in the young men from Africa and Asia who’ve been seduced by the promise of Western modernity. They eagerly abandon their old identities but soon find they have “succumbed to the fantasies of consumerism without being able to satisfy them. They respond to their own loss and disorientation with a hatred of modernity’s supposed beneficiaries.”

Having shed their old identity, and unable to claim another, they retreat back into their indigenous one, seeking “a sentimental refuge” from this new world which refuses to notice them.

With brutal perception Mishra calls them “superfluous young people condemned to the anteroom of the modern world” and by clutching at the rigours of a strict religion and an old hierarchy they feel on firm ground at last. Likewise with disaffected Trump supporters who yearn for the good old days when they had a job for life, a busy factory on the edge of town, and a prim white church on the hill. They are desperate for old certainties in a new world.

Therefore, Mishra says, you cannot simply blame militant Islam but must instead ask why people are flocking to it. This is an unfashionable stance when it’s becoming increasingly common to view the rise of Islamic terror as “a clash of civilisations” with the West. Mishra sneers at such proponents, “those experts on Islam who opened for business on 9/11” and who “peddle their wares” after each atrocity.

Terrorism is nothing new, he says, referring to bomb attacks in 19th century Paris, and is a symptom of modernity colliding with established societies and creating losers. He refers also to calls in Italy in 1909 to burn museums and libraries – though it does feel Mishra is straining too hard to join the dots here in linking the crank manifesto of an Italian poet to ISIS’s destruction of Palmyra.

Nonetheless, he argues the West is not simply enduring the rage of radical Islam but of the descendants of Dostoevsky’s bitter “Underground Man”. Globalisation has shrunk the world so they see its glittering prizes everywhere but cannot claim them. There is a party going on to which they’re not invited, yet are constantly taunted by its music. Their resulting violence, to paraphrase Nietzsche, is driven by ressentiment: a mix of envy and humiliation, “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge.”

And the Enlightenment lies at the root. It promised a better world as it was based on rationalism: men will always work towards their own best interests. This became 19th century utilitarianism – the greatest good for the greatest number – which developed into the 20th century pursuit of economic growth. The West’s trajectory can be followed back to the basic Enlightenment belief that we are rational, but this didn’t concede that lost honour, disappointment, humiliation and envy may drive a man’s actions as much as cold, hard logic.

Age of Anger is not an easy or enjoyable read. The prose never sparkles and some sentences are tortuous. It often seems weighed down by the intellectual heft it’s carrying and perhaps the author felt this too as he sometimes slips the leash to indulge in spurts of baroque writing: “foaming at the mouth with loathing and malice”, “render the air mephitic with violence.” Yet it’s a valuable book. Mishra’s ideas are bold and initially discomfiting – it’s a challenge to look over the head of the latest terrorist and try to dispassionately trace his rage back to Voltaire – but it’s undeniably good to stretch intellectual muscles and test your own prejudices. Mishra invites us to hear the ugly, muffled shouts beneath the “drumbeat” of Western civilisation.