Degeneration of Welfare Systems, Deregulation of Economies and the Rise of Privitisation Have Proved Catastrophic For Our Globalised World, Says Pankaj Mishra
By Carlo Pizzati
20/OCT/2020
Pankaj
Mishra labels his most recent book Bland
Fanatics – Liberals, Race and Empire (Juggernaut 2020) as a Gramscian book.
It is a collection of razor-sharp critical essays against the “discredited
evangelists of liberalism”, who, according to the American theologian Reinhold
Niebuhr, consider “the highly contingent achievements” of Western civilisation
as “the final form and norm of human existence”.
World
leaders at a previous G20 summit. Credit: Reuters
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In this
long conversation, which took place in Italy, Mishra explores the relationship
between today’s political predicament in India and Italian fascism, the
worsening status of democratic debate, the collapse of the Anglo-American way,
along with China’s real role in the world, the crisis of journalism, Donald
Trump, Matteo Salvini, the climate crisis and the COVID era.
Pankaj
Mishra. Courtesy: www.pankajmishra.com
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You have asked rhetorically if Britain or
America are democracies. You’ve said democracy is discussion, persuasion,
debate. But, debate is all over the internet, and it does not seem to work.
You’ve said that we all need a good dose of seriousness. How can it come about,
with which instrument?
I think
what the internet has done is basically fragmented the public sphere into
incredible numbers of bubbles, which people can inhabit, and within which they
can create their own version of reality. Democracy needs some agreed upon
notions, some sense of solidarity and community, some sense that we are in
this, all of us, together. And that has been missing for a very long time,
because societies everywhere, and not only in the West, have invested too much
in a very hyper individualist notion, whereas the individual’s energy and
entrepreneurial skills were by itself enough to create a functional society.
All the given number of individuals in a society, all of them working to pursue
their interests were expected to contribute to the common good. If you think
about it, it almost seems like magic.
Yes, that
idea which emerged in the US in the 1980s, which I’ve sort of consistently
critical of, has shown to be an utterly lethal idea, especially now in the wake
of the pandemic. So, by seriousness, I mean recovering some notion of
solidarity and compassion without which societies anywhere are unsustainable.
This notion that greed is somehow good, or the pursuit of private interests
amounts to a common good…all these notions that became mainstream in the last
three decades or so are really incredibly dangerous ideas and are really what
has brought many of us to this very sorry path right now.
You have pointed out the damages done by the
“bumbling chumocrats in charge” in Bland Fanatics, and you have spelled out the
slow but persistent failure and weakening of anglobalisation which rests its
roots in white supremacy and brings about institutionalised poverty. Do you
really think it is the end of the Anglo-American century? Is the Yellow Peril
finally here? Should I learn Chinese?
I think the
United States and Britain became extremely powerful culturally and
ideologically starting in the 1980s while at the same time their economies were
beginning to decline, in fact, the American economy had started to decline much
earlier, the British as well, there was some creation of private wealth in the
1980s and 1990s. The media was very fascinating by that new wealth that was
created and so the media failed to cover the fact that real incomes were
declining, wages were stagnating, the middle class was starting to suffer. But
while all this was happening, Anglo-America was accumulating an unprecedented
amount of cultural power and ideological power. What do I mean by this? I mean
American and British periodicals, The New York Times, The Guardian, The
Economist, The Financial Times became globally important and influential in a
way they had never been before. And what were these newspapers doing? They were
all becoming mouthpieces for these Anglo-American ideologies of deregulation,
privatisation, the American way is the best. It was always assumed that the
American way is the model for everyone else to follow.
So, here
you have a perfect storm. You have this enormous political consensus in
Washington and in London, backed by the World Bank, by the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the administrations in both countries, and then you have
the Fourth Estate, the media, which is cheerleading this consensus in different
parts of the world and prescribing to other societies in other parts of the
world how to live the Anglo-American way. That is all really now collapsed. I
think it is safe to say. I am generally careful about pronouncing in such
categorical terms.
How has it collapsed?
Well,
because it has proven to be catastrophic, that particular model of
hyperindividualism, of letting social welfare systems, not just letting them
decline or degenerate, but actually accelerating the degeneration, because ‘we
don’t need them, they are creating entire generations of idles and scroungers,
and therefore we need to do away with them’. Of course, in the absence of a
proper public health system, you would be extremely vulnerable to something
like COVID-19. And not to mention, even before the pandemic, the election of
Donald Trump and the Brexit results that had already shown what the disaster of
the last 20 years of deregulation and privatisation had been.
The
Washington consensus had some of its most influential victims it seems on the
western side of Washington D.C. We’ve seen populist revolts in Latin America,
we saw Yeltsin floundering and then Putin coming to power, we saw autocrats
rising in various other parts of the world, including India. But finally, it
also happened in the very places that had exported these ideologies, in Angloamerica.
And I think there’s no real going back. Of course, the media is still being run
by the very same people who were cheerleading deregulation, and privatisation
and the Washington consensus all these years. So, they are very much ensconced:
how they can change, and whether they will change is a different question.
The owners
of the media?
And the
people who work for it. That’s also important. I think people in senior
editorial positions.
Can they?
I think
they probably can’t.
Because
their mind is already set?
Yes. The
only thing they seem to be capable of doing is of dreaming of some kind of
restoration. Of returning back to things as they once were. You know, for many
people, and I include myself in this category, the last 20 and 30 years have
been exceptionally good. So, even though large numbers of people have suffered
a relative decline in living standards, opportunities, many people have
actually benefitted from three decades of globalisation, especially people who
speak English, people who can work and write for international periodicals.
So,
journalists have come to prefer the status quo that to many people seems
utterly intolerable, so I think there’s a real gap that has opened up between
the way many people within the journalism profession see the world and
experience it and the way the people they are supposed to write about and cover
it experience it. Which also explains why the media has been in such a state of
shock and trauma for the last many years, with the election of Donald Trump and
Brexit.
Volunteers
from Mercy Angel and their helping hand team pray before performing the last
rites of a COVID-19 victim, at Khuddus Saab burial ground in Bengaluru,
Saturday, July 11, 2020. Photo: PTI/Shailendra Bhojak.
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So, that
brings us to the next question. You said the media bubble feeds the idea of a
competitive race, which is the worst system to battle a virus, like Covid-19.
Do you think the media bubble could change this and how?
No, the
media bubble cannot change. This is also in answer to your question about what
the solutions are. As a writer, I really feel it is not my place to prescribe,
largely because I believe that prescriptions given with no regard for local
circumstances with specific regional, national factors, have really brought us
to this situation. It was this arrogant prescribing by people sitting far away
in places like Washington and London, who had no idea about what life was in
places like India, but insisted that free markets is the way to move forward,
or cracking down on trade unions was the way to go forward. I feel like we
should move away from this arrogant way of prescribing, and really focus on the
lived experiences of people and to see what solutions can emerge from those
experiences.
As a
writer, my job is to attend to those experiences, and as a writer, one of my
experiences of the media and of the world of journalism there I do feel more
ready to prescribe, and even though it may feel like a joke, I do feel like
people in senior editorial positions right now in the media either should
listen to more young voices or they should give way for those younger people.
That they are, at least in my experience, are simply unable to understand this
new world that we are living in right now.
I think if
you have grown up in the 80s and 90s in the ideological regimes of Reagan and
Thatcher, and the world doesn’t make sense to you now, that’s fair enough, but
then…do you want to hang around? Feeling completely bewildered by everything
that is happening around you or do you want to gracefully exit? Leave your
position open for younger people whose future is definitely much more important
than the future of people who are now in their 50s and 60s, so if there is one
prescription I would make is: have more young voices in the media and in
journalism and in senior positions right now. Because the media is in a serious
state of crisis right now, and that is part of democracy right now.
Almost
never have I been invited either on television or in a newspaper with someone
whom I am not debating who does not hold completely contrary views. The media
stages these debates essentially as battles between gladiators. They want to
draw entertainment from this, they want to see blood on the screen, blood on
the page. They never realise that, actually, people talking without these fake
passions can arrive at some new idea that might not have occurred to either of
them. That conversations have a way of opening up all kinds of issues and that
that is the most fruitful way of having a conversation rather than people
shouting at each other. And of course, the debates you see in India is kind of
an absurd extreme of this kind of obsessive debating. But I really think too
much has been made of this notion of debate. Of “the marketplace of ideas.” Where
we really need to think about that: here we are in a crisis, what can we do to
open up new possibilities and possibilities or ideas that have been proven to
be utterly shallow should not even be entertained at this point.
There’s no
way of entertaining the libertarian objections or notions at this point,
because libertarianism as far as most people are concerned has no legitimacy
right now. The individual cannot do anything against the virus. It is only a
well coordinated State that can act against the virus and against the climate
emergency!
TV debates
are entertainment because they feed themselves on the excitement that creates
audiences. Whereas debates that create new ideas are for think tank…
Well, that
is the other problem with the professionalisation of knowledge. Think tanks are
not as intellectually independent as you would like to think they are. Think
tanks are also recipients of foundation money, grants, often from corporate
sources who have their own agenda, we know that. There has been so much work
done in these American institutions, supposedly liberal, like the Brookings
institution for example. Well, they all turned out to be advancing some kind of
political agenda or other. So, the idea that free intellectual exchange takes
place in those places is not tenable. I think they are all advancing particular
corporate interests and particular private interests sometimes.
Media needs entertainment, think tanks need
private money. So where is free thought happening?
It is
happening in marginal places like academia, which does not go out now into the
public sphere. There is a huge gap now which has developed between journalism
and scholarship. Journalism today seems to have to track with the sophisticated
scholarship which has emerged in academia. History, philosophy, economics, it’s
all there, the books are all there, but journalists don’t read them, or they
are not interested in them or they try to ignore them.
A
U.S. dollar banknote featuring American founding father Benjamin Franklin and a
China’s yuan banknote featuring late Chinese chairman Mao Zedong are seen among
U.S. and Chinese flags in this illustration picture taken May 20, 2019. Photo:
Reuters
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What about the role of China in the world?
You know
China’s role in the world…I was going to say is overplayed but…the fear of
China is exaggerated. It is very much a fear rooted in two centuries of white
dominance over the world. So right from the late 19th century people started to
fear in places like England, Australia and Canada, that the Chinese were on the
rise, even though the Chinese were in the worst possible state in the late 19th
century, or the fear that the Japanese were taking over the world. These
insecurities existed because these countries were being pressured by Britain
and bullied in horrible ways and the fear was, quite logically, that these
countries would, one day, strike back. Today China is not striking back in the
way people feared it would but what it has done is become the factory of the
world.
As it was once before….
Yes, so
things have gone back to being how they were for a very long time. And the last
200 years seem like an exception. At the same time, China is never going to be
this supreme superpower the way the United States was. Never. That’s not going
to happen. It has far too many rivals, it has far too few friends. And it is
not interested in that kind of Imperium, in that kind of global domination. You
know, it doesn’t fight wars. Some people might have noticed that China has not
gone to war since the late 70s when it invaded Cambodia and fought a war with
Vietnam. It doesn’t have 100s of military bases like the United States
encircling the globe, and most importantly, China is also very dependent in its
own region, East Asia.
So Asia is
at the centre of a vast East Asian network of trade and manufacturing and they
are both in a kind of co-dependent relationship right now. So the idea that
China can break free of all these constraints and become an indispensable
superpower in the way the United States was is a kind of white supremacist
neurosis. I just don’t think it’s rooted in any kind of realistic assessment of
China’s strengths and weaknesses…
The Belt and Road is not a network to start
world domination?
The number
of words spent on the Belt and Road initiatives compared to the number of words
spent in the media worldwide about American military bases around the world…
Most people are not aware of how heavy-handed that military presence is around
the world, we just don’t talk about that.
Unless you grow up next to an American military
base, like I did in Vicenza, in Italy, for example. And I suppose you believe
the shrinking of the number of American bases around the world is part of the
crisis of anglobalisation. So what is the solution, the alternative? You seem
to be asked a lot for a solution since you are so surgically precise in
diagnosing the problem. You have not spelled it out but you seem to provide
dots to join. Solidarity, collaboration in the face of a common disaster, such
as Coronavirus, for example. Should we add ethics?
The role
traditionally played by ethics was for a long time outsourced to the market.
The market was where we were all going to find value for ourselves and how to
monetise it. Whether you were a writer dealing in the marketplace of ideas,
branding yourself successfully as a thought leader. Or whether you were an
actual entrepreneur with something to sell, some manufactured item. And what
was important there was that most transaction is lawful and that the rule of
law prevails. And that was the extent to which ethical questions were even
raised. There was no talk about compassion. Why do we need compassion? Why do
we need some kind of social solidarity?
It was not
necessary for the market where we were all supposed to be competing with each
other. So the market has dominated our ethical imagination, replaced it
actually, not just dominated it, for far too long. And I think it is actually
time to rediscover what has been the guiding light for most human beings in the
recorded history and even in the post-war era where European governments
everywhere, Italy, Germany, France, whether you were on the wrong side of the
war or on the right side of the war, or whether you were a Christian democrat
or a Social democrat, governments made a concerted effort to recreate a sense
of society and a sense of solidarity and they did with social reform and the
social state which they introduced with reforms after 1945.
In fact,
the Christian Democrats were at the lead of this effort. And you see traces of
this in the Italian response to the pandemic, in the German response to the
pandemic. But that spirit has been weakened to a great degree, and I think a
sense of caring for other people, for cultivating civic concerns and a civic
identity, and this is part of the current crisis of democracy. So I think those
resources need to reanimated and made central to our political imagination. We
simply cannot expect the impersonal mechanisms of the markets to bring us
prosperity and dignity and security. That was never going to happen and it
seems now very clear is never going to happen.
In a sense,
religion was supposed to defend that aspect of society, in a way. So there has
been a retrenchment of the role of religion in the West and in Catholic
countries because it came with the heavy baggage of restraints. So, the
retrenchment of religion has left the field open… which has not been filled.
No question
about that. Two things happened there. Socialism, right from the beginning of
the modern age and from the beginning of industrialisation, and the increasing
number of people moving from villages from an agrarian economy to an industrial
economy, for them socialism was the ethical alternative to the regimes they
found themselves under, which were highly exploitative. And socialism drew a
great deal from Christianity, the idea of equality comes from Christianity, the
idea of being equal before God. I think there were various variants of that.
Equality sought to be enforced by many Communist regimes and that failed
disastrously because they also invested in this bizarre idea of the planned
economy.
Socialism
also found a very hostile and very resourceful enemy in British American
capitalism and after 1991, especially, we know that Socialism really found
itself delegitimised to the point that parties that used to call themselves
socialist stopped calling themselves that. The disappearance of an ethical
alternative has left the field wide open for the far right, for all kinds of
populist figures and personalities in Italy and elsewhere. Not surprising many
of them made the lateral move that Mussolini made, moving from socialism into
fascism.
Speaking of socialism, you said both Biden and
Johnson are turning towards socialism…
Not
socialism but some idea of the social state, some kind of creation of the New
Deal or the Welfare state that America and Britain had in the past and that
then British America systematically destroyed. But they are still far from
socialist positions.
The
experience of globalisation shows it creates some winners and some losers.
Photo: Horia Varlan/Flickr
CC BY
2.0
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You also said that China proved that being
ideologically flexible pays well, for example by remaining communist but
adopting free-market strategies. The criticism many libertarians make towards a
shift towards a more social democratic system, which seems inevitable
considering that in many economies the private sector will shrink and public
spending is bound to increase in order to keep more people from poverty, is
that corruption is inevitable in public administration, especially within a
democratic system. How can a more well-distributed wealth system be put in
place without corruption and without a dictatorship, what’s the missing
element?
Corruption
is a constant. It will always be with us. As long as there are human beings
there will be corruption. There will be greed, and mechanisms of the state and
of the marketplace will not be enough to prevent their greed from becoming
corrupt. I think that the libertarian argument could be turned around and it
could be said that there we have never seen as astronomical levels of
corruption as in these decades of the supposedly free markets where we know
that all kinds of people like tax dodgers were enriching themselves at great
expense to the national exchequer and that big Silicon Valley’s companies even
to this day are enjoying great tax-free regime. Some might not call it
corruption, but it’s actually legalised corruption, really, that you are not
paying taxes, or you are cheating on taxes in the countries that you are
working in. Not to mention many other numbers of ways in which the political
class has become corrupt.
Every
European leader of the last 20 to 25 years has been implicated in corruption
scandals. So, this idea that we had, during the free-market regime, some kind
of corruption-free system, and now with the re-emergence of the Big State,
corruption will grow up, I think it’s a bit of a fantasy really. Of course,
with the State in charge, there are great numbers of inefficiencies and great
levels of corruption. Corruption is always there. But I think sometimes things
have to become a bit inefficient. Not everything is meant to make a profit. You
can privatise the national rail and run it into the ground, which happened in
Britain, because it’s not making enough profit for certain people, but when you
nationalise it, as they have now started to do, it will run at a loss but
actually it is much more efficient for more people.
For the passengers?
Exactly.
And it is still mostly run by the State in places like France, and there’s a
kind of assumption that there are certain utilities that cannot be privatised.
They will be inefficient in generating a profit, but that is something we just
have to take on board because it is a public utility. It’s not meant to create
profit for shareholders.
It’s not sustainable then.
Yes, but
again this notion that we are all living with limited money, when we see
countries running up massive debts and then getting out of it. This insistence
in budgetary discipline, austerity, which conveniently the neoliberal regimes
all desire intensely…and now of course with the pandemic, all kind of money is
being found for various projects. Previously, we were being told there is no
money. So, what happened there? So, I
suppose ideological deception that we are asked to believe in like, oh, no, you
know, we can’t do this because it will put our generation into debt, well,
let’s live in the moment here. It’s also a choice of where to put the debt.
You’ve been criticised for not analysing class
struggle in Bland Fanatics. Do you think this is an outmoded Marxist dialectic
that no longer reflects contemporary reality?
I’m not
sure what kind of class struggle anyone would see in the world today, because
the idea of a class struggle was devised during a much simpler time, the 19th
century, when you had the proletariat that was being exploited in the factories
and you had the capitalist owners, and the bourgeoisie which was benefiting
largely from capitalism and then there were the peasants who did not feature in
the classical Marxist scheme of things, urban working classes they were
concerned with. Now the working class itself has split and split and split to
the point where people don’t have regular jobs, they don’t work in factories,
even when they are employed they are underemployed, they don’t have any union
rights, they are working in the gig economy, the landscape is much more
fragmented.
We can
pretend to see it as something deeply unified and we can pretend to still see
deep unity there, and we can argue that ah, ok if only we could put them in
opposition with each other we could have a good political outcome. But it is a
kind of fantasy really. I just don’t think it’s a much more complex place than
when Marx was writing about world-class struggles. Today there are splits even
in the big political parties in the United States. The Democratic party is
split between Biden the statusquoists, and there is a progressive left, and
they are all representing very specific class interest, so the idea that there
can be some kind of unity there, no, we are looking at contradictions
everywhere, we are not looking at unity.
So, is Marxism as outmoded as liberalism?
And it is
too connected to an economist’s outlook of reality and of human beings. I’m not
saying it is outmoded because I think that post Marx there were a lot of
exciting developments and many thinkers emerged, people like Gramsci, who wrote
from a very different experience, that of the Italian south, and no wonder he’s
such a beacon to people from outside the Western world because he wrote from experience
that people like Marx were not interested in, at all. There have been others in
places like India who have made very important contributions to our
understanding of politics and economy, but this notion of the class struggle is
too 19th century. It would be more interesting…I mean you could say that Bland
Fanatics is Marxist in one sense because it talks about hegemony in the way
Gramsci wrote about it. It may not be Marxist from the 19th century, but it
borrows from a Marxist tradition.
Can we say you are not Marxist but you are
Gramscian?
Yes, we
could say that.
Prime
Minister Narendra Modi (right) and US President Donald Trump exchange greetings
after their joint press statement, at the Hyderabad House in New Delhi,
Tuesday, February 25, 2020. Photo: PTI
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You question if Modi’s India is indeed a
democracy, considering he is seen, as you say, more like a holy man that can do
no wrong than a political leader. Media and judiciary are taken over by the
ruling party in ways that are worse than North Korea, making the country look
more like an authoritarian state than democracy in crisis. Is it the end of
democracy for India? What aren’t Indians doing that they should be doing?
This kind
of crisis that India is in right now is something that should be familiar to
students of Italian history, which is that a nation-state that is 70 years old
before experimenting with far-right solutions, it has explored a lot of
experiences, like parliamentary democracy, economic liberalism, social
reformism of various sorts, and all of it could not really battle the
disaffection that an ever-growing number of Italians felt about their lives and
their situation, and on top of that, there was a burden imposed on the fantasy
that Italy had to live up to a great ideal of the past and become the third
Rome or become the great nation that it once was, unified Italy had that was
supposed to be its mission.
India
suffers from all of these issues. It has suffered the problem of not strong
enough industrialisation, so uneven growth which was the problem with Italy,
and still remains a problem in many ways, big gaps between particular regions,
and inequality, of course, lots of crisis of legitimacy of big institutions,
like big bank, similar to what happened to pre-fascist Italy, big scandals, big
political scandals, politicians being implicated, so you had all this in India
before Modi came to power and he rose to power also to solve those problems and
to create an efficient government that would swiftly mete out justice and deal
with the enemies of India both internal and external, and make India a great
superpower.
So, it’s
this mentality, the mentality of the defeated, and the aspiring combining to
create this moment where a far-right movement takes over. And once it takes
over, it’s very difficult to get rid of it. In the case of Italy and other
places it was only after the war and after a calamitous war that people were
finally able to liberate themselves, and in Spain it took much longer because
there was no war there. So in India, I feel especially pessimistic because the
takeover that is happening…the media is certainly North Korean in the
glorification of the leader and in the way talks about the judiciary and the political
establishment. But the takeover of institutions, if it is very effective as it
has been in India, then you have entrenched interests, in support of the status
quo, so there’s no reason to change it, because there are far too many powerful
people invested in the status quo.
Like the Ambani family?
Like the
Ambani and others. Here too, in Italy, any number of very distinguished
intellectuals and people became members of the regime or at least went quiet.
Like the philosopher Benedetto Croce?
Croce is a great
example of that. What seemed tolerable at one time, started to seem more and
more intolerable and then it actually started to become comfortable, the
longest a regime stays in power. Unless it is completely brutal and incompetent
and ruthlessly dictatorial and then it became truly oppressive to many people I
think even then you can still secure consent if you exercise that level of
hegemony. And the Hindu nationalist does now exercise that kind of total
hegemony, culturally, politically, so it’s very hard to see how that will
break. I mean, Modi might go tomorrow, he might retire, or he might die, but
someone else will take his place.
What can Indians do?
There’s not
much they can do. The kind of events India is going through at this time was
set in motion a long time ago. I am not saying it was inevitable, but the
possibility was always there that the Indian experiment with democracy and
nation-building will fail like it failed here (Italy), something like the
far-right would emerge. No one expected for that to happen in India, because it
seemed like a modern democracy with routine elections, but I think India is not
exempt from certain historical events and crises, so when they happen in India,
they produce this irreversible outcome. We are a long way from seeing any kind
of reversal. Historically these things can last for a long time, at least 20
years, until they are checked by war. It may be possible to argue that
Mussolini would have lasted much longer had he not joined Hitler.
Pro-democracy
protesters attend an anti-government protest, in Bangkok, Thailand October 18,
2020. Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun
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In this scenario of liberalism versus populism,
what do you think is happening in Italy? We had two populist movements, the
Five Star and the Lega allying themselves versus the Democratic Party. Then
that changed. Is there any fresh opening for the left now?
People like
Salvini are actually not in charge and he’s been trying to get as much mileage
as he can out of the perceived failures of the Italian government. I’m not sure
to what extent he has succeeded. I feel like politics has been put on hold in
all the countries, not just Italy because right now most of our societies have
gone into a survival mode. In the US elections are very very close, but they
are almost a kind of easily predictable, as I think it’s safe to assume that
Biden is most likely to go through. In that sense, we have a first casualty
which is Trump, who is very likely to lose.
If he goes down easy…
Yes,
whether he’ll leave or create a constitutional crisis is another question. In
other countries in France and Germany, I don’t think the populists have
benefited a great deal. Incumbent governments have managed to survive the
disaster, like in Britain for example, where the Conservative government is not
as unpopular as you would like to think it is. It has managed to maintain its
support. And it is largely because people are not thinking about politics right
now, they are not thinking about politics in a partisan way, they are looking
towards government to help them and help them survive in these very uncertain
times.
So my
feeling is, I’m being cautious here, it’s that it’s too early to say what will
be the true political result of the COVID era. If we have a serious economic
crisis, the effects will be felt for much longer, and we can’t rule out the
far-right making another come back during this period. Because the potential
for it still exists, and it might grow more for a time, if for example, the
Left is seen too accommodating of refugees and migrants, that could be a
potential flashpoint that the far-right could take advantage of saying, while
everyone is suffering why are you letting people in here and extending rights
to them. I see articles all the time in the NYTimes or FT saying that populists
are the biggest losers in this situation. I just don’t believe that. It’s too
early to say. This is just the interval, half of the film is yet to be shown.
Is there any possibility of being a liberal and
not being a staunch individualist without religion? Isn’t liberalism also about
social progress and state-building? Can there be a humanist liberal who
believes in the common good before personal good, even though not through the
mediation of a state? Couldn’t that be an alternative? And if so, how can it be
built?
One of the
essays in the book talks about how Western liberalism was received in places
like India and China, where people insisted that actually, we didn’t need this
from elsewhere because we had our own liberal traditions, and they really
actually have to do with liberality, with generosity, with being genuinely open-minded
and tolerant. And not insisting on this program of hyperindividualism but
actually thinking of social welfare. Translators of J. S Mill had a difficult
time with such words because they did not exist in Chinese, no version could be
found. They did have a kind of interest and advance in the value of freedom and
autonomy and recognising that the individual is very important, whereas the
Western contribution in many ways, the Christian, we have to take it on board,
but we also have to think of society at large and individuals within society,
not separate from it, not in opposition to it. And I think that thought is
still important, because we still think of Western philosophy in terms of
lieralism and perhaps there is the possibility of a dialogue between Western
traditions and these other traditions. But these conversations were never
really held. There was no interest in them. The thinktank model or the media as
it exists is simply not the place to conduct these conversations, it does not
have the intellectual resources, the confidence, or the knowledge.
It’s even
more important to think of new solutions, because of the climate crisis,
because the conception of the individual as the self-expanding figure, who is
finding its identity, who’s being is in the pursuit of a particular desire, in
feeling satisfaction in the fulfilment of such desires. Well, that model has to
be moderated a little bit, a bit at least, because we know that the pursuit of
desires of the kind we never had before, to consume, to grow, to expand, have
also caused this global climate emergency, so we need to moderate liberalism
also in that way to make it more compatible with our concern for the
environment we live in which is under a serious threat right now, so elective
solution is imperative again and a philosophy which focuses on individual
freedom, and autonomy is not going to deliver that solution.
Do you believe that the climate crisis will
change the “every man for himself” philosophy which America and Europe are
imbued in and, by injection, some parts and social classes in the rest of the
world?
What is
preventing in finding a solution is the political imagination which is still
constrained by national boundaries, by particular cultures of journalism, we
are writing in our respective countries for specific newspapers, but we still
have not gotten into the habit of thinking in these larger terms. Part of the
problem is that we have a generation of people in the media who are still
living intellectually and mentally back in the 80s and 90s which was the hay
day. It was the end of the Cold War, and the feeling that the European Union is
happening, the Soviet Union is crumbling, History is Ending, liberal democracy
is here, capitalism is here, and those are the ones who hope that the US and
China dichotomy is the new cold war.
And this is
the problem with the professionalisation of knowledge, so that these think
tanks who have trained their minds in the old Cold War can quickly readapt
themselves to the easy model of a new Cold War and offer their expertise and
knowledge. So, I feel there really is a problem in which the knowledge
ecosystems work in much of Europe and America. It’s a system not able to meet
the challenges of the pandemic crisis. When people talk about the crisis of media,
they talk about falling sales, the Internet, falling subscriptions,
disappearing advertising, but the real crisis of the media is its intellectual
inability to cope with the crisis of our times.
And it is
strange how little attention is devoted to this problem. One of the major
pillars of democracy is that it is unable to function properly, it’s kind of
crumbling and we are still thinking in terms of ‘Oh, it’s because there’s not
enough advertising and people are not buying print editions’. Yes, of course,
this is happening, but one reason all this is happening, is because the media
doesn’t offer much anymore, it’s not rising to the challenge of writing about
reality, and it’s become a huge problem. People are still reading, but blogs of
conspiracy theorists.
Will COVID change this, bring about
seriousness?
This is
actually a time for the media to recover its lost legitimacy, lost to bloggers
and social influencers and so on, but these guys know nothing about science,
they don’t have the expertise, it’s only the traditional media that can have
that expertise and resources. Even if they don’t have their own resources they
can reach out to scientists and people with some credentials. Yes, it’s time
for the media to reclaim its legitimacy.
-----
Carlo Pizzati is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction.
His most recent ones are La Tigre e il Drone (Marsilio ‘20), Bending over
Backwards (Harper Collins ‘19), Mappillai (Simon & Schuster ‘18). He is a
political analyst and editorialist for the Italian newspapers la Repubblica and
la Stampa.
Original Headline: Pankaj Mishra on
Deconstructing Far-Right Populism, COVID-19 and Global Crises
Source: The
Wire
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