The image on the History and Context card in the Group Works deck. Image by Nomad Tales on flickr, CC-BY-SA 2.0 (this artist is no longer on flickr).
Before our average attention spans were reduced to something less than a minute, we were required, if we expected to be taken seriously in any discussion about the state of the world, to have invested a significant portion of our leisure time to learning the “lessons of history”.
Indeed, people who had made such an investment were among our most-respected citizens, and their synopses of relevant history were “required reading” not only in universities and political circles, but often even in water cooler and coffee klatch conversations.
Unlike today’s “op-eds”, which are mostly diatribes devoid of novel, relevant and supporting information or coherent argument, these analyses allowed those of us without the time to spend years learning the history of distant nations and the backstory behind long-standing traditions and conflicts, to develop a much deeper appreciation of how the world really works and what is really going on behind the rhetoric, posturing and bluster.
Now, instead, almost all so-called “analysis” consists of wild speculation about what someone “meant”, or what they “might” be planning, or simply bald statements of blame and opinion, often amounting to nothing more than paid advertisements shilling for lobbyists and vested interest groups.
One by one, I have given up reading publications that once offered intelligent and knowledgeable, information-based analyses: The NYT and WAPO and Atlantic, of course, as well as the Economist, The New Yorker, the Guardian, and dozens of others. The quality of writing, research and journalism in these and other ‘mainstream’ publications has now deteriorated to the point that it provides essentially zero value to readers: No useful information, no historical context, no well-reasoned alternative perspectives, no coherent explanation of complex and intractable issues, and certainly no insight. Just unfounded, and often patently erroneous and ideologically biased, opinion, masquerading as ‘news and information’.
Absent these ‘condensed’ sources of information on what is going in the world, and about why it is happening, we have mostly been required to “do our own research”, starting by reading books by people experienced and expert in their fields describing what they have learned and how they learned it, in much more detail than will fit in a magazine.
But it is impossible to keep up with all the books written on every subject needed to understand how the world ‘works’ and what is really going on. And book publishers have become as lazy and greedy as the press — they will publish any piece of crap written (or ghost-written) by any celebrity because they know that crap will sell in the mass market. But they have no interest in publishing what used to be described as “scholarly works” because they can’t move them in enough volume to make a profit from them.
Fortunately, there are a few people who both do that heavy lifting for us, and who also still have the language skills needed to articulate and synthesize what all that reading has taught them about our current predicaments.
One of those writers is Pankaj Mishra. Pankaj, born into a rich Brahmin family in India, followed a long tradition of writers from all over the world, retreating from modern urban life to spend years in research and study learning the craft of writing. He’s written both fiction and non-fiction books, and now commutes between India and London.
He was thrust into the public limelight when he wrote a very long essay, titled The Shoah [Holocaust] After Gaza, published two years ago (when Biden and the Tories were in power in the US and UK respectively) in the London Review of Books.
The essay is a thorough, well-researched, and coherent attempt to understand the mindset of all the ‘players’ in Israel’s ongoing genocidal slaughter in Palestine and now Lebanon. I highly recommend it to you — it doesn’t apologize for or excuse the genocide or any of the events that preceded it and have led to it. It seeks only to understand, and explain, out loud, what seems to be going on in this ‘incomprehensible’ slaughter.
A few critics have questioned his choice of the biblical term Shoah in lieu of the term Holocaust. Beyond that, there has been very little criticism of this uncompromising examination of brutality and violence by Zionists. It’s hard to argue with cited facts and sources. The article is just an excellent example, IMO, of intelligent, honest, useful, insightful, articulate journalism.
This week, Pankaj wrote a (much shorter) article in Harper’s magazine, entitled Geopolitical Narcissism, which presents his interpretation of a swath of events that have transpired over the past two years, since his LRB article. (The inclusion of his writing is the main reason I still subscribe to Harper’s, now my only print subscription.) In this astonishing piece of writing he covers:
- The “climate of opinion” that has allowed Trump to launch and pursue the disastrous war against Iran.
- The narcissistic and exceptionalist “pathology” of modern US relationships with other nations: “a compulsive pattern of infatuation, expectation, frustration, recrimination, revulsion, hostility and reinfatuation”.
- The psychological and ideological basis for long-standing antipathy to Iran in the west.
- How “ideas about uplifting other societies (rather than their own racially abused minority populations)” have substituted in the American consciousness for its own “indigenous sources of identity”.
- How the US has consistently and perilously misunderstood events in China and the very different culture of that country, and its dissident movements.
- The deep-seated sense of uncomfortable “embarrassment” about the increasingly obvious social, political, military and economic failures, violent interventions, endless reckless propaganda, and general incompetence of the US in everything it has done for generations. He writes:
It is the United States that now seems to have been the great anomaly in human history. Its extravagant self-image, parasitic on the false perception of a materially and spiritually inferior world outside America, has been cracking for some time, evident not only in its chaotic 2021 flight from the Taliban’s ragtag military but also in the steady erosion of its national industries, from manufacturing to entertainment, where the United States once led unchallenged. An addiction to displays of “lethality,” combined with fracturing awareness of global events and trends—such as the availability of cheap Iranian weapons or China’s rise as a clean-energy superpower—culminated in Trump’s reckless assault on Iran.
And then, his wry conclusion:
Embarrassment over a vulgar and inept political class seems unlikely to open out into severe introspection among the United States’ intellectual and cultural elites, who are primed to regurgitate the narratives of American exceptionalism. Though repelled by the proud brutishness of Trump and his fellow travelers Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Alex Karp, liberal Americans are hardly likely to suddenly start seeing capitalist imperialism through the eyes of its victims, or understand how it is the original source of the challenges still being overcome by China, Iran, and most of the rest of the human population.
But there should be no doubt that Americans are freer now amid the ruins of U.S. power and prestige than at any other time in the past—free to relinquish their role as exemplars and tutors and to recognize the grim fate they share with the rest of humanity.
I would be very surprised if you don’t learn something new and change your point of view a little as a result of it. I’m grateful that Harper’s regularly provides a forum for his writing.
We need to find and support more writers of this calibre. Writers who, backed by the weight of a deep knowledge of the history and context of current events, skillfully help us to understand a little better what is happening in the world, in all its complexity.
That’s all I have to say.
