Speaker(s): Pankaj Mishra | Mass shootings and suicide bombs; Donald Trump, Narendra Modi and Rodrigo Duterte; the rise of nationalism, racism, sexism and homophobia; the rise of a new anti-Semitism in parts of Europe; climate change; the refugee crisis; ISIS. Pankaj Mishra identifies the unifying root cause of all of these things that we deem unintelligible and random, to reveal the unsettling ways history is repeating itself, and who and what is to blame. Modernity, secularism, development, and progress have long been viewed by the powerful few as benign ideals for the many. Today, however, botched experiments in nation-building, democracy, industrialization and urbanization visibly scar much of the world. As once happened in Europe, the wider embrace of revolutionary politics, mass movements, technology, the pursuit of wealth and individualism has cast billions adrift in a literally demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity. As Mishra shows, it was from
