Pete Thigpen

Introduction to: "Welcome to the Age of Anger"

What Mishra does in the Age of Anger is launch a wholesale assault on the idea that the Enlightenment project has led in an inexorable arc from the 18th century explosion of new ways of looking at the world and our place in it to the benefits of liberal cosmopolitanism and attendant material benefits of the 21st century. 

Not so fast, he says.  Rationalism, individualism, secularism, and the benefits of the progress of science have brought what Aristotle called eudaemonia – a flourishing life – to a pathetically small portion of the world’s population.  And the ressentiment ( Nietzsche- “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.”) of those who have been left out of the largess brought to us by capitalism and democracy has brought us, he says, the cataclysms of ISIS, Brexit, and Trump. 

In 2015, 62 of the richest people on the planet owned as much private net wealth as the bottom half – 3.5 billion people – of humanity.  At the heart of his argument is this dramatic disparity.  Just how can a society function when we don’t have “have mores and have lesses”, but rather “have alls and have nothings”?  His conclusion is simply that we can’t and we will pay a dear price in global socioeconomic upheaval unless we can figure out some way to reverse the trend.

What can the Good Life do about this?  The first is to decide if we think if Mishra is even directionally correct.  If we conclude he is, then we need to determine that we are not helpless flotsam caught in an historical tsunami about which we can do nothing.  He ends his book with this sentence: “They (the contradictions and costs of a minority’s progress) underscore the need for transformative thinking, about both the self and the world”.  Not much for guidance.  Clearly, the next steps in “transformative thinking” are up to us. 

 Read Mishra's essay in the Guardian

Read NY Times Book Review of Mishra's Book