Illustration: People standing on a cliff on a see-saw.

A Crumbling Ecosystem

The Western-influenced understanding of modernity dominates public life worldwide. But how long will the knowledge ecosystem of the West determine the discourses of the world? Indian author Pankaj Mishra draws a sobering conclusion: "Democracy does not guarantee good government, even in its original heartlands.

Among the lesser culprits of history’, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, ‘are the bland fanatics of western civilization who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence.’ For Niebuhr, the bigger culprits of history were, of course, communists and fascists. A dedicated anti-communist, the American theologian was vulnerable to phrases such as ‘the moral superiority of Western civilization’.

Nevertheless, he could see the peculiar trajectory of liberalism: how ‘a dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the “ideology” of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power’. He was also alert to the fundamentalist creed that has shaped our age – that Western-style capitalism and liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and every society, in short, ought to evolve just as Britain and the United States did.

 

Apologists for Globalized Markets

Of course, Niebuhr could not have anticipated that the bland fanatics who made the Cold War so treacherous would come to occupy, at its end, history’s centre stage. Incarnated as liberal internationalists, neocon democracy promoters and free-market globalisers, they would blunder through a world grown more complex and intractable, and help unravel large parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America before sowing political chaos in their own societies.

The global history of the post-1945 ideologies of liberalism and democracy, or a comprehensive sociology of Anglo-America and Anglo- and America-philic intellectuals, is yet to be written, though the world they made and unmade is entering its most treacherous phase yet.

But it has long been clear that the global wager on unregulated markets, and military interventions on behalf of them, were the most ambitious ideological experiments undertaken in the modern era.

Most of us are still only emerging, bleary-eyed, from the frenetic post-Cold War decades when, as the American writer Don DeLillo wrote, ‘the dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber-capital’. But it has long been clear that the global wager on unregulated markets, and military interventions on behalf of them, were the most ambitious ideological experiments undertaken in the modern era.

Their adepts, allies and facilitators, from Greece to Indonesia, were also far more influential than their socialist and communist rivals. Homo economicus, the autonomous, reasoning, rights-bearing subject of liberal philosophy, came to stalk all societies with some fantastical plans to universally escalate production and consumption. 

 

Idiom of Modernism

The Statue of Liberty in front of a blue sky.
The vernacular of modernity coined in London, New York and Washington, DC, came to define the way in which much of the world’s population understood society, economy, nation, time and individual and collective identity, photo: Zoonar Edi Chen via picture alliance

The vernacular of modernity coined in London, New York and Washington, DC, came to define the common sense of public intellectual life across all continents, radically altering the way in which much of the world’s population understood society, economy, nation, time and individual and collective identity. Of course, those trying to look beyond the exalted rhetoric of liberal politics and economics rarely found any corresponding realities.

My own education in this absence began through an experience of Kashmir, where India, billed as the world’s largest democracy, descended into a form of Hindu supremacism and racist imperialism of the kind it liberated itself from in 1947.

I went to the valley in 1999 with many of the prejudices of the liberal Indian ‘civiliser’ – someone who placidly assumed that Kashmiri Muslims were much better off being aligned with ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ India than with the Islamic state of Pakistan. The brutal realities of India’s military occupation of Kashmir and the blatant falsehoods and deceptions that accompanied it forced me to revisit many of the old critiques of Western imperialism and its rhetoric of progress.

When my critical articles on Kashmir appeared in the year 2000 in The Hindu and the New York Review of Books, they were attacked at home most vociferously by self-styled custodians of India’s ‘liberal democracy’ rather than by Hindu nationalists. I had come up against an influential ideology of Indian exceptionalism, which claimed moral prestige and geopolitical significance for India’s uniquely massive and diverse liberal democracy. Many of those righteous notions reeked of upper-caste sanctimony and class privilege.

Piously invoking the ‘idea of India’, the country’s experiment with a secular and liberal polity, the fetishists of formal and procedural democracy seemed unbothered by the fact that people in Kashmir and India’s north-eastern border states lived under de facto martial law, where security forces had unlimited licence to massacre and rape, or that a great majority of the Indian population found the promise of equality and dignity underpinned by rule of law and impartial institutions to be a remote, almost fantastical, ideal.

For decades, India benefited from a Cold-War era conception of ‘democracy’, which reduced it to a morally glamorous label for the way rulers are elected, rather than for the kinds of power they hold, or the ways they exercise it. As a non-communist country that held routine elections, India possessed a matchless international prestige despite consistently failing – worse than many Asian, African and Latin American countries – to provide its citizens with even the basic components of a dignified existence. The halo of virtue around India shone brighter as its governments embraced free markets and communist-run China abruptly emerged as a challenger to the West.

For decades, India benefited from a Cold-War era conception of ‘democracy’.

Even as India descended into Hindu nationalism, an exuberant consensus about India was developing among Anglo-American elites: that liberal democracy had acquired deep roots in Indian soil, fertilising it for the growth of free markets.

 

Defective Knowledge about the West

For a writer of my background, it became imperative to challenge this unanimity – first at home, and then, increasingly, abroad. In many ways, India’s own bland fanatics, who seemed determined to nail their cherished ‘idea of India’ into Kashmiri hearts and minds, prepared me for the spectacle of a liberal intelligentsia cheerleading the war for ‘human rights’ in Iraq, with the kind of humanitarian rhetoric about freedom, democracy and progress that was originally heard from European imperialists in the nineteenth century.

It had long been clear to me that Western ideologues during the Cold War absurdly prettified the rise of the ‘democratic’ West. The long struggle against communism, which claimed superior moral virtue, had required many expedient feints. The centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, brutal exploitation and genocide were suppressed in accounts that showed how Westerners made the modern world, and became with their liberal democracies the superior people everyone else ought to catch up with.

The centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, brutal exploitation and genocide were suppressed in accounts that showed how Westerners made the modern world.

What I didn’t realise until I started to inhabit the knowledge ecosystems of London and New York is how evasions and suppressions had resulted, over time, in a massive store of defective knowledge about the West and the non-West alike. Simpleminded and misleading ideas and assumptions, drawn from this blinkered history, had come to shape the speeches of Western statesmen, think tank reports and newspaper editorials, while supplying fuel to countless log-rolling columnists, television pundits and terrorism experts.

It may be hard to remember today, especially for younger readers, that the mainstream of Anglo-America in the early 2000s deferentially hosted figures like the British historian Niall Ferguson, who supported George W. Bush’s Iraq war. There was also support for arguments that the occupation and subjugation of other people’s territory and culture were an efficacious instrument of civilisation, and that we needed more such emancipatory imperialism to bring intransigently backward peoples in line with the advanced West.

 

Statue of a colonialist in front of blue sky.
There was also support for arguments that the occupation and subjugation of other people’s territory and culture were an efficacious instrument of civilisation, photo: Kevin Olson via unsplash

Astonishingly, British imperialism, seen for decades by Western scholars and anti-colonial leaders alike as a racist, illegitimate and often predatory despotism, came to be repackaged in our own time as a benediction that, in Ferguson’s words, ‘undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour’. Never mind that free trade, introduced to Asia through gunboats, destroyed nascent industry in conquered countries, that ‘free’ capital mostly went to the white settler states of Australia and Canada, and that indentured rather than ‘free’ labour replaced slavery.

The fairy tales about how Britain made the modern world weren’t just aired at some furtive far-right conclaveor hedge funders’ luxury retreat. Mainstream television, radio, and the broadsheets took the lead in making them seem intellectually respectable to a wide audience.

Politicians as well as broadcasters deferred to their belligerent illogic. The BBC set aside prime time for Niall Ferguson’s belief in the necessity of reinstating imperialism. The Tory minister for education asked him to advise on the history syllabus. 

Looking for a more authoritative audience, the revanchists then crossed the Atlantic to provide an intellectual armature to Americans trying to remake the modern world through free markets and military force. Of course, the bards of a new universal liberal empire almost entirely suppressed Asian, African and Latin American voices. And the very few allowed access to the mainstream press found that their unique privilege obliged them to, first of all, clear the ground of misrepresentations and downright falsehoods that had built up over decades.

 

Seductive Contrast

This often frustrating struggle defined my own endeavour, reflected here. It was hard to avoid, for the prejudices were deeply entrenched in every realm of journalistic endeavour, looming up obdurately whether one wrote about Afghanistan, India or Japan.

To give one example: in Free to Choose, a hugely influential book (and ten-part television series), Milton and Rose Friedman had posed a seductive binary of rational markets versus interfering governments (what came to underpin World Bank and International Monetary Fund reports, policies and prescriptions for the next two decades). Friedman, who inspired the ‘Chicago Boys’ re-engineering of Chile’s economy after the CIA ousted Salvador Allende in 1973, sought intellectual vindication in East Asia, claiming that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore had succeeded owing to their reliance on ‘private markets’.

In The End of History, Francis Fukuyama echoed this assertion, arguing that East Asia’s economies, by ‘repeating the experience of Germany and Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have proven that economic liberalism allow slate modernizers to catch up with and even overtake’ the West.

This fable about the East Asian ‘miracle’, then, became central to mainstream reporting about Asia. It did not tally at all with the historical record, which showed that state-led modernisation and economic protectionism were as central to the economies of pre-war Japan and Germany as to post-war East Asia. More recently, the long traditions of technocratic governance in East Asia have proven crucial to its relatively successful response to the coronavirus pandemic while Anglo-American free-marketeers lethally flounder.

This fable about the East Asian ‘miracle’, then, became central to mainstream reporting about Asia.

In Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, Daniel Rodgers showed that many Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries returned from stays in Germany with ideas that would inform the New Deal.

The New Deal was an exceptional instance of a US government recognising that the state can and should be a guardian of the people’s interests; but it arose out of the twin calamities of the First World War and the Great Depression.

 

Moral Institution

Struggling to survive them, even extreme individualists were forced to recognise that, as Walter Lippmann wrote, ‘to create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.’ After the Second World War, nearly all Western governments accepted, to varying degrees, that the state was a necessary actor, even if they didn’t all agree that it was the ‘greatest moral institution for the education of mankind’ (in the words of the German economist Gustav Schmoller).

The leaders of the free world were keen to appear to be working hard to secure social justice as well as prosperity for their citizens; even the most conservative among them seemed to agree with Bismarck that ‘the state cannot exist without a certain socialism.’ Responding to East Germany’s claim that it possessed a superior social security system, Christian Democrats extended the West German system to benefit increasing numbers of people.

These were also the decades when the National Health Service was created; when welfare projects like Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, which promised cash benefits for all families in need, were launched; and when civil rights legislation was introduced with one nervous eye on Soviet propagandists, who tirelessly and irrefutably pointed to the organised degradation of African Americans in the US.

 

Fantasies of Americanising the Globe

In 1970, Milton Friedman could count on an increasingly congenial ideological climate when he argued in the New York Times Magazine that businesses had no social responsibility beyond making a profit. He was the public face of an ideological shift which saw libertarian economists such as James Buchanan acting in concert with the right-wing zealot Charles Koch and lobbyists for corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank and General Motors, disseminating radical ideas through a pliable media and a new curriculum for economics education in universities.

The Reagan-Thatcher model [...] condemns an unconscionable number of people to premature death or to a desperate struggle for existence.

Partly as a result of their influence, and emboldened by the rhetoric of Reagan and Thatcher, during the 1980s politicians across the ideological spectrum began to dismantle social protections, undermine labour rights and slash taxes on the rich. The process accelerated after the West’s ‘victory’ in the Cold War, when fantasies of Americanising the globe bloomed. ‘I want everyone to become an American,’ Thomas Friedman, consigliere to globalising CEOs and modernising despots, insisted as late as 2008. Inspired by Thatcher and right-wing US think tanks, Tony Blair pushed state policy and public attitudes in Britain closer to the notion that welfare is a problem rather than the solution. Over the last decade, successive Conservative governments have ruthlessly shredded what was left of the social safety net in the name of budgetary ‘austerity’, hastening Britain’s decline into a flailing – if not failed – state that can’t even secure supplies of gowns and masks for its hospital workers. 

In the US, welfare was turned into a dirty word by Reagan’s dog-whistles about ‘welfare queens’, and then came under intensive attack by Bill Clinton, America’s ‘first black president’. If the shambolic response to Hurricane Katrina established that George W. Bush ‘doesn’t care about black people’, as (the now discredited) Kanye West put it, the aftermath of the financial crisis showed that Barack Obama was keen not to be seen as caring too much about black people. The second black president lectured African Americans about individual responsibility while bailing out his future paymasters on Wall Street.

 

Ideological Export Goods

The pandemic, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the US, including a disproportionate number of African Americans, has now shown, far more explicitly than Katrina did in 2005 or the financial crisis in 2008, that the Reagan-Thatcher model, which privatised risk and shifted the state’s responsibility onto the individual, condemns an unconscionable number of people to premature death or to a desperate struggle for existence. An even deeper and more devastating realisation is that democracy, Anglo-America’s main ideological export and the mainstay of its moral prestige, has never been what it was cracked up to be. Democracy does not guarantee good government, even in its original heartlands.

Modern democracy, in other words, bears little resemblance to the form of government that went under its name in ancient Greece.

Neither does the individual choice that citizens of democracies periodically exercise – whether in referendums or elections – confer political wisdom on the chosen. It might even delude them, as Johnson and Trump confirm, into deranged notions of omnipotence.

 

The ideal of democracy, according to which all adults are equal and possess equal power to choose and control political and economic outcomes, is realised nowhere. The fact of economic inequality, not to mention the compromised character of political representatives, makes it unrealisable. More disturbing still, voters have been steadily deprived, not least by a mendacious or click baiting fourth estate, of the capacity either to identify or to seek the public interest. Modern democracy, in other words, bears little resemblance to the form of government that went under its name in ancient Greece.

And in no place does democracy look more like a zombie than in India, Anglo-America’s most diligent apprentice, where a tremendously popular Hindu supremacist movement diverts attention from grotesque levels of inequality and its own criminal maladroitness by stoking murderous hatred against Muslims.

 

 

Ruin of an ancient greek archway.
An even deeper and more devastating realisation is that democracy, has never been what it was cracked up to be, photo: Micheile via unsplash
About the Author
photo of Pankaj Mishra at a podium discussion.
Pankaj Mishra
Essayist, literary critic and author

Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist, literary critic and author. He writes as an essayist for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian on the Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan and China. Pankaj Mishra has been a visiting professor at Wellesley College and University College London.

A selection of books:

  • Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York 2021
  • Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Penguin, London 2018
  • From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. Penguin, London 2013
  • Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond. Picador, London 2011

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