What’s in a Naomi?

Naomi Klein. Image: Mariusz Kubik, Wikimedia Commons

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

Naomi Klein, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023, hb., 399pps.

Montréal-born Naomi Klein is a prominent international voice of the left, author of influential and often insightful books about capitalism and climate change. She has spent decades linking capitalism with an alphabet of other isms, from ableism to Zionism. Her political Theory of Everything has been rewarded with plaudits, posts and pulpits in Canada and beyond, and a pleasant reputation as something of a sage.

How horrifying then, for her to discover that she was being confused with another Naomi – one equally famous and loquacious, but espousing rather different and (in Klein’s eyes) usually reprehensible views. This is a book born of a very personal grievance, which ends in a not wholly convincing attempt at acceptance. More usefully, it also offers ponderable points about the interstices of ideology and individuality, the permeabilities of personalities, and modernity’s unhealthy obsession with images.

Naomi Wolf. Image: Sunset Parkerpix, Wikimedia Commons

The author’s alter ego is Naomi Wolf, once lionized for her 1991 feminist classic, The Beauty Myth, but who in recent years has taken (sometimes foolish) contrarian positions, and associated with what Klein calls “some of the most malevolent men on the planet” – by whom she mostly means Steve Bannon. Confusion between two Naomis is hardly surprising in our age of distraction and dichotomy, when millions click ‘Like’ or hate on articles they may not have read, by author-avatars who bear superficial resemblances of appearance, profile, and rhetoric. At the top of both authors’ Wikipedia entries is an underscored sentence: “Not to be confused with [the other Naomi].” They are even mixed up by text autocomplete. 

There are real resemblances, as Klein outlines, inadvertently amusingly: “We both write big-idea books…We both have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting (hers is longer and more voluminous than mine). We’re both Jewish.” As well as hairstyles, their areas of concern also often entangle, from feminism to Occupy Wall Street. Both have been vociferous liberals, both have enjoyed stratospheric careers, and both can exhort with commitment and skill. They are similar in age, and at one point even had partners with the same first name. But then doppelgangers are always disconcerting.

She touches tantalizingly on doppelgangers across ages and cultures – from the ‘changelings’ of medieval legend via Jungian shadow-selves to modern parallel universes, like the hapless laundromat operator in Everything Everywhere All At Once, who simultaneously exists successfully in other dimensions. Innumerable artists and storytellers have drawn fruitfully on the idea of people who are like-yet-unlike, and who for all their differences also have unique understandings of each other – even the evillest of ‘evil twins,’ like Dr Jekyll’s Mr. Hyde.

To Klein, the greatest evil twin of all is Western civilization, an originally sinful conception in which everyone is complicit, and everything is tainted – where every old ill has 21st century relevance. Through our Naomi’s looking-glass lies a nastily dualistic Wonderland – “whiteness’s shadow world” – thronged with ancient-to-modern monsters, from Christianity to Nazism and Trump. In her cheval-glass, New York looks like a shinily skyscrapered refraction of the Old, carrying over and amplifying its pathologies. Even ‘purity’ is impure, just as ‘beauty’ was Wolf’s myth. Klein sees herself, and everybody else, making idolatrous images of ourselves, colonising and consuming ourselves, turning personas into personal brands always competing for attention and influence. Staring back at us from all screens is another version of us, as we’d like to be, or some hateful inversion – a winsome mirror-image or a dead-eyed golem.

Klein, then still a student, interviewed Wolf in 1991 when the author of the just-published Beauty Myth was visiting her campus. Klein was “transfixed” by Wolf’s appearance, less so by her book “(We were already way ahead of her”). There was a startling exchange after Wolf’s speech, when Wolf said to Klein, “You look like you’ve just been raped.” This was untrue, but it led to an intense if short-lived correspondence, and Klein still credits Wolf for giving her the confidence to write.

Klein’s criticisms are more-in-sorrow-than-anger, bemoaning an ally lost to the Dark Side rather than calling down contumely on Wolf’s big-haired head. There are however enjoyably catty asides. She notes that Wolf, asked whether she had written The Shock Doctrine, denied it, but was “flattered.” When Wolf found there was a Telegram account parodying hers, she complained it made her “look like a lunatic”, and as if she had “a tacky, blowsy, overdressed, grammatically-intolerable doppelganger,” to which Klein adds an arch “Ahem.” There is space too for self-aggrandizement: “Would I participate in events leading up to a key United Nations Climate Summit? No sorry, I am overcommitted” – “I somehow convinced one of the top graphic designers in the world…” – “I accepted a chair at Rutgers University.”

By examining Wolf’s choices, Klein hopes to prevent others making similar choices, maybe even stop society sinking further into distrust, irresponsibility, paranoia, rivalry, and superficiality. Many will agree with many of her points about anomie, late stage capitalism, environmental degradation, narcissism, and social media – and share her distaste for the strange coalition of hustlers, hyper-individualists and quacks who came to the fore over Covid. She is also commendably candid about some of the Left’s failures – their demonisation of ‘Deplorables’, hypocrisy, lack of commitment to free speech, and ossified thinking. She nevertheless blames the right for debasing the political lexicon, whereas it has been the zealots of her side who have made everything political, and levelled insults so liberally they now mean almost nothing. 

Wolf is notoriously careless with data, quite apart from bizarreries about ‘fascist coups,’ ‘global governments’ or ‘chemtrails.’ Conspiracy theorists, Klein notes neatly, “get the facts wrong but the feelings right.” Society really is sick, and there really are forces working to make the world even worse than it is. Wolf’s answers to such questions are often wrong; that does not mean that Klein’s subtler answers are right. Conspiracy theories can be found on all sides, and unhelpful outrage confected by anyone. Deep passion is another thing shared by these Naomis. “I go through periods,” Klein groans, “when the impunity of it all gets the better of me….My throat constricts. My breath becomes shallow. On bad days, I feel like I might explode.”

She scoffs at Wolf’s vaccine-scepticism, yet declares Covid victims were “murdered,” and the virus amounted to eugenics. In truth, there was no malign intent on the part of any government or group (except maybe manufacturers of substandard PPE gear) – just tragic errors born of panic and lack of information. She also alleges there were murders of First Nations children at Canadian residential schools. While those schools were designed to erase indigenous culture, and children did die from neglect, no evidence of murder seems to have been adduced, and the total number of dead is undoubtedly exaggerated. She portrays white truckers who convoyed to one school to show sorrow as enthusiastic embracers of “enmeshment,” although it sounds more like a literal guilt trip.

She blames Trump for anti-Jewish hate – although any rise in such hate since the incumbency of the President with Jewish in-laws, and who recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, is more attributable to homeward-looking Muslims of the kind Klein wishes America to continue admitting. Wolf’s worries that Biden has opened the borders are apparently “a lie,” something which may come as news in the South.

She writes of “migrants left to drown to protect the fantasy of a fortressed Europe” – “boat after boat”, apparently – whereas in fact few boats have foundered, and angsty European governments make Sisyphean efforts to pick up migrants (who are often economic migrants rather than refugees), at vast cost. It never occurs to her that barriers may sometimes be necessary to maintain global diversity, or that mass migration might be imperilling the social solidarity she seeks. Perhaps the conservative, cruel, cupidinous “forces of forgetting” she caricatures are just rallies of realists. She complains Wolf’s Weltanschaaung only comprehends white, middle-class and educated women; one might reasonably enquire how many non-white, non-middle-class or uneducated women read Klein’s works.

“The known world is crumbling. That’s okay,“ Klein assures us, but she offers no unknown world in its place. For someone easily capable of incisiveness, her Great Reset is short on substance. Her chief prescription seems for us all to lose sight of ourselves, because “no one is quite as special or unique as we might have imagined ourselves to be” – a statement which even if it was true is not exactly inspiring. Her concept of community is expansive to the point of incomprehensibility: “We have kin everywhere. Some of them look like us, lots of them look nothing like us…some aren’t even human. Some are coral. Some are whales.” When she eventually thanks Wolf for freeing her from “the tyranny of my own self,” we simply can’t take her at face value. As she has already noted, there is an “inherent humiliation in…one’s own interchangeability and/or forgettableness.” Perhaps ostentatious self-abnegation is just a new kind of complacent self-regard.

Societies simply cannot be sustained on vacancy, or fleeting fist-pumping feelings of the kind she remembers fondly from a Bernie Sanders rally. Endless critiquing and picking at ancient sores, and emphases on every kind of ‘otherness,’ can result in nothing more than a permanent revolution of resentments. Whatever her excesses, whatever her errors, Klein’s more bouffant mirror image has found at least some ground.

Happily, this cerebral author, in her remote British Columbia (hateful name!) bolthole, will be largely insulated from any consequences of even the most utopian theories. She’s luckily free to smash all the mirrors in these ruins of the West, to shatter through all silvered glass and blend herself completely into the blind blank plate behind.

This review first appeared in Chronicles, and is reproduced with permission

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