Rousseau, a guiding light for the German Romantics, proved to be more prescient than his Enlightenment compatriots in condemning commercial society based on mimetic desire, as a game rigged by and in favour of elites: a recipe, in other words, for class conflict, moral decay, social chaos and political despotism. Little did the elites foresee that their basic assumption of stability, bound up with the guarantee of rights to a restricted number of individuals, would be overthrown, first by an ambitious rising class of the bourgeoisie insisting on perpetual growth and dynamism, and then the masses clamouring to catch up.
Instead of harmonizing socially mediated interests, an increasingly industrialized economy created class antagonisms and gross inequalities – an outcome that none of the salon philosophes could have anticipated in their own pre-industrial age. Frustrated expectations and appalling working conditions radicalized more and more people. By the mid-nineteenth century, the self-interested bourgeois had turned into a hated figure and socialism into a magnetic idea for budding intelligentsias across Europe, before spreading across the world as the primary motivating force of ‘revolution’ – the word itself now connoting the creation of a totally new and entirely man-made order, and opening the way to the radical solutions of totalitarianism.
The appeal of democracy, broadly defined as equality of conditions and the end of hierarchy, would grow and grow – to the paradoxical point where Fascists, Nazis and Stalinists would claim to be the real democrats, realizing a deeper principle of equality, and offering greater participation in politics, than the bourgeois liberal democrats bothered with. A consciousness of unlimited and unprecedented power, boosted by the industrial, scientific and technological revolutions, would tempt many into discarding inherited values and norms.
Unwittingly, then, the philosophers of the Enlightenment instigated the end of ancien régimes everywhere – in thought if not in fact. They also inadvertently initiated challenges to their own status and expertise – and that of every subsequent liberal elite. Writing decades after the French Revolution, Hegel described its world-historical transmutation of the Enlightenment’s abstract rationalism into revolutionary politics: ‘Ever since the sun has stood in the heavens, and the planets revolved around it, never have we known man to walk on his head, that is, to base himself on the Idea and to build the world in accordance with it.’
The Latecomers to Modernity: Resentful Stragglers
The Enlightenment also created the vast stage on which more and more people appeared, changing as well as interpreting their world in a series of often monstrous, and deeply repetitive, tragic-comic scenes. For many outside France, its revolution had institutionalized some irresistible ideals: a rationalistic, egalitarian and universalizing society in which men shaped their own lives. The all-conquering army of Napoleon, the ‘Robespierre on horseback’, as Engels called him, then taught much of Europe – and Russia – a harsh lesson in political and military innovation.
The global human drama would henceforth be powered by appropriative mimicry. According to Girard, the most eloquent contemporary theorist of mimetic rivalry, the human individual is subject, after satisfying his basic needs, to ‘intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being. If the model, who is apparently already endowed with superior being, desires some object, that object must surely be capable of conferring an even greater plentitude of being.’
A triumphant Napoleon was the perfect ‘model who becomes a rival’ and the ‘rival who becomes a model’. He helped accelerate what Adam Smith, generalizing his own theory of mediated desire from individuals to nations, had called ‘national emulation’. In the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, European societies quickly learned how to deploy, French-style, a modern military, technology, railways, roads, judicial and educational systems, and create a feeling of belonging and solidarity, most often by identifying dangerous enemies within and without. (Germany would succeed abundantly in this project to crush France militarily in 1871, provoking, in another tragic-comic scene, French elites to mimic German-style nationalism.)
Four years before Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, the German thinker Max Stirner argued in the equally incendiary The Ego and its Own that the impersonal rationality of power and government had disguised itself in the emollient language of freedom and equality, and the individual, ostensibly liberated from traditional bonds, had been freshly enslaved by the modern state. Bakunin, the forebear of today’s leaderless militants, spoke with glee of the ‘mysterious and terrible words’, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, which portend ‘the complete annihilation’ of the ‘existing political and social world’.
His friend Herzen saw Europe’s new gods of wealth and power as inaugurating an era of mass illusion – and violent counter-attacks. Europe was fated to move, Tocqueville warned, to ‘democracy without limits’, but it was far from clear ‘whether we are going toward liberty or marching toward despotism, God alone knows precisely’. Benjamin Constant cautioned that ‘there is no limit to tyranny when it seeks to obtain the signs of consensus’.
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But most observers were happy to be overwhelmed by the nineteenth-century spectacle of continuous achievement and expansion. For the promise of world-transformative politics was backed by the power of money – the new currency of values created by England’s industrial revolution. Money, circulating unrestrainedly with the help of gunboats, bound more and more people into a state of negative solidarity. As Marx and Engels famously declaimed:
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls.
This rhapsody to the Promethean powers of the industrializing and universalizing bourgeois came naturally to two provincials from then pre-industrial Germany enviously recording the progress of the Anglo-French West. Its remote observers in largely peasant countries, such as the radical Russian thinker Nikolai Chernyshevsky, were even more awed. Chernyshevsky found the Crystal Palace, a huge glass and iron structure built by Joseph Paxton for London’s 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, to be ‘a miracle of art, beauty and splendour’.
In his What is to be Done? (1863), probably the worst Russian novel of the nineteenth century (and also the most influential), the Crystal Palace embodies a utopian future, built on rational principles, of joyful work, communal existence, gender equality and free love. (Lenin was stirred enough by this vision to write a political blueprint with the same title.) But it was also latecomers to political and economic modernity – the Germans and then Russians – who sensed acutely both its irresistible temptation and its dangers.
Dostoyevsky’s writings capture the unnerving appeal of the new materialist civilization, and its accompanying ideology of individualism: how that civilization was helped as much by its prestige as well as its military and maritime dominance. Two years before he published his novella Notes from Underground (1864), Dostoyevsky went on a tour of Western Europe. During his stay in London in 1862, he visited the International Exhibition. At the Crystal Palace he testified:
You become aware of a colossal idea; you sense that here something has been achieved, that here there is victory and triumph. You even begin vaguely to fear something. However independent you may be, for some reason you become terrified. ‘For isn’t this the achievement of perfection?’ you think. ‘Isn’t this the ultimate?’ Could this in fact be the ‘one fold?’ Must you accept this as the final truth and forever hold your peace? It is all so solemn, triumphant, and proud that you gasp for breath.
France in the eighteenth century had originally represented to the res
t of the world the modern civilization of wealth, elegant manners and sensibility, surpassing, as Voltaire asserted, even ancient Athens and Rome, in the ‘art of living’. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, Britain rather than France was the paradigmatic modern state and society. It had staged an epochal transition from an agrarian to industrial, a rural to urban economy, and generated, by way of a supporting philosophy, a utilitarian ethic – the greatest happiness of the greatest number – that had even made its way to Russia (Dostoyevsky was to rail against it in subsequent novels).
The success of its perpetually expanding capitalist bourgeoisie made unceasing motion, forward and onward, seem a political imperative for states and individuals alike. Intellectuals in Cairo, Calcutta, Tokyo and Shanghai were reading Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill in order to learn the secrets of self-improvement. A small minority of Western Europeans had become the bearers and promoters of a civilization that confronted the rest of the world’s population with formidable moral and spiritual as well as political challenges.
Dostoyevsky had no illusions about the world-historical import of what he was witnessing at the Crystal Palace:
Look at these hundreds of thousands, these millions of people humbly streaming here from all over the face of the earth. People come with a single thought, quietly, relentlessly, mutely thronging into this colossal palace; and you feel that something final has taken place here, that something has come to an end. It is like a Biblical picture, something out of Babylon, a prophecy from the apocalypse coming to pass before your eyes. 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.
In Dostoyevsky’s view, the cost of such splendour and magnificence as displayed at the Crystal Palace was a society dominated by the war of all against all, in which most people were condemned to be losers. In tones of awe and fear he described London as a wilderness of damaged proletarians, ‘half-naked, savage, and hungry’, frantically drowning their despair in debauchery and alcohol. Visiting Paris, Dostoyevsky caustically noted that Liberté existed only for the millionaire. The notion of Égalité, 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.
Even the socialist played the same game of materialism with his mean calculus of order, and his bitter notion of class struggle. True socialism, which rested on spiritual self-sacrifice and moral community, could not be established in the West, for the ‘Occidental Nature’ had a fundamental design flaw: it lacked Fraternity. ‘You find there instead,’ Dostoyevsky wrote:
a principle of individualism, a principle of isolation, of intense self-preservation, of personal gain, of self-determination, of the I, of opposing this I to all nature and the rest of mankind as an independent autonomous principle entirely equal and equivalent to all that exists outside itself.
Dostoyevsky returned to Russia with much rage against all those who bowed before Baal. Russian tourists in Europe, he wrote, reminded him of little dogs running around in search of their masters. He spent the rest of his life inveighing against the Westernizing engineers of soul who think that ‘there is no soil, there is no people, nationality is just a certain tax system, the soul is tabula rasa, a little piece of wax from which one can straightaway mould a real person, a universal everyman, a homunculus – all one has to do is apply the fruits of European civilization and read two or three short books’.
In Notes from Underground, published a year after What is to be Done?, Dostoyevsky made his narrator resolutely reject Chernyshevsky’s vision of progress. The short monologue was Dostoyevsky’s first sustained barrage on Russians importing Western ideas, and on the increasingly popular notion of rational egoism. Insisting that man is fundamentally irrational, the novella’s anti-hero, an insignificant St Petersburg clerk, methodically destroys Chernyshevsky’s smug symbol of the utopian society, the Crystal Palace. ‘I am a sick man,’ he starts, ‘I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.’
But this is not actually a knowable man. ‘The fact is,’ he adds, ‘that I have never succeeded in being anything at all.’ And there are no grounds for anything in his character or for his actions. Rational self-interest provides a poor basis for action because it can be easily and pleasurably defied. The Underground Man goes on to reveal his unstable ego as the least reliable guide to moral and sensible behaviour as he enacts its tragi-comic rebellion against an overpowering and humiliating reality. ‘Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it,’ he admits, ‘but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.’
Universal happiness could not be attained through individuals succumbing to the material plenitude of the Crystal Palace. Far from it: as the Underground Man says, ‘I’m convinced that man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos.’ Dreaming constantly of revenge against his social superiors, this creature of the netherworld luxuriates in his feeling of impotence, and projects blame for his plight outward. Nietzsche derived from Notes from Underground his specific understanding of ressentiment, and its malign potential as a particularly noxious form of aggression by the weak against an aloof and inaccessible elite.
Keeping Up with the Joneses
Nevertheless, the stealthy Europeanization of the world that Dostoyevsky witnessed in its early stages is now complete. There is hardly a place on Earth, not even in Borneo or the Amazonian rainforests, that has not felt the impact of the Atlantic West, its ideas and ideologies of materialism, and their mass-produced Americanized versions.
The European institutions of the nation state and capitalism have supplanted millennia-old forms of governance, statecraft and market economy. The spread of literacy, improved communications, rising populations and urbanization have transformed the remotest corners of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The desire for self-expansion through material success fully dominates the extant spiritual ideals of traditional religions and cultures.
Speaking before the French Chamber of Deputies in 1840, Tocqueville was already marvelling at the speed and intricacy of this unification of the globe (while urging France to participate in it through more vigorous colonialism): ‘Do you know what is happening in the Orient? An entire world is being transformed … Europe in our times does not attack Asia only through a corner, as did Europe in the time of the crusades: She attacks … from all sides, puncturing, enveloping, subduing.’ Definitely, European dominance was multi-sided; it came about as much through eager emulation as military conquest.
The Crystal Palace, as Dostoyevsky feared, portended a universal surge of mimetic desire: people desiring and trying to possess the same objects. Germany, Russia and Japan set out to catch up with Britain and France in the nineteenth century’s first major outburst of appropriative mimicry. Two world wars eventually resulted from nations desiring the same objects and preventing others from trying to appropriate them. But by 1945 the new nation states of Asia and Africa had already started on their own fraught journey to the Crystal Palace, riding roughshod over ethnic and religious diversity and older ways of life.
Non-Western men and women educated in Europe or in Western-style institutions despaired of their traditionalist elites as much as they resented European dominance over their societies. They had keenly imbibed the ideologies of Social Darwinism; they, too, were obsessed with finding true power and sovereignty in a world of powerful nation states. In this quest to give their peoples a fair chance at strength, equality and dignity in the white man’s palace, China’s Mao Zedong and Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as much as Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq followed the Western model of mass-mobilization
, state-building and industrialization.
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Long before such twentieth-century attempts at ‘national emulation’, European and American dominance over ‘the world’s economies and peoples’ had, as Christopher Bayly writes in The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (2004), turned a large part of humanity ‘into long-term losers in the scramble for resources and dignity’. Imperialism had not only imposed inapposite ideologies and institutions upon societies that had developed, over centuries, their own political units and social structures; it had also deprived many of them of the resources to pursue Western-style economic development.
Despite, or because of, this disadvantage, the explicitly defined aim of Asia and Africa’s first nationalist icons (Atatürk, Nehru, Mao, Sukarno, Nasser and Nkrumah) was ‘catch-up’ with the West. Immense problems – partly the consequence of colonial rule – confronted these many catch-up modernizations soon after independence. The antagonisms and alliances of the Cold War aggravated them further. Left-wing regimes across Asia, Africa and Latin America were embargoed or overthrown by the representatives of the free world; explicitly communist movements, as in Indonesia and Egypt, were brutally suppressed by their local allies. Those that survived became increasingly authoritarian and erratic. By the 1970s, many pro-West nation states had also plunged into despotism.
But one aim united all these ideologically divergent regimes. Socialist as well as capitalist modernists envisaged an exponential increase in the number of people owning cars, houses, electronic goods and gadgets, and driving the tourist and luxury industry worldwide. This is a fantasy that has been truly globalized since the end of the Cold War and today synergizes the endeavours of businessmen, politicians and journalists everywhere. Since the collapse of Communism, ruling classes of the non-West have looked to McKinsey rather than Marx to help define their socio-economic future; but they have not dared to alter the founding basis of their legitimacy as ‘modernizers’ leading their countries to convergence with the West and attainment of European and American living standards.
Age of Anger Page 7
