Scan barcode
shallihavemydwarf's review
3.0
Mishra's book attempts to present a fairly definitive history of the modern era, and being himself a child of both Western and Eastern traditions, he is in a better position than most to do this. However, in characterizing modernity's ressentiment (particularly focusing on male rage), I find it oddly lacking to mention the rise of feminism only in passing. Similarly, Mishra refers frequently to Rousseau's philosophies as architectural in our era but bleep-bloops over his misogyny. This is an interesting history but a disappointingly limited one.
abeanbg's review against another edition
5.0
Probably more of a 4.5, but not an option on here. I found this work deeply fascinating and fairly persuasive, even when I struggled with the density of its historical and philosophical references. But, as I said, I find the idea that much of the contemporary world's turmoil stems from the chasm between the promises of liberal, secular, capitalists modernity created in the West and the needs of individuals whose lives cannot ever reach all those promises. It's something of a stretch to connect things as disparate as ISIS, Hindu nationalism, and Trump to the same "restiment" of the prevailing order, but Mishra marshals a lot of evidence to draw those dots. At the very least, the issues and ideas presented here will linger in my head for quite a long time.
blackoxford's review
4.0
How the World Feels
Identifying the fictions in which we live is an awkward matter, mainly because it involves creating an alternative fiction. And comparing the merits of competing stories is tricky. Each story carries with it its own criterion of verification and presents its facts accordingly: Jews are responsible for our financial problems; look at all the Jewish names in banking. Muslims are educated to hate us; proven by the Q’uran. Immigrants undermine society; drugs come from the same places they do.
‘Fact-checking’ these sorts of narratives is unproductive. The problem isn’t one of falsehood but of incompleteness. One way to judge such a narrative therefore is its inclusion of more facts than its competitors. Particularly telling is the inclusion of apparently contradictory facts which are otherwise unexplained: The Jewish names on the door might front largely Christian organizations. The Bible is as casually and inhumanely brutal as anything in the Q’uran. Immigrants and drugs come from the places that have been impoverished through globalization.
Mishra’s technique for creating a more ‘inclusive’ narrative is to start with an aesthetic judgement rather than a thesis: “... ressentiment as the defining feature of a world... where the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status, and property ownership.” He then lets rip on a journey through culture and its present discontents, drawing in as many facts as he can handle, and that’s quite a few. He considers himself a “stepchild of the West” as well as an Asian. Only a few are likely to have his breadth of cultural experience, so his choice of ressentiment as the key to global sentiment seems inspired to me.
Mishra’s opinion is that this pervasive feeling of disappointment and fear is the result of the collapse in the principle of “historic inevitability” that was the foundation of not just Marxism, but also of the liberal and neo-liberal believers in free market progress. Both socialism and capitalism have created societies in which material advantage has been offset by enormous economic, racial, and sexual inequities. What young, thinking, even vaguely aware, person could avoid the conclusion that those in charge are either frauds or crooks? The road to both ISIS and the Alt-right are paved with thwarted idealism. Contingency not fate rules the world.
It is the young especially who perceive the absurd gap between any ideology that suggests it knows the destination of human society and the obvious mess of reality. Neither proletarian nor consumer utopia has ever been in sight; the Second Coming has been unconscionably delayed. And if the narratives of ideology as well as religion are bust, then “Nothing less than this [Enlightenment] sense of expectation, central to modern political and economic thinking, has gone missing today, especially among those who have themselves never had it so good.” Neither body nor spirit provides a foothold for supporting intelligent life. A sort of negative idealism, a rampant nihilism, beckons. Mishra quotes Walter Benjamin for effect: the self alienation of humankind “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
Could there be a better confirmation of this claim than Trump, a man who fits Benjamin’s description exactly (although elected only after Age of Anger was already with the publisher)? If not, then it is essential to recognise Trump not as anomaly but as epitome. He is what we have become, in all his vileness. He is a symbol, one hopes not of the moral standards of modern society, but certainly of the existential deficiency of all of our conventional political and cultural narratives. As surely as Kant, Trump deserves the title of der alles Zermalmender, the All-destroyer.
It is fatuous to think that some sort of familiar normality will return with Trump’s departure, no matter when that takes place. The myths of the past - American democracy, indeed liberal democracy, as a natural end-state; increasingly rational international cooperation in the furtherance of mutual interest; the universality of human interests themselves; the possibility of global rule of common law - are no longer tenable and not worth the treaties they’re written in.
Ressentiment is a symptom of despair among populations who still long for the comforts these myths provide. Their loss makes us all sick, although it is generally the young (and the psychotic) who act out most readily. It is the young (and the psychotic) who first spot how facile and self-satisfied these myths are. The rest of us resist like the Boers resisted in South Africa, by doubling down on the myths. Hence the apparent paradox of simultaneously increasing secularisation and religious fundamentalism - in Alabama, and Moscow, as well as Aleppo; the economic dissatisfaction among those who are the wealthiest on the planet; the drive to roll back democratic institutions by those democratically elected to safeguard them.
Can we exist as cognitively gifted social animals without myths? Highly unlikely. Can we find better ones? Possibly, if we can only get past the kind of either/or dualisms that infest so much of our culture and are embedded in our institutions: Christianity defines itself essentially as ‘not-Jewish’; the monotheistic God is most fundamentally not his creation; the rational is that which is logical rather than that which is important; will, desire, and faith are personal possessions and not communally owned; European institutions (one thinks of the modern corporation) have proven themselves superior by their proliferation; wrongs must be righted, if necessary by employing more wrongs.
The Age of Anger is far too rich with historical, literary, and cultural facts to summarise easily. Its conclusions are less than precise and directive. But I find this both consistent and convincing rather than a flaw. It is a narrative which denies its own definitiveness and begs for additions and modifications and reversals. Perhaps it is a model for the kind of myth we now need to keep us from exterminating one another.
Identifying the fictions in which we live is an awkward matter, mainly because it involves creating an alternative fiction. And comparing the merits of competing stories is tricky. Each story carries with it its own criterion of verification and presents its facts accordingly: Jews are responsible for our financial problems; look at all the Jewish names in banking. Muslims are educated to hate us; proven by the Q’uran. Immigrants undermine society; drugs come from the same places they do.
‘Fact-checking’ these sorts of narratives is unproductive. The problem isn’t one of falsehood but of incompleteness. One way to judge such a narrative therefore is its inclusion of more facts than its competitors. Particularly telling is the inclusion of apparently contradictory facts which are otherwise unexplained: The Jewish names on the door might front largely Christian organizations. The Bible is as casually and inhumanely brutal as anything in the Q’uran. Immigrants and drugs come from the places that have been impoverished through globalization.
Mishra’s technique for creating a more ‘inclusive’ narrative is to start with an aesthetic judgement rather than a thesis: “... ressentiment as the defining feature of a world... where the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status, and property ownership.” He then lets rip on a journey through culture and its present discontents, drawing in as many facts as he can handle, and that’s quite a few. He considers himself a “stepchild of the West” as well as an Asian. Only a few are likely to have his breadth of cultural experience, so his choice of ressentiment as the key to global sentiment seems inspired to me.
Mishra’s opinion is that this pervasive feeling of disappointment and fear is the result of the collapse in the principle of “historic inevitability” that was the foundation of not just Marxism, but also of the liberal and neo-liberal believers in free market progress. Both socialism and capitalism have created societies in which material advantage has been offset by enormous economic, racial, and sexual inequities. What young, thinking, even vaguely aware, person could avoid the conclusion that those in charge are either frauds or crooks? The road to both ISIS and the Alt-right are paved with thwarted idealism. Contingency not fate rules the world.
It is the young especially who perceive the absurd gap between any ideology that suggests it knows the destination of human society and the obvious mess of reality. Neither proletarian nor consumer utopia has ever been in sight; the Second Coming has been unconscionably delayed. And if the narratives of ideology as well as religion are bust, then “Nothing less than this [Enlightenment] sense of expectation, central to modern political and economic thinking, has gone missing today, especially among those who have themselves never had it so good.” Neither body nor spirit provides a foothold for supporting intelligent life. A sort of negative idealism, a rampant nihilism, beckons. Mishra quotes Walter Benjamin for effect: the self alienation of humankind “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
Could there be a better confirmation of this claim than Trump, a man who fits Benjamin’s description exactly (although elected only after Age of Anger was already with the publisher)? If not, then it is essential to recognise Trump not as anomaly but as epitome. He is what we have become, in all his vileness. He is a symbol, one hopes not of the moral standards of modern society, but certainly of the existential deficiency of all of our conventional political and cultural narratives. As surely as Kant, Trump deserves the title of der alles Zermalmender, the All-destroyer.
It is fatuous to think that some sort of familiar normality will return with Trump’s departure, no matter when that takes place. The myths of the past - American democracy, indeed liberal democracy, as a natural end-state; increasingly rational international cooperation in the furtherance of mutual interest; the universality of human interests themselves; the possibility of global rule of common law - are no longer tenable and not worth the treaties they’re written in.
Ressentiment is a symptom of despair among populations who still long for the comforts these myths provide. Their loss makes us all sick, although it is generally the young (and the psychotic) who act out most readily. It is the young (and the psychotic) who first spot how facile and self-satisfied these myths are. The rest of us resist like the Boers resisted in South Africa, by doubling down on the myths. Hence the apparent paradox of simultaneously increasing secularisation and religious fundamentalism - in Alabama, and Moscow, as well as Aleppo; the economic dissatisfaction among those who are the wealthiest on the planet; the drive to roll back democratic institutions by those democratically elected to safeguard them.
Can we exist as cognitively gifted social animals without myths? Highly unlikely. Can we find better ones? Possibly, if we can only get past the kind of either/or dualisms that infest so much of our culture and are embedded in our institutions: Christianity defines itself essentially as ‘not-Jewish’; the monotheistic God is most fundamentally not his creation; the rational is that which is logical rather than that which is important; will, desire, and faith are personal possessions and not communally owned; European institutions (one thinks of the modern corporation) have proven themselves superior by their proliferation; wrongs must be righted, if necessary by employing more wrongs.
The Age of Anger is far too rich with historical, literary, and cultural facts to summarise easily. Its conclusions are less than precise and directive. But I find this both consistent and convincing rather than a flaw. It is a narrative which denies its own definitiveness and begs for additions and modifications and reversals. Perhaps it is a model for the kind of myth we now need to keep us from exterminating one another.
dannybmoreno's review against another edition
5.0
Good book but left me feeling hopelessly ignorant. Might have to re-read once I have a better grasp of Nietzsche and Rousseau.
chloehamburn's review
4.0
Not sure what to rate this book because I have two general thoughts: one, this book was very nerdy and very much me in that it was an overview/synthesis of 18th and 19th century literature and I always enjoy collecting information; two, this book could use some serious organization. Truly the writer was all over the place in terms of chronology, ideas, regions... impossible to keep it orderly in my head as I listened. Jumped from ISIS to 19th century Russian philosophers to Nazism to Gandhi in India in the span of a few minutes, over and over again. I had this book on in the background as I cleaned so I wasn't too hung up on the order, just had it for the flow of information. It is an ambitious topic that in my opinion fails to deliver in full on its promise to connect modern anger with Western philosophical thought of recent centuries, but it doesn't mean that it's not an incredible book for its sheer amount of research. Academically speaking, it's a weak dissertation because the huge scope and span of the book gives the impression the author is cherry-picking facts and anecdotes across the ages as he pleases. I didn't notice any glaring examples but just had that sense of suspicion that someone was making it too easy to connect dots across history. Regardless, glad I got around to this one because it's certainly a timely issue that could use more information and research.
Have I mentioned that I love information?
Have I mentioned that I love information?
martinza's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Ich mochte, wie das Buch parallelen zum 19. Jahrhundert aufgezeigt hat. Viele politische Konflikte im Internet lassen sich wiedererkennen.
unionmack's review against another edition
5.0
I was extremely impressed by this one. It flits between cultures and eras seamlessly, sourcing perfect quotes from the most influential minds in history, all to build a thorough picture as to why we've found ourselves in the global predicament we're in now. There's an element to which Mishra's project proves the cyclical nature of history. From the Enlightenment till now, the things that foment social tumult and popular unrest haven't changed that much and neither have the things people do to respond to them. What's different about now is that it seems we've reached a place beyond hope, beyond meaningful corrective narratives, and beyond much else besides retreats into naked nativism and cruel self-interest—and it's happening everywhere on the planet at once (in Mishra's view, largely because of how far neoliberal capitalism has spread its tendrils). His analysis was shrewd, eloquent, and bleak. By the time it's over, it's easy to see why Mishra doesn't really propose any sort of way out or solution to our current situation: there doesn't seem to be one.
kamila79's review against another edition
4.0
Opening newspapers, turning on the TV, checking out social media we see anger pouring at us. Pankaj Mishra in “Age of Anger. A History of the Present”, published shortly after the election of Trump for the president of the USA, seems to suggest that this is just the beginning. In his very well researched book he goes back several centuries to explain how European elites have created the world order that now sees hundreds of millions of people angrily showing that they’ve had enough.
Current protests in the US and social unrest in much of the rest of the world are a direct result of marginalisation and exclusion of large groups of the population in societies focused on economic profit and the exploitation of others. We are observing the crisis of values such as empathy, compassion and kindness even though the legislation in many parts of the world is aimed at improving the lot of a greater number of people. However, the increase of nationalism all over the world and the support for chauvinist, misogynistic, racist bigots as countries’ leaders prove that many aren’t ready for equality and justice for all. Oftentimes the countries which gained independence from European colonisers repeat the mistakes of Western countries. Their leaders, usually educated in the West, transform the politics of these countries along Western lines. Anger of the disenfranchised continues to boil.
Mishra’s aim for this book is not to give solutions for how to deal with that anger but rather to contextualise it, help readers understand where it comes from and look for the common denominator regarding societies, from India to Egypt to Poland. Populists in power, eager to blame Islam, immigrants, global institutions for their own inability to connect with their citizens and represent their interests, are responsible for the escalation of anger.
I must say though that while I appreciate Mishra’s writing my mind often wandered while reading “Age of Anger”. I find his books rather boring and his arguments a trifle too convoluted. I also found the balance unequal - too much space devoted to history, too little of it to the present. It’s an important book, but one must love history to enjoy it and argue with the author.
Current protests in the US and social unrest in much of the rest of the world are a direct result of marginalisation and exclusion of large groups of the population in societies focused on economic profit and the exploitation of others. We are observing the crisis of values such as empathy, compassion and kindness even though the legislation in many parts of the world is aimed at improving the lot of a greater number of people. However, the increase of nationalism all over the world and the support for chauvinist, misogynistic, racist bigots as countries’ leaders prove that many aren’t ready for equality and justice for all. Oftentimes the countries which gained independence from European colonisers repeat the mistakes of Western countries. Their leaders, usually educated in the West, transform the politics of these countries along Western lines. Anger of the disenfranchised continues to boil.
Mishra’s aim for this book is not to give solutions for how to deal with that anger but rather to contextualise it, help readers understand where it comes from and look for the common denominator regarding societies, from India to Egypt to Poland. Populists in power, eager to blame Islam, immigrants, global institutions for their own inability to connect with their citizens and represent their interests, are responsible for the escalation of anger.
I must say though that while I appreciate Mishra’s writing my mind often wandered while reading “Age of Anger”. I find his books rather boring and his arguments a trifle too convoluted. I also found the balance unequal - too much space devoted to history, too little of it to the present. It’s an important book, but one must love history to enjoy it and argue with the author.