Who is Pankaj? He is an Indian born cosmopolitan.
Pankaj grew up in semi-rural India to parents who were shaped by their upbringing in a pre-modern world of myth, religion and custom. He observed the rupture of lived experience and historical continuity leading to emotional and psychological disorientations in the arduous journey to modernity.
Pankaj’s earliest readings were in Indian classical literature and philosophy, and continues to marvel at Buddhism’s subtle analysis of human experience.
Pankaj’s intellectual formation is largely European and US American. Unqualified regard for Montaigne who recognized the diversity of human cultures and the subdivisions of the individual selves, commending humility, self-restraint, and compassion before the reality of human existence.
Pankaj is drawn mostly to German, Italian, Eastern European and Russian thinkers. For this has much to do with his upbringing in India which like Germany and Russia were latecomers to modernity. India now has its nationalists fabricating a proud new Hindu ideology.
He sees the old West-dominated word order now giving way to global disorder.
Pankaj calls himself a stepchild of the West and feels sympathy for both sides. He lives in London and is a columnist for the Bloomberg Review (International Newsagency headquartered in New York), the New York Times Book Review. Writes regularly for the Guardian British daily newspaper, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
What is Pankaj’s concern? Attacks on Western cities since 9/11 in 2001 by alQaeda raised the question “Why do they hate us?” Then ISIS raised more questions.as an anonymous writer to The new York Review of Books wrote that, “nothing since the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse.”
For Pankaj this has been a major error for 9/11 was portrayed as a clash civilization and missed the unfocused fury and frustration of citizens feeling left behind in unequal societies. Of individuals living with a constant dread where social, political and economic forces determining their lives are unclear. Globalization and volatile markets restrict nation’s autonomy, refugees and immigrants challenge citizenship, national culture and tradition. The fear and insecurity expands.
The hopeful period following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 for with the collapse of Soviet communism the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured. Free markets and human rights were the correct formula for the billions trying to overcome degrading poverty and political oppression.
For Pankaj the core issue is Post 1945 planned protected economic growth within sovereign states to uplift specific goals like gender equality.
In the age of globalization post fall of the Berlin Wall political life has become boisterous with unlimited demands for individual freedoms and satisfactions.
From the 1990s a democratic revolution of aspiration across the world with longings for wealth, status and power, along with stability and contentment. In India egalitarian ambition broke free of old social hierarchies.
The crisis of recent years is the failure to realize the ideals of endless economic expansion and private wealth creation.
Most newly created individuals operate within poorly imagined social and political communities within states with weakening sovereignty. Suffer from the loss of old certainties about their place in the world with sense of identity and self-worth along with links to traditional communities and other systems of support and comfort and sources of meaning.
Isolation also been intensified with the decline of post-colonial nation-building ideologies and the junking of social democracy by technocratic elites.
Herded by capitalism and technology into common present with grossly unequal distributions of wealth and power have created humiliating new hierarchies. Hannah Arendt’s “negative solidarity” increased by digital communications with improved capacity for envious and resentful comparison of the commonplace with its compromised quest for individual distinction and singularity.
Many of the shocks of modernity were once absorbed by inherited social structures of family and community and the state’s welfare cushions. Today’s individuals are directly exposed in accelerating competition on uneven playing fields, so it is easy to feel that there is no such thing as either society or state and that there is only a war of all against all.
Their evidently natural rights to life, liberty and security challenged by deep-rooted inequality and threatened by political stagnation and climate change.
Hannah Arendt feared a “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and … irritability of everyone against everybody else.” As ressentiment as existential resentment of other people’s being because of envy, humiliation and powerlessness which infects civil society undermining political liberty in authoritarianism and chauvinism as prejudiced support for one’s cause.
Our perplexity that societies organized for individual self-interest can collapse into manic tribalism and nihilistic violence. In the entrepreneurial free market world swift economic growth and worldwide prosperity enabling Asian, Latin American and African societies to become more secular, rational. Governments getting out of the way of entrepreneurs and stop subsidizing the poor and lazy. Hence in 1990 V.S. Naipaul stated, the “pursuit of happiness through individual enterprise as the final and greatest quest of humankind.”
Yet this secular salvation has been undermined in the assumption that the future will be materially superior to the present yet it is not easily abandoned.
In 1919 only 20% of humankind lived in countries claiming to be independent. In Asia and Africa traditional religious and philosophical belief gave most people their interpretation of the world and their life meaning with social ties and shared beliefs, with family structures and professional and religious bodies defining the common good and the individual. Few could become disenchanted with liberal modernity.
Now billions are exposed to the promises of individual freedom in a global neo-liberal economy imposing constant improvisation and adjustment.
Can the millions of young people awakening around the world realize the promise of individual freedom and prosperity?
The world has never seen a greater accumulation of wealth, or a more extensive escape from material deprivation but this cloaks the inequality of opportunity with nearly half of the world’s income between 1988 and 2011 appropriated the richest tenth of humanity.
A quarter of the world’s largely urban population, 1.8. billion, are between fifteen and thirty. Extremists find easy recruits among unemployed youth. Having undergone multiple shocks and displacements in their transition to modernity and find themselves unable to fulfil the promise of self-empowerment. Heightened in the IT revolution with young graduates and dropouts overnight billionaires. The chasm between them and the technocratic and financial elites.
The majority see social power monopolized by people with money, property, connections, and feel shut out from higher culture and decision making.
Even in advanced countries the collapse of the labour market with young people working part time, study and work at the same time, travelling huge distances to find work (in different countries and culture).
White nationalists in US taking control of their lives again vindicating their liberties. China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Modi, Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, retrofit old-style nationalism for their growing populations of uprooted citizens with their sense of self-contradictory yearnings for belonging, identity and community, along with individual autonomy, material affluence, and national power. The demagogues promise security in an insecure world. The demagogues take a generalized discontent, the mood of drift, resentment, disillusionment and economic shakiness and transform it into a plan for doing something. They make inaction seem morally wrong. Many young people are eager to transform their powerlessness into irrepressible rage to hurt or destroy.
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