On the relearning of world history (once again) – Pankaj Mishra in NYRB:

‘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.”’

(…)

‘As 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.”’

(…)

‘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.
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.’

(…)

‘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.”’

(…)

‘Many outraged young people today want to know how it became possible for white police officers to murder black people and for armed vigilantes to assault antiracist protesters in broad daylight with the tacit consent of a sitting US president.’

(…)

‘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 phrase.
Berlin seemed to have assumed, like Mill before him, that only the liberty of the white male mattered.’

(…)

‘What then is to be done to exorcise the many ghosts in those cold war stories of liberalism, democracy, and the free world? How can we escape an intellectually enfeebled milieu where the self-interests and self-perceptions of privileged white men are passed off as “global thinking,” and world philosophy and world history are essentially Western in nature and provenance? (The left tradition, with its endless and repetitive invocations of Marx, Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin, and Arendt, doesn’t escape the trap of insularity, either.)’

(…)

‘Something more radical and arduous will be required to avoid the total conceptual loss suffered by the Crow Indians: the interrogation of an intellectual tradition that distorts our sense of reality, and the relearning of world history, with the recognition that fundamental assumptions about the inferiority of nonwhite peoples have tainted much of our previous knowledge and analysis.’

Read the article here.

Berlin definitely out, Marx, Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin and Arendt also out.

In: ‘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.’’ Niebuhr can stay.

Do Fanon and Du Bois, to name just two, really operate outside the intellectual tradition that Mishra sees as the source of most if not all evil?

Is ‘decolonization, the central event of the twentieth century?’

Maoism, Nazism, Stalinism?

‘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.’

Ah really, by writing and thinking about two World Wars we obscure ‘long centuries of global violence?’

Speaking of suffering as competition.

Had Mr. Mishra paid a bit more attention to Stalin, Hitler and Mao who would have known more about several attempts to relearn world history.

The track record of this unlearning and relearning is not that convincing.

Which is not that say that all Mr. Mishra is stating in this article is equally worthless. But somebody who appears to suggest that liberalism is as dangerous and lethal as Nazism is like somebody who claims that there is no difference between Trump and Biden. No slightly worse. (Remember the leftists in the fall of 2000 who claimed that there was no difference between Gore and Bush?)