Reviews

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

leda's review against another edition

3.0

3.5 stars

This is quite a challenging book. Interesting but also depressing. The Age of Anger: A History of the Present is about how anger and violence have influenced modern societies. Or, to be more precise, how male dominance and masculinity promotes anger and violence in our societies.

Age of Anger is also a book about resentment, male resentment. The election of the nationalist Narendra Modi in India, provoked the writer and essayist Pankaj Mishra to delve deep into history, European history in particular, to examine the figures and the social movements that developed in response to the rise of industrial capitalism. The ideologies that developed during that period travelled around the world and although they assumed different forms, they shared similar ideas. In addition, the events that developed in Europe before the WWI, argues Pankaj Mishra, give us an idea of the social movements that happen today in a global scale, as, for example, the connection between Hindu nationality and German and Italian fascism.

Identifying terrorism and political militarism with a particular religion is a mistake, says Pankaj Mishra. Now, especially after Trump’s election, we realise that a lot of the pathologies that we identified with Muslim countries, can spring everywhere, irrespective of religion; they usually lie under the surface and it only takes a bit of economic decline, deprivation or humiliation for them to reappear. The thing that even Buddhists have resorted to ethnic cleansing and violence in Myanmar and other places, shows that it has very little to do with religion, but with specific social, economic, culture and political realities.

In the Age of Anger, Mishra investigates Voltaire and his relationship with Catherine the Great, the bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and the nineteenth-century anarchist movement. He examines the connections through time from Rousseau to Giuseppe Mazzini to the Hindutva founder Savarkar in India, and how all this relate to the rise of our present generation of demagogues—Trump, Putin, Duterte, Orban, etc.

To me, this is a book about male aggression and dominance, about men who feel marginalized and alienated by a globalized, neoliberal society, and often humiliated by their role in the society. Their anger and frustration becomes violence which then is manifested in various forms.

Except two brief mentions of Hannah Arendt and Emma Goldman, women does not exist in this book. I shouldn’t be surprised by their absence, the era of modernity offered women many possibilities but still, it was an era of subjugation of women. Nevertheless, their absence was so plain and evident that hit me emotionally. All over the book you come across bitter men obsessed with their masculinity; their resentment and loss of personal dignity leads them to degrade other human beings, and often, to terrorism.

Could this change along with women’s changing role in the world? I certainly believe it will.

my review