Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

  Underneath Rousseau’s strictures lay a primal fear of female sexuality, which in his view must be restrained if women are to help in the creation of sturdy male citizens. Mary Wollstonecraft rightly accused Rousseau of reducing women to ‘gentle, domestic brutes’. Rousseau, however, was no more misogynistic than most thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who feared that the ideals of modern society morally and physically enervated men.

  But Rousseau went further than most of them in advocating a military and patriotic spirit. ‘Every citizen,’ he wrote, ‘must be a soldier as a duty and none may be so by profession.’ Also: ‘The patriotic spirit is exclusive and makes us look upon all those who are not our fellow citizens as strangers and almost enemies. Such was the Spirit of Sparta and of Rome.’

  This soldier-citizen, according to Rousseau, is superior to the inhabitant of cosmopolitan society because he can explain his every action in terms of shared values rather than selfish interests. His moral self-assurance derives from the fact that he is not motivated by private amour propre. His egoism is reoriented towards collective public ends; and though he may become a xenophobe, he at least lives at peace with himself and with his immediate neighbours, as distinct from the abstraction-addled liberal internationalist, who ‘loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbours’. Patriotism was the right antidote to the unhealthy morals and policies of a bourgeois society devoted to luxury and self-indulgence.

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  Rousseau’s notion of Sparta was as historically grounded – and idealized – as the Caliphate of radical Islamists. He used it to attack cosmopolitan elites who presented themselves as the worldwide nemesis of religious prejudice and superstition and designers of rational society. With his image of civic virtue in Sparta, he wanted to show that the men and women of Paris, and, more generally, societies founded on self-interest and envious comparison, were dissolute. Unbeknown to him, Rousseau was also elaborating something new: the sentiment of militant cultural nationalism.

  For him, civic virtue included a belligerent attitude of citizens to all outsiders. As he wrote in Émile (1762):

  Every restricted society, when it is small and closely unified, alienates itself from the greater whole. Every patriot is severe with strangers: they are merely men, they are nothing in his eyes. Abroad, the Spartan was ambitious, avaricious, unjust; but disinterestedness, equity and peace reigned within his own walls. Beware of those cosmopolitans who go on distant bookish quests for the duties which they disdain to fulfil in their own surroundings.

  Rousseau never saw the good of the collective in any other terms than the spiritual and moral well-being of its members. The extraordinary paradox of his thought is that he hopes for the individual to subordinate himself to the community for the sake of his freedom, and not for the sake of any collectively shared goals. In fact, he argued against any optimism about collective progress precisely because it did not protect the human individual from oppressive external compulsions. As he wrote in his last, unfinished book, Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782), ‘I had never thought the liberty of man consists in doing what he wishes, but rather in not doing that which he does not wish.’

  But his feelings of insecurity, and nostalgia for a home he had never known, didn’t cease to feed a longing for an ideal society in which the tension between man’s inner life and his social nature could be resolved. His abraded sensibility registered keenly the appeal of a political ideal of equally empowered and virtuous citizens; and there is much in his writings to confirm the commonplace perceptions of Rousseau in the following two centuries as the dangerous prophet of revolution, the destroyer of established values, and the proponent of totalitarianism. One of his most interesting critics, Joseph de Maistre, who accused him of irresponsible radicalism, put it best:

  he often discovers remarkable truths and expresses them better than anyone else, but these truths are sterile in his hands … No one shapes their materials better than he, and no one builds more poorly. Everything is good except his systems.

  Nevertheless, Rousseau is rewardingly seen in our own context as the man who understood the moral and spiritual implications of the rise of an international commercial society, and who saw the deep contradictions in a predominantly materialist ethic and a society founded on individuals enviously emulating the rich and craving their privileges. It was Rousseau who pointed out that the new dispensation, while promising freedom and equality, did much to hinder them. He sensed, earlier than anyone else, that the individual assertion mandated by modern egalitarian society could amount in practice to domination of other individuals; he foresaw its pathologies, flaws and blind spots, which made certain negative historical outcomes likely in practice.

  In his attempt to heal the acute self-division of modern men and women, their perpetually agitated and unhappy selves, Rousseau founded the main political and cultural movements of the modern world. Many ‘isms’ of the right and the left – Romanticism, socialism, authoritarianism, nationalism, anarchism – can be traced to Rousseau’s writings. Whether in his denunciation of moral corruption, his claim that the metropolis was a den of vice and that virtue resided in ordinary people (whom the elites routinely conspired against and deceived), his praise of militant patriotism, his distrust of intellectual technocracy, his advocacy of a return to the collective, the ‘people’, or his concern for the ‘stranger’, Rousseau anticipated the modern underdog with his aggravated sense of victimhood and demand for redemption.

  The Thrill of Moral Superiority

  What’s crucial about Rousseau, and many of his ideological successors, is that politics was always personal for him, unlike those whom Tocqueville faulted for indulging abstract theories. He felt that all valets had the same vices – dishonesty, pride, anger and envy – because he himself had been one. He scathingly connected atheism to the interests of the powerful and disdain for the poor because, unlike the Parisian philosophers, he had known a simple Christianity in the Geneva of his childhood. His humiliating stint as a minor diplomat in Venice exposed to him both his unfitness for the smart set and also the injustice, inequality and corruption of government run by and for the rich.

  Politics for Rousseau was also entangled in neuroses of the over-socialized self. He was the prototype of the man who feels himself, despite his obvious success, to be at the bottom of the social pyramid, and knows that he can never fit into the existing order. His confidence and self-righteousness derived from his belief that he had at least escaped the vices of modern life: deceit and flattery. In his solitude, he was convinced, like many converts to ideological causes and religious beliefs, that he was immune to corruption. A conviction of his incorruptibility was what gave his liberation from social pieties a heroic aura and moved him from a feeling of powerlessness to omnipotence. In the movement from victimhood to moral supremacy, Rousseau enacted the dialectic of ressentiment that has become commonplace in our time.

  Championing the purity of inner life against the contamination of the social, the poor against the rich, ordinary folk against privileged classes, religious sentiment against atheism and libertinism, he spoke on behalf of the injured and the insulted against powerful elites. It is no accident that ‘tearing the mask of hypocrisy off’ was, as Arendt pointed out, the French Revolution’s ‘favoured simile’; and that Rousseau’s first great disciple, Robespierre, was obsessed with ‘tearing the façade of corruption down and of exposing behind it the unspoiled, honest face of the peuple ’.

  Rousseau actually went beyond the conventional political categories and intellectual vocabularies of left and right to outline the basic psychological outlook of those who perceive themselves as abandoned or pushed behind. He provided the basic vocabulary for their characteristic new expressions of discontent, and then articulated their longing for a world cleansed of the social sources of dissatisfaction. Against today’s backdrop of near-universal political rage, history’s greatest militant lowbrow seems to have grasped, and embodied, bet
ter than anyone the incendiary appeal of victimhood in societies built around the pursuit of wealth and power.

  The recent explosions, from India to the United States, of ressentiment against writers and journalists as well as politicians, technocrats, businessmen and bankers reveal how Rousseau’s history of the human heart is still playing itself out among the disaffected. Those who perceive themselves as left or pushed behind by a selfish conspiratorial minority can be susceptible to political seducers from any point on the ideological spectrum, for they are not driven by material inequality alone. The Jacobins and the German Romantics may have been Rousseau’s most famous disciples, determined to create through retributive terror or economic and cultural nationalism the moral community neglected by Enlightenment philosophes.

  But Rousseau’s prescient criticism of a political and economic system based on envious comparison, individual self-seeking and the multiplication of artificial needs also helps us understand a range of historical and sociological phenomena: how and why a cleric like Ayatollah Khomeini rose out of obscurity to lead a popular revolution in Iran; why many young people seduced by modernity come to pour scorn on Enlightenment ideals of progress, liberty and human perfectibility; why they preach salvation by faith and tradition and uphold the need for authority, hierarchy, obedience and subjection; or why, suffering from self-disgust, these divided men and women embrace conflict and suffering, bloodshed and war.

  Rousseau’s obsessive concern with the freedom and moral integrity of individuals, combined with an extreme loathing for inequality and change, makes for a perpetually renewable challenge to contemporary political and economic arrangements – and certainly it chimes perfectly with the present clamour against globalization and its beneficiaries. Uprooted iconoclastic men with their great dissatisfactions and longings for radical equality and stability have made and unmade our world with their projects of extreme modernity (often paradoxically pursued by imitating ancient and medieval society), and their fantasies of restoring the moral and spiritual unity of divided human beings. There will be many more of them, it is safe to say, as billions of young people in Asia and Africa negotiate the maelstrom of progress.

  4. Losing My Religion: Islam, Secularism and Revolution

  What proves the freedom of humanity and the generosity of its nature is the longing for homeland, yearning for the return of compatriots, and weeping over the passage of time.

  Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, The Extraction of Gold, or an Overview of Paris (1834)

  The Shared Fate of the Modern

  In Ian McEwan’s novel Amsterdam (1998) the protagonist, a composer, travels out of his arty west London bubble to confront the other side of modern urban civilization:

  square miles of meagre modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions, and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic. It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after. No one would have wished it this way, but no one had been asked. Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it. To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare or Milton, had ever existed? Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung further away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened to a concreted sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.

  This vision of the ‘human project’, or modern development, as a cosmic abortion sounds a bit choleric. But McEwan’s protagonist hasn’t strayed too far from the Romantics who warned against the aggressive pursuit of material wealth and power at the expense of the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of human life. The Romantics in turn were inspired by Rousseau’s contention that human beings have become the victims of a system they have themselves created. Or, as Mr Pancks in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) puts it, ‘Keep me always at it, and I’ll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.’

  The Romantics seeded a whole tradition of Anglo-American criticism in the nineteenth century to which the conservative Dickens belongs as much as Thoreau, who famously asserted in his section on ‘Economy’ in Walden (1854) that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. This largely moral critique of modernity was broadened by writers in countries playing ‘catch-up’ with the Atlantic West. The Russians, in particular, stressed social facts: the ill-directed energy and posturing of political elites, and the loss of a sense of community and personal identity.

  Doubt and ambivalence appear early in The Bronze Horseman (1836), Pushkin’s narrative poem about the statue of Peter the Great and the self-consciously Western city he built on the banks of the Neva. The city was said to have cost a hundred thousand lives in the building. The Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, a friend of Pushkin, had denounced the statue in a poem as ‘a tribute to a tyrant’s cruel whim’. Pushkin deeply resented a stateless Pole’s criticism of anything Russian; but he had mixed feelings of his own about Peter. So his own poem about the statue begins with a celebratory tone:

  Here shall a city be laid down

  In defiance to a haughty neighbour

  Here nature has predestined us

  To break a window through to Europe …

  The window has to be broken; violence, Pushkin seems to concede, is necessary to the urgent task of resembling the West. But it will also provoke a backlash from its victims. Commenting on the appearance in bronze of Peter in a Roman toga, his outstretched arm wielding an emperor’s protective baton, Joseph de Maistre had scathingly remarked that one ‘does not know if that hand of bronze is raised to protect or to threaten’. Pushkin, who knew of this quip, makes the poor, slightly crazed clerk Eugene in the poem – the first of many pathetic officials alienated, scorned and terrorized by the modern in Russian fiction – respond to the statue’s overweening power with the defiant words: ‘You’ll reckon with me yet!’

  Indian Summer (1857), a novel by Adalbert Stifter set in a swiftly industrializing and urbanizing Germany, registers the new hierarchies, injustices and discontents to come with the encroachments of the modern:

  Now any little country town and its surrounding area, with what it has, what it is and what it knows, is able to seal itself off. Soon that will no longer be the case; it will be wrenched into the general intercourse. Then, to be adequate for its contacts on every side, the lowliest will have to possess much greater knowledge and capacity than it does today. The countries which … acquire this knowledge first will leap ahead in wealth and power and splendour, and even be capable of casting doubt on the others.

  So they did. Stifter could have been speaking of any country that had suffered, long after decolonization, the intellectual as well as geopolitical and economic hegemony of Western Europe and the United States, and had failed to find its own way of being modern. Already in the nineteenth century, Britain and the United States seemed to be outlining the future of humanity with their scramble for wealth, power and splendour, their network of banking, railroads, industry and commerce spreading across uncharted tracts and seas, in a perfect Rousseau nightmare, with the help of venturesome immigrants, ruthless politicians and unscrupulous magnates. This extraordinary success of an economic universalism allowed a figure like Jeremy Bentham to take, as Marx sneeringly wrote, ‘the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man’.

  After 1945, as we saw, American elites, singularly undamaged and actually empowered by the most destructive war in history, idealized their exceptional experie
nce – of individual self-seekers achieving more or less continuous expansion under relatively thin traditional constraints – into a model of universal development. With this new ‘Western Model’, or human project, looming over many ‘under-developed’ countries, development, quick and urgent, became the common sense of the age, despite the apparent costs. As an influential United Nations document put it in 1951:

  There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of cast, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated.

  As the UN predicted, the ‘developing world’ was soon full of men uprooted from rural habitats and condemned to drift in the big city – those eventually likely to focus their rage against the modernizing West and its agents in Muslim countries. One of those thwarted migrants muttering ‘You’ll reckon with me yet’ in the last years of the twentieth century was a lower middle-class young man from Cairo writing a master’s thesis on urban planning. Describing the despoliation of a neighbourhood in the old Syrian city of Aleppo by highways and modernist high rises, he called for them all to be demolished and the area to be rebuilt along traditional lines, with courtyard homes and market stalls. He saw this as part of a restoration of Islamic culture. His thesis, submitted to a university in Hamburg, passed with high marks. A few months later this same young man by the name of Mohammed Atta was told that he been chosen to lead a mission to destroy America’s most famous skyscrapers.

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  ‘Imperialism has not allowed us to achieve historical normality,’ Octavio Paz lamented in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Paz was surveying the confused inheritance of Mexico from colonial rule, and the failure of its many political and socio-economic programmes, derived from Enlightenment principles of secularism and reason. Paz himself was convinced that Mexico had to forge a modern politics and economy for itself.