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April 29 - May 20, 2018
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” —PHILIP K. DICK
People tend to regard the Trump moment—this post-truth, alternative facts moment—as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. In fact, what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of attitudes and instincts that have made America exceptional for its entire history—and really, from its prehistory.
No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press, and Protestantism was its first viral cultural phenomenon.
As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That’s the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.
One winter in the White House, President Jefferson performed an extraordinary act of revisionism: he cut up two copies of the New Testament, removing all references to miracles, including Christ’s resurrection, and called the reassembled result The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.
Like his pioneering predecessor Whitefield a century earlier, he understood that in America Christianity should be a kind of show business:
Joseph Smith was a quintessentially American figure. Whether he was a heartfelt believer in his delusions or among the greatest confidence men ever, his extreme audacity—his mind-boggling balls—is the American character ad absurdum.
“History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain allegedly said, “but it does rhyme.”
Thoreau epitomized this particular have-your-cake-and-eat-it American fantasy, a life in harmony with nature as long as it’s not too uncomfortable or inconvenient.
Practically in real time, Cody—no, Buffalo Bill!—turned news and history into entertainment, turned real-life figures of historic consequence (himself, his pal Wild Bill Hickok, his enemy Sitting Bull) into simulated versions of themselves, riding real horses and firing real guns outdoors.
Another moral of the Oz story, what the con man/wizard teaches the lion and scarecrow and tin man, is an underlying theme of this book: for Americans, wishfully believing that something is true, even when it’s false, makes it effectively true.
The younger generation in the 1960s, he decided, was defined “not, as I used to think, [by] their morality, political will and common sense,” but by their “religion,” their reflex to be “scornful of rationality.”
For the first half of the twentieth century, it was traditionalists in America, such as the conservative Christians, who despaired at how rationalism and modernity were taking over, reshaping minds, wrecking everything. But after World War II, the academic Establishment also developed second thoughts about reason.
Conservatives are correct in pointing out that the anything-goes relativism of the campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America, it helped enable extreme Christianities and consequential lunacies on the right—gun
Thus the era turned out to be a curious win-win for extreme Christianity in America. The manifestations of the new anything-goes paradigm that appalled them, such as the hippies and blasphemy and sexual looseness, provoked a backlash that made them more fervently “traditional.” Yet the anything-goes paradigm was simultaneously enabling their beliefs in magic to spread and become more extreme.
during an average week in 1969 and 1970, at least ten bombs were set off by the far left in America.
The Panthers’ self-conception, as a heavily armed and well-regulated militia ready to defend Oakland’s black community against the police, led quickly to a California law, sponsored by a Republican and signed by Governor Reagan, that made it illegal to carry loaded guns in public.
“The likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted,” they concluded, by two key pieces of our national character that derive from our particular Christian culture: “a propensity to attribute the source of unexplained or extraordinary events to unseen, intentional forces” and a weakness for “melodramatic narratives as explanations for prominent events, particularly those that interpret history relative to universal struggles between good and evil.”
“A fundamentalist,” the religious historian George Marsden famously said, “is an evangelical who is angry about something.”
In Fantasyland, purely about data is a phrase like mainstream and Establishment and consensus and rational and fact, meaning elitist, narrow, and blind to the disruptive truths.
In Austin a couple who ran a daycare center were accused by children of the standard horrors (including children airlifted to be raped elsewhere, abused by tigers and gorillas, babies fed to sharks) but with more chainsaws than usual.
As the incomes of middle- and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity; economic insecurity does correlate with greater religiosity; and for white Americans, greater religiosity does correlate with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, that’s a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.
In retrospect, the sudden change in the gun lobby in the late 1970s, from more or less flexible to absolutely hysterical, was a harbinger of the transformation of the entire right a generation later.
are we not already close to something like Turkey, officially secular but with a distinctly religious party in charge?
Today only about a quarter of Americans own guns—but the average owner has three or four. Fewer than eight million people, only 3 percent of all American adults, own roughly half the guns. Members of that tiny minority of superenthusiasts own an average of seventeen guns apiece.*1
Waiting to get what you want is a definition of maturity; demanding satisfaction this instant, on the other hand, is a defining behavior of seven-year-olds.
A major argument of this book is that Americans are not just exceptionally religious but that our dominant religion has become exceptionally literal and fantastical—childlike—during the last fifty years in particular.
The fantasies of perpetual youth, Kids “R” Us Syndrome, also appeared fifty years ago, when American adults started becoming more than ever like adolescents and children in our tastes and ways of thinking. These simultaneous spikes could be a coincidence, but they look to me like another case of cultural symbiosis.
After his election, another Times editorial granted that “Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody,” that the “breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity.”
Donald Trump is a pure Fantasyland being, its apotheosis. If he hadn’t run for president, I might not have mentioned him at all. But here he is, a stupendous Exhibit A. To describe him is practically to summarize this book.
“Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals,” because we live in a “world where fantasy is more real than reality,” Boorstin wrote. “Strictly speaking, there is no way to unmask an image. An image, like any other pseudo-event, becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.”
From 1967 through 2011, California was governed by former movie stars more than a third of the time, and one of them became president of the United States.
Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham—that a conspiracy consisting of “the press, the talk-show experts, the campaign strategists, the political parties, even the candidates themselves—has rigged the game,”
Most of the Americans who have recently been most certain that America is both wrecked and the best place ever call themselves Republicans.
Jefferson’s nemesis Alexander Hamilton hoped the Electoral College would do something similar every four years, that a sober, deliberative group could have the final say in case the People ever elected some unacceptable charlatan or demagogue with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity.”
The unprecedented and broadly shared affluence of our twentieth century—with its go-go blowout starting in the 1960s—was a prerequisite to Fantasyland, but the arrival of full Fantasyland was accompanied by the end of those economic glory days for most people.
As far as religion goes, then, America isn’t so much secularizing as splitting into two distinct societies, one more secular and reality-based, one much less so. Rationalism and reasonableness are gaining some ground, but the true believers, still the bigger cohort, are sticking to their guns. We are polarizing religiously the way we have been polarizing politically. As I’ve said, that’s not coincidental, it’s synergistic.
