Capítulo 4
The Birth of Modern Discontent
In 1736, Voltaire's poem "Le Mondain" heralded a moral revolution that would reshape Western culture. Rejecting medieval ideals of poverty and pastoral life, Voltaire boldly dismissed the Christian past as "one long night of ignorance" while celebrating global commerce, material prosperity and consumerism. By mid-eighteenth century, history had been newly periodized, with society seemingly moving from war toward a cosmopolis defined by trade and refined culture. Wealth through commerce became more desirable than old property-based riches, with Montesquieu noting politicians now spoke only of "manufactures, commerce, finance, wealth, and luxury."
Against this moral revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau launched a counter-revolution that inaugurated the characteristically modern revolt against modernity itself. Born to a watchmaker in Geneva, abandoned by his father at ten, and living a rootless existence across Europe, Rousseau developed a radical perspective: the new commercial society with its prescribed values of wealth and ostentation made people corrupt and cruel. In his view, humans were good by nature until entering society, where ceaseless transformation and complexity made them neither privately happy nor active citizens. He described how the powerful exploit the weak while the powerless enviously imitate the powerful, creating a society where jealousy, suspicion, fear and fraud lie concealed under a veneer of civility.
Rousseau's most productive disagreement was with Voltaire, with whom he rarely disguised mutual contempt. Their conflict illuminated perennial questions about human nature, social cohesion, and the moral character of the bourgeoisie. Voltaire saw self-interest as the necessary foundation of society, claiming "Amour propre is the instrument of our preservation." Rousseau countered that this self-love was a dangerous craving for recognition that bred hatred and injustice. Where Voltaire celebrated the London Stock Exchange as embodying social harmony between different faiths, Rousseau condemned finance as making "venal souls" and putting "freedom and public good upon the auction block."
The fundamental divide between Voltaire and Rousseau extended to their views on modernization in Eastern Europe. Voltaire was an unequivocal top-down modernizer who celebrated Peter the Great's transformation of Russia, despite the steep price paid by Russian peasants who faced increased oppression and strengthened serfdom. Rousseau, conversely, believed that "liberty is not inherent in any form of government, it is in the heart of the free man" and looked forward to a world without despots.
Rousseau countered the philosophes' support for despotic modernizers by outlining a social order centered on morals, virtue and character rather than commerce and money. His extraordinary paradox was advocating individual subordination to community for the sake of freedom itself, not collective goals. Despite his contradictions, Rousseau understood the moral implications of commercial society better than anyone, foreseeing its pathologies and blind spots. His writings spawned numerous political movements-Romanticism, socialism, nationalism, anarchism-and anticipated the modern underdog's aggravated sense of victimhood and demand for redemption.
Capítulo 5
Islam, Secularism and the Crisis of Identity
The shared fate of modernizing societies extends far beyond Europe. While some traditionalists like Sayyid Qutb offered "demagogic fantasies," others like Indian scholar Radhakamal Mukerjee developed practical economic blueprints based on Asian agrarian realities, promoting environmentally sustainable small-scale industries over American-style factories. However, by the 1950s, these locally-rooted approaches retreated as Asian and African nations embraced Western development models.
The 9/11 attacks sharpened the divide between "Islam" and "West," prompting questions about Islam's supposed resistance to modernity. The Bush administration's "war on terror" broke with precedent by criminalizing the enemy rather than treating terrorism as a police matter. Unlike European left-wing violence, Muslim terrorism was placed "outside the history of the secular modern world" and deemed inherent to Islamic civilization.
This approach catastrophically failed while inadvertently undermining Western Enlightenment values through extrajudicial killings, torture, and surveillance. Yet the simplistic paradigm of "Islam-inspired terrorism versus modernity" persists. After each terrorist attack, politicians lead collective grieving that reaffirms Western moral superiority, while "maniacal cries of 'Allahu Akbar'" are countered with "louder drumbeats of 'Western values.'"
The notion of the unenlightened Oriental "other" has long been used to define Western superiority. Western intellectuals have repeatedly invested faith in authoritarian "modernizers" who promise to introduce scientific rationality to "superstitious" societies. Tocqueville had described Frederick of Prussia's modernization as creating "a monstrous being... in transition between one shape and another," yet Western advisors continued supporting similar figures.
The first generation of Muslim leaders rarely discussed Islam, focusing instead on anti-imperialism and modernization. Ataturk, after defeating Allied forces, ruthlessly abolished the Caliphate, banned Sufi practices, replaced Shariah with European laws, and famously called Islam "an absurd theology" and "a rotting cadaver." These modernization projects largely failed, undermined by imperialism's legacy, arbitrary nation-state boundaries, and the impossibility of compressing centuries of Western development into decades.
The encounter with the West often created what Naipaul called "a panic" and "a dwindling of the sense of self," leading to what Dostoyevsky described as "furious civil war" within societies and individual souls. Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, son of an Iranian cleric, exemplified this struggle between traditional religious authority and deracinating secularism. As Iran's rulers imposed European ways, Al-e-Ahmad questioned the uncritical embrace of the West. He described his countrymen as crows who "tried to imitate the way that a partridge walked and forgot how to walk like a crow without learning to walk like a partridge."
The revolutionary idea that suffering could be relieved through radical social transformation emerged in the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment philosophers introduced the concept of a perfectible society-heaven on earth rather than the afterlife-which the French revolutionaries embraced before it evolved into the political religions of the nineteenth century and spread to the postcolonial world. The religious impulse never truly disappeared from Europe; it merely transformed. As Tocqueville noted, the French Revolution "flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs" like Islam.
Capítulo 6
The Rise of Wounded Nationalism
On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu Brahmin and RSS activist who accused Gandhi of appeasing Muslims. While Godse was executed, his vision has gained traction decades later. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a lifelong RSS member, Hindu nationalism flourishes in India. Gandhi's assassin is revered by many young Indians, and Godse's mentor Savarkar, whose portrait hangs in parliament, has been rehabilitated in the national pantheon.
The wounded intellectual identity Naipaul and Chaudhuri observed in upper-caste Hindus-combining self-adoration with self-contempt-isn't unique to India. Similar nationalist resurgence appears across the world: Putin's Russia claiming moral superiority over the "neutered" West; Xi Jinping's "China Dream" positioning a 5,000-year civilization against Western individualism; Erdogan's vision of Islam as Europe's indigenous religion. Even Western nations have embraced ethnic-racial nationalism, from far-right European parties to white supremacism in America.
Between 1770 and 1815, German thinkers influenced by Rousseau developed a response to commercial cosmopolitanism that would transform politics and culture. Feeling marginalized by Western Europe's sophisticated order, these provincial intellectuals idealized the Volk-an organic national community united by language, traditions and collective memory. This theory of collective identity, created by Germans condescended to by French elites, would prove more appealing to historical latecomers than individualist rationalism.
Herder, Rousseau's influential disciple, went beyond his teacher by developing a showy separatism based on the idea of vital German culture rooted in region and language. While Rousseau's patriotism was inward-looking, Herder inaugurated the nativist quest for authentic national spirit in literature, cuisine, architecture and language. Though not a simple nationalist like Fichte, Herder's path-breaking concept of cultural identity served psychological needs of many late-modernizing peoples.
The ressentiment of German literati had political origins. Germany had lost its medieval prominence after Europe's economic center shifted to the Atlantic. Despite a doubled population and brilliant creative talent, Germans suffered under petty princes, religious division, and economic constraints. The Holy Roman Empire comprised 300 states and 1,500 minor units with different customs and dialects. Educated Germans, aware of England's Industrial Revolution and political revolutions in France and America, yearned for similar transformation.
Fichte became nationalism's original fount, insisting Germany find its own path to modernity by rejecting "swindling theories of international trade" and instituting patriotic education. Crucially, he gave nationalism its characteristic secular feature: transposing religious loyalties into national ones. Napoleon, as a modern imperialist imposing universal rationality through the metric system and Code Napoleon, initially fascinated the Romantics but lost their admiration after humiliating Prussia. Religious fervor infused the anti-French campaign-Schleiermacher presided over war-launching ceremonies, Fichte exhorted students to fight to death, and poet Theodor Korner described dying for Germany as "nuptials" with the fatherland in Europe's first post-Christian "holy war."
Capítulo 7
The Birth of Modern Extremism
Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people including 19 children, exemplifies the "lone wolf" domestic terrorist. Initially appearing as a classic case of white male ressentiment-railing against feminism, using racial slurs, and hoarding guns as a "noble survivalist"-McVeigh's motivations defy simple classification. His military background, decorated service in Desert Storm, and subsequent disillusionment with government authority created a complex psychological profile that would later influence his radical actions.
Though prosecutors portrayed him as a psychotic loner, McVeigh had extensive connections to networks of government-hating white men, including militia groups and far-right organizations. He immersed himself in literature like "The Turner Diaries" and developed a sophisticated anti-government ideology. He positioned himself as a patriotic defender of the Constitution, comparing himself to Revolutionary War heroes and frequently quoting Jefferson and Locke on liberty. Yet his behavior revealed a more disturbing archetype: the nihilistic revolutionary described in Bakunin's "Catechism of a Revolutionary" who "has severed every link with the social order" with the sole purpose of destroying it.
In a remarkable coincidence, Timothy McVeigh befriended Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack, while both were imprisoned at Colorado's Supermax facility. Despite their vastly different backgrounds-McVeigh an American veteran, Yousef a globetrotting jihadi trained in Afghan camps-they recognized a profound spiritual kinship. "I never have known anyone in my life who has so similar a personality to my own as his," Yousef later remarked. Their shared tactical knowledge, anti-establishment views, and dedication to violent resistance created an unlikely but deep connection.
This unexpected alliance exemplifies the transnational nature of modern terrorism, where ideological boundaries increasingly blur. Like nineteenth-century anarchists who formed international networks through journals and cafes, today's violent extremists find common cause across cultural divides through social media, encrypted communications, and online forums. McVeigh defended bin Laden before his execution, seeing both as responding to American imperial overreach. Meanwhile, radical Islamists increasingly adopt eclectic ideological positions-bin Laden eventually expressed concern about climate change and American corporate power, Anwar al-Awlaki extensively quoted Noam Chomsky in his lectures, and al-Qaeda strategist Abu Musab al-Suri developed a hybrid doctrine drawing equally from Mao's guerrilla warfare theories and Islamic texts.
The post-1848 generation experienced a profound spiritual crisis that parallels modern extremist psychology. Baudelaire, whose God died young, began seeing Satan as the only real supernatural presence in an increasingly secular world. Nietzsche diagnosed this pervasive "nihilism" while condemning Europeans for resurrecting Christianity in modern ideologies like democracy and socialism. He scorned these "last men" who pursue bovine happiness in a shrunken world where mediocrity rules, hoping instead for noble spirits-supermen uncontaminated by ressentiment-who would creatively use their freedom to forge new values.
Dostoyevsky's insights anticipated the wave of destructive violence that erupted across Europe from the late 1870s through World War I. His characters in "Demons" and "Crime and Punishment" prefigured the psychological profile of modern terrorists. The radical Russian group People's Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881, inspiring similar attacks across Europe and America. Anarchists systematically targeted symbols of bourgeois society-bombing a music hall in Lyons, attacking the Paris Stock Exchange, and hurling bombs at government chambers. This period of "propaganda by deed" established tactical and ideological precedents that continue to influence contemporary extremist movements.
Capítulo 8
Finding Reality in an Age of Anger
Europe, as Alexander Herzen predicted, faced a terrible cataclysm because while new desires had been lit in people's hearts, no ways to satisfy them were provided. This intermediate ground between elites and masses has produced modern militants throughout history, expanding as economic shifts and communication revolutions raise hopes only to abandon people in limbo. Democratic expectations grew in the 19th century as hierarchical society gave way to stark divisions between rich and poor, masters and laborers, exploiters and exploited.
Behind today's violence and authoritarianism lies worldwide ressentiment. Timothy McVeigh exemplifies this humiliation, but countless more like him exist globally, especially in "emerging economies" where mass disillusion, anger and disorientation spread through increasingly unequal societies. Frustration peaks in countries with large populations of educated young men-some 1.8 billion people aged fifteen to thirty worldwide now form a vast urban anteroom to modernity.
Our state of negative solidarity has become "an unbearable burden" provoking political apathy, isolationism, and desperate rebellion. With traditional mediating institutions (churches, unions, local government) diminished, digital communications offer relief from pervasive anxiety. For 1.5 billion Facebook users and hundreds of millions more, screen culture has become the primary mode of engaging with-and detaching from-reality.
Ressentiment flourishes in our global capitalist system where wealth, power and status are pursued while severe disparities remain visible. Digital media intensify our tendency to compare ourselves with the apparently fortunate, fueling rage particularly among men who feel threatened by women in the workforce.
Today's extremism stems from the mismatch between personal expectations and unresponsive reality. Freed in theory to deploy skills and choose occupations, most find individualism and social mobility unrealizable. Consequently, anomie and anarchist violence-phenomena noted in 19th-century Europe-have become widespread globally, with the disappointed revolting and the confused seeking refuge in collective identity.
Our burden has increased through awareness of global complications beyond our control. Unlike Rousseau's time, retreating into self-cultivation is nearly impossible in our interconnected world. Individuals confronting the indecipherable whole of the globe can act satisfactorily neither upon themselves nor the world. As Goethe observed, humans function best in limited situations with definite purposes, but struggle when facing vast, complex systems.
The precariat-those in insecure, part-time work-know there's no level playing field. Their contempt for political elites reflects diminished respect for the political process itself. The gap between promises of freedom and organizational capacity to deliver has widened, driving secessionist impulses from Catalonia to Hong Kong, while elites respond by fear-mongering against minorities-a campaign that feeds off the alienation it provokes.
