BLAND FANATICS - PANKAJ MISHRA

I was initially interested in the book because I read some essays by Mishra and really appreciated that he drew from non-western theoretical sources. So, instead of Kant and Marx and Nietzsche or whatever, you’re more likely for him to allude to Tagore or Qutb or Liang Qichao or Mbembe. As someone who is himself trying to expand my base of knowledge in non-Western criticism/philosophy, I appreciated this and found it really deepened the writing. There are 16 essays in this book and they mainly revolve around liberalism and its failures. The best ones contrast the way the Western liberal world feels about it self with the reality of how they shape the world. There is a really masterful essay about Brexit (there’s actually more than one essay about Brexit but one of them is much better than the others) that shows how Britain, a country that has caused so much current misery because of how foolishly and ignorantly drew lines around the globe (~1 million dead from the Radcliffe line in less than 5 years alone), is now being undone and fucked up from their own attempt to draw a boundary between themselves and the European Union, a path they’re only pursuing because they feel nostalgic for their empire and lost without it. Mishra is great at drawing out all the ironies and contradictions and historical echoes embedded in these processes. The other thing he’s amazing at is the takedown. Mishra calls bullshit often but when he dials in on a handful of people, it’s really amazing. He’s got long passages on Obama that goes in. Same with Salman Rushdie. He’s got a pretty sharp and intelligent critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates, someone that I admire. But his most savage takedown is definitely of celebrity pseudo Jordan Peterson. I don’t think I’ll read one of his books all the way through and thus won’t review it on this site so I’ll take this moment to level my critique. Peterson is an almost folkloric figure, in the sense that his life story seems to have a clear moral. He’s a unremarkable college psych professor until he gets famous for saying that he, hypothetically, wouldn’t call a trans student by the correct pronouns. He parlayed this fame into a series of silly books that read like a dumb person’s Paglia (esp. the “chaos is female” stuff) combined with a dumb person’s Campbell (who is already a dumb person’s Jung). And after spending years conning people with his silly, “you boys all need to toughen up” act he’s convinced by his daughter to begin an all-meat diet, which, along with his natural vapidity, sends him into the exact anxiety spiral he claims to have the cure for. This, in turn, led to a Xanax addiction and him going to Russia to undergo a series of procedures that American doctors won’t do. The idea that someone with his set of beliefs being tricked by his daughter (an agent of chaos, as a woman) into almost killing himself with a dumb diet and crippling anxiety is almost too rich to be believed. His life is an allegory, one of the most “doctor, heal thyself” style stories available. Mishra also lays into him, mostly focusing on the fact that his influences are also all crypto-fascists (though, at least Eliade and Jung are engaging and original). Peterson also threaten to fight Mishra because of this essay, which is also very delightful to imagine. I work with benzo addicts all day, so his behavior is familiar. Either way, I’ll continue to keep my eye out for Mishra, he’s very clever. 16 liberals.