Pankaj Mishra, whom I’ve previously praised, has an excellent, excellent article up at theguardian, as it calls itself these days, “How to think about Islamic State”, though it might better be called “Civilization and its Discontents, Neo-Liberal Edition,” because it treats the really world-wide complaints of those who aren’t making a decent living in the New World Order, everyone from IS/ISIS to the KKK.
“In the lengthening spiral of mutinies from Charleston to central India, the insurgents of Iraq and Syria have monopolised our attention by their swift military victories; their exhibitionistic brutality, especially towards women and minorities; and, most significantly, their brisk seduction of young people from the cities of Europe and the US. Globalisation has everywhere rapidly weakened older forms of authority, in Europe’s social democracies as well as Arab despotisms, and thrown up an array of unpredictable new international actors, from Chinese irredentists and cyberhackers to Syriza and Boko Haram. But the sudden appearance of Islamic State (Isis) in Mosul last year, and the continuing failure to stem its expansion or check its appeal, is the clearest sign of a general perplexity, especially among political elites, who do not seem to know what they are doing and what they are bringing about.”
The diagnostician for our discontents that Pankaj proposes is none other than Nietzsche’s favorite psychologist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. As Mishra puts it,
“Returning to Russia from Europe in 1862, Dostoevsky first began to explore at length the very modern torment of ressentiment that the misogynists of Twitter today manifest as much as the dupes of Isis.
…
“… Dostoevsky … saw most acutely how individuals, trained to believe in a lofty notion of personal freedom and sovereignty, and then confronted with a reality that cruelly cancelled it, could break out of paralysing ambivalence into gratuitous murder and paranoid insurgency.
"His insight into this fateful gap between the theory and practice of liberal individualism developed during his travels in western Europe – the original site of the greatest social, political and economic transformations in human history, and the exemplar with its ideal of individual freedom for all of humanity. By the mid-19th century, Britain was the paradigmatic modern state and society, with its sights firmly set on industrial prosperity and commercial expansion. Visiting London in 1862, Dostoevsky quickly realised the world-historical import of what he was witnessing. ‘You become aware of a colossal idea,’ he wrote after visiting the International Exhibition, showcase of an all-conquering material culture: 'You sense that it would require great and everlasting spiritual denial and fortitude in order not to submit, not to capitulate before the impression, not to bow to what is, and not to deify Baal, that is, not to accept the material world as your ideal.’
"However, as Dostoevsky saw it, the cost of such splendour and magnificence was a society dominated by the war of all against all, in which most people were condemned to be losers. In Paris, he caustically noted that liberté existed only for the millionaire. The notion of equality before the law was a 'personal insult’ to the poor exposed to French justice. As for fraternité, it was another hoax in a society driven by the 'individualist, isolationist instinct’ and the lust for private property.”
Is it rude to point out that as late as 1861 in Russia one could buy and sell people, a practice that was surely discontinued only because those godless folks in the West found it disgusting? That it was only in liberal bourgeois society that most people were not condemned to be losers? That Dostoyevsky’s sneer that “liberté existed only for the millionaire” holds a healthy helping of ressentiment itself, the bitter complaint of the “gentleman” that a “classical”—that is to say, useless—education and gentle birth no longer entitle him to the unthinking deference of the great majority of mankind?
Everyone should read The Brothers Karamazov,1 because it is one of the greatest novels ever written, but when they do so they should remember that Dostoyevsky was a vicious anti-Semite, who repeated the very worst of anti-Semitic lies, that Jews used the blood of Christian boys to make unleavened bread. Dostoyevsky was an hysterical Russian nationalist who believed that it was Russia’s Christian duty to conquer and thus Christianize the West, even as the IS boys want to Islamicize us.
Afterwords
Despite himself, Pankaj can’t come up with something better than the liberal bourgeois state, because there isn’t one. He radically underrates the beneficence of the market economy, blaming it when it goes wrong and ignoring it when it goes right. Most of all, he ignores the extraordinary triumphs of modern science, which somehow don’t count, perhaps because they’re hard to understand and can’t be talked about with a gentleman’s vocabulary.
- While you’re at it, you might want to read Joseph Frank’s extraordinary five-volume biography of Fyodor as well. You won’t regret it. ↩︎
