Are Moustaches Fascist?

Some housekeeping and a book review

It’s been quiet around here for a while. In part that’s because I’ve been quite distracted by moving to Sweden (of all places! Did I really do that? It seems so. I look out my window and I see people walking by and I think they’re Swedish. They’re speaking in Swedish. They’re tall and blond, they look healthy and relaxed as if they’ve never experienced true hardship, but also unaccountably morose). But if I’m honest, that’s also been kind of an excuse for me to succumb to the crippling self-doubt that has kept me from finishing almost anything over the course of my entire life to this point. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is something of a specialty of mine.

However, having lived in Sweden for nearly a year at this point, it no longer feels like reasonable excuse for not getting anything done. So I’ve decided to experiment with being a little bit easier on myself. Maybe I have the right to express a thought, even if it isn’t the most perfectly phrased thought that has ever been expressed. The stakes could hardly be lower, after all. And in any case, since I was last posting on here regularly, the vast majority of all new writing is now being produced by Skynet. In the time it takes me to sweat over a few pages of half-decent prose, the computer could spew out a library’s worth of superficially perfect word vomit. As a representative of the human race, I consider it my duty to demonstrate the unique value of human creativity by doing what the AI cannot: (a) composing metaphors inspired by my real physical experience of the phenomenological world, and (b) making frequent grammatical errors.

With all that in mind, I’m going to begin with a quick book review. You can read it right below this plug for the newsletter that you’re already reading:

Belief is a fascinating thing. Our self-perception as a modern, enlightened and rational civilization is belied by any number of widespread popular ideas — homeopathy, chiropractic medicince, Waldorf schools, Jungian psychology — that have their roots in superstition, pseudoscience and the occult.

So I was excited to read Fascist Yoga, a book by British artist Stewart Home that came out last year, about the ideological roots of modern yoga. However, as I read it, I was reminded (as an aging millenial is liable to be) of an old episode of the Daily Show. A book called Liberal Fascism had just come out — which became a kind of bellwether for the state of the culture war at that moment in time — and its author had agreed to sit down for a hostile interview. The one moment in the episode that stuck in my memory was Jon Stewart’s response to the conclusions that the book draws about Hitler’s vegetarianism: “That’s literally like saying that moustaches are fascist because Hitler had a moustache.”

Stewart Home’s book boils down to a repeated application of the fascist-moustache thesis for yoga. And like Liberal Fascism, it can also be read as a culture-war bellwether, reflecting a set of received ideas (albeit from the war’s opposing side) that may make little sense to anyone in only a decade or two’s time. Is being anti-vax inherently fascist, as Home implies in the book’s first sentence? (Or, conversely, does the far right’s embrace of health policy libertarianism suggest that it might be something quite different from what is normally meant by “fascism”?)

For whatever reason, I went into the book expecting an interesting social history rather than a takedown of Big Yoga. Which is not to say that yoga is above reproach. I’ve never even done yoga. I have no strong feelings about it one way or the other. There are a number of lines of critique that one could take against the discipline, but Home does his argument no favours by refusing to perceive any distinctions among them. Is it an ineffective or counter-productive form of exercise? Is it rooted in pseudoscience that renders its adherents susceptible to fraud? Or does it actually promote fascism? At times, Home seems to believe that by making any of these arguments he’s proving all of the others.

As Home’s narrative progresses further from fascism’s growth period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he relies more and more on guilt by (often extremely tenuous) association. Like the film reviewer who has only previously seen Boss Baby, Home gets fascist vibes from everything. Feeling uncomfortable on public transport? Fascist. Quoting an article in the Daily Mail? Fascist. When he describes the career of occult publisher James Lee-Richardson, Home says his “business activities can be seen as a precursor to those of Alex Jones of Infowars infamy, albeit without the hate content.”

...like Jones, Lee-Richardson built a media empire peddling fake news. Both men used their publishing operations to shift income-generating health supplements. The range of issues covered by Lee-Richardson’s media outlets was broader than that of Jones, and the former covered many subjects — such as UFOs — whose boosters, like Jones, were prone to stray into conspiracy theory.

UFOs? You’d better believe they’re fascist.

Rather than analysing things like the occult, pseudo-science, racism and so on as separate phenomena that might have interesting connections, Home treats them all as essentially interchangeable waypoints on a slippery slope with fascism at its inevitable end. You would never know from reading this book that the Theosophical Society (mentioned only in passing as an alleged promoter of race science) inspired Gandhi’s philosophy of religious universalism and non-violence. But it’s true! Theosophy helped to liberate India!

But for Home, no degree of quackery can be tolerated. Although he says that he “wouldn’t want to prohibit modern yoga,” he clearly doesn’t see any place for it:

The combination of essentialism and anti-empiricism that is prevalent among modern yoga practitioners makes them particularly susceptible to both occult delusions and fascist conspiratorialism. Over time, this has led me to the position that it is more practical to simply take up an alternative exercise regime than attempt to sanitise modern postural practice.

For me, “believe science” arguments of this kind betray an authoritarian impulse (a liberal fascism, perhaps?). One set of beliefs receives the benediction of reason: we’re required to believe it because we’re informed that it’s true by our betters. Anything else is the province of hucksters and dupes. Ironically, there’s a certain amount of magical thinking as well. Let’s suppose that yoga was invented by fascists. If I do a downward dog (is that how you say it? I have no idea! I’ve never done yoga!), am I doing fascism, as opposed to doing exercise? My son was taught yoga poses in pre-school: was he being taught fascism? (Admittedly, it was a montessori, so it probably does fit on Home’s spectrum somewhere.)

At no point does Home express any curiosity about why so many people might be attracted to irrational beliefs. Why did modern yoga become so much more successful than the conventional programmes of postural exercise offered by dour Swedish Lutherans that helped inspire it? Is it possible that the chants and the meditations, and even the belief itself in chakras and energies and whatever else might impart some intangible benefit?

I have no idea. As I say, I’ve never even done yoga. But one thing that I’m fairly sure of is that the fight for a perfectly rational society is not winnable and probably not even desirable. There are certain ideas which are objectively true — germ theory, for example — a widespread belief in which can protect a body from infection. But there is no comparable “belief in science” that can innoculate a society from fascism. We already saw this play out in recent memory with the New Atheists. If anything, the conceit that derives from one’s own sense of superiority is liable to lead in the opposite direction, towards elitism and contempt for one’s fellows. Conversely, an individual’s resistance to fascism must be rooted in a moral sense which will always be essentially irrational.