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

by Kurt Andersen

I’m agnostic about God, always ready but never expecting to be persuaded.*6 America’s tiny population of agnostics and atheists is growing briskly, doubling in the last decade to 7 percent. Back in 1972, the entire nonreligious fraction of Americans, disbelievers plus doubters plus nothing-in-particulars, was just 5 percent—and now it’s 23 percent. (That’s partly a function of education. Almost half of Americans who didn’t get beyond high school think every bit of the Bible is literally true, while only one in six college graduates do.)

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.

Instead of the Puritans’ shining city upon a hill, a newly invented model society to which the rest of the world should aspire, we’ve become a warts-and-all model of the messy, mistrustful rest of the whole world—split between cosmopolitan seculars and tribal fundamentalists, between educated people hopeful about possible futures and others desperate to return to some dreamy past.

“Keeping an open mind is a virtue,” Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but “not so open that your brains fall out….I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” That was twenty years ago.

then I look at the rise and fall of ancient Greece. The seven centuries of Greek civilization are divided into three eras—the Archaic, then the Classical, then the Hellenistic. During the first, the one depicted by Homer, Greeks’ understanding of existence defaulted to supernaturalism and the irrational. Then suddenly science and literature and all the superstar geniuses emerged—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—in the period we canonize as “ancient Greece.” But that astonishing era lasted less than two centuries, after which Athens returned to astrology and magical cures and alchemy, the end. Why? According to The Greeks and the Irrational, by the Oxford classicist Eric Dodd, it was because they finally found freedom too scary, frightened by the new idea that their lives and fates weren’t predestined or managed by gods and they really were on their own. Maybe America’s Classical period has also lasted two centuries, 1800 to 2000, give or take a few decades on each end.

I haven’t abandoned hope. Even as we’ve entered this winter of foolishness and darkness, when too many Americans are losing their grip on reason and reality, it has been an epoch of astonishing hope and light as well.*10 During these same last three decades, Americans accomplished the miracle of reducing murders and other violent crime by more than half. We decoded the human genome, elected an African-American president, recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion years ago, and created Beloved, The Simpsons, Goodfellas, Angels in America, The Wire, The Colbert Report, Transparent, Hamilton, and, in my extended family alone, a dozen excellent babies. Since 1980, the fraction of Earth’s people living in extreme poverty has plummeted from more than 40 percent to 10 percent. I do despair of our devolution toward unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.

We need to adopt a guiding principle, based on those aphorisms of Daniel Moynihan and Thomas Jefferson I’ve quoted so often: You’re entitled to your own opinions and your own fantasies, but not your own facts—especially if your fantastical facts hurt people.

According to a 2014 Pew survey, the Americans who most frequently “feel a deep sense of wonder about the universe” are agnostics.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was…like the present period.”