Mishra & Aliwa: Your critiques of Salman Rushdie and Niall Ferguson have gener-
ated considerable notoriety. And you recently wrote a scathing review
of Jordan Peterson’s best-selling 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,
calling it a brand of “intellectual populism” that is “packaged for people
brought up on Buzzfeed listicles,” a category that seems predominantly
to include young men. You also accused him of romancing the noble
savage. He responded by calling you an “arrogant, racist son of a bitch”
and threatened to slap you—a threat he reiterated at a conference I re-
cently attended. As a person of color, a South Asian man in particular, do
you feel you have a particular role as a public intellectual in challenging
academics who find comfort in an order and hierarchy that privileges
white men? What should be the role of public intellectuals—especially
those of color—today?pm: I think the fact that we have to ask this question shows how serious
the problem has become. Many people we think of as intellectuals—our
“thought leaders”—are basically global professionals, adept movers in the
networks of Oxbridge, the Ivy League, the London School of Econom-
ics, think tanks, Davos, and Aspen. The result, as we see more clearly
after Trump, has been a stultifying sameness in the public intellectual
sphere: loud echo chambers in which you have a whole class of writers
and journalists saying the same things over and over again. This is
why our political crisis today is, first and foremost, a global intellectual
crisis—the result of a feckless homogenization of thought.
We have had these academic superstars who went on about knowl-
edge and power but were themselves busy climbing social ladders. Even
writers and intellectuals with a great deal of integrity and courage have
become too professionalized, too career-oriented, and too concerned not
to upset their peers—not to mention those they regard as their more
famous and successful superiors. This professional docility has allowed