Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

  The most popular among these thinkers was Herbert Spencer with his notion of a self-made man who overcomes all obstacles, biological and social, in his appointment with destiny. Spencer believed, among many things, that a race of Supermen would rise after industrial society had accomplished its task of weeding out the unfit. His medley of ideas, variously interpreted, consumed and appropriated, found an awestruck global audience. Spencer himself, towards the end of his long life, confessed that ‘I detest that conception of social progress which presents as its aim, increase of population, growth of wealth, spread of commerce.’ However, for budding Egyptian, Indian and Chinese nationalists as much as for Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Spencer had defined nothing less than the laws of social evolution and progress. (Exasperated by the adoration of Spencer by fellow Indians, Gandhi in Hind Swaraj (1909) quoted G. K. Chesterton’s sarcastic remark, ‘What is the good of Indian national spirit if they cannot protect themselves from Herbert Spencer?’)

  Many others in the same cluster of thought as Spencer spoke of unconscious impulses and heroic striving, heredity and environment, the rediscovery of the uncivilized within human souls, national greatness and regeneration, and the struggle for existence. A common urge among them was the surrender of the effete rational self to irrational forces that were the true fount of creativity and energy. War in particular came to be widely celebrated, especially among educated classes.

  In even relatively affluent England, there appeared, as J. A. Hobson wrote in The Psychology of Jingoism (1901) a ‘coarse patriotism, fed by the wildest rumours and the most violent appeals to hate and the animal lust of blood’. Hobson deplored these pathologies. So did the poet Edward Carpenter, who sought with the Fellowship of the New Life (founded in 1883, with the sexologist Havelock Ellis, the feminist Edith Lees and the animal-rights activist Henry Stephens) ‘a universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour’.

  How to Be a New Man

  Spencer was appalled during the Boer War by bellicose poets and journalists, and the general militarization of public life. England had become, he wrote, ‘a fit habitat for hooligans’. Many more writers and thinkers were eager to intensify racial, class and national passions. ‘It is war,’ Treitschke argued, ‘which turns a people into a nation.’ The German historian clarified that the ‘virile’ features of history are ‘unsuited’ to ‘feminine natures’. Even Max Weber, a sensitive and troubled figure, sneered at the unmanly and immature bourgeoisie and the ‘Anglo-Saxon conventions of society’. Agonizing over Germany’s unfitness for international competition, he warned in 1895 that Germans ‘do not have peace and happiness to hand down to our descendants, but rather the eternal struggle to preserve and raise the quality of our national species’. Weber would later welcome a ‘great’ and ‘wonderful’ war in 1914, greeting guests at his home in his reserve officer’s uniform.

  ‘Societies perish because they are degenerate,’ asserted the French writer Arthur de Gobineau (a friend of both Tocqueville and Wagner). His screed Essay on the Inequality of Races (1853–5), justly neglected on publication, was rediscovered after France’s humiliating defeat to Germany in 1871 sparked a desperate search for recipes of regeneration. For racial theorists, it became an intellectual resource along with The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century (1899), an extended hymn to the Teutonic spirit by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s notoriously anti-Semitic English son-in-law.

  Hitler attended Chamberlain’s funeral in 1927. Some startlingly diverse figures at the turn of the century enacted in their writings the dialectic of decadence and rebirth fully worked out later in Mein Kampf. In Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau, the co-founder with Theodor Herzl of the World Zionist Organization, identified a range of culprits, from Wilde to Zola, for widespread emasculation. ‘Things as they are,’ he wrote, ‘totter and plunge. They are allowed to reel and fall because man is weary.’ Nordau soon became obsessed, along with other Jewish readers of Herbert Spencer, with creating a new generation of Muskeljudentum, literally muscular, virile, warrior-like Jews.

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  The fixation with manliness cut across apparent ideological barriers. Maxim Gorky, one of the many Bolshevik adepts of Nietzsche, hoped for a Russian Superman to lead the masses to liberation. Undaunted by Lenin’s denunciation of ‘literary supermen’, he would later hail Soviet man as the ‘New Man’, who was pitting his human will against intransigent nature. Likewise, Mussolini hoped to fabricate a ‘New Italian’, who would talk and gesticulate less (and also eat less pasta) while being driven by a ‘single will’. The novelist and Catholic monarchist Maurice Barrès was one of the French aesthetes of the time who moved from hating decadent bourgeois to exalting a national self, which, defined by heredity, tested its will against such treacherous ‘others’ as cosmopolitans, socialists and Jews.

  Muhammad Iqbal, South Asia’s most important Muslim writer and thinker in the early twentieth century, returned from his studies in Europe with a Nietzschean vision of Islam revivified by strong self-creating Muslims (Iqbal surely took heart from Nietzsche’s own Islamophilic view that the ‘Crusaders fought against something they would have done better to lie down in the dust before’). Lu Xun was convinced that the Chinese nation had to consist of the kind of self-aware individuals with indomitable will exemplified by Zarathustra. Once a sufficient number of Nietzschean self-overcoming individuals come into being, the Chinese ‘will become capable of mighty and unprecedented achievement, elevating us to a unique position of dignity and respect in the world’.

  Muhammad Abduh, the Arab world’s foremost scholar and jurist, who paid a fan’s ultimate tribute to Herbert Spencer – a visit to the philosopher’s home – presented his reformist Islam as a bulwark against the degeneracy apparently caused by both extreme traditionalists and hyper-Westernized Muslims. Swimming in the same intellectual currents of fin de siècle Europe, the Hindu revivalist Swami Vivekananda, another earnest student of Spencer, called for Hindus to eat beef, develop ‘muscles of iron’ and pray, ‘O Thou Mother of Strength, take away my weakness, take away my unmanliness, and make me a Man!’

  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, which redefined freedom beyond bourgeois self-seeking to a will to forge dynamic new societies and reshape history. 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 glorious rebirth after decline and decadence, borrowed from the Christian idea of resurrection, that Mazzini had done so much to introduce into the political sphere.

  Like the European thinkers who influenced them, Nordau and Iqbal were not arguing specifically against capitalist or imperialist exploitation. They could seem completely indifferent to the criteria of the left and the right: private property, inequality or alienating modes of production. The key problem for them was a decadent or degenerate modern culture that fostered egotism, cynicism and passivity; they saw a solution in radical renewal, achieved through a strong will and commitment to superhuman action.

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  A more extreme version of such Prometheanism was the belief, already articulated by Italian nationalists and taken up by the demagogues of the twentieth century, that bloodshed was necessary in the creation of the New Man. Such was the extraordinary conjuncture of the fin de siècle that Georges Sorel, a retired engineer and autodidact in Paris, could say independently at the conclusion that conflict, combat and the élan vital embodied by heroic individuals are necessary for the world to move forward.

  Sorel wanted to see ‘before descending into the grave’ the ‘humbling of the proud bourgeois democracies, today so cynically triumphant’. Indulging this desire in his writings, Sorel c
ame to enjoy an elastic appeal, like Mazzini, whom he greatly admired. Mentor to Catholic nationalists in France, Sorel saluted Lenin in 1919 and Mussolini was one of his devotees when the latter was still a socialist. ‘What I am,’ the Duce said, ‘I owe to Sorel.’

  Sorel’s writings came out of, and reflected, a largely traumatic experience of France after its embourgeoisement: the country seemed lost in what Tocqueville in 1851 called a ‘labyrinth of petty incidents, petty ideas, petty passions, personal viewpoints and contradictory projects’, and appeared redeemable only through virile empire-building in North Africa. Born in 1847, Sorel grew up as the country went through the humiliation of German invasion in 1870 and the trauma of the Paris Commune.

  In Zola’s The Debacle (1892), which documents both ordeals, the novel’s sickly protagonist grapples with ‘the degeneration of his race, which explained how France, virtuous with the grandfathers, could be beaten in the time of their grandsons’. Sorel himself frequently invoked Ernest Renan’s angst-ridden question, ‘On what will the future generations live?’ His own answers were as uncompromisingly tough as Tocqueville’s, composed in a language reminiscent of Nietzsche, in which the alternative to bourgeois vices was not a particular economic system but a whole new – and epic – mode of being in the world.

  Sorel scorned the promise of liberalism and socialism, and the simple utilitarian saw of maximizing happiness. Pain and suffering, he asserted, was life. Life acquired meaning and grandeur from the struggle against decay and destruction, and striving for liberation – to be achieved by a self-chosen heroic morality. Sorel prophesized a revolt against the bourgeois, which has ‘used force since the beginning of modern times’. ‘The proletariat now reacts against the middle class and against the state with violence.’ As he wrote, ‘All our effort should aim at preventing bourgeois ideas from poisoning the class which is arising.’

  Sorel borrowed his terms of reference from religious movements: war, honour, glory, heroism, vitality, virility and sublimity. He was interested in the Mazzini-style myth that could stir the soul, and bring to power the elite of strong men who could rule. And so he offered prophecy rather than blueprint. It did not matter who fulfilled it – big industrialists, trade unions, American frontiersmen, or Catholic monarchists – though he tended to speak more of the proletariat, recognizing it as the angel of history in the age of the masses. For him, the love of conquest and the will to power resolved all apparent contradictions of political theory.

  In that sense, Wyndham Lewis, one of England’s rare fascist thinkers, was right to say that Sorel ‘is the key to all contemporary political thought’. For his work consummated the nineteenth century’s steady transformation of politics: from the Enlightenment’s liberal notion emphasizing rational self-interest and deliberation to Napoleon’s total war, heroism and grandeur, aestheticization and, finally, an existential politics where survival is at stake, and the choices are life or death.

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  Sorel’s eclecticism (or unity) of thought gave him a bigger reputation in Italy than in his native France; many of his books first appeared there, and their eager students were to include Gramsci as well as Mussolini and Marinetti. He also had many influential disciples in Germany, including the writer Ernst Jünger, who would see the First World War through Sorelian lenses, as ‘the forge in which the world will be hammered into new limits and new communities’ – a project of building unity and fraternity through bloodshed that was later applied by Hitler to life at large. In Italy, however, Sorel immediately found a favourable intellectual climate.

  Early in the century, Italian prophets of Futurism had started to advertise their fascination with violence, modern technology, insane acts and pageants. Unlike the Impressionists or Cubists, the Futurists were political artists, who saw themselves as creating a revolutionary style for heroic violence. They actually competed with Italian imperialists in the new century in uttering bombast about communion with the savage forces of life. Marinetti hailed war as the ‘breeder of morals’. Papini spoke of the necessity of ‘cleansing of the earth … in a warm bath of black blood’. Even the liberal Salvemini, opposed to imperialism, conceded that the national unity brought by war was not to be belittled.

  Arguing that France’s domestic instability necessitated Napoleon’s warmongering and imperialism, Madame de Staël had wondered whether a nation could be ‘oppressed in the interior without giving it the fatal compensation of ruling elsewhere in its turn?’ North Africa, which Napoleon invaded early in his career, was also the site where Italians in the early twentieth century sought to avenge their setbacks and humiliations.

  A cult of Rome and Roman imperialism became common among diplomatic as well as artistic circles. Amid general enthusiasm, Italy went to war with the Ottoman Empire, invading the Ottoman territory of Libya in 1911. Sorel hailed it as ‘Italy’s greatest day’. Marinetti marvelled in the second Futurist Manifesto at ‘the remarkable symphony of the lead shrapnel’ and the ‘sculpture wrought in the enemy’s masses by our expert artillery’. The Italian assault on Libya was ferocious, stirring sympathy for its Muslim victims and anger against Western imperialists as far as Malaya. But Marinetti, who travelled to Libya as a newspaper correspondent, deplored the government’s lack of ruthlessness; he thought that military operations were undermined by ‘stupid colonial humanitarianism’.

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  The ravaging of Libya, which suffered the world’s first aerial bombing in 1912, confirmed that the emerging New Man, theorized by Nietzsche and Sorel, and empowered by technology, saw violence as an existential experience – an end in itself, and perpetually renewable. D’Annunzio, in exile in France since 1910 from his creditors and out of literary favour, returned to the fray with war songs, each meant to fill a whole page in the Corriere della Serra. As early victories gave way to Arab resistance, and diplomatic compromise, Papini thought D’Annunzio’s war songs were too feeble. ‘The future needs blood,’ he argued. ‘It needs human victims, butchery. Internal war, and foreign war, revolution and conquest: that is history … Blood is the wine of stronger peoples, and blood is the oil for the wheels of this great machine which flies from the past to the future.’

  Italy’s subsequent intervention in the First World War, in which it was initially neutral, came to be cheer-led by a broad social coalition, socialists as well as anarchists, on the grounds that war would act as a sort of detergent. Among its champions was Mussolini, who had opposed the Libyan adventure, but was now fiercely interventionist, and actually had been expelled from the Socialist Party for his warmongering. He was on his way to found the myth that would goad men to transcend their mediocre selves and become supermen.

  As Italy went to war in May 1915, he wrote:

  If the revolution of 1789, which was both a revolution and a war, opened up the world to the bourgeoisie after its long and secular novitiate, the present revolution, which is also a war, seems to open up the future to the masses and their novitiate of blood and death.

  Over four years later, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume offered the socialist apostate a fresh template for arousing the masses: black uniforms, stiff-armed salutes, military parades, war songs, and the glorification of virility and sacrifice. Mussolini later encouraged the writing of a biography of D’Annunzio entitled The John the Baptist of Fascism. He clearly fancied himself as the Messiah. But Mazzini, the true Messiah, had already come and gone, leaving a large imprint on the modern world.

  Reading Mazzini in Shanghai and Calcutta

  Mazzini would have been appalled by the degeneration of his dream of humanizing man through democratic nationalism into romantic imperialism. For Gandhi was not wholly wrong to see the Italian as ‘a citizen of every country’, who believed that ‘every nation should become great and live in unity’. Nor was Mazzini unjustified in thinking that a good society should be based on duties rather than individual rights.

  Gandhi together with Simone Weil was among many twentieth-century thinker
s who questioned the emphasis on rights – the claims of self-seeking possessive individuals against others that underpinned the expansion of commercial society around the world. They, too, said that a free society ought to consist of a web of moral obligations. But Mazzini’s messianism cancelled his good ideas; and he failed to anticipate that his desired Third Rome might require high levels of brutality, and that Europeans, not to mention Ethiopians and Libyans, might resist it.

  One early perceptive critic of Mazzini was the Russian anarchist Bakunin. They met at the home of their mutual friend Herzen in London in the early 1860s. Bakunin had good reason to be grateful to the Italian, who had defended him from Marx’s harsh attacks. The Russian anarchist ought also to have thrilled to Mazzini’s call for ‘insurrection of the masses’, for the ‘holy war of the oppressed’. But he wrote disparagingly of Mazzini as a ‘great priest of religious, metaphysical and political idealism’ and enumerated his blunders: ‘It is the cult of God, the cult of divine and human authority, it is faith in the messianic predestination of Italy, queen of all the nations, with Rome, capital of the world.’ Bakunin criticized, too, Mazzini’s ‘passion for uniformity that they call unification and that is really the tomb of liberty’.

  Mazzini’s passion for unification and uniformity actually recommended him to his non-European disciples: fellow exiles and expatriates, in the rest of the world, who grappled with the encroachments of European globalizers on one side the collapse of the authority embodied by their mandarins and Brahmins. These unmoored men, almost all with powerful literary imaginations, saw their own unborn or fallen nations as bursting into the small club of advanced nations in the way Italy had, throwing off the shackles of foreign occupation, corrupt religion and sectarian differences to offer a new vision of humanity.