19 Oct 2024

yeah sorry, no, different great replace­ment

Pankaj Mishra, in the course of tightening up on the large subject of his From the Ruins of Empire (2012), in the book’s last chapter:

For a while at least, the Third World, as a large part of the postcolonial world was inaccurately called, seemed doomed from a Western point-of-view, the site of obscure civil wars and the source of needy immigrants.

The picture is a lot clearer and multifarious after more than half a century of change, when many of the ideological blinkers of the Cold War no longer exist. Moral idealism rather than practicality and effectiveness seems to have defined such broad transnational groupings as the Non-Aligned Movement, which almost all postcolonial Asian nations joined in an attempt to build an alternative to the crude polarities of the Cold War. We can see that the seemingly wholesale adoption of Western ideologies (Chinese communism, Japanese imperialism) did not work. Attempts at syntheses (India’s parliamentary democracy, Muslim Turkey’s secular state, China’s state capitalism) were more successful, and violent rejections of the West in the form of Iran’s Islamic revolution and Islamic movements continue to have an afterlife.

Many new nations, such as Pakistan, never recovered from birthing traumas; their liberationist energies dispersed into political-religious movements of an increasingly militant nature. Others, such as the populous nations of China, India and Indonesia, despite some serious setbacks, managed their economic growth and sovereignty to the point where their cumulative heft now seems to pose a formidable challenge to the West itself.

Recent history tells us that there are more such challenges — political, diplomatic and economic — still to arise from large parts of Asia. More than half a century after decolonization began, we continue to live in what the American writer Irving Howe called ‘a revolutionary age.’ . . .

Replacing Europe’s power with its own, America, Howe wrote, was ‘sincerely convinced that only by the imposition of its will can the world be saved. But the world resists this will; it cannot, even if it would, surrender its own mode of response.’ Written in 1954, these words sound no less convincing a year after the Arab Spring and the collapse of several pro-Western dictatorships. Chaos and uncertainty may loom over a wide swathe of the Arab world for some years. But the spell of Western power has finally been broken. If uprooted Muslims defy it contemptuously, others such as the Chinese have adopted its ‘secrets.’ The sense of humiliation that burdened several generations of Asians has greatly diminished. The rise of Asia, and the assertiveness of Asian peoples, consummates their revolt against the West that began more than a century ago; it is in many ways the revenge of the East.

Yet this success conceals an immense intellectual failure, one that has profound ramifications for the world today and the near future.

It is simply this: no convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy, even though these seem increasingly febrile and dangerously unsuitable in large parts of the world.

I’m new to Mishra — learned of him only a couple of weeks ago from a ChiCommons co-worker. From the Ruins is the second of his books I’ve finished (audio, via Everand, where I’m happy in finding a lot of his output available) in the short time since. He’ll turn up in future longer posts here, I expect, soon enough. If I can get to them.

This is material that goes hand-in-hand with that of Priya Satia, historian at Stanford U., of whom I first learned two years ago and whom immediately I found so helpfully provocative. As it happens, I wasn’t to finish her Time’s Monster then, life being what it’s been; this year, a few months ago, I returned to it and made it through to end, at last. That’s primed me well to take up Mishra now.

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