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Matthew Michael

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Nelson Mandela

by Kadir Nelson

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Mar 13, 2017 12:59PM

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Age of Anger: A History of the Present

by Pankaj Mishra

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Matthew Michael said: " The Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra in his new thought-provoking book, "The Age of Anger: The History of the Present" describes the uncontrollable and pervasive anger of the modern world. According to Mishra, this anger comes largely from the disillusions The Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra in his new thought-provoking book, "The Age of Anger: The History of the Present" describes the uncontrollable and pervasive anger of the modern world. According to Mishra, this anger comes largely from the disillusions of modernity--by individuals and institutions who failed to realize the forced ideals of modernity on the entire human race. Mishra observed, there is “an existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness.” This resentment has found expressions in terrorism, racism, hatred, and repulsion of the ideologies at the heart of modernity and the neo-liberal sentiments behind it. For Mishra, the ISIS, the voters of Brexit and the Trump's presidency are angry for the same reason. The rising waves of global fundamentalism in religion and politics are the results of human anger directed against modernity and its failed promises to human race. Mishra critiques Enlightenment's cultural agenda to spread modernity across the globe. For Mishra, Enlightenment's agenda has misfired because many people have dropped out from the pursuits of the ideals of modernity. The world has renegaded from rationality of the modem era to the irrational norms and worldviews of a pre-modern world.

Interestingly, while many people have been cut off from their traditional roots in the modern era but they have failed to find a lasting foothold on the modern space. In this regards, modernity has created floating individuals who strived all their lives to fit into the ideals of the modern cultural clubs only to realize that these ideals are beyond their reach. These failed attempts at modernity have generally triggered a collective anger at modernity and the hallowed institutions of the modern era. This disllusionary state has created a retrogressive renaissance whereby modern individuals have gone back in time and taken solace in the ideals of a pre-modern world. These pre-modern ideals could explain the rise of ISIS, Boko Haram, global terrorism and the quest to recreate the pre-modern ideals of 7AD Caliphate. The cultural crusades within this neo-Islamist fundamentalism have continually painted for their followers the exotic pictures of the Arabian peninsula, and the golden era of Islam is readily situated within these pre-modern times.

The same phenomenon is also at work in modern politics with the increasing popularity of Far-right politics in Europe and North America, and their extreme sense of nationalism, which seeks to undermine the globalized institutions of the modern world. It is like the world has gone backward in times to the extreme nationalism of the 18th and 19th centuries which gave birth to the two World wars. The rejection of the ideals of globalization by European nations seeking to break away from European Union and to assert their nationalistic pride also falls within these global agitations around the world. For the first time in human history, people are angry at their social, religious and political dislocations precipitated by the forces of modernity, and clearly seeking a home in the arms of pre-modern social, cultural, and religious worlds. Spiritually disoriented and culturally displaced, the modern persons are angry at modernity which have engineered these deep-rooted and pervasive cause of their dislocations. The growing alienation of many people unable to realize the modern dreams has encouraged worldwide resentments. The experimentation in modernity is seen to have largely failed in spite of the advancements recorded by modern science.

There is an important paradox here that the human race has chosen to embrace the stringent ideals of pre-modernity rather the flexible values of the modern world. The growing resentment against the neo-liberalistic order of the western society in Europe and North America is an important statement against the dissatisfactions with the ideologies which have in history invigorated and empowered modernity against traditional forms. This return to pre-modernity is never a nostalgic return into a pristine past, but it is selectively exercise which is more of a vindictive statement against modernity and its institutions rather than a pleasure trip into the past. In addition, the collapse of modernity has rightly ushered in a period of uncertainty in the world with conflicting ethics. The post-truth orientation has now pitched itself in the problematic scenario of the present era.

In his work," The State of Exception," the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben described the suspension of laws and civic process that come from the state dealing with the period of emergency. For Agamben, state of emergency is an interim time of law-less state where the state is temporarily ungoverned by law or the civic process. Agamben observed, "[i]n every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other..."Like Agamben's description of the state of exception, there is a sense of a global emergency around the world at the moment with the contemporary call for the temporal suspension of the ideals of modernity and all its cultural paraphernalias.

In the pivotal stage of this global emergency, calls for the suspension or termination of modernity and its Enlightenment cultural agenda are heard and felt everywhere. The world is in a state of cultural emergency created by the anger and violence of people against modernity and its cultural agenda. As the war against modernity rages on and the human quest to find solace in an idealized past continues, humanity is at the crossroads once again as at previous times in human history. In particular, the rejections of the worldviews of the medieval period, and the core assumptions of the dark ages ushered in the Enlightenment period and the bedrock of modernity. The world is undergoing the same seismic rejections of the assumptions of modernity and its cultural ideals. The termination or temporal suspension of rationality is creating a new global order. In spite of the anger against modernity, we all know that some cultural coordinates of modernity will still linger on. However, Christian theology should brace herself for the radical times ahead when modernity can no longer sets the cultural agenda for our world. It is a period in the future filled with great promise but also much anxiety because of the unfortunate marriage of Christianity with modernity and its fast-disappearing cultural agenda. ...more "

Mar 13, 2017 01:06PM · see review

Matthew’s Quotes

“...there is no head of state in the world today who is not in virtuality a criminal. Those who shoulder the dreary mantle of sovereignty know that their turn may come to be branded a criminal by their colleagues. We certainly will not be the ones to complain. For the sovereign, who freely consented to donning the executioner's clothes, is now finally manifesting his originary kinship with the criminal. ”
― Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics

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