Responding to that silly neo-Hegelian "end of history" meme at the end of the Cold War, Allan Bloom warned that fascism might be the future; and John Gray telegraphed the return of "primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian."
And that leads us to why the exceptional bearers of Enlightenment humanism and rationalism cannot explain the current geopolitical turmoil -- from ISIS to Brexit to Trump. They could never come up with anything more sophisticated than binary opposition of "free" and "unfree"; the same 19th century Western cliche's about the non-West; and the relentless demonization of that perennially backward Other: Islam. Hence the new "long war" (Pentagon terminology) against "Islamofascism."
They could never understand, as Mishra stresses, the implications of that meeting of minds in a Supermax prison in Colorado between Oklahoma City bomber, all-American Timothy McVeigh, and the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef (non-devout Muslim, Pakistani father, Palestinian mother).
And they cannot understand how ISIS conceptualizers can regiment, online, an insulted, injured teenager from a Parisian suburb or an African shantytown and convert him into a narcissist -- Baudelairean? -- dandy loyal to a rousing cause worth fighting for. The parallel between the DIY jihadi and the 19th century Russian terrorist -- incarnating the "syphilis of the revolutionary passions," as Alexander Herzen described it -- is uncanny.
And the DIY jihadi's top enemy is not even Christian; it's the "apostate" Shi'ite. Mass rapes, choreographed murders, the destruction of Palmyra, Dostoyevsky had already identified it all; as Mishra puts it, "it's impossible for modern-day Raskolnikovs to deny themselves anything, and possible to justify anything."
It's impossible to summarize all the rhizomatic (hat tip to Deleuze-Guattari) intellectual crossfire deployed by Age of Anger. What's clear is that to understand the current global civil war, archeological reinterpretation of the West's hegemonic narrative of the past 250 years is essential. Otherwise we will be condemned, like puny Sisyphean specks, to endure not only the recurrent nightmare of history but also its recurrent blowback.
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