The Age of Anger, 406 pages in seven chapters, is a well-in depth analysis to the huge wave of hatred, fanaticism, blind revengeful nationalism, racism, & discriminatory policies that put millions of people on the margin, almost rootless and without a clear identity & goal for their lives. Going back to the age of Enlightenment in the 18 th century, and quoting heavily from Tocqueville, Montesquieu, Voltair, Kant, Rousseau to Marx & Engels, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin to Salman Rushdie , Gandhi, Chinua Achebe , Abd al-Rahman Munif, Abu Mosaab al-Suri, Erdogan, Reza Shah Pahlavi, Ataturk, Narendra Modi, Marine Le Pen ,Trump & a host of other influential personalities, whether in politics, philosophy, social studies or fiction. Europeans, Americans, Africans, Asians & The Middle East, from the Right to the Left & those located in between …Mishra meticulously gave us a panoramic well founded view of how enlightenment failed drastically to liberate the man or the human soul, and how those central personalities played a fundamental role in mocking & discrediting people of Asia, Latin America, Russia, and the East generally of their indigenous religions, culture, dignity, history & tradition, for the sake of mere profit and power, manifested by material progress. Although few of his analysis needed more depth, such as his quick judgment on Edward Said (Has the author read properly “the world, the text & the world the critic” , 1983, and “Orientalism” in 1978, where examples of how the contemptuous vision of the west was manifested towards the East, he could have another view of Said’s work, especially in facing the heritage of Europe’s past, under both the colonial period & the post colonial era. Mishra gave us details of how Dostoyevsky mocked his Russian citizens when they travelled to Paris and London, looked as dogs who search for their lost master. In an essay on Pushkin, Dostoyevsky wrote about the dilemma of those who tried to imitate the west looks like those whose “conscience murmurs to him that he is a hollow man….suffering from a “”contradiction between two heterogeneous elements: an egoism extending to the limits of self adoration and a malicious self-contempt”, p 141. Shah Iran, Atatürk and many other nationalists who tried to impose the western style on their societies, such as unveiling of women, (with the net result that many women never left their homes) as the writer commented- the same experience done by Syrian president Assad in the 80’s when he tried to crush the Muslim Brothers movement in Syria-“. Echoing Dostoyevsky, those people “were as a crow”, wrote the Iranian writer Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, “who tried to imitate the way a partridge walked and forgot how to walk like a crow without learning to walk like a partridge ….People who were neither authentically Iranian nor Western”. P. 145 . Ali Shariati tried to advance Jalal’s theories by calling for “Liberty, Equality, & Spirituality”. To him liberty & democracy could be achieved without capitalism, equality without totalitarianism, and spirituality and religion without clerical authority”, P. 149.
Tanizaki, a Japanese write wrote in “In Praise Shadows” 1933 : ” we have to leave a road we have followed for thousand of years”, p142. Mishima, another Japanese writer invoked Japan’s lost culture of the Samurai -(I have visited their wonderful village recently when touring Japan). Gandhi wrote in 1909 of the dangers of educated men from colonised land mindlessly imitationg the ways of their colonial masters. Chinua Achebe’s first novel in 1958 revealed the mask of the west organisations who look only for profit and power. Abd al-Rahman Munif, in his cities of salt, 1984, wrote of the spiritual devastation of Arab tribal societies by American oil companies ( personally I read the five volumes of the cities of salt, and I think that he is the Arab’s Dostoyevsky, & I recommend them warmly to be read).
It is difficult to give a short summary of the book & the main causes of chauvinism, messianism, fanaticism, misogyny & terrorism aiming to kill as many innocent civilians as possible, that cast millions of people to the extreme margins of their societies, uprooted from their own traditions and local cultures. But al least Mishra succeeded to touch the deep roots of the anger that rages between the youth of the world, whether in the East or West, if it is possible to still divide the world between these classic categories- the industrialised progress touched every corner of the world, whether you like it or not. I enjoyed more reading Mishra’s last book “The World after Gaza” where he put forward all his powerful international critique vision to reveal the cowardness of the modern western world’s elits & politicians who failed to stop the horrors, ethnic cleansing & the ongoing genocide in Gaza for the last 18 months.
Perhaps Hannah Arendt was right as Mishra quoted her written note in 1968, “for the first time in history, all peoples on earth have a common present”, p 8. quoted by Mishra. That is what we are facing nowadays in Globalization, Social media and On-Line News that connect rapidly in few seconds all the corners of our Small Village-the Whole World- together. A novel written by Conrad in 1911: “Under Western Eyes” to criticise revolutions & their representatives invoke me to say: Mishra’s book & his criticism of the enlightenments’ philosophers and all those “Easterners” who tried to copy and imitate them could have the following title: “Under Southern Eyes”.
