THE TWO BASES:

The German poet-critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in an influential essay, described the modern terrorist as one of myriad "radical losers" produced by the chaotic process of globalization, in which science, progress, and capitalism have gradually turned what was for many a reliably static world into a bewilderingly fluid one. This process, while generating significant and even revolutionary contributions to the world's health, prosperity, and knowledge, has also, Enzensberger writes, "made sure that inequality is constantly demonstrated to all of the planet's inhabitants around the clock on every television channel. As a result, with every stage of progress, people's capacity for disappointment has increased accordingly."

One way of understanding the underlying motivations of Islamist terrorists, then, is to recognize their resemblance to other, more familiar anti-moderns: the superfluous or "underground" men of czarist Russia, the conservative reactionaries in Wilhelmine Germany, the Italian futurists who glorified war and eroticized machinery. Like them, Islamist terrorists have responded violently to the inequitable march of modernity, indulging their feelings of stinging ressentiment. The Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra, in his acclaimed Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), offered a useful definition of the term: an "existential resentment of other people's being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness ... " Mishra thinks that "ressentiment, as it lingers and deepens, poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism."

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