The Mental is Political
Political satires, like politicians themselves, often have a hard time striking a balance. Tilt too much in one direction and you alienate your base, tilt too much in the other direction and you end up preaching to the choir. Many authors lose their balance and end up tilting at windmills.
Such is the tightrope that Lionel Shriver walks in her new political-satire novel, Mania. Don’t expect any subtlety here. Mania is set in an alternate-history 2010s, where a new movement called Mental Parity (MP) sweeps across the Western world, a movement that declares that there are no differences in intelligence between people. This mania took over the West shortly after the publication of a bestselling book titled The Calumny of I.Q.: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight, an obvious allusion to the “do-the-work-and-educate-yourself-you-bigot” books that were ubiquitous during our own manias of the last few years. (Another book is titled How to Be an Anti-Smartist, drawing direct parallel to the real-life book How to Be an Antiracist.)
The MP movement quickly captures all of America’s institutions. Aptitude and IQ tests are banned. Schools are forced to dumb everything down—the word dumb is banned, along with any word that might imply a difference in intelligence, including stupid, idiot, wise, and dense. Even using dim in the context of low lighting is banned; one has to say “poorly illuminated,” and dimmer switch becomes “knob that raises or lowers how seeable everything is.” Movies and TV shows that depict vast differences in intelligence, like Rain Man and Sherlock, are banned. Anyone who refuses to go along with the MP movement is labeled a “smartist” and immediately socially ostracized. Multiple real-life events play out differently: Osama bin Laden fails to be assassinated due to intelligence failures (pun not intended), and Barack Obama only manages one term as president because he was too eloquent for the populace to accept, with Biden replacing him after the 2012 election.
Our not-so-humble protagonist, an English professor named Pearson Converse, is a dissident who secretly resists the Mental Parity mania, speaking in clandestine tones about the truth behind intelligence at her home in the not-subtly-named city of Voltaire, Pennsylvania. She narrates with an antiquated ostentatious lexicon, as if she has imbibed a decades-old thesaurus: I found myself having to look up five-dollar words like obstreperous, panjandrums, and foofaraw that would pop up every few pages. Converse was raised as a Jehovah's Witness before running away from home, ignoring organized religion for decades only to see a new religious mania sweeping across the country.
As the child of preachers myself, I was not surprised to find out that Lionel Shriver is the daughter of a famous preacher, as the abilities to recognize religious fervor and to pen fire-and-brimstone polemics are in our genes. Through the voice of Pearson Converse, she drops allusions throughout the book recognizable to those with an intellectual Christian background, with references to Damascene conversions and the theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer, and provides a metacommentary on religious experience, both in Converse’s Witness upbringing and in the MP mania.
While the MP movement is an obvious satire of our current manias, the very premise of the book itself may be prophetic to a future one. After all, we’ve already had a mania over intelligence back in the Nineties, where Charles Murray was pilloried for co-writing The Bell Curve, a book that claimed that IQ was highly heritable and was a good predictor of socioeconomic outcomes. The Bell Curve was hugely controversial, especially over a chapter that linked IQ to race, which is why I was surprised to see that Shriver even dares to venture into that territory in this novel, almost as if challenging critics to “cancel” her book. Converse selects a sperm donor for her children based on IQ and invokes multiple Asian stereotypes throughout the book, assuming that the Japanese sperm donor she picked (which she notes had an IQ of 146) was naturally good at math and assuming her son’s thin body comes from Japanese genes. Converse implies that her children have high IQs due to having a Japanese sperm donor, and that in the classes she teaches, “It was the Asian students who had the hardest time getting with the MP program. I wouldn’t want to overgeneralize, but striving cultures are keen on measurable achievement, and with no clear markers of where they stood on a numerical ladder the Asians were at sea.”
Indeed, Converse herself knows how controversial her eugenics project is, writing that “My divulgence here that I specifically screened the lists of donors for high levels of intelligence will doubtless lose me any chance at sympathy these days.” I did note, though, that Converse carefully omits any discussion of what racial groups under her hereditarian framework do not have high IQs. Even Converse knows that there are some topics that can’t be conversed about.
Much of this novel is told in a style that blurs the lines between what is commentary on reality versus commentary on a satirical world. The forced equity of the MP movement ends up leading to widespread incompetence, reminding readers of the current controversies raging over DEI programs in the workplace. (It’s no surprise that Shriver, a disaffected Democrat, endorsed Florida governor and noted anti-DEI warrior Ron DeSantis for president.) Near the end of the novel, Converse goes on a diatribe impugning the effectiveness of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine that reads like it was ripped from real life.
As I mentioned at the beginning, political satires often aren’t able to strike the right balance between delivering political commentary while still being a compelling piece of fiction. In Mania, it does feel at certain points like narrative is being sacrificed for the sake of invoking political invectives. But maybe that’s where the world is going anyway. Converse notes that “Despite the appearance of seriousness at political gatherings, their audiences are the same as audiences everywhere: they want to be entertained. You don’t win by landing a trenchant point but by making the mezzanine laugh.” Indeed, while the ancien régime may have treated politics as serious and sacred, today we treat politics as banal entertainment. We stopped worshiping at church only to transfer our religious sentiments onto politics, sitting at the mezzanine of social media for our daily bread and circuses. You can run away from Jehovah’s Witnesses, but you can’t run away from politics. Maybe the real mania isn’t over wokeness or DEI or intelligence or climate change or vaccines or the Middle East or whatever the current thing is. It’s politics itself.
Sheluyang Peng is a writer living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
