Guardian member Jane Knott considers Welcome to the age of anger by Pankaj Mishra – a long read published in December which reflected on the seismic events of 2016.
I was aware of the anger brewing across Britain. In the buildup to and aftermath of the EU referendum it was really quite palpable. Mishra’s piece explored the idea that neoliberalism is dead, democracy is passé and we now have to grapple with our old ideas about society being irrelevant. It made me realise that the events of 2016 can be better explained when we accept that humans are ruled far more by emotion than by logic.
I always enjoy the Guardian’s long reads. It’s refreshing to read something that really delves into a topic and gets under the skin of those living it; it’s a chance to consider and ponder the topic amid the noise of the news cycle.
Mishra wove together theories from people including novelists, sociologists and historians to argue that democracy has become unstable. He argued that because democracy involves humans, and so comprises not just rational thought but also, crucially, emotion, we shouldn’t have expected more from it.
Britain’s decision to leave the EU, Mishra argued, is a rejection of rationale, facts and so-called experts, primarily because none of this matters when you’re feeling left behind by society. He referenced liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff – who recently wrote that “enlightenment, humanism and rationalism” can no longer adequately explain the world we’re living in – and Dostoevsky – one of the first modern thinkers to air the suspicion, now troubling us again, that rational thinking does not decisively influence human behaviour.
Mishra suggested that the “widening abyss of race, class and education” is due to the “failure of capitalism to fulfill its own promise of general prosperity”. In many ways, it appears we are living the end of democracy and, as an instinctive coping mechanism, many are embracing nostalgic fantasies of a vanished society, abandoning the present in order to make way for a return to the past.
This article struck a particular chord. My husband and I lived in Brussels form 1976 to 2003, teaching in European schools. We raised our children to have a strong sense of European identity, and had friends who had lived all over Europe. We couldn’t understand where all of this anger and resentment of the EU had sprung from. Something that Mishra really captured well in his article is this sense, that many felt, of having their identity forcibly redefined. The comfort blanket being decidedly yanked away.
One afternoon last year, I found myself discussing the referendum with some elderly ladies in a tea room. When asked which way they would vote, they collectively barked “out!” and I just found myself wondering what could have inspired such volatility of emotion. They wanted to “take back control”, but of what I’m not sure. I wondered if they had heard it so many times, offered up as at once a problem and a neat solution, that they had started to believe it.
After I had read this article, I finally started to understand what was going on in Britain, the US and the wider world. The perspective Mishra described was truly illuminating. Many of us have recently felt the need to put our rather comfortably entrenched ‘liberal’ ideas and values under the spotlight, and this piece really helped explain and clarify what I was trying to get to myself. And, at the end of a long and unexpected year, it changed my view on how the last few months had unfolded.
Jane Knott, 72, is a retired teacher and lives with her husband, Adrian, in Suffolk.
