Westlessness: The Great Global Rebalancing

By Samir Puri

Hodder & Stoughton 2024

Soothsaying and fatiloquence ought to be regarded as money-grabbing opportunism in our scientifically sophisticated 21st century. Prediction is a mug’s game. There’s far too much cloaked clairvoyance, far too many recently widowed women told that their husband is on the mend, far too many infertile couples told to purchase a papoose in anticipation of a youngling. Whilst clearly taking heed of this nonsense, Samir Puri’s new book Westlessness concerns itself with geopolitical hierarchies and a supposedly certain decline in the West’s table-topping, without bothering to treat readers to any absorbing predictions whatsoever.

We begin with a hurried and vivaciously succinct summary of European colonialism, America’s booming superabundance after its internecine civil war and the wrestling of the global oar from its fellow seamen. Puri quickly shifts focus to the modern era, prodding the supposed royal racists of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha as well as our sclerotic education systems, and takes aim at those grifters who discuss de-Westernisation apocryphally or in bad faith. “One common coping mechanism deployed in literary Western circles is to look to the Romans and search for analogies in their imperial decline. Allusions to the classical world tend to make their enunciator sound eminently cultured [but they are useless when] fathoming the era of diminishing Western influence.” Here is evidenced Puri’s angered analytical nuance and his bold intention to amputate any reeking, rotten aphorisms.

In consultation with Sinologists (another toothsome noun for your glossary and mine) the vaunted red century of insidious Chinese advance has the demographic rug pulled from beneath it. “Anyone anxious about China’s unstoppable economic rise would have been relieved to read [this quoted report].” A later chapter focussing on the dubiously named Global South and an emergent counter-committee to the G7 and NATO in the form of BRICS+, posits a future in which this medley of humourless autorats and deranged libertarians collude in cobwebbed lairs. Puri demonstrates a well-mannered and increasingly rare certainty when assessing the likelihood of a Second Cold War. “The world is full of middle-ground emerging powers that see an increasingly diverse world ripe with opportunities…they do not want to be corralled one way or another.” Readers delight in some subtle refutations of historian Niall Ferguson’s wrongheaded simplism.

It is in Puri’s sessions wading through the cultural gunge that we’re really piqued by a staunch and sassy evaluative conviction. Book critics reach for their garlic medallions when he writes that “quality in art is clearly subjective”, but a thematic harmony between China’s mind-fattening, atrophying app Tiktok and the insatiable “need for immediacy” that creators, consumers and politicians exhibit saves him from any bibliophilic lynch mob. When mentioning that “Hollywood has been at the cutting edge of special effects…and tying all this into promoting the pro-US and pro-Western messages”, readers are left to wonder what these latterly mentioned messages are. Not once in 385 fact-spangled pages does Puri care to adumbrate perhaps; the West’s sanctification of the individual, its aggressive defence of jurisprudence and its impartial judgement of voices from both the regal gantry and the cheap seats. For this theorist, the West seems to have benefitted wholeheartedly from fortuitous temporal winds.

The largest shortcoming of Westlessness is its tentative, pusillanimous, robotically ambivalent refusal to offer thoughts on the most likely and favourable outcomes as we canter into this century’s second wrathful quarter. What follows is a list of the timid cop-outs that Puri commissions. “It is distinctly possible that the value and appeal of adopting a partially Westernised identity will fluctuate” is beaten for caution by “let us wait and see what positive markers of identity association catch on in the future” which sounds positively pugilistic compared to “whether this is generational and subject to change is well worth pondering.” With such antlered aversion to risk-taking, and such eventually deplorable fence-sitting, we start to wonder about the strength of Samir’s convictions.

Westlessness is too learned to be maligned as amateurish, but it’s also too feeble to be venerated as a shatterer of received wisdom. There is an absence of salacious gossip for this reviewer’s cocktail parties. Secrets like “psst..China has a nuclear-powered shark…India makes a trillion dollars a day from cricket”. The prolegomena of flashcard history will only be of interest to Zoomers heretofore convinced that all observable reality began at the cutting of their umbilical cord. Plus, it has a Trump-shaped hole in its supposition that the United States and China will always be at ideological variance. From its dooming title and the scholarly aptitude of its author, we expect Westlessness to use some entropic superlatives - ‘will, ‘won’t’, ‘should’, ‘must’ etc. It’s a shame he was talked out of any prophecy by a platitudinous reticence.

Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull