The age of mass revenge

Journalists have never been noted for originality in their choice of metaphor, so readers must be wearied by now of hearing that the world is on fire. Skeptics will observe that the flames have been more or less constant for well over a century, as the major powers and their allies, satellites and acolytes maneuver to establish, or reestablish, global power or hegemony. In fact, the present crisis extends well beyond the collapse of the international order that prevailed since 1945. The situation is actually far more complicated, the world today being infused with a generalized and simmering anger that extends beyond the great powers to include middling and minor ones everywhere, their societies and their various elements.

All significant shifts in power, status and influence in human relationships promote enhanced confidence in the interests that gain from them, and resentment in those that lose in the struggle of altered relations between races, classes, religions, cultures, nations or the sexes — and the faster and more drastic the alterations, the greater their social and political consequences. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries experienced the most rapid, comprehensive and transformative changes in human history, and the twenty-first is experiencing even greater ones. It is inevitable that among the beneficiaries of change the negative responses should overbalance the positive ones, according to the historical maxim that revolutions occur in times when the conditions that encourage them are improving. Even in comparative victory the winners nurse their resentment of the indignities and injustices, real or imagined, suffered under the previous unreformed order, redirecting it toward revenge. The twenty-first century will be the age of many things. So far, it is the Age of Mass Revenge.

The acceptance of women at the highest levels of finance, business, the law and politics has not alleviated the resentment that drove the most successful of them, but has failed to modify their aggressively liberal or radically oppositional view of politics, government and society. The same goes for members of racial and sexual minorities, of minority religions and minority cultures, among whom the instinct for revenge seems almost obligatory, a matter of self-assertion, tribal pride and loyalty. The same phenomenon, which accounts for so much of the distemper, anger, disruption, conflict and confusion in modern societies, is also responsible for the conflictive state of relations between nations, as hemispheres, geographical regions and countries that believe they have been historically oppressed by the wealthy and successful West, or at least relegated to undeserved second-or third-rate status, want their revenge against the oppressor. In many instances, anger and resentment are a natural and spontaneous expression of national feeling. In others they are deliberately created, cultivated and directed by messianic leaders who view their nations as personifications of themselves, and take what they see as national insults, slights, inequalities and imbalances of power as personal insults, as well as challenges to their own ambitions. This is certainly true of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and similar personages, though to a lesser degree, perhaps, with Xi Jinping — who is more realistic and less single-minded, delusional and narcissistic than the Russian, with his resemblance to a classical scholar who has convinced himself that the classics are the most elevated and important field of knowledge because he holds a doctorate in them. It is true, of course, that wars of revenge are as old as history itself. What is unprecedented is the sheer number of them occurring at the same moment in history. Also remarkable is how greatly many international struggles to gain or regain status and power, and assert it, resemble domestic conflicts.

Ultimately, the “root causes,” as politicians and journalists like to say, of the postmodern revolution in human relations in nearly every country around the world, the Western ones especially, are the bleeding together of nations like watercolors on paper, from Westernization, immigration and migration; the new global network of mass communications; a cosmopolitan and relativized system of secular values and morals; and the vision of a future in which every race, culture and nation enjoys equal (and, if possible, “more equal”) power and influence if only it can succeed in grabbing it today.

While this cycle of resentment, revenge and reaction is nothing new under the sun, its ubiquity seems historically unprecedented. In any case, it helps to explain how it is that while humanity has been making more or less uninterrupted advancement in knowledge, technology and wealth since it emerged from tens of thousands of years at the hunter-gatherer stage, it has accomplished, by comparison, little in the way of achieving peaceable feelings and relations within societies and between nations, leading to the near-certain conclusion (anything, as they say, is possible) that neither liberalism, international and nongovernmental organizations, technology nor anything else can produce peace and harmony among men (and women) so long as human beings remain human. Indeed, as a matter of historical fact, they achieve the exactly the opposite result.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2024 World edition.