Quotes from Pankaj Mishra

The German Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rejected the Atlantic West's new materialist, individualistic and imperialistic civilization in the name of local religious and cultural truth and spiritual virtue.

Voltaire was soon turned, with Catherine's encouragement, into a patron saint for the secular Russian aristocracy. Voltairianism, vaguely signifying rationalism, scepticism and reformism, became her official ideology. Almost all of Voltaire was translated into Russian; no library was deemed complete if it did not contain a collection of Voltaire's works in the original French.

To accept the conventions of traditional society is to be less than an individual. To reject them is yo assume an intolerable burden of freedom in often fundamentally discouraging conditions.

It was actually in the Atlantic West that we first witnessed the paradox of religious fundamentalism: that it reflects the weakening of religious conviction.

Quoting the Slavophile Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn ('To destroy a people, you must sever their roots'), Awlaki claimed that Muslims 'are suffering from a serious identity crisis', sharing more in common with a 'rock star or a soccer player' than 'with the companions of Rasool Allah [Mohammed]'.

It was as if California, specifically the Bay Area, had most of what Nietzsche once defined as the 'precondition' of Buddhism: a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and that it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home. The supreme goal is cheerfulness, stillness, absence of desire, and this goal is achieved.1

And gun-owning truck drivers in Louisiana have more in common with trishul-wielding Hindus in India, bearded Islamists in Pakistan, and nationalists and populists elsewhere, than any of them realize.

Globalization – characterized by roving capital, accelerated communications and quick mobilization – has everywhere weakened older forms of authority, in Europe's social democracies 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.

Briskly aestheticizing politics, this predecessor of today's live-streaming militants outlined a likely endgame for a world in which, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the self-alienation of humankind 'has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order'.

Voltaire also keenly endorsed Catherine of Russia's plan to 'preach tolerance with bayonets at the end of their rifles' in Poland. Exhorting Catherine to learn Greek as she prepared to attack the Ottoman Empire, he added that 'it is absolutely necessary to chase from Europe the Turkish language, as well as all those who speak it'.

According to the historian Arrian who reported the encounter, the ascetics beat their feet on the ground as Alexander passed them. When asked about the gesture, they said that Alexander occupied, despite his conquests, no more ground than that covered by the soles of his two feet. Like everyone else, he, too, was mortal, 'except that you are ambitious and reckless, traversing such a vast span of land, so remote from your home, enduring troubles and inflicting them upon others'.4

Japan's economy had remained strong. So called 'Dutch' learning- useful Western knowledge- was circulating in Japan well before Commodore Perry's arrival. A strong local tradition of banker-merchants and an efficient tax collection system meant that the Japanese economy was not crippled by foreign loans of the kind that banished Egypt, the first non-Western country to modernize, to the ranks of permanent losers in the international economy.

Imperialism has not allowed us to achieve historical normality,' Octavio Paz lamented in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Paz was surveying the confused inheritance of Mexico from colonial rule, and the failure of its many political and socio-economic programmes, derived from Enlightenment principles of secularism and reason. Paz himself was convinced that Mexico had to forge a modern politics and economy for itself.

What's crucial about Rousseau, and many of his ideological successors, is that politics was always personal for him, unlike those whom Tocqueville faulted for indulging abstract theories.

But, writing in the late 1940s, he found himself commending the 'traditionalism' of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. It was Zapata, he wrote, who had freed 'Mexican reality from the constricting schemes of liberalism, and the abuses of the conservatives and neo-conservatives'. Such 'traditionalists', ranging from Gandhi to Rabindranath Tagore to Liang Qichao, had also emerged in many other non-Western societies in the first half of the twentieth century.

Unlike his compatriots - many of whom were still, in their mid-twenties, adolescent posturers, doomed to futility - he had an engaging earnestness about him. Unlike them, he realized his incompleteness as a person and strove to overcome that. One of the ways in which he did that was by reading. He didn't read much, or too widely, but attentively, looking for instruction, hints for self-improvement, and he read serious books.

The emphasis on individual rights has heightened awareness of social discrimination and gender inequality; in many countries today, there is a remarkable greater acceptance of different sexual orientations. The larger political implications of this revolutionary individualism, however, are much more ambiguous.

Bernard Lewis was most likely unaware of the Turkish leader's fan base among Nazis and Fascists when he hailed Atatürk for taking, with his attempted obliteration of Islam, 'the first decisive steps in the acceptance of Western civilization'. Nevertheless, Lewis as well as Atatürk was working with an ideal of civilization originally posited by salon intellectuals in the eighteenth century, and reworked by various modernizers of the twentieth century.

The world, whose nature is to become other, is committed to becoming, has exposed itself to becoming; it relishes only becoming, yet what it relishes brings fear, and what it fears is pain.10

History, largely experienced previously as a series of natural disasters, could now be seen as a movement in which everyone could potentially enlist.

Rabindranath Tagore's family, connected to the British East India Company right from the settling of Calcutta in 1690, was a prominent beneficiary of the British economic and cultural reshaping of India. His grandfather was the first big local businessman of British India, and socialized with Queen Victoria and other notables on his trips to Europe; his elder brother was the first Indian to be admitted by the British into the Indian Civil Service (ICS).

Suicide and depression rates, to take one revealing statistic, have shot up in countries with the fastest-growing economies. So has the number of young suicide bombers attempting their own version of podvig.

Focus, your way to success." ?#?iampm?

Today, the belief in progress, necessary for life in a Godless universe, can no longer be sustained, except, perhaps, in the Silicon Valley mansions of baby-faced millennials.