Age of Anger review: All the world’s a tinderbox

Age of Anger: A History of the Present

Author: Pankaj Mishra

ISBN-13: 978-0-241-27813-0

Publisher: Allen Lane

Guideline Price: £20

As the world stage swells with supremacist demagogues of all hues, and our screens with endless slaughter, ethnic cleansings and refugee “swarms”, the often electrifying Indian author and essayist Pankaj Mishra has delivered a caustic archaeology of the “unreason” underlying the “crisis of legitimacy” now fuelling secessionist movements from Catalonia to Hong Kong, as Brexit puts the kibosh on 50 years of European integration.

Mishra's last book, From the Ruins of Empire, charted two centuries of western imperialism through Asian eyes, agape at the white man's debauchery. The book appeared after his celebrated spat with Niall Ferguson (then "overhauling" the UK history curriculum) in the London Review of Books, where Mishra roasted Ferguson's wistful "neoimperial" oeuvre over the fires of inconvenient history.

Age of Anger interrogates the contradictions in western liberal democracy, which was forged in the 18th-century Enlightenment by Adam Smith, Voltaire, Montesquieu et al as a secular materialist civilisation based on rational self-interest, formal equality, "liberty" and laissez-faire free-market capitalism.

Mishra’s talisman is Rousseau, the “prickly” Genevan who prophesied pandemonium in the roll-out of the lofty ideals he so crucially helped formulate. Unlike Voltaire, who grew rich on a stock exchange that he saw as a temple of modernity (“where Jew, Mohammedan and Christian” are equal “and only apply the word ‘infidel’ to people who go bankrupt”), Rousseau foresaw only dystopia in universal competition.

Rousseau claimed that international trade and opaque finance attract “pilferers and traitors” who put “the public good on the auction block”, thus creating new forms of enslavement, with the arts and sciences mere “garlands of flowers over the chains”.

Propulsive passages

Mishra mines a kaleidoscope of philosophers, sociologists, novelists, poets, radicals and revolutionaries, embroidering their words into dense, propulsive passages that frequently take flame. His central notion is Nietzschean resentment: “a tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts”; a corrosive mix of subjugation, impotency, humiliation and hatred that always threatens a Hobbesian “war of all against all”.

Mishra argues that unattainable Enlightenment aspirations sparked the French Revolution, sowing dragon seeds of nationalism and “mimetic” capitalist imperialism across the 19th century. Channelling domestic misrule, Napoleon’s expansionist warmongering took Berlin, as exalted German romantic emotion curdled to loathing. “Spew out the ugly slime of the Seine!” the writer and philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder spat. Heinrich von Kleist urged Germans to dam the Rhine with French carcasses as students burned “un-German” books by Wartburg Castle – a symbolic act not lost on the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine.

Solitary anomie crystallised in Dostoyevsky’s “underground man”, who espied Baal in a soulless, grotesquely unequal Europe where “nationality is just a tax system, the soul a tabula rasa, a little piece of wax from which one can mould a real person, a universal everyman, a homunculus . . .”

As Germany, Russia and Japan emulated British and French imperial “modernity”, and the “Third Rome” of the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini spawned the Risorgimento, uprisings influenced by the Russian Mikhail Bakunin morphed into anarchist terror killings, including of a tsar, an empress and a US president. Soon the “New Man” archetypes of Nietzsche and Georges Sorel chimed with a world restive for existential violence.

Mishra returns repeatedly to the aesthetic radicalism that prefigured 20th-century totalitarianism, not least the preposterous Gabriele d’Annunzio (dubbed “Wagner’s monkey” by Thomas Mann), who, with his black-uniformed, Roman-saluting balcony addresses (before his irredentist occupation of Fiume) so exhilarated Hitler, Mussolini and the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

The latter’s manifestos glorified war (“the world’s only hygiene”) and Italy’s 1911 invasion of Libya – “the remarkable symphony of the lead shrapnel” and the “sculpture wrought in the enemy’s masses by our expert artillery”, hampered only by “stupid colonial humanitarianism”.

Culture shocks

Mishra charts the culture shock rippling through Japanese, Arab and African thought. The Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao was horrified by American racism and corruption, as was Gandhi, who advocated duty over individualism. Yet, by the 1950s, western-backed dictators from Iran to Indonesia embraced the creed of modernisation, as left-leaning nation-builders read Lenin and Mao. All rapidly laid waste to indigenous cultures.

Jalal Al-e-Ahmad grew up under the US-backed Iranian despot Reza Shah Pahlavi, who imposed western dress (forcibly unveiling women) before his son, installed by the CIA/MI6-backed coup of 1953, gifted Iranian oil proceeds to western powers. Al-e-Ahmad's classic Islamist text, Westoxification, from 1962, bemoaned migrant masses forced off the land into Tehran's squalid slums.

A visiting British MP called the city a “Mercedes museum” where British double-decker buses looked “surprisingly at home under the blue skies”.

The nonreligious Al-e-Ahmad came late to politicised Islam as a bulwark against western “machine civilisation”, taking lessons from the “messianic” Zionist renaissance of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and minister of defence.

Mishra pinions the West’s hypocritical vilification of Islam, as Samuel Huntington’s old Clash of Civilisations thesis (“Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards”) reanimates under Donald Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon, a former investment banker whose apocalyptic propaganda fans global war against “Islamic fascism”.

As Middle Eastern carnage reaches western cities, the West's hand-wringing about its superior moral "values" denies centuries of occupation and brutal colonial legacies in secret-police agencies across Iran and Turkey and the mukhabarat of many Arab countries. Meanwhile, the "war on terror" – extrajudicial drone massacres and invasive regime change in increasingly privatised wars – provokes only annihilationist enmity.

Community fantasy

In Mishra’s native India “fantasies of a new community” have elevated Narendra Modi, the often flower-bedecked prime minister whose Hindu-supremacist regime purges dissidents and “westernised” intellectuals. Accused of inciting the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom of more than 1,000 people in Gujarat, Modi is a lifelong member of the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, modelled on European fascism. He now commands a nuclear-armed, immiserated nation: 43 per cent of under-fives malnourished; more than half the population defecate in the open.

Mishra is light on economic mechanisms, but certainly the “neoliberalised” superstructure of global capital, particularly since 1989, pulverises ethnicity. Its glittering fortresses rise, from Mumbai to Nairobi, over deracinated masses in megacity slums, trapped in ever yawning inequity. War and famine have displaced 65 million people, many to stateless camps or remote islands: a vastly expanded Calais in recent decades, especially in Asia and Africa.

Despite Mishra’s vision of “global civil war” he resiles from pessimism. Uprooted masses, he writes, have long “made and unmade the modern world”, just as billions of young Asians and Africans will again, reconstituting their own ethnic histories.