Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

Still, I couldn’t read Gilbert Seldes’s 1928 takedown of America’s New Age moment around 1900 and not feel busted. “What then could be the appeal to Americans,” he wrote when he was thirty-five, “of yoga…and the other forms of oriental mysticism?” Maybe it was “that satiety had set in, after all our grasping and possessing, and that we wished to rid ourselves of our encumbrances….Mysticism would then be our escape from the implications of our own materialistic philosophy.” But…not really. Instead, Seldes says, upscale America’s original embrace of yoga and the like “served actually to soothe exasperated nerves” for people who had not the faintest intention of giving up the world. Yoga was for them a mystic way of renouncing whatever was irritating and preserving whatever was pleasing. It was an elaborate game of pretense by which noisy people went into silence and distracted people imagined that they were concentrating. The glamour of renunciation suffused the picture which they had of themselves. Actually nothing was renounced….One was alone with the mysterious spirit and, breathing in a refined way, one returned to conquer the world.