Category: History & Politics

  • Doppelganger

    Naomi Klein

    Quite eerie that I read this immediately after I read Carol Roth’s “You will own nothing”. Here’s why. Doppelganger’s starting premise is how the author (Naomi Klein) gets confused for Naomi Wolf, both being ‘white Jewish women’, increasingly helped by the overlap in the subjects they comment on. The former is a left-leaning writer and social activist while the latter is a third wave feminist who turned from centre-left to becoming a right wing conspiracist. It is fascinating how Roth’s views largely align with Klein (Davos, Big Tech) but also agree with Wolf in others (Canadian truckers, for instance)

    In her new avatar, Wolf’s argument – with a full endorsement from none other than Steven Bannon (once Trump’s chief strategist) – during Covid was that vaccines and public health measures were a conspiracy by a global cabal to sterilise, and in general, undermine the constitution. People increasingly began believing that these were Klein’s views. At one point, after it goes beyond being just a joke, Klein decides to dive into the rabbit hole of the universe that Wolf inhabits – the Mirror World is how Klein describes it.

    While this is where the book starts, and also spends pages drawing out the different worldviews, approaches etc, the narrative then expands its scope to cover the title – Doppelgangers – in general. Not just at an individual level but a societal level. For instance, today the simplistic left vs right categorisation is almost devoid of meaning. Even the horseshoe theory of left and right being similar the extremes isn’t nuanced enough. With big tech, Covid lockdowns, and a plethora of social media influencers, most people have very little trust in anything mainstream media, or what politicians say or do. The difference is only in their own perspectives of who is lying and for what. Wolf and Klein, for example, agree on Bill Gates being a force for evil. While the former goes on about tracking people, the latter is against how he sided with big drug company patents on life-saving Covid medicines.

    Klein decodes how issues remain the same but how Bannon & Co spin it to stoke common underlying tensions and use it to further their agenda. For example, blue collar workers who felt betrayed by Democrats when the latter signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures, Bannon pitched Trump as a radically different Republican who promised to make the rich pay. This modus operandi was an echo of what I had read in Peter Pomerantsev’s ‘This is not propaganda’, in which he pointed out how Trump and his ilk could create coalitions of people who agreed on some topics, while the left/liberals would argue on the tiniest of nuances. There is a name for the former – diagonalism.

    There is also an interesting section on how our personal brands are our doppelgangers – what happens to our self when we create for social media? What is real, and what is for camera? “Which of our opinions is genuine, and which are for show? Which friendships are rooted in love, and which are co-branding collabs? Which collaborations don’t happen that should because individual brands are pitted against one another?” What doesn’t ever get said, or shared, because it’s off-brand?” What does it do to our capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation?

    The focus on doppelgangers allows Klein to apply it to diverse contexts – wellness influencers who became anti-vaccine propagandists, parents of autistic children (and their belief that this was something that had to be cured instead of accepting the child and its unique ways), to Nazis (and the fascinating view that European colonists had been on genocide sprees long before Hitler, and that it was only the scale and more importantly, that it happened in Europe that shocked the West into retaliating; also how the Australian Aborigines League saw this coming way back in 1938 and wrote a protest letter against persecution and handed it to the German Consulate) to Israel (and how the Palestinians had become the victims’ victims).

    Towards the end of the book, the narrative switches back to personal, with lovely anecdotes on how Klein was originally inspired by Wolf, and also how today, with Wolf uttering all sorts of things in public, Klein believes she is freed from her own public self and how it’s an “unconventional Buddhist exercise in annihilating the ego”.

    This is a fascinating read which prompts us to look within ourselves and at the society we inhabit, forcing us to acknowledge the doppelganger within us at both levels.

    Quotes
    “Ms. Wolf is the moral equivalent of an Armani T-shirt, because Mr. Gore has obscenely overpaid for something basic” ~ Maureen Dowd

    “The accelerated need for growth has made our economic lives more precarious, leading to the drive to brand and commodify our identities, to optimise our selves, our bodies, and our kids” Naomi Klein

    “In the Mirror World, they… rile up anger about the Davos elites, At Big Tech and Big Pharma – but the rage never seems to reach those targets. Instead it gets diverted into culture wars about ant-racist education, all-gender bathrooms, and Great Replacement panic directed at Black people, nonwhite immigrants and Jews.” Naomi Klein

    Doppelganger

  • Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

    Tara Isabella Burton

    Strange Rites is another book I discovered only thanks to a podcast. I found it a fascinating exploration of how the (almost) post-religion United States is evolving. Folks who call themselves Christians have been steadily decreasing, and ‘Nones’ who claim no affiliation to any organised religion is the fastest growing group. One-third of millennials (and one fourth of all adults) have no affinity to religion. Tara Isabella Burton tries to find out who (or what) is filling the God-sized hole.

    She begins with her personal experience at the McKittrick Hotel, home to the British theatre company Punchdrunk’s production – Sleep No More, an experiential phenomenon that she describes as “equal parts video-game, voyeurism and religious pilgrimage”. It’s a retelling of Macbeth but every part of it is subject to interpretation by the performers and the audience, with the latter also having the option to be part of the ‘play’.

    This serves as a preview of the world of SoulCycle, Korean beauty routines, Gwyneth Paltrow’s juice cleanse, Crossfit, Internet fan fiction, Headspace, and so on. A long list of options from which people can mix their own religious cocktail of spiritual, philosophical, aesthetic and experiential dimensions. It influences not just individual lifestyle but societal politics too.

    The author broadly classifies the non-affiliated into SBNRs (Spiritual but not religious), Faithful Nones (who hunger for something larger than themselves) and Religious Hybrids (who practice a portion of their religion, and supplement it with things outside it). All of them (and us) are looking for what religion originally delivered – meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.

    She then spends a chapter on the war that has been fought on religion within America – the institutional (centred around Church and society) vs the intuitional (centred around the person). And that progression and the heterogenous mixes that happened reflects in the changes in culture and mindset within society during the 60s, 70s and so on.

    And thus, while the new forms of religion aren’t new, the author cites three factors that makes this era different and likely to stick around – the absence of wider demographic pressure, the power of consumer capitalism, and the rise of the internet. While millennials are caught between their lack of belief in their parents’ religion and the political conservatism on societal issues, capitalism finds a way in, helping them create identities and tribes. It will sell us meaning, brand our purpose, custom-produce community, tailor-make rituals and commodify our humanity. That includes a spiritual entrepreneurship course at the Columbia Business School!

    This new age version of religion (spiritualism) has an interesting parallel – the role that the printing press and the spread of mass literacy played for Protestantism is what the internet is doing today for new age movements. From Yahoo Groups for The X Files and Xena to Harry Potter and World of Warcraft, people were no longer bound to their geography to find their tribe. Fan fiction boomed. The author cites two watershed moments which show how ‘fans’ started taking ownership – the call for Rowling to step away from the Harry Potter universe after her fall from grace, and Gamergate, when there was a backlash against a section of gamers who wanted video games to address the interests and concerns of minority players. Though it wasn’t the first of its kind, the movement was the first to get into a large cultural conversation. Many of the players on the reactionary side (against the demand) would later become alt-right/alt-lite celebs.

    Another evident phenomenon is wellness culture, which focuses on self improvement and commoditises self care. It has the fandom and the ‘theology’ of purpose and meaning to back it. The philosophy of SoulCycle, Goop etc have their roots in New Thought, one of America’s earliest spiritual traditions that blended liberal Christianity with Transcendentalism, and the path includes folks like Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking), and the discourse in the contemporary era even included self care as a revolutionary act against Trump’s America! The other phenomenon that the author brings up is the revival and rise of witchcraft. The number of adherents are over a million. Here too, Trump served as a nemesis, with the larger narrative connecting the rituals of witchcraft to a higher social and spiritual purpose – dismantling toxic and oppressive structures associated with patriarchy, white supremacy and other unjust hierarchies.

    Another massive shift is in social-sexual identities. Though swapping, kink etc existed in the 1900s, many interests and groups were in the closet are now lifestyles accepted by the mainstream. A key role was played by the internet in transforming the modes and rituals of these communities too, accelerating access and consumption. Simultaneously monogamy is receiving a pushback. The 1970s and 80s were the peak time for divorces in the US, that means children growing up then have a fairly dismal view of marriage.

    74% of American millennials now say that “whatever is right for your life or works best for you is the only truth you can know”. While fandom, wellness, witchcraft, sexual utopias all play out, are there organising thoughts that can take the place of religion? The author works out three of them. The first is ‘social justice culture’ – a progressive mix of self care, moral determination through lived experience, and a fight against racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry and injustice. The second is a Silicon Valley based version who work towards an optimised self. Libertarian techno-utopians, rewriting biology and society through ‘hacking’. Despite their cosmetic differences, both groups have much in common. They both have a disdain towards society’s mores, maxims and rules. And both seek self actualisation. And yes, both are viable consumer categories for capitalism. Wokeness, self care and more!

    However it is the third that the author considers the most viable contender, and the most dangerous. Authoritarian, reactionary, materialist, and one that valourises submission to a higher political or biological truth. They find spiritual and moral meaning in primal, masculine images of heroes past. Yes, mostly white. They believe that biological determinism, gender binary, and natural hierarchies are what leads to progress. Not progressivism and political correctness. Jordan Peterson is one of the high priests, and r/TheRedPill forum is an active shrine of the movement. They provide a sense of brotherhood. Meme magic in 4chan, Pepe and Kekism all were connected to the Donald Trump campaign. Many mass shootings and other acts of violence are by graduates of this school of thought.

    Religion and politics have been connected throughout history, but is remarkable to watch the narrative in the contemporary era unfold as the author connects the pieces and lights up the path that got us to where we are. But then again, to learn of something and to learn from something are two different things. In my favourite reads of 2023, and highly recommended if you have any interest in modern society and/or religion/ and/or culture.

    Notes
    1. In 1890, a businessman Elijah Bond patented a “talking board” for mass use. That’s the Ouija board.
    2. Apparently Fifty Shades of Grey started out as fan fiction – based on Twilight’s lead characters!

    Strange Rites

  • Liberalism and Its Discontents

    Francis Fukuyama

    In The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein’s book on how capitalism hijacked crisis to further its own unbridled growth agenda – she calls out Francis Fukuyama’s “History has ended. Capitalism and freedom go hand in hand” and essentially considered liberalism the endpoint of mankind’s ideological revolution. That book gave me a lot of (alternate) context on the general narrative of capitalism, and also shifted my view on Fukuyama because of his role in (probably) encouraging the Chicago School of thought that impacted the development of multiple countries across the globe.

    That meant I picked up “Liberalism and Its Discontents” with some skepticism, but though Fukuyama defends liberalism, I felt that he has tried to dissociate himself from the extreme forms the ideology has taken, and attempted to see the criticism and shortcomings objectively. In that sense, probably redeemed himself in my eyes a bit. (not that he cares)

    He begins by acknowledging the challenges facing liberal democracies, and then steps back to trace the historical and philosophical evolution of liberalism and how it came to be the go-to ideology after the Cold War, and begins his defence by reminding us of the significance of individual rights, rule of law, and market economies in creating and maintaining political and economic freedom. He also looks at liberalism’s internal frictions and contradictions. For instance, tension between individual rights and collective identities, and the excessive focus on individualism undermining social cohesion and communal solidarity. Individualism, which has resulted in the twin extremes of identity politics and populist nationalism.

    Liberalism is attacked on many fronts since its basic tenets are all open to separate criticism, thereby questioning its essence. Collectively, these forces challenge the principles of liberal democracy by undermining institutional structures, eroding trust, and fostering polarisation in the general public. What has also compounded this is the the rise of social media, surveillance technologies, and artificial intelligence, and while these could be beneficial to liberal values theoretically, the current usage is mainly manipulation of information, erosion of privacy, and the potential for authoritarian control.

    But what I felt was that his thinking is still largely Western, and thus does not really go deep into the nuanced challenges faced by other parts of the world, or the intersections of related issues – globalisation, economic inequality, and complicated cultural dynamics, which foment populist movements. And because of that, his dismantling of the alternatives seem less convincing, and look closer to the paraphrasing he attributed to Winston Churchill – liberalism is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

    Liberalism and its discontents | Francis Fukuyama
    Screenshot

  • Wanderers, Kings, Merchants

    Peggy Mohan

    For a while, I have been fascinated by the similarity in words across languages – from the simple biradar-brother to the slightly more elaborate Agni-ignite. I even started a Twitter thread to keep track of these ‘discoveries’. Linguistics per se, the theory of it though, is less of a fascination. I started reading it with the notion that it would be this, but was pleasantly surprised. I love history and that’s what Peggy Mohan has actually done using language(s) and their evolution as her tool in Wanderers Kings Merchants.

    She gives us a quick introduction with Creoles in the Caribbean, and points out the appearance of the vocabulary layer, which is influenced by the more powerful group (usually male), and the more intrinsic sound and grammar, which is the maternal side of the story – mother tongue. With this background she brings the narrative to India and creates a storyline using different languages.

    She begins with the presence of sounds of Dravidian origin in the recitation of the Rig Veda, and with supporting historical & DNA evidence of a male-driven migration about 3500 year ago when the Harappan civilisation was in decline, traces the Vedic male – local wife combination which led to the Dravidian sounds in the Rig Veda. To be noted that this didn’t happen in the beginning when they were orally preserved and transferred, but around 700 years later when they were formally compiled, edited and written down, reflecting a Sanskrit which by then had vernacular sounds. This was also when the Kuru super-tribe spread east and south, from Kabul to Andhra, taking Sanskrit along. This Sanskrit then mixed with the language of the elite in these regions and created the first versions of Prakrit. As the language trickled down from the elite to the masses, or rather, locals moved up in lifestyles and hence words used, the influence of the latter’s native tongue became stronger and around 1000 CE marked the beginning of the Indo Aryan languages, first as dialects in small areas, and then gradually expanding their domain.

    Meanwhile, in my little state of Kerala, around 800 CE, brahmins relocated from the north – Namboodiris, at the behest of local kings. As with the story up north, male-driven migration + local women and an elite happened. The brahmins’ original Apabhramsa language (a ‘corrupted form of Sanskrit that didn’t follow Paninian rules) faded because they had to pick up Malayalam in the long-term, and centuries later, a new language Manipravalam emerged – Sanskrit nouns in (erstwhile) Malayalam sentences. Interesting that a sociopolitical tumult also happened here around the same time – the rise of the Second Chera Empire and the beginning of a strong Malayali identity distinct from Tamil/Cholas. In parallel, a resurgence of Hinduism at the expense of Buddhism and the re-emergence of Brahminical Hinduism.

    Similarly, the Central Asian influx into the north (Delhi Sultanate, Mughals) brought with it Uzbek, which quickly vanished as the Central Asians started using the dialect in the region (Hindi) as their vernacular. It was only in the late 1700s that they moved from using Persian as the official language and started writing in Hindi – then renamed Urdu, with an infusion of Persian nouns.

    She then takes us to the contemporary example of Nagamese – the grammar of Assamese and a small portion of Naga. It grows even as the both Assamese and the Naga languages continue to exist. The flashback on Assamese is Ahom, courtesy migrants from Burma. This itself is a later episode of the SE Asia + Munda people of the Magadha region. This combination, and the presence of the Vratyas, a pre-Vedic Arya group, is what makes the Magadha languages different from Dravidian.

    The most recent play- British and English. The British not only created a Hindi-Urdu divide which hadn’t existed before, but also, thanks to having Indian employees, got the latter to pick up English, though mostly in ‘Prakrit English’ form in the beginning. Ironically, English really spread only after Independence, because the elites wanted to retain their hold on power using language as an access point, and were helped by the fact that no single language had the heft to cover the entire country. And that’s where we are now. ‘What had started as a code to identify the elite snowballed into something set to replace our older languages and cultures as it trickled down, forging a new homogeneity.’

    I have to admit I glazed over some of the parts where she decided to go a little deep (by my standards) on technicality of language, but I found the book to be mostly accessible, and definitely fascinating. If you’re even vaguely interested in history, this is a must-read.

    Interesting points
    Cows as a metaphor for women in the Rig Veda.
    The uncanny resemblance between Panini, and the Phoenicians (Poeni in Latin)
    Ditto Turkic Ordu (army) and horde
    Urdu got its name in the Deccan in 1780, and in its later usage was practically the same as Hindi, both belonging to Hindus and Muslims, until the British decided to cause a split by trying to create a shudh Sanskritised version of Hindi, and in addition the use of Devanagari script. The idea being that they wanted to undermine Urdu, written in Persian script, because it was associated with the Mughal empire.

    Wanderers, Kings, Merchants

  • Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

    Claire L. Evans

    I had a sense of deja vu while reading this, and later realised that it was thanks to Maria Popova’s Figuring. The books are very different in terms of scope, but are connected by the women-oriented narrative, the idea of intellectual successors, and the presence of what one could call a ‘crossover character’ – Maria Mitchell.

    When we think about the internet’s history, and its current pantheon, the names that pop up are all, or at least mostly, male. But Claire Evans points out that the origin stories are actually mostly female. Their contributions are practically invisible both in the public eye, and while we use the web.

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