(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
How should we understand the political situation in the world today? Is it at all possible to get a proper overview?
Take, for example, the "angry, white working class" who voted for Trump. These are people who have lost their jobs or have had no wage growth since the 70 century – unlike the urban elites. They are not alone. We see similar groupings at the bottom of political movements in Europe, led by populist politicians such as Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen. In Poland and Hungary we already have right-wing radicals in the lead and Erdogan is pulling Turkey in unmistakably despotic direction, in line with Putin's "tsarification" of Russia. In Myanmar, even Buddhists have started ethnic cleansing (who was expecting something like that?). Fear of minorities, racism and irreconcilable and hateful use of words has become comme il faut. For many, Islam has become the scapegoat, or – as Hege Storhaug so stupidly puts it – "the eleventh country plague". Moreover, with Trump and Erdogan, and now also Wilders, the press is under attack. Fake news and alternative facts are becoming a viable coin in several political environments around the world. How did we end up here?
Scratch on the surface. Shall we begin to understand, we have to scratch in our own self-image, says the Indian political essayist Pankaj Mishra in his new book Age of Anger – A History of the Present. Below the surface we will see a more complex pattern than the dichotomies we usually operate with can explain. Irrational / rational, modern / outdated, developing country / country and so on. Instead of seeking solutions here, we should go back to enlightenment, he believes. In this era, it is the idea of people as rational actors who are primarily interested in maximizing income and happiness, was defined as "development". This abstract way of thinking progressed was perhaps its most distinct form in the utilitarian spokesman John Stuart Mill and his analysis of the best of man as avoiding pain and increase joy and enjoyment.
«Indeed, we live today in a vast, homogeneous world market, in which human beings are programmed to maximize their self-interest and aspire to the same things, regardless of their difference of cultural background and individual temperament. The world seems more literate, interconnected and prosperous than at any other time in history. [But] the promised universal civilization – one harmonized by a combination of universal suffrage, broad educational opportunities, steady economic growth, and private initiative and personal advancement – has not materialized. »
Enlightened and unenlightened. Modern versus outmoded and rational versus irrational thus provide poor starting points for understanding the mind we see today, Mishra believes. An anger that has to do with humiliation and the feeling of being forgotten and overlooked is a better place to start. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau knew this well. Roussau, the main character in Mishra's book, was born in Geneva and was on the outskirts of the well-groomed company in the French capital. He saw how a mixture of fascination, envy and rejection were as strong driving forces for how people behaved as the rational "pursuit of self-interest" that Adam Smith and the French Enlightenment philosophers combined with talk of rights and duties. But competition and rationality led to strife and inequality, Rousseau believed: The idealistic idea of equality would lead to the opposite. The reason was that these thoughts were managed by an elite who knew how things were connected, unlike everyone else, who was – yes, you guessed it – outdated and irrational.
Rousseau saw that fascination, envy and rejection were as strong driving forces as the Enlightenment philosophers' rational "pursuit of self-interest".
We must also not forget that formal equality in practice never led to real equality, neither then nor now. When the American authors of the Constitution wrote the winged words about the important equality between the citizens – "We, the people" – most of them sat with slaves in their own hands. It became the task of the enlightened to teach the uninformed about rights and the blessings of the market, which could be combined with colonialist and imperial ambitions. However, this did not prevent the market and the idea of individual rights from spreading to every nook and cranny of the world in the two centuries to come. We know the result today under the name "globalization".
"Individuals with very different pasts find themselves herded by capitalism and technology into a common present, where grossly unequal distributions of wealth and power have created humiliating new hierarchies," as Mishra writes.
Mishra's book shows how the ideals of modernity – the rational individual seeking to maximize his wealth, happiness and freedom – affect the most non-Western contexts.
Mutual influences. Opposition to elites, in other words, is not new. When we talk about radical Islam is too the material moisture meter shows you the a part of globalization, says Mishra, with his many Youtube videos and Instagram accounts. Nor is a movement like IS an expression of any ancient or "original" Islam – the majority of jihadists have little knowledge of the religion. No, it is rather a contradictory movement that both envies and hates Western privileges, while at the same time dreaming of an Islamic golden age that is long gone. As Mishra points out, key figures in IS and al-Qaeda have far from been ascetics, rather living real playboy life after the worst. haram-sort before they were called to the duties of the Islamic State. Several also have an education from the West.
Mishra's book shows how the ideals of modernity – the rational individual seeking to maximize his wealth, happiness and freedom – affect the supposedly most non-Western contexts. The influences go hand in hand: Ayatollah Khomeini, for example, received help from the left in Paris before launching the revolution in Iran. In the opposite direction, the French philosopher Michel Foucault was immensely fascinated by the Iranian revolution and wrote enthusiastically back from Tehran. This was a revolt that was precisely not shaped by an abstract, calculating reason that had its origins in Western clock belief in rationality and the market. This hope was shattered, as we know.
Good contemporary diagnosis. Understanding the present is an art few master, because the stories presented daily through the media – but also in conversations around the dinner table – are almost always captured by the moment. It is, for example, a common notion that the terrorist threat is greater now than it has ever been, but the fact is that there have been several times in the last 150 years terrorist waves around the world, including in Europe. There has also been more terrorism in the past, although today's jihadists and solo terrorists à la Breivik have an infinitely larger media surface to distribute their cruel actions and distorted opinions on. If we expand the horizon by 250 years, we will be able to see many, many more interesting – and in some cases disturbing – correspondences and analogies between the current situation, the literature of the past, art, politics, mass movements and national understanding.
That is why you should read Age of Anger. I have never encountered a better depiction of today's historical roots. For me, it clarified a lot and a lot.
