Truthdig
The Age of Anger
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_age_of_anger_20170611/
Posted on Jun 11, 2017
By Chris Hedges
The nihilism and rage sweeping across the globe are not generated by warped
ideologies or medieval religious beliefs. These destructive forces have
their roots in the obliterating of social, cultural and religious traditions
by modernization and the consumer society, the disastrous attempts by the
United States to carry out regime change, often through coups and wars, and
the utopian neoliberal ideology
(http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376) that has concentrated wealth
in the hands of a tiny cabal of corrupt global oligarchs.
This vast, global project of social engineering during the last century
persuaded hundreds of millions of people, as Pankaj Mishra
(http://www.pankajmishra.com/about/ ;) writes in The Age of Anger: A
History of the Present
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30989285-age-of-anger ;) , to
renounceand often scorna world of the past that had endured for thousands
of years, and to undertake a gamble of creating modern citizens who would be
secular, enlightened, cultured and heroic. The project has been a
spectacular failure.
To destroy a people, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aleksandr-Solzhenitsyn ;) noted
acidly, you must sever their roots. The wretched of the earth, as Frantz
Fanon (http://www.iep.utm.edu/fanon/ ;) called them, have been shorn of any
ideological or cultural cohesion. They are cut off from their past. They
live in crushing poverty, numbing alienation, hopelessness and often terror.
Mass culture feeds them the tawdry, the violent, the salacious and the
ridiculous. They are rising up against these forces of modernization, driven
by an atavistic fury to destroy the technocratic world that condemns them.
This rage is expressed in many formsHindu nationalism, protofascism,
jihadism, the Christian right, anarchic violence and others. But the various
forms of ressentiment (https://www.google.com/#q=ressentiment) spring from
the same deep wells of global despair. This ressentiment poisons civil
society and undermines political liberty, Mishra writes, and it is fueling
a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism.
Western elites, rather than accept their responsibility for the global
anarchy, self-servingly define the clash as one between the values of the
enlightened West and medieval barbarians. They see in the extreme
nationalists, religious fundamentalists and jihadists an inchoate and
inexplicable irrationality that can be quelled only with force. They have
yet to grasp that the disenfranchised do not hate us for our values; they
hate us because of our duplicity, use of indiscriminate industrial violence
on their nations and communities and our hypocrisy. The dispossessed grasp
the true message of the West to the rest of the planet: We have everything,
and if you try to take it away from us we will kill you.
The more that Western elites are attacked, the more they too retreat into a
mythological past, self-glorification and willful ignorance. Mishra writes:
Thus, in the very places [in the West] where secular modernity arose, with
ideas that were then universally establishedindividualism (against the
significance of social relations), the cult of efficiency and utility
(against the ethic of honour), and the normalization of self-interestthe
mythic Volk has reappeared as a spur to solidarity and action against real
and imagined enemies.
But nationalism is, more than ever before, a mystification, if not a
dangerous fraud with its promise of making a country great again and its
demonization of the other; it conceals the real conditions of existence,
and the true origins of suffering, even as it seeks to replicate the
comforting balm of transcendental ideals within a bleak earthly horizon. Its
political resurgence shows that ressentimentin this case, of people who
feel left behind by the globalized economy or contemptuously ignored by its
slick overlords and cheerleaders in politics, business and the mediaremains
the default metaphysics of the modern world since [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/ ;) first defined it. And its
most menacing expression in the age of individualism may well be the violent
anarchism of the disinherited and the superfluous.
The proponents of globalization promised to lift workers across the planet
into the middle class and instill democratic values and scientific
rationalism. Religious and ethnic tensions would be alleviated or
eradicated. This global marketplace would create a peaceful, prosperous
community of nations. All we had to do was get government out of the way and
kneel before market demands, held up as the ultimate form of progress and
rationality.
Neoliberalism, in the name of this absurd utopia, stripped away government
regulations and laws that once protected the citizen from the worst excesses
of predatory capitalism. It created free trade agreements that allowed
trillions of corporate dollars to be transferred to offshore accounts to
avoid taxation and jobs to flee to sweatshops in China and the global south
where workers live in conditions that replicate slavery. Social service
programs and public services were slashed or privatized. Mass culture,
including schools and the press, indoctrinated an increasingly desperate
population to take part in the global reality show of capitalism, a war of
all against all (https://www.google.com/#q=%22war+of+all+against+all%22 ;) .
What we were never told was that the game was fixed. We were always
condemned to lose. Our cities were deindustrialized
(https://www.google.com/#q=deindustrialized ;) and fell into decay. Wages
declined. Our working class became impoverished. Endless war became,
cynically, a lucrative business. And the worlds wealth was seized by a tiny
group of global oligarchs. Kleptocracies, such as the one now installed in
Washington, brazenly stole from the people. Democratic idealism became a
joke. We are now knit together, as Mishra writes, only by commerce and
technology, forces that Hannah Arendt (http://www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/ ;)
called negative solidarity.
The backlash, Mishra writes, resembles the anarchist, fascist and communist
violence and terrorism that took place at the end of the 19th century and in
the early 20th century. In one of the most important parts of his brilliant
and multi-layered analysis of the world around us, Mishra explains how
Western ideas were adopted and mutated by ideologues in the global south,
ideas that would become as destructive as the imposition of free market
capitalism itself.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
(https://www.biography.com/people/ayatollah-ruhollah-khomeini-13680544 ;) s
Islamic revolution in Iran, for example, borrowed liberally from Western
ideas, including representation through elections, egalitarianism and
Vladimir Lenin (http://www.history.com/topics/vladimir-lenin ;) s
revolutionary vanguard, which was adapted for a Muslim world. Nishida Kitaro
and Watsuji Tetsuro of Japans Kyoto School
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/ ;) , steeped in the
romantic nationalism of German philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
transformed the glorification of the German nation into a glorification of
imperial Japan. They provided the intellectual justification for Japans
brutal assault on China in the 1930s, and then the sudden attack on its
biggest trading partner in December 1941at Pearl Harbor. South Asias most
important writer and scholar, Muhammad Iqbal
(http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/muhammad-iqbal-3595.php ;) ,
provided a Nietzschean vision of Islam revivified by strong self-creating
Muslims. And the Chinese scholar Lu Xun
(http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_luxun.htm ;) called for
Chinese to exhibit the indomitable will exemplified by Zarathustra
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroaster) . These bastard ideologies
cloaked themselves in the veneer of indigenous religious traditions and
beliefs. But they were new creations, born out of the schöpferische
Zerstörung, or the gale of creative destruction
(https://www.google.com/#q=sch%C3%B6pferische+Zerst%C3%B6rung ;) , of global
capitalism.
Nowhere is this more true than with the modern calls for jihad by
self-styled Islamic radicals, most of whom have no religious training and
who often come out of the secularized criminal underworld. The jihadist
leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, nicknamed the sheikh of slaughterers in Iraq,
had, as Mishra writes, a long past of pimping, drug-dealing and heavy
drinking. The Afghan-American Omar Mateen
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/14/orlando-shooter-omar-mateen
-was-a-regular-at-nightclub ) reportedly was a frequenter of the nightclub
in Orlando, Fla., where he massacred 49 people and had been seen there
drunk. Anwar al-Awlaki, who preached jihad and was eventually assassinated
by the United States, had a penchant for prostitutes. Abu Mohammed
al-Adnani, a senior leader of Islamic State before he was killed, called on
Muslims in the West to kill any non-Muslim they encountered. Smash his head
with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car,
or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison, al-Adnani
told followers.
The idea of Mikhail Bakunins propaganda by deed
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_deed) is, Mishra writes,
now manifest universally in video-taped, live-streamed and Facebooked
massacres. It grew, he writes, naturally from the suspicion that only acts
of extreme violence could reveal to the world a desperate social situation
and the moral integrity of those determined to challenge it. These imported
ideas filled the void left by the destruction of indigenous beliefs,
traditions and rituals. As Mishra says, these jihadists represent the death
of traditional Islam rather than its resurrection.
As it turned out, he writes, the autocratic modernizers failed to usher a
majority of their wards into the modern world, and their abortive
revolutions from above paved the way for more radical ones from below,
followed, as we have seen in recent years, by anarchy.
The terrorist attacks in Paris or London were driven by the same
ressentiment, Mishra points out, as that which led Timothy McVey to bomb the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168,
including 19 children, and injuring 684. And when the American was
imprisoned in Florence, Colo., the prisoner in the adjacent cell was Ramzi
Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center,
in 1993. After McVey was executed, Yousef commented, I never have [known]
anyone in my life who has so similar a personality to my own as his.
Mishra writes, Malignant zealots have emerged in the very heart of the
democratic West after a decade of political and economic tumult; the simple
explanatory paradigm set in stone soon after the attacks of
9/11Islam-inspired terrorism versus modernitylies in ruins. The United
States, aside from suffering periodic mass killings in schools, malls and
movie theaters, has seen homegrown terrorists strike the Boston Marathon, a
South Carolina church, Tennessee military facilities, a Texas Army base and
elsewhere.
The modern West can no longer be distinguished from its apparent enemies,
Mishra notes. The hagiography of the U.S. Navy sniper Chris Kylewho had a
tattoo of a red Crusader cross and called the Iraq War a battle against
savage, desperate evilin Clint Eastwoods movie American Sniper
celebrates the binary worldview adopted by jihadists who deify their suicide
bombers.
The xenophobic frenzy unleashed by Clint Eastwoods film of Kyles book
suggested the most vehement partisans of holy war flourish not only in the
ravaged landscape of South and West Asia, Mishra writes. Such fanatics,
who can be atheists as well as crusaders and jihadists, also lurk among
Americas best and brightest, emboldened by an endless support of money,
arms, and even ideas supplied by terrorism experts and
clash-of-civilization theorists.
Donald Trump, given the political, economic and cultural destruction carried
out by neoliberalism, is not an aberration. He is the result of a market
society and capitalist democracy that has ceased to function. An angry and
alienated underclass, now making up as much as half the population of the
United States, is entranced by electronic hallucinations that take the place
of literacy. These Americans take a perverse and almost diabolical delight
in demagogues such as Trump that express contempt for and openly flout the
traditional rules and rituals of a power structure that preys upon them.
Mishra finds a similar situation in his own country, India. In their
indifference to the common good, single-minded pursuit of private happiness,
and narcissistic identification with an apparently ruthless strongman and
uninhibited loudmouth, [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modis angry voters
mirror many electorates around the worldpeople gratified rather than
appalled by trash-talk and the slaughter of old conventions, he writes.
The new horizons of individual desire and fear opened up by the neoliberal
world economy do not favour democracy or human rights.
Mishra excoriates the Wests idealized and sanitized version of history,
the simple-minded and dangerously misleading ideas and assumptions, drawn
from a triumphant history of Anglo-American achievements that has long
shaped the speeches of statesmen, think-tank reports, technocratic surveys,
newspaper editorials, while supplying fuel to countless columnists, TV
pundits and so-called terrorism experts. The mandarins who spew this
self-serving narrative are, as American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called
them and their ilk, the bland fanatics of Western civilization who regard
the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm
of human existence.
The roots of modernization and colonization are, as Mishra writes, ones of
carnage and bedlam. The rapacious appetite of capitalists and imperialists
never considered such constraining factors as finite geographical space,
degradable natural resources and fragile ecosystems. In carrying out this
project of global expansion, no form of coercion or violence was off-limits.
Those who opposed us simply learned to speak our language.
The intellectual pedigree of todays nasty atrocities is not to be found in
religious scriptures, Mishra writes. French colonialists in Algeria had
used torture techniques originally deployed by the Nazis during the
occupation of France (and also were some of the first hijackers of a
civilian aeroplane). Americans in the global war on terror resorted to cruel
interrogation methods that the Soviet Union had patented during the Cold
War. In the latest stage of this gruesome reciprocity, the heirs of Zarqawi
in ISIS dress their Western hostages in Guantanamos orange suits, and turn
on their smartphone cameras, before beheading their victims.
The Wests dangerous faith in the inevitability of human progress is
chronicled by Mishra through the dueling French intellectuals Rousseau and
Voltaire, as well as Bakunin, Alexander Herzen, Karl Marx, Fichte, Giuseppe
Mazzini and Michel Foucault. This intellectually nuanced and philosophically
rich book shows that ideas matter.
The Hindu, Jewish, Chinese and Islamic modernists who helped establish
major nation-building ideologies were in tune with the main trends of the
European fin-de-siècle (https://www.google.com/#q=+fin-de-si%C3%A8cle ;) ,
which redefined freedom beyond bourgeois self-seeking to a will to forge
dynamic new societies and reshape history, Mishra writes. It is impossible
to understand them, and the eventual product of their efforts (Islamism,
Hindu nationalism, Zionism, Chinese nationalism), without grasping their
European intellectual background of cultural decay and pessimism: the
anxiety in the unconscious that Freud was hardly alone in sensing, or the
idea of a glorious rebirth after decline and decadence, borrowed from the
Christian idea of resurrection, that Mazzini
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Mazzini) had done so much to
introduce into the political sphere.
Mishra goes on:
ISIS, born during the implosion of Iraq, owes its existence more to
Operation Infinite Justice and Enduring Freedom than to any Islamic
theology. It is the quintessential product of a radical process of
globalization in which governments, unable to protect their citizens from
foreign invaders, brutal police, or economic turbulence, lose their moral
and ideological legitimacy, creating a space for such non-state actors as
armed gangs, mafia, vigilante groups, warlords and private revenge-seekers.
ISIS aims to create a Caliphate, but, like American regime-changers, it
cannot organize a political space, as distinct from privatizing violence.
Motivated by a selfie individualism, the adepts of ISIS are better at
destroying Valhalla than building it. Ultimately, a passion for grand
politics, manifest in ISISs Wagnerian-style annihilation, is what drives
the Caliphate, as much as it did [Gabriele] DAnnunzios utopia
(https://groenenationalisten.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/fiume-the-last-pirate-
utopia/) . The will to power and craving for violence as existential
experience reconciles, as [philosopher and social theorist Georges] Sorel
prophesized, the varying religious and ideological commitments of its
adherents. The attempts to place them in a long Islamic tradition miss how
much these militants, feverishly stylizing their murders and rapes on
Instagram, reflect an ultimate stage in the radicalization of the modern
principle of individual autonomy and equality: a form of strenuous
self-assertion that acknowledges no limits, and requires descent into a
moral abyss.
Philosopher George Santayana foresaw that Americas obsessive
individualistic culture of competition and mimicry would eventually incite
a lava-wave of primitive blindness and violence. The inability to be
self-critical and self-aware, coupled with the cult of the self, would lead
to a collective suicide. Cultural historian Carl Schorske in Fin-de-Siècle
Vienna: Politics and Culture wrote that Europes descent into fascism was
inevitable once it cut the cord of consciousness. And, with the rise of
Trump, it is clear the cord of consciousness has also been severed in the
twilight days of the American empire. Once we no longer acknowledge or
understand our own capacity for evil, once we no longer know ourselves, we
become monsters who devour others and finally devour ourselves.
Totalitarianism with its tens of millions of victims was identified as a
malevolent reaction to the benevolent Enlightenment tradition of
rationalism, humanism, universalism and liberal democracya tradition seen
as an unproblematic norm, Mishra writes. It was clearly too disconcerting
to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological
currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism,
technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the
violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late
nineteenth century.
Mishra knows what happens when people are discarded onto the dung heap of
history. He knows what endless wars, waged in the name of democracy and
Western civilization, engender among their victims. He knows what drives
people, whether they are at a Trump rally or a radical mosque in Pakistan,
to lust after violence. History informs the present. We are afflicted by
what writer Albert Camus called autointoxication, the malignant secretion
of ones preconceived impotence inside the enclosure of the self. And until
this autointoxication is addressed, the rage and violence, at home and
abroad, will expand as we stumble toward a global apocalypse. The
self-alienation of humankind, Walter Benjamin
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/) warned, has reached such a
degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure
of the first order.
The conflicts in Egypt, Libya, Mali, Syria and many other places, Mishra
notes, are fueled by extreme weather events, the emptying of rivers and
seas of their fish stocks, or the desertification of entire regions on the
planet. The refugees being driven by their homelands chaos into Europe are
creating political instability there. And as we sleepwalk into the future,
the steady deterioration of the ecosystem will ultimately lead to total
systems collapse. Mishra warns that the two ways in which humankind can
self-destructcivil war on a global scale, or destruction of the natural
environmentare rapidly converging. Our elites, oblivious to the dangers
ahead, blinded by their own hubris and greed, are ferrying us, like Charon
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_(mythology) ) , to the land of the
dead.
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