Pankaj Mishra at n+1: At a time of widespread economic distress, ethnonationalists in the United States and United Kingdom as well as Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and Italy are united by their antipathy to immigrants, and targeting of institutions deemed insufficiently patriotic or indulgent of sexual, ethnic and racial minorities. This bleak scenario can be further elaborated. The main economic ideologies of endless growth and global prosperity have come up against environmental constraints and technological innovation, as well as built-in limits, and look unsustainable.
Editors and writers in hallowed periodicals were never mentally prepared for the collapse of their ideology of capitalist globalization and the rapid diminishment of Western power, legitimacy, and prestige. They were too attached, by national and class origin, and training, to the intellectual assumptions developed during the unchallenged hegemony of the West. Personally too implicated in the death-agonies of the old world, they cannot now feel the birth-pangs of the new. Indeed, they struggle to comprehend their own societies as these drastically change around them; they obsess over mere symptoms of a splintered social consensus such as “culture wars” and end up wringing meaning out of abstractions like “populism,” “democratic backsliding,” and “crisis of liberalism.”
A greater problem is that intellectual as well as political elites in the West have very few means to understand, let alone explain, the rest of the world. Mainstream journalists try to capture the speed and scale of an ongoing world-historical transformation—the rise of the Global South—through quantitative analysis. They offer statistics about the growing share of foreign trade of China, the expanding size of the Indian, Brazilian and Indonesian economies.
But these facts and figures are mere surface ripples on the spate of global change, which is sweeping away all that we once knew to be true.
We inhabit a world that differs radically, in all its political mentalities and emotional outlooks as well as economic structures, from the world that existed just two decades ago. History has always been a clash between stories in which people aspire to recognize themselves. Our preferred story about the past orients us to the world as it is, offers us a place and an identity, and broadly explains our feelings of possibility. The widely used framework of Western journalism was built on Western triumphs—defeats of totalitarian regimes in two world wars, the postwar taming of Germany, Italy and Japan, and then victory over communism in the cold war, followed by the worldwide dissemination of western-style capitalism and democracy. This rare experience of progress in the postwar West made it possible for its beneficiaries to generalize, optimistically, about changes in the rest of world, and the West’s own capacity to direct them.
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