{"id":25408,"date":"2023-03-05T12:23:18","date_gmt":"2023-03-05T20:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=25408"},"modified":"2023-03-05T12:23:20","modified_gmt":"2023-03-05T20:23:20","slug":"its-a-mad-mad-world-but-another-utopia-isnt-the-answer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/03\/05\/its-a-mad-mad-world-but-another-utopia-isnt-the-answer\/","title":{"rendered":"IT\u2019S A MAD, MAD WORLD\u2014BUT ANOTHER UTOPIA ISN\u2019T THE\u00a0ANSWER"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

People Are Fed Up With Modernity\u2019s False Promises, Says Author Pankaj Mishra, and It\u2019s Time for a New Experiment<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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by<\/em> REED JOHNSON | MARCH 2, 2018 (zocalopublicsquare.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The writer Pankaj Mishra has a name for an era in which frustrated young men commit savage acts of violence, society is starkly split into economic winners and losers, and despotic leaders exploit the public\u2019s bitter resentments. He calls it the \u201cAge of Anger,\u201d which is also the title of his 2017 book, subtitled \u201cA History of the Present.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that history begins long before our own benighted century. A pervasive and alarming sense of uprootedness and spiritual dislocation began brewing in the late 18th century in Europe, Mishra believes, and has mutated into \u201ca global, universal experience.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The resulting \u201ccontradictions are felt most painfully within one\u2019s own soul, within one\u2019s divided self,\u201d Mishra said, setting the tone for a Z\u00f3calo event titled \u201cWhy Is the Modern World So Angry?\u201d The fantastical promises of Western neo-liberal democracy, that all humanity could attain lives of prosperity and \u201cenlightenment,\u201d have proven \u201cunfulfillable,\u201d Mishra said. That has left millions of people feeling alienated not only from society but from themselves; their sense of disillusionment and fury has deepened since the fall of the Berlin Wall, leading to what Mishra calls a global \u201cmanic tribalism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How did Mishra come to this conclusion? Gregory Rodriguez, founder and editor-in-chief of Z\u00f3calo Public Square and the evening\u2019s moderator, launched the conversation by asking Mishra about his self-characterization as a \u201cstepchild of the West.\u201d How did growing up in rural India during a period of intense and rapid change help shape Mishra\u2019s ideas about a planetary maelstrom that has produced ISIS guerrillas, Russian cyber-hackers, and neo-Nazi skinheads wielding tiki torches in Charlottesville?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mishra said that \u201cpractically everything I\u2019ve written\u201d\u2014from histories to travel essays\u2014has come out of his knowledge of friends and acquaintances who left college and plunged into a world of personal frustrations and constricted professional opportunities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was really writing about the kind of young men I have grown up with, and you can find in large parts of Asia and Africa,\u201d he said, \u201cpeople uprooted from their traditional habitats who have been brought out of traditional village life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their frustration and rage, widely shared in many parts of the world, hasn\u2019t been reflected in popular media, said Mishra. Instead, we\u2019re accustomed to seeing images of the \u201cslumdog millionaire,\u201d a poor parochial who somehow manages to realize the American Dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy instinct has been to push back against this boosterish narrative,\u201d said Mishra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrative of \u201cambition, aspiration, and disappointment\u201d is a new one. Millions of Indians in Mishra\u2019s parents\u2019 generation underwent the trauma of having to migrate from their ancestral villages in search of work, and reinvent themselves as urbanites. Yet often they were able to preserve some traditional aspects of their prior small-town lives without having to fully embrace modernity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy generation had to make a cleaner break,\u201d Mishra said. He and his friends knew that learning English, and acquiring a knowledge of Western culture, was an essential \u201cpassport\u201d for any kind of success in the modern world\u2014for becoming what the West conceives of as a modern individual. But that process of self-reinvention comes at an excruciating psychological and spiritual price for many people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other places that for centuries have been scrambling to catch up materially with the United States and Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Picking up on that point, Rodriguez asked whether the tone of Mishra\u2019s 2004 book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha In the World<\/em>, hadn\u2019t posited a more hopeful, and healing message. How had Mishra\u2019s thinking evolved between that book and Age of Anger<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mishra jokingly cited Proust\u2019s observation that everything that can be said has already been said, since nobody listens. \u201cPerhaps the change of tone may be put down to the fact that I just got pissed off because nobody was listening.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou were younger, you seemed happy!\u201d Rodriguez told him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m very happy today!\u201d Mishra shot back. More seriously, he added, \u201cThere is something therapeutic about understanding. That has certainly motivated me to get to the bottom of things.\u201d When he arrives at understanding, he said, it does feel somewhat \u201credemptive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asked about his feelings toward the United States\u2014and, in particular, the man serving in the White House\u2014Mishra replied that he has many friends and colleagues here, feels very connected to American intellectual life, and sees America as \u201cthe most radical experiment in human history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as someone who comes from India, and \u201cwho also has felt the sharp edge of American imperial power, it\u2019s difficult not to be critical, and sometimes stridently, of American power in that part of the world.\u201d He views the American faith in boundless expansion, and the inevitability of progress, with a sense of foreboding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI feel like we\u2019ve come to the end of that experiment, and a new American experiment has to begin,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some audience members followed up on this theme during the question-and-answer period. One asked about the relationship of the \u201cage of anger\u201d to the decline of U.S. power. Mishra said that what the United States is facing, and sometimes struggling with, is that many countries have been experiencing rising upward mobility at a time when U.S. growth has been relatively decelerating, and many Americans are watching their opportunities shrink relative to those of previous generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another audience member asked what Mishra thinks the world should be like in the future. Mishra replied that he could only make such prescriptions for the limited locality in which he grew up. \u201cThe world is something too abstract for me,\u201d he said. \u201cPrescribing what the world should look like might be repeating the same error that has brought us to this point.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rodriguez also pressed Mishra about how the future world might reassemble itself, once the age of anger burns itself out. Could \u201csome new broad sense of transcendence\u201d emerge? What sort of structures would we need to foster and support a good society?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think we\u2019ve invested far too much in utopias, in the idea that we\u2019ve arrived at the end of history,\u201d Mishra concluded. Such ideas are a cover for preserving the rights and privileges of a very small minority, he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a writer and a native of rural India who now makes his home in cosmopolitan London, Mishra is comfortable at least knowing that his own future will remain rooted in a place in-between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFeeling too much at home in the world,\u201d Mishra summed up, \u201cis a recipe for complacency and intellectual laziness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

REED JOHNSON<\/strong> is managing editor at Z\u00f3calo Public Square<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People Are Fed Up With Modernity\u2019s False Promises, Says Author Pankaj Mishra, and It\u2019s Time for a New Experiment by REED JOHNSON | MARCH 2, 2018 (zocalopublicsquare.org) The writer Pankaj Mishra has a name for an era in which frustrated young men commit savage acts of violence, society is starkly split into economic winners and losers,… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25408"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25408"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25409,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25408\/revisions\/25409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}