Mania, Equity, and Truth

Most of us have, at some point or another, lightheartedly chastised ourselves or our friends for doing something dumb. In Lionel Shriver’s Mania, this is an impossibility. Mania follows an alternate history in which a “mental parity” movement—that is, a movement insisting that acknowledging differences in intelligence is unequal and oppressive—flourishes, with catastrophic effects for society. Universities are restructured; academics are devalued; global conflicts escalate. At the heart of the novel is Shriver’s protagonist, Pearson Converse, a professor who refuses to conform to the demands of this new movement and is eventually fired for assigning Dostoevsky’s The Idiot to her students.

If you think you cannot possibly imagine living in a world like Mania’s, think again: according to Shriver, we already do. In Shriver’s view, some strands of contemporary discourse already point toward the total denial of reality she imagines in her novel. She argues that our cultural current has moved from criticizing inequality to censuring recognition of difference, that natural variation has become heavily moralized, and that equality of opportunity has become equality of outcome, or equity. It bears down on every domain of life, and in some corners of public conversation, it leaves no room for differences that are inconvenient or uncomfortable to discuss.

Shriver’s critique rests on patterns she sees emerging around questions of biology and identity, particularly regarding how we define various bodies. According to her, the claim that trans women are women is not a question about individual dignity or respect; rather, it is a claim that defies material categories. Similarly, efforts to declare all body types equally beautiful are not aesthetic judgments, but insistences that social and sexual norms be negotiated according to political rather than visual criteria. In these examples, she sees a structure identical to the mental-parity doctrine of Mania: an ideological commitment that overwrites reality.

One of the most striking elements of this cultural shift, which Shriver calls mania, is its mechanism of enforcement. Typically, it is not legal enforcement that shapes people’s speech and thought. Instead, it is social expectations, professional risks, and reputational costs. Cultural institutions that once placed utmost importance on competence and nuanced debate increasingly treat dissent from orthodoxy as illegitimate. Writers, professors, and experts are admonished for innocuous words; college syllabi are transformed overnight to avoid offending. Personal attacks are leveled at anyone who diverges from the norm. The result, Shriver claims, is a feedback loop in which fear of social sanction encourages self-censorship, which breeds conformity and eventually becomes evidence of consensus.

Shriver’s view is not that everyone who stays quiet or adapts to these new social standards is cowardly. On the contrary, she emphasizes the rationality of conformity. People have families, livelihoods, and reputations. So, they must make pragmatic decisions about what speech to withhold. This is one of the features of mania that makes it so powerful, Shriver says: it forces people to capitulate to popular ideas under threat of termination or complete social isolation, so that most people are too frightened to resist in any way.

At the same time, she warns that conformity corrodes the foundations of free thought. The ability to describe the world as it is—including the various inequalities and discrepancies it contains—is itself a social good. It is not morally neutral. Inquiry, nuance, observation, and the capacity to revise or discard a belief when presented with new evidence are the forces that drive intellectual achievement. When these goods are ignored in favor of authoritative ideology, she says, a society’s institutions begin to fail not because they are unfair or unjust, but because they are misaligned with reality. Shriver’s mania involves not just individual cognitive dissonance but societal dissonance as well.

And this dissonance is not only theoretical. It has deep importance for practical domains as well. Shriver imagines a society that collapses public health, education, and culture in order to preserve ideas of fairness and equity, arguing that it would be an extremely uncomfortable and dangerous world to live in. According to Shriver, people should notice what happens when a system rewards compliance over ability and comprehension. A system that refuses to examine basic empirical data in the hope that everyone will be happy with the outcome is headed not toward an equitable paradise but toward total dysfunction.

All of this leads Shriver to conclude that certain values, while noble in moderation, can become toxic when they begin to override all other values. Fairness is one such value. Although it rightly illuminates struggles against real injustice and discrimination, Shriver thinks that it has become the sole measure of a society’s advancement, leading other goods to wither: goods like excellence, beauty, humor, tradition, and competency. And while not all of these are moral goods, they are central components of human experience and flourishing, and Shriver worries that a society obsessed with equity may lose sight of them (or already has).

Why, then, are people so drawn to manias? According to Shriver, it’s just easy. Manias erase the cognitively taxing processes of gathering evidence, evaluating, and forming opinions. It is far simpler to feel righteous than to engage in rigorous intellectual inquiry. And once righteousness is inextricable from being on the “right side,” it becomes difficult to question a mania’s premises without feeling that one’s own moral status is at risk. In this way, ideology becomes more than a set of beliefs; it is also a safety blanket.

Shriver remains unsure whether these manias will die out. She does not predict that these cultural currents will inevitably lead to societal ruin, but she also is not naive enough to suggest that they will quickly annihilate themselves. Instead, she sees them as contests between values and interpretations of reality. Ultimately, she insists that one thing cannot be surrendered: the freedom to describe the empirical truth of the world and its complexity, rather than adhering mindlessly to dominant ideological standards.

At the heart of Shriver’s reflection seems to be a plea for intellectual humility: the acknowledgement that the world is more diverse and complex than we would, perhaps, like it to be. Human beings vary in many ways, and that variation is not always beautiful or fair. But denial of variation does not make those inequalities disappear; it only makes societies less capable of responding to them in a way that can be epistemically and socially dangerous.

In Shriver’s view, the most frightening thing about these manias is that they lead people to mistake their strongly-held convictions for objective truths. When moral ideals become a substitute for truth, she argues, culture enters a kind of authoritarian or even totalitarian phase in which any beliefs that challenge the status quo must be violently policed. Of course, this policing is not strictly legal. It operates, instead, through social shunning, loss of status, and professional consequences. But its effects are ultimately the same: it narrows the range of acceptable thought, and in doing so, collapses a society’s collective capacity to reason well and identify truth.