Under the Skin - In the Age of Anger with Pankaj Mishra Flashcards
The Age of Anger - how the pursuit of progress and individualism has created a demoralised world.
The experience of disaffection is common among nations in the advanced and developed world.
In the US, many people feel that the future is going to be worse than what they’re parents were accustomed to (this is a big historical shift).
Progress was the substitute for God. This notion of continuous improvement was completely radical.
Nietzsche warned that progress is a false God. We have given up belief in a transcendental deity. Instead, we have put our faith in progress, but this is a false religion.
Today, the religion of progress and economic growth (essentially neoliberalism) is losing believers.
I have been irredeemably secularised.
Secularisation refers to the historical process in which religion loses social and cultural significance.
Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche made the point that once you bring down the Kingdom of God onto Earth, you will have trouble.
Once you start thinking that what is promised to you in the afterlife can be recreated on Earth, you set yourself up for cruel disappointment.
It has become hugely fashionable to mock religious people as superstitious and ignorant. We forget that religion is a huge source of consolation. It helps people to accommodate themselves to grief, loss and disappointment.
Disappointment is the fate for most people, perhaps all people.
Your ego will let you down, your primal drives will be insufficient to satisfy you.
Most religions have cultural accoutrements which could perhaps be left behind. We must look beyond them.
In the late 18th century, we were moving away from a society where church, God and monarchy was important, and towards one where people will devise a social contract, and use individual reason and science. This period was called the Enlightenment, and 2 of it’s most prominent figures were Voltaire and Rousseau.
There is a conflict between them. Voltaire was offering a blueprint for society that we live in today: a society driven by self interest and the entrepreneurial spirit, competing against each other.
Rousseau was offering an alternative vision. He came to Paris and found himself alienated. Rousseau was talking about human needs, the needs of the soul. He thought that a society premised on self-interest, vanity, imitation on trying to keep up with Joneses is a recipe for all kinds of psychological disorders. He is an acute psychologist of the human soul.
Ressentiment - a psychological state resulting from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred which cannot be satisfied. A feeling of powerlessness.
We are now in a global epidemic of ressentiment. It can erupt volcanically as in the election of Trump and Brexit.
The revulsion that we feel at somebody else’s suffering - this or compassion should be the basis of the Social Contract, according to Rousseau.
The dominant cultural commentators blamed Brexit on racist views of the voters. This argument was very reductive.
Reductive - tending to present a subject or problem in a simplified form, especially one viewed as crude.
Obama was the embodiment of neoliberal chic who managed to conceal a whole range of grotesque inequalities through this very seductive personal style he had.
8 years of Obama enabled someone like Donald Trump.
Trump is precisely a product of neoliberalism.
The last time we had mass movements was in the 1960s/1970s with civil rights, feminism, and the Vietnam War. There was a palpable sense of solidarity.
Liberalism means freedom to be an individual and freedom to be disconnected.
We live, however, in an interdependent world.
This notion of the individual self which has to expand with material advances, has become so dominant in the past few decades. We should call it ‘hyper-individualism’ because it has become so unconstrained by institutions.
This philosophy has been digested by so many people.
There is far too much easy criticism and mockery of people who look to older cultures and philosophies.
They are looking to find an alternative to a way of living which feels like too much of a trap - a soulless, mechanical hamster wheel.
There is a lot of value in these traditions. This is how many human beings lived for centuries. We would be foolish to discard the wisdom in these philosophies.
The basic building blocks of human society are compassion and solidarity.
