Daily Archives: February 6, 2017

Every once in a (long) while a book comes out that rips the zeitgeist, shining on like a crazy diamond.Age of Anger, by Pankaj Mishra, author of the also-seminal From the Ruins of Empire, might as well be the latest avatar.

Think of this book as the ultimate (conceptual) lethal weapon in the hearts and minds of a rootless cosmopolitan Teenage Wasteland striving to find its true call as we slouch through the longest the Pentagon would say infinite of world wars; a global civil war (which in my 2007 book Globalistan I called Liquid War).

Mishra, a sterling product of East-meets-West, essentially argues its impossible to understand the present if we dont acknowledge the subterranean homesick blues contradicting the ideal of cosmopolitan liberalism the universal commercial society of self-interested rational individuals first conceptualized by the Enlightenment via Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire and Kant.

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Historys winner ended up being a sanitized narrative of benevolent Enlightenment. The tradition of rationalism, humanism, universalism and liberal democracy was supposed to have always been the norm. It was clearly too disconcerting, Mishra writes, to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic rationalism, imperalism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering) already convulsing Europe in the late 19th century.

So, evoking T.S. Eliot, to frame the backward half-look, over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror that eventually led to The West versus The Rest, weve got to look at the precursors.

Enter Pushkins Eugene Onegin the first of many superflous man in Russian fiction, with his Bolivar hat, clutching a statue of Napoleon and a portrait of Byron, as Russia, trying to catch up with the West, mass-produced spiritually unmoored youth with a quasi-Byronic conception of freedom, further inflated by German Romanticism. The best Enlightenment critics had to be Germans and Russians, latecomers to politico-economic modernity.

Dostoevsky: Society dominated by the war of all against all in which most were condemned to be losers.

Two years before publishing the astonishing Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky, in his tour of Western Europe, was already seeing a society dominated by the war of all against all in which most were condemned to be losers.

In London, in 1862, at the International Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, Dostoyevsky had an illumination (You become aware of a colossal idea that here there is victory and triumph. You even begin vaguely to fear something.) Amid the stupor, Dostoyevsky was also cunning enough to observe how materialist civilization was enhanced as much by its glamor as by military and maritime domination.

Russian literature eventually crystalized crime at random as the paradigm of individuality savoring identity and asserting ones will (later mirrored in the mid-20th century by beat icon William Burroughs claiming shooting at random as his ultimate thrill).

The path had been carved for the swelling beggars banquet to start bombing the Crystal Palace even as, Mishra reminds us, intellectuals in Cairo, Calcutta, Tokyo and Shanghai were reading Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill to understand the secret of the perpetually expanding capitalist bourgeoisie.

And this after Rousseau, in 1749, had set the foundation stone of the modern revolt against modernity, now splintered in a wilderness of mirrored echoes as the Crystal Palace is de facto implanted in gleamy ghettos all around the world.

Mishra credits the idea of his book to Nietzsche commenting the epic querelle between the envious plebeian Rousseau and the serenely elitist Voltaire who duly hailed the London Stock Exchange, when it became fully operational, as a secular embodiment of social harmony.

Nietzsche: Ultimate cartographer of Resentment. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But it was Nietzsche who eventually came from central casting, as a fierce detractor of both liberal capitalism and socialism, to make Zarathustras enticing promise a magnetic Holy Grail to Bolsheviks (Lenin, though, hated it), the left-wing Lu Xun in China, fascists, anarchists, feminists and hordes of disgruntled aesthetes.

Mishra also reminds us how Asian anti-imperialists and American robber barrons borrowed eagerly from Herbert Spencer, the first truly global thinker who coined the survival of the fittest mantra after reading Darwin.

Nietzsche was the ultimate cartographer of Resentment. Max Weber prophetically framed the modern world as an iron cage from which only a charismatic leader may offer escape. And anarchist icon Mikhail Bakunin, for his part, had already in 1869 conceptualized the revolutionist as severing every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose to destroy it.

Bakunin: the revolutionary as merciless enemy of the civilized world. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Escaping the Supreme Modernist James Joyces nightmare of history in fact the iron cage of modernity a viscerally militant secession from a civilization premised on gradual progress under liberal-democratic trustees is now raging, out of control, far beyond Europe.

Ideologies that may be radically opposed nonetheless grew symbiotically out of the cultural maelstrom of the late 19th century, from Islamic fundamentalism, Zionism and Hindu nationalism to Bolshevism, Nazism, Fascism and revamped Imperialism.

Not only WWII but the current endgame was also visualized by the brilliant, tragic Walter Benjamin in the 1930s, when he was already warning about the self-alienation of mankind, finally able to experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. Todays live-streaming DIY jihadis are its pop version, as ISIStries to configure itself as the ultimate negation of the pieties of neoliberal modernity.

Weaving savory streams of politics and literature cross-pollination, Mishra takes his time to set the scene for The Big Debate between those developing world masses whose lives are stamped by the Atlanticist Wests still largely acknowledged history of violence and the liquid modernity (Bauman) elites yielding from the (selected) part of the world that made the crucial breakthroughs since the Enlightenment in science, philosophy, art and literature.

This goes way beyond a mere debate between East and West. We cannot understand the current global civil war, this post-modernist, post-truth intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, if we dont attempt to dismantle the conceptual and intellectual architecture of historys winners in the West, drawn from the triumphalist history of Anglo-American over-achievements.

Even at the height of the Cold War, US theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was mocking the bland fanatics of Western civilization in their blind faith that every society is destined to evolve just as a handful of nations in the West sometimes did.

And this the irony! while the liberal internationalist cult of progress glaringly mimicked the Marxist dream of internationalist revolution.

Arendt: Homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In her 1950 preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism now a resurgent mega-best seller on Amazon Hannah Arendt essentially told us to forget about the eventual restoration of the old world order; we were condemned to watch history repeat itself, homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.

Meanwhile, as Carl Schorske noted in his spectacular Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, American scholarship cut the cord of consciousness linking the past to the present; bluntly sanitized history; and then centuries of civil war, imperial ravage, genocide and slavery in Europe and America simply disappeared. Only one TINA (there is no alternative) narrative was allowed; how Atlanticists privileged with reason and individual autonomy made the modern world.

Enter master spoiler Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, born in 1928 in poor south Tehran, and the author of Westoxification (1962), a key reference text of Islamist ideology, where he writes about how Sartres Erostratus fires a revolver at the people in the street blindfolded; Nabokovs protagonist drives his car into the crowd; and the stranger, Mersault, kills someone in reaction to a bad case of sunburn. Talk about a lethal crossover existentialism meets Tehran slums to stress what Hanna Arendt called negative solidarity.

And enter Abu Musab al-Suri, born in 1958 one year after Osama bin Laden in a devout middle class family in Aleppo. It was al-Suri not the Egyptian Al-Zawahiri who designed a leaderless global jihad strategy in The Global Islamic Resistance Call, based on unconnected cells and individual operations. Al-Suri was the Samuel clash of civilizations Huntington of al-Qaeda. Mishra defines him as the Mikhail Bakunin of the Muslim world.

Responding to that silly neo-Hegelian end of history meme at the end of the Cold War, Allan Bloom warned that fascism might be the future; and John Gray telegraphed the return of primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian.

And that leads us to why the exceptional bearers of Enlightenment humanism and rationalism cannot explain the current geopolitical turmoil from ISIS to Brexit to Trump. They could never come up with anything more sophisticated than binary opposition of free and unfree; the same 19th century Western clichs about the non-West; and the relentless demonization of that perennially backward Other: Islam. Hence the new long war (Pentagon terminology) against Islamofascism.

Islamofascist? Photo: AFP

They could never understand, as Mishra stresses, the implications of that meeting of minds in a Supermax prison in Colorado between Oklahoma City bomber, all-American Timothy McVeigh, and the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef (non-devout Muslim, Pakistani father, Palestinian mother).

And they cannot understand how ISIS conceptualizers can regiment, online, an insulted, injured teenager from a Parisian suburb or an African shantytown and convert him into a narcissist Baudelairean? dandy loyal to a rousing cause worth fighting for. The parallel between the DIY jihadi and the 19th century Russian terrorist incarnating the syphilis of the revolutionary passions, as Alexander Herzen described it is uncanny.

Bombing Barcelona in 1893

or executions in the 21st century. Photo: Reuters

And the DIY jihadis top enemy is not even Christian; its the apostate Shiite. Mass rapes, choreographed murders, the destruction of Palmyra, Dostoyevsky had already identified it all; as Mishra puts it, its impossible for modern-day Raskolnikovs to deny themselves anything, and possible to justify anything.

Its impossible to summarize all the rhizomatic (hat tip to Deleuze-Guattari) intellectual crossfire deployed by Age of Anger. Whats clear is that to understand the current global civil war, archeological reinterpretation of the Wests hegemonic narrative of the past 250 years is essential. Otherwise we will be condemned, like puny Sisyphean specks, to endure not only the recurrent nightmare of history but also its recurrent blowback.

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Age of Anger - Asia Times

1. Our way of life takes liberties with human nature. It uses Enlightenment ideas about reason which Samuel Hammond says psychologists know are very unrealistic (if not laughable).

2. Hammonds essay on liberalism (=workable liberties sought by lefties and conservatives) makes many crucial points, but isnt entirely realistic about reasons role.

3. Key principles of workable liberty are discovered, not invented. For instance, Hammond says, church/state separation and multicultural religious toleration were discovered in 1590s India under Islamic rule. And in 1640s Europe after many wars. (Aside, the supposed failure of multiculturalismisnt universal).

4. Certain behavioral rule patterns (like the Golden Rule, or property rights) are discoverable by any perspective-taking game-theoretic thinking.

5. Game theory enables mathematicalethics" with patterns as provable as geometry. And like geometry, game theory takes teaching (try rediscovering Euclid). But cooperation-preserving game theory matters far more than geometry.

6. Hammond mentions the badly taught Prisoners Dilemma game. If the strategy labeled rational produces bad results, is it rightly called rational? That the Golden Ruled or god-fearing beat rationalists suggests we need to rescue rationality.

7. Experts play a vital role says Hammond. Yes, but only if theyre properly motivated. If experts (or leaders) arent loyal to something above self-gain, like the public good, theyre buyable and unreliable (see Plato on greed-driven politics, + original idiocy).

8. Hammond feels that reason can help establish cooperative norms. But theyre also established, transmitted and internalized emotionally (see paleo-economics). Social emotions evolved partly for cooperation, as did language (weve got evolved social cooperation rule processors, akin to our tacit grammar rule processors).

9. Darwin saw that in humans workable cooperative norms work like natural-moral selection. Your way of life discovers them, or it dies out (see needism, + negative telos).

10. Hammond advises reason and persuasion, not fear-mongering or other emotive strategies. But persuasion often requires emotion (see Aristotles rhetoric). The trick is to recruit emotions for good, not to ignore them (see Platos emotive Chariot, + facts versus fears).

11. Many besides psychologists know that the Enlightenments reason-reliance is laughably unrealistic. Only the unobservant or experts educated into rationalist delusions or theory induced blindness (like model-mesmerized economists) could believe otherwise.

12. Some Enlightenment thinkers understood; Hobbes>Reason is not...born with usbut attained by industry, Hume>Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions:

13. But less realistic ideas won, and Enlightenment errors, though unempirical, still underpin democracy and economics.

14. Three unempirical Enlightenment errors, rationalism, individualism, and hedonism, are particularly seductive because theyre partly truth. However their elegant oversimplifications exclude much that matters. Theyre typically empirically complex compositions hybridized with their opposites (emotional and relational rationality, self-deficient individualism, painstaking mattering and meaning-seeking).

15. No workable liberty can permit freedom to harm what your community depends on. Yet logic that pits self-interest against collective self-preservation lurks among the market-mesmerized.

16. Ways of life built on unempirical views of emotions or reason arent sustainable. Hammond makes progress by using empirically sounder psychology (e.g., mentioning System 1 + System 2). But long-lived liberty requires behavioral politics and better behaved behavioural models.

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IllustrationbyJulia Suits,The New Yorkercartoonist & author ofThe Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions

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Taking Liberties With Workable Liberty - Big Think

Its time the Left parties introspect where they had floundered, and developed a lingo to address the aspirations of the new middle class, Hamid Dhabolkar, son of the slain anti-superstition campaigner Narendra Dhabolkar and a leader of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti that works towards eradicating superstitions, has said.

They must ask themselves and find out where they went wrong. As to whether they were not adequately appreciative of the new role of the middle class that emerged in the 1990s, he said in an interaction with The Hindu on the sidelines of the DYFI national meeting which he addressed on Thursday.

Dr. Dhabolkar, a psychiatrist by profession, feels that Left politics for some reason had taken the back seat in national polity in the 1990s and the vacuum thus created was soon captured and filled by the far Right communal forces with a flourish. It is therefore important that the Left in India remain sensitive to issues of culture, which are political as well, and address them as part of their pro-poor agenda, he says.

To cite an instance, sorcery and black magic have been used time and again by opportunistic, self-proclaimed godmen to exploit the poor, he says. While his father had led the struggle for legislation against black magic, Maharashtra promulgated an Act after his father fell to the guns of bigots in 2013.

Dr. Dhabolkar is happy that the Kerala Sastra Sahithya Parishad has taken up the cause for such an act with the Kerala government.

Sabarimala temple

If the anti-superstition body that he is part of had successfully led a struggle for entry of women into the Shani Shingnapur temple in Maharashtra, he now would want the same to be allowed at Sabarimala temple.

The case is coming up for hearing in the Supreme Court on February 20, on the second anniversary of communist leader and rationalist Govind Pansares murder by anti-nationalists, he says.

It pains Dr. Dhabolkar to think that justice has not been delivered yet in the murders of Narendra Dhabolkar, Govind Pansare and M.M. Kalburgi; trial has been rather slow and the actual shooters are absconding. But it is important that the message left by them go far and wide.

Megha Pansare

Govind Pansares daughter-in-law Megha Pansare thinks combating superstition is as important as the fight against globalisation. By opposing superstition, you are promoting rationalism, scientific temper, and freedom of thought, says Dr. Megha, an activist with the National Federation of Indian Women and a lecturer in Russian at the Shivaji University in Kolhapur, Maharashtra.

Govinda Pansare was a cultural activist and a politician and deemed cultural activity as part of his political commitment. He was gunned down when he was on the morning walk with his spouse. Now, as an act of resistance, Dr. Megha is organising morning walks by people on the 20th of each month.

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Go for introspection, Left parties told - The Hindu

Many Irish rugby fans in Edinburgh this weekend will at some point pass the statue of David Hume, prominently located on the citys most prestigious thoroughfare, the Royal Mile. If they notice it, the superstitious among them may even stop to rub the figures right big toe.

When sculptor Sandy Stoddart was preparing the work in the mid-1990s, he correctly identified a public demand for statues of the famous dead to have rubbable body parts. So casting the 18th century philosopher in Roman attire, without shoes, he arranged for the right foot to protrude from the plinth, with a tantalisingly flexed toe.

Stoddart predicted that the rubbing of same would become an ancient tradition. He was right. Since its installation in 1997, the toe has been been burnished to a shiny bronze by those in search of luck. Hume, a famous rationalist, may be turning in his grave.

It could be worse. Had the sculptor not been careful, the great philosopher might have shared the indignities of Victor Noir, a 19th-century Parisian journalist killed in a duel, who unwittingly founded a fertility cult thanks to the bronze likeness on his grave having a conspicuously swollen crotch, which is now being shined for all eternity in Pre Lachaise cemetery, by women intent on motherhood.

In Verona, a statue of the fictional Juliet has had one of her breasts similarly polished.

And I noticed recently that this trend of inappropriate touching of monuments has extended to Dublin, via the mammarian tourism magnets of Molly Malone.

Rationalism aside, Irish rugby fans might in any case want to think twice before rubbing Humes toe. For although the man was undoubtedly possessed of a towering intellect, he was also what we would now call a racist. He considered some peoples innately inferior to others.

Among these were the Irish.

Here he is in his History of England (1773), for example, explaining why this country so badly needed invading in 1169: The Irish, from the beginning of time, had been buried in the most profound barbarism and ignorance; as they were never conquered or even invaded by the Romans, from whom all the western world derived its civility, they continued still in the most rude state of society, and were distinguished only by those vices to which human nature, not tamed by education or restrained by laws, is for ever subject.

So at least we had an excuse in his eyes the failure of the Romans to humanise us.

Perhaps too, in life, some Irish people just rubbed him up the wrong way. Still, confronted with his smug, Roman toga-wearing features, I might be inclined to boycott the toe on principle, regardless of its supposed powers.

It is knowledge or wisdom, by the way, that the statue is said to confer. Thus, before tourists picked up on the habit, the superstition was the preserve of local philosophy students, especially before exams.

That being so, its the Irish team and coaches, not the fans, who should be rubbing it, before they face this afternoons practical in Murrayfield. But then again, in the matter of how to win rugby matches, Joe Schmidt appears to have more knowledge in his big toe than most of his rivals.

Superstition should not enter into it.

Mind you, Schmidt and all other rational explanations aside, the turnaround in results between Scotland and Ireland over recent years has been extraordinary.

Many of todays team wont remember it, but there was a time, as recently as the 1990s, when Ireland couldnt win this fixture. Only a 6-6 draw in 1994 interrupted a sequence of 11 straight defeats and this during an era when, on paper, Scotland were always at least as bad as us.

Even after that run ended, we still couldnt win in Edinburgh.

The Scots decline, funnily enough, set in soon after the installation of Humes sculpture, although the locals loss of wisdom about how to beat us may have been influenced by other developments.

That fine sportswriter Vincent Hogan has noted that, in the run-up to our last Edinburgh hammering, in 2001, it was suspected there had been surreptitious surveillance of the Irish training sessions.

So in 2003, new coach Eddie OSullivan left a decoy list of lineout calls, accidentally on purpose, in a bin near the training base. Scotlands subsequent performance suggested that, to paraphrase Pope, a little planted misinformation can be a dangerous thing. Ireland won 36-6, and have been (almost) unbeatable in the fixture ever since.

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Rubbing for the Green An Irishman's Diary about David Hume's big toe - Irish Times