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Grand Illusions
Pankaj Mishra
It’s time to abandon the intellectual
narcissism of cold war Western liberalism.
November 19, 2020 issue
In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural
Devastation (2006), Jonathan Lear writes of
the intellectual trauma of the Crow Indians.
Forced to move in the mid-nineteenth
century from a nomadic to a settled
existence, they catastrophically lost not only
their immemorial world but also “the
conceptual resources” to understand their
past and present. The problem for a Crow
Indian, Lear writes, wasn’t just that “my way
of life has come to an end.” It was that “I no
longer have the concepts with which to
understand myself or the world…. I have no
idea what is going on.”
It is no exaggeration to say that many in the
Anglo-American intelligentsia today
resemble the Crow Indians, after being
successively blindsided by far-right
insurgencies, an uncontainable pandemic,
and political revolts by disenfranchised
minorities. For nearly three decades after the
end of the cold war, mainstream politicians,
journalists, and businesspeople in Britain
and the US repeatedly broadcast their
conviction that the world was being knit
together peaceably by their guidelines for
capitalism, democracy, and technology. The
United States itself appeared to have
entered, with Barack Obama’s election, a
“post-racial age,” and Americans seemed set,
as President Obama wrote in Wired a month
before Donald Trump’s election, to “race for
new frontiers” and “inspire the world.”
This narrative of a US-led global journey to
the promised land was always implausible.
Four years of Trump have finally clarified
that between 2001 and 2020—and through
such events as the terrorist attacks of
September 11, intensified globalization, the
rise of China concurrent with the failed war
on terror, and the financial crisis—the world
was moving into an entirely new historical
period. Moreover, in this phase, many ideas
and assumptions dominant for decades were
rapidly becoming obsolete.
Today, those who insisted that there was no
practical alternative to Western-style liberal
democracy and capitalism have no concepts
with which to explain how China, a
Communist-ruled country, became central to
global networks of trade and finance; how
India, ostensibly the “world’s largest
democracy” and fastest-growing economy,
as well as a counterweight to China, came to
be ruled by Hindu supremacists inspired by
European fascist movements of the 1920s;
and how electorates angered by
dysfunctional democracy and capitalism at
home empowered far-right demagogues. An
intelligentsia shocked and traumatized by
Brexit and Trump has seemed largely
bemused, too, by the biggest protests in the
United States since the civil rights
movement—mass uprisings led by young
people and fueled by the stunningly swift
spread of a new historical awareness of how
slavery and racial capitalism underpinned
the wealth and power of the United States
and Britain.
A s members of what Lear calls a
“literate culture,” we may seem to be
better placed than the Crow Indians to grasp
our altered reality. But the upheavals of our
times have devastatingly exposed our own
deficit of conceptual resources, and it won’t
be addressed by anything that happens in
the US elections in November.
Guilty of calamitously mismanaging their
response to the pandemic, Trump and his
fellow travelers in Britain have plainly staked
their future on victory in the “culture wars”:
stories of past greatness, of America and
Winston Churchill, and the villainy of
“cultural Marxists” are their talking points.
But rational illumination has not been
forthcoming from their critics, who lurch
from shock and despair over outbreaks of
Trumpism to absurd hopes that Joe Biden’s
election will restore the “liberal order.”
Whether in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street
Journal and The Times of London or in The
Washington Post, The New York Times, The
Economist, and the Financial Times, the
laments and exhortations of a still largely
white, male, and middle-aged commentariat
bring to mind James Baldwin’s verdict that
“the white man’s world, intellectually,
morally, and spiritually, has the meaningless
ring of a hollow drum and the odor of slow
death.”
A new way to understand the forces at play
is urgently needed. But it will come about
only if we make a conscious attempt to
interrogate and discard the formative
influences of many writers over the age of
forty.
The late Tony Judt, born in 1948, once spoke
of the “pretty crappy” generation he
belonged to, which “grew up in the 1960s in
Western Europe or in America, in a world of
no hard choices, neither economic nor
political.” In Judt’s view, too many of his
intellectual peers moved from radical
postures into the “all-consuming business of
material accumulation and personal
security” in the 1970s and 1980s as the
postwar consensus in favor of the welfare
state gave way to neoliberalism; they were
especially quick to internalize the popular
belief when the Berlin Wall fell that liberal
democracy and capitalism had “won.”
A similar worldview prevails among a still
younger generation than Judt’s. Its members,
beneficiaries of an even more complacent
era, the end of the cold war, are entrenched
in senior positions in the periodicals,
television channels, think tanks, and
university departments of Anglo-America.
Growing up during the triumphalist 1990s,
they assumed that American-style
democracy and capitalism had proven their
superiority; “the class issue,” Francis
Fukuyama wrote in 1989 while declaring the
end of history, had been “successfully
resolved” in the “fundamentally egalitarian”
West—and it was only a matter of time
before “authoritarian” China and Russia
moved to duplicate such Western
accomplishments, and “democratic” India
became a stakeholder in the liberal
international order.
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It is imperative today to abandon not only
these shattered fantasies of two Western
generations but also the intellectual
narcissism implicit in them. For only then
will the deeper structural changes of a
suddenly unfamiliar world come into view—
the changes that flow from decolonization,
the central event of the twentieth century.
I t was clear, even during the cold war, that
the shape of things to come would be
decided by ideas and movements occurring
in places geographically remote from the
West, with their vast majority of the world’s
population, rather than by Western cold
warriors. The Chinese Revolution of 1949
always seemed to hold greater consequences
for the wider world than the Russian
Revolution, and Mao Zedong’s declaration
that “the Chinese people have stood up”
after a century of humiliation by Western
countries was always more than just
boosterish rhetoric, inaugurating as it did a
feverish, calamity-prone, but ultimately
successful pursuit of national wealth and
power.
Today, it cannot be denied that the major
developments within Anglo-America—from
deunionization, increased corporate clout,
and the outsourcing of jobs to extreme
inequality and white supremacist upsurge—
cannot be explained without reference to the
rise of China as a manufacturing giant and
aggressively nationalist world power. In
other words, understanding the
contemporary world requires a truly global
perspective—and not just one that merely
adds the history of “democratic” India and
“authoritarian” China to preexisting
narratives of Western eminence. It means
forsaking the whole structure of
preconceptions on which a parochial West-
centric view has long been based.
It is not easy to stop beating the old drums.
The self-images and modes of thought and
perception developed during the cold war
are as pervasive as they are tenacious.
American and British commentators were
then battling against a potent indictment of
Western-style democracy and capitalism by
Communists and Communist sympathizers
around the world. One consequence of this
intense ideological clash was that anti-
Communist commentators consistently
overestimated their “free world”: they saw in
it more widespread and enduring material,
moral, and intellectual uplift than could be
supported by historical facts.
In the most significant defensive maneuver
by Western commentators during the cold
war, liberalism became “not only the
dominant but even the sole intellectual
tradition,” as Lionel Trilling confidently put
it in 1950. This moral promotion was an odd
fate for an ideology of individual freedom
and property rights that had been
denounced from both the left and the right
for conceitedly fueling inequality and mass
disa"ection. As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in
1944, “bourgeois liberalism was, on the
whole, completely unconscious of the
corruption of its own class interest and
fondly imagined its perspectives to be
ultimate.”
Voltaire; drawing by David Levine
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Nevertheless, as the cold war intensified,
liberalism came to have, almost by default, a
flattering image, especially when set against
the miserable realities of Soviet and Chinese
communism. It acquired, too, as
contemporary scholars have shown, a
prestigious intellectual ancestry, with John
Locke and Thomas Hobbes enlisted as
brainy forebears. The Enlightenment,
sharply questioned within Europe from the
late nineteenth century onward, came to be
depicted as the source of the free world’s
uniquely good fortune. This tradition of self-
congratulation has reached its reductio ad
absurdum in Steven Pinker’s door-stopping
data banks that claim things are getting
better all the time and we just don’t realize
it.
M any outraged young people today
want to know how it became possible
for white police o#cers to murder black
people and for armed vigilantes to assault
antiracist protesters in broad daylight with
the tacit consent of a sitting US president.
The glowing accounts of the free world as
custodian of liberalism and democracy, heir
to the Enlightenment, and nemesis of
authoritarianism were never going to be of
much help here. These cold war mythologies
of virtue suppressed too many awkward
facts—about, for instance, Voltaire, who
described black people as “animals” with
“little or hardly any intelligence”; Kant, who
believed that dark skin constituted a clear
proof of stupidity and that women were
unsuited for public life; or John Stuart Mill,
who assumed that Indians were
“barbarians,” unfit for self-rule.
Moreover, a fixation on the crimes of Stalin,
Mao, and Hitler managed to obscure the long
centuries of global violence and
dispossession that made Britain and the
United States uniquely powerful and
wealthy. As the feminist philosopher Lorna
Finlayson recently wrote:
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As surely as terrible crimes have been
committed by socialist states, the history
of liberal nations is the history of
systematic acquisitive violence: from the
genocide of indigenous populations, to
chattel slavery, to contemporary “regime
change” and “humanitarian
intervention.” This much is
uncontroversial, even though it may not
be thought relevant—or polite, perhaps
—to talk about it.
Certainly, those who invented entire
intellectual genealogies (“Counter-
Enlightenment,” “Romantic irrationalism,”
“Islamofascism”) to define the enemies of
the liberal-democratic and enlightened West
weren’t going to talk about it. And those who
could—the long-term victims and
necessarily close observers of the
enlightened West—were e"ectively silenced
or marginalized.
The problem with this cold war liberalism,
exploited to the hilt by antiliberal
demagogues today, wasn’t only its moral
haughtiness and corruption by class
interests. It was also that liberal
internationalism amounted in practice to an
ignorance of, and reflexive contempt for,
other worldviews. Even those devising a
respectable philosophical pedigree for the
free world ignored much that was happening
and had happened in the supposedly unfree
world. Take, for instance, the writings of
Isaiah Berlin, a frequent contributor to The
New York Review.
Berlin came to prominence as an Anglo-
American sage after World War II, precisely
during the time when anticolonial
movements across the world started to
achieve their delayed victories, and black
activists in the United States intensified their
long battle for fundamental rights. By the
1950s, these often interconnected global
struggles against white supremacy had
generated a vast archive of political thought.
Those degraded by racist Western empires
obviously had very di"erent ideas about how
to achieve liberty and justice, and a range of
figures—from Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, José
Martí, Rabindranath Tagore, Mohandas
Gandhi, and Sun Yat-sen to W.E.B. Du Bois,
Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon—o"ered
both a strong critique of Western political
and economic arrangements and alternative
visions of human coexistence on a fragile
planet.
Many Asian and African countries
floundered soon after liberating themselves
from white rulers, their formal sovereignty
radically curtailed by the cold war and
economic neoimperialism. This fraught
experience—of failed modernization and
state-building, secessionist movements and
ethnic-religious insurgencies, demagoguery,
and despotism—provoked an even deeper
intellectual engagement with the perennial
problems of politics and society. The works
of the Egyptian economist Samir Amin, the
Indian social psychologist Ashis Nandy, the
Malaysian sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas,
the Moroccan feminist Fatema Mernissi, the
Jamaican historian Orlando Patterson, the
Chinese critic Wang Hui, the Brazilian
philosopher Roberto Unger, and the
Colombian scholar Arturo Escobar are
exemplary in their overturning of
assumptions derived from histories of
1
Western exceptionalism.
But their voices have rarely been heard in the
Western mainstream. Consequently, there
has been little challenge to the presumption
that the “liberal” political institutions of
Britain and the United States can be
disentangled, and assessed separately, from
such grossly illiberal practices as slavery and
imperialism. Berlin’s own advocacy of
liberalism ignored its tormented history, and
he barely acknowledged any non-Western
intellectual and political traditions.
Theorizing influentially about concepts of
liberty in 1958, a year after shocking images
of the forced integration of Little Rock’s
Central High School circulated globally,
Berlin even managed to overlook the world-
transforming quest for liberty launched by
the “darker nations,” to use Du Bois’s
2
phrase. Berlin seemed to have assumed,
like Mill before him, that only the liberty of
the white male mattered.
John Rawls; drawing by David Levine
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In a critique of Berlin’s work, the
anthropologist Ernest Gellner once pointed
to its peculiar lack of social, political, and
historical context. Working with a similar
handicap, John Rawls, author of A Theory of
Justice (1971), the most influential book of
political philosophy in the late twentieth
century, assumed that Western political
institutions are fundamentally oriented
toward promoting liberty and justice.
Strangely, such ahistorical thought
emanating from members of a credentialed
Western elite became hegemonic inside and
outside academia just as the United States
and Britain entered a period of decline in the
1970s. As the political theorist Katrina
Forrester points out in her recent book on
Rawls, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar
Philosophy and the Remaking of Political
Philosophy (2019), a few “a%uent, white,
mostly male analytical political
philosophers” drawn almost exclusively
from Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford “tried
to expand their theories across space to
encompass wider communities, nations, the
international realm, and ultimately the
planet.” A deep facility with their historically
innocent abstractions became, as Forrester
writes, “the price of admission into the elite
institutions of political philosophy,” at the
expense of feminist and anticolonial writers.
A whole history of conquest and domination
and its political legacy was thereby erased—
what is being uncovered, however belatedly
or imperfectly, today by e"orts like The New
3
York Times’s “1619 Project.”
