age of a nge r

called a dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspi-

cion and greed and panic. In Italy, the invasive bureaucracy
of the new state, and its brazen indulgence of a rich minority,
made the young in particular more vulnerable to fantasies of
vengeful violence. As The Futurist Manifesto, produced in 1909
by DAnnunzios admirer the poet Filippo Marinetti,
proclaimed:
We want to glorify warthe worlds only hygienemilitarism,
patriotism, the destructive act of the anarchists, the beauti-
ful ideas for which one dies, and contempt for women.
We want to destroy museums, libraries and academies of all
kinds.
For fteen months in Fiume, DAnnunzio rabble-roused
through his experiment in beautiful ideas, in contemptuous
deance of all the worlds great military powers. His occupa-
tion ended tamely, after the Italian navy bombarded Fiume
in December 1920, forcing DAnnunzio to evacuate the city.
But a whole mass movementMussolinis fascismcarried
on where he had left off. The poet-imperialist died in 1938,
three years after Italy had invaded Ethiopia a ferocious
assault that he predictably applauded. Today, as alienated
radicals from all over the world ock to join violent, mis-
ogynist and sexually transgressive movements, and political
cultures elsewhere suffer the onslaught of demagogues,
DAnnunzios secession moral, intellectual and aesthetic
as well as militaryfrom an evidently irredeemable society
seems a watershed moment in the history of our present: one
of many enlightening conjunctures that we have forgotten.

Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad

swathe of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East,

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suicide bombings inBelgium, Xinjiang, Nigeria andTurkey,

insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris,
Tunisia, Florida, Dhaka and Nice. Conventional wars
between states are dwarfed by those between terrorists and
counter-terrorists, insurgents and counter-insurgents; and
there are also economic, nancial and cyber wars, wars over
and through information, wars for the control of the drug
trade and migration, and wars among urban militias and
maa groups. Future historians may well see such un-
coordinated mayhem as commencing the third and the
longest and strangest of all world wars: one that approxi-
mates, in its ubiquity, a global civil war.
Unquestionably, forces more complex than in the previ-
ous two great wars are at work. The violence, not conned
to any xed battleelds or front lines, feels endemic and
uncontrollable. More unusually, even this wars most con-
spicuous combatantsthe terroristsare hard to identify.
Attacks on Western cities since 9/11 have repeatedly pro-
voked the questions: Why do they hate us? and Who are
they ? Before the advent of Donald Trump, the Islamic State
of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) deepened a sense of extraordinary
crisis in the West with its swift military victories, its exhibi-
tionistic brutality, and its brisk seduction of young people
from the cities of Europe and America.
ISIS has seemed to pose to many even more perplexing
questions than al-Qaeda did. Why, for instance, has Tunisia,
the originator of the Arab Spring and the most Westernized
among Muslim societies, sent the largest contingent among
ninety countries of foreign jihadis to Iraq and Syria? Why
have dozens of British women, including high-achieving
schoolgirls, joined up, despite the fact that men from ISIS
have enslaved and raped girls as young as ten years old, and

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 age of a nge r

have stipulated that Muslim girls marry between the ages of

nine and seventeen, and live in total seclusion?
An anonymous writer in The New York Review of Books, a
major intellectual periodical of Anglo-America, says that we
should admit that we are not only horried but baffled and
that nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman
North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and
difficult to reverse.
Some of the Islam-centric accounts of terrorism have
translated into the endless global war on terror, and no less
forcefulor quixoticpolicies aimed at encouraging mod-
erate Muslims to prevent extremist ideology, and reform
Islam. It has become progressively clearer that political elites
in the West, unable to junk an addiction to drawing lines in
the sand, regime change and re-engineering native moeurs,
dont seem to know what they are doing and what they are
bringing about.
They have counterbalanced their loss of nerve before the
political challenge of terrorism with overreaction, launching
military campaigns, often without bothering to secure the
consent of a frightened people, and while supporting despotic
leaders they talk endlessly of their superior valuesa rhetoric
that has now blended into a white-supremacist hatred, lucra-
tively exploited by Trump, of immigrants, refugees and Mus-
lims (and, often, those who just look Muslim). Meanwhile,
sele-seeking young murderers everywhere confound the
leaden stalkers of extremist ideology, retaliating to bombs
from the air with choreographed slaughter on the ground.
How did we get trapped in this danse macabre ? Many read-
ers of this book will remember the hopeful period that
followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the collapse
of Soviet Communism, the universal triumph of liberal

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capitalism and democracy seemed assured. Free markets and

human rights appeared to be the right formula for the
billions trying to overcome degrading poverty and political
oppression; the words globalization and internet inspired,
in that age of innocence, more hope than anxiety as they
entered common speech.
American advisors rushed to Moscow to facilitate Russias
makeover into a liberal democracy; China and India began to
open up their economies to trade and investment; new nation
states and democracies blossomed across a broad swathe of
Europe, Asia and Africa; the enlarged European Union came
into being; peace was declared in Northern Ireland; Nelson
Mandela ended his long walk to freedom; the Dalai Lama
appeared in Apples Think Different advertisements; and it
seemed only a matter of time before Tibet, too, would be free.
Over the last two decades, elites in even many formerly
socialist countries came to uphold an ideal of cosmopolitan
liberalism: the universal commercial society of self-interested
rational individuals that was originally advocated in the
eighteenth century by such Enlightenment thinkers as
Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire and Kant. Indeed, we
live today in a vast, homogeneous world market, in which
human beings are programmed to maximize their self-interest
and aspire to the same things, regardless of their difference
of cultural background and individual temperament. The
world seems more literate, interconnected and prosperous
than at any other time in history. Average well-being has
risen, if not equitably; economic misery has been alleviated
in even the poorest parts of India and China. There has been
a new scientic revolution marked by articial intelligence,
robotics, drones, the mapping of the human genome, gen-
etic manipulation and cloning, deeper exploration of space,

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and fossil fuels from fracking. But the promised universal

civilizationone harmonized by a combination of universal
suffrage, broad educational opportunities, steady economic
growth, and private initiative and personal advancement
has not materialized.
Globalizationcharacterized by roving capital, accelerated
communications and quick mobilization has everywhere
weakened older forms of authority, in Europes social democ-
racies as well as Arab despotisms, and thrown up an array of
unpredictable new international actors, from English and
Chinese nationalists, Somali pirates, human traffickers and
anonymous cyber-hackers to Boko Haram. The shock waves
emanating from the nancial crisis of 2008 and Brexit and
US presidential elections in 2016 conrmed that, as Hannah
Arendt wrote in 1968, for the rst time in history, all peoples
on earth have a common present. In the age of globalization,
every country has become the almost immediate neighbour
of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events
which take place at the other end of the globe.
The malign minds of ISIS have moved particularly ener-
getically to use this interdependent world to their advantage;
the internet in their hands has turned into a devastat-
ingly effective propaganda tool for global jihad. But
demagogues of all kinds, from Turkeys Recep Tayyip
Erdogan to Indias Narendra Modi, Frances Marine Le Pen
and Americas Donald Trump, have tapped into the simmer-
ing reservoirs of cynicism, boredom and discontent.
China, though market-friendly, seems further from
democracy than before, and closer to expansionist national-
ism. The experiment with free-market capitalism in Russia
spawned a kleptocratic and messianic regime. It has brought
to power explicitly anti-Semitic regimes in Poland and

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Hungary. A revolt against globalization and its beneciaries

has resulted in Britains departure from the European Union,
sentencing the latter to deeper disarray, perhaps even death.
Authoritarian leaders, anti-democratic backlashes and right-
wing extremism dene the politics of Austria, France and
the United States as well as India, Israel, Thailand, the Phil-
ippines and Turkey.
Hate-mongering against immigrants, minorities and vari-
ous designated others has gone mainstream even in
Germany, whose post-Nazi politics and culture were founded
on the precept Never Again. People foaming at the mouth
with loathing and malicesuch as the leading candidates in
the US Republican presidential primaries who called Mex-
ican immigrants rapists and compared Syrian refugees to
rabid dogshave become a common sight on both old and
new media. Amid the lengthening spiral of ethnic and sub-
ethnic massacre and mutinies, there are such bizarre
anachronisms and novelties as Maoist guerrillas in India, self-
immolating monks in Tibet, and Buddhist ethnic-cleansers
in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
Grisly images and sounds continuously assault us in this
age of anger; the threshold of atrocity has been steadily
lowered since the rst televised beheading (in 2004, just as
broadband internet began to arrive in middle-class homes)
in Iraq of a Western hostage dressed in Guantanamos orange
jumpsuit. But the racism and misogyny routinely on display
in social media, and demagoguery in political discourse, now
reveals what Nietzsche, speaking of the men of ressentiment ,
called a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge,
inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.
There is a pervasive panic, which doesnt resemble the
centralized fear emanating from despotic power. Rather, it is

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the sentiment, generated by the news media and amplied

by social media, that anything can happen anywhere to
anybody at any time. The sense of a world spinning out of
control is aggravated by the reality of climate change, which
makes the planet itself seem under siege from ourselves.

This book takes a very different view of a universal crisis, shift-

ing the preposterously heavy burden of explanation from Islam
and religious extremism. It argues that the unprecedented pol-
itical, economic and social disorder that accompanied the rise
of the industrial capitalist economy in nineteenth-century Eur-
ope, and led to world wars, totalitarian regimes and genocide
in the rst half of the twentieth century, is now infecting much
vaster regions and bigger populations: that, rst exposed to
modernity through European imperialism, large parts of Asia
and Africa are now plunging deeper into the Wests own fate-
ful experience of that modernity.
The scope of this universal crisis is much broader than the
issue of terrorism or violence. Those routinely evoking a
worldwide clash of civilizations in which Islam is pitted against
the West, and religion against reason, are not able to explain
many political, social and environmental ills. And even the
exponents of the clash thesis may nd it more illuminating to
recognize, underneath the layer of quasi-religious rhetoric, the
deep intellectual and psychological affinities that the gaudily
Islamic acionados of ISISs Caliphate share with DAnnunzio
and many other equally amboyant secular radicals in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the aesthetes who
gloried war, misogyny and pyromania; the nationalists who
accused Jews and liberals of rootless cosmopolitanism and
celebrated irrational violence; and the nihilists, anarchists and
terrorists who ourished in almost every continent against a

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background of cosy political-nancial alliances, devastating

economic crises and obscene inequalities.
We must return to the convulsions of that period in order
to understand our own age of anger. For the Frenchmen
who bombed music halls, cafs and the Paris stock exchange
in the late nineteenth century, and the French anarchist
newspaper that issued the call to destroy the den (a music
hall in Lyon) where the ne ower of the bourgeoisie and of
commerce gather after midnight, have more in common
than we realize with the ISIS-inspired young EU citizens
who massacred nearly two hundred people at a rock concert,
bars and restaurants in Paris in November 2015.
Much in our experience resonates with that of people in
the nineteenth century. German and then Italian national-
ists called for a holy war more than a century before the
word jihad entered common parlance, and young Euro-
peans all through the nineteenth century joined political
crusades in remote places, resolved on liberty or death. Revo-
lutionary messianism the urge for a global, denitive
solution, the idea of the party as a sect of true believers, and
of the revolutionary leader as semi-divine hero prospered
among Russian students recoiling from the cruelty and hyp-
ocrisy of their Romanov rulers. Then as now, the sense of
being humiliated by arrogant and deceptive elites was wide-
spread, cutting across national, religious and racial lines.

History, however, is far from being repeated, despite many

continuities with the past. Our predicament, in the global
age of frantic individualism, is unique and deeper, its dan-
gers more diffuse and less predictable.
Mass movements such as Nazism, Fascism and Com-
munism, which claimed to innovatively mobilize collective

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