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May 29, 2019 - June 11, 2020
The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control.
Before the Internet, crackpots were mostly isolated and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the Web, just like actual news. Now all the fantasies look real.
Over time the patches of unreality take up more and more space in our lives. Eventually the whole lawn becomes AstroTurf. We stop registering the differences between simulated and authentic, real and unreal.
In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.
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.
The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.
It was inconvenient that humans already inhabited the northern New World. However, Hakluyt reported that the natives were “people good and of a gentle and amiable nature, which willingly will obey.”
Four years later the several dozen Leiden ultra-Puritans sailed away from corrupt, contentious Europe for this latest Edenic piece of the New World, to create their New Jerusalem in New England. In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.
If you’re fanatical enough about enacting and enforcing your fiction, it becomes indistinguishable from nonfiction.
Fantasyland is both a deliriously happy and nightmarishly scary place.
In Europe, the learned had entered The Age of Reason. In the New World, however, unreason had made a ferocious comeback.
THE BIG PIECE of secular conventional wisdom about Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.
For Protestants as for Americans—well north of 90 percent of colonial Americans were Protestant—persecuted righteousness was central to their self-identities.
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.
Jefferson himself kept up appearances by attending church but instructed his seventeen-year-old nephew to “question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”
When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”
“The Enlightenment was as much about rejecting the claims of reason and of rational choice as it was about upholding them.”
“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.” —MARK TWAIN,
We started to believe attractive falsehoods about our founding. Successful leaders had been glorified always, but America’s mythologizing happened immediately and had a particular sanctimonious flavor.
the new American way: it was awesome, it was democratic, you’re a winner if you believe you’re a winner.
There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America….
But it turned out that a lot of Americans, being Americans, still wanted a promise of the adventure tale to end all adventure tales. They wanted to see Jesus for real, here on Earth, sooner rather than later, actually leading them in a sensational battle against monsters from Hell, a war they were guaranteed to win.
Religious insanity is very common in the United States.”
Looking back from the present, stories of forgotten pseudoscientific medical fads—there are dozens, hundreds—reassure us that the authentic eventually drives out the wishful and fake.
abortifacients.
abortifacient /əˌbôrdəˈfāSHənt / ‹Medicine› I. adjective (chiefly of a drug) causing abortion. II. noun an abortifacient drug.
In a single generation, Americans came up with the terms holy roller, double-cross, confidence man, bunkum, and sucker.
caveat emptor,
caveat emptor /ˌkavēˌät ˈem(p)ˌtôr/ I. noun the principle that the buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods before a purchase is made.– origin early 16th cent.: Latin, literally ‘let the buyer beware.’
when the word entered English in the 1800s, entrepreneur was a synonym for showman or impresario, a creator and promoter of spectacles.
“I know of no country where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men,” Tocqueville observed. “Love of money is either the chief or secondary motive in everything Americans do.”
“Americans are, among other things, prone to be hustlers,”
Americans, predisposed to believe in bonanzas and
their own special luckiness, were not really learning the hard lessons of economic booms and busts.
Christian religiosity itself, in particular our pseudo-hyperrational kind, amounts to belief in the grandest and greatest conspiracy of all: God the mastermind plotting and executing His all-encompassing scheme, assisted by a team of co-conspirators, the angels and prophets.
The illusion of American omnipotence…easily leads to a fear of un-American omnipotence.
Skepticism, after all, is an antonym for credulity. But when both are robust and overheated, they can fuse into conspiracy-mindedness. Take nothing on faith—except that the truth is deliberately hidden and can be discovered and precisely diagrammed.
The great irony, as Davis noted, was that in America, “actual conspiracies from Aaron Burr to the American Communist Party have seldom been as significant social realities as the movements against alleged conspiratorial groups.”
The effect of the American environment…was to break down commonsense distinctions between art and life.”
Americans living in towns and cities, in order to feel truly, virtuously American, needed nearby reminders of wild nature, needed to pretend they were pioneers living at the edge of the untamed.
efflorescing
reach an optimum stage of development; blossom
men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
These cheap daily papers didn’t scruple about the advertising they published, and they had loose standards of accuracy and truth in their news reports as well. They were beacons of a new American audacity about blurring and erasing the lines between factual truth and entertaining make-believe.
“the perfect good-nature with which the American public submits to a clever humbug.”
simulacra
simulacrum /ˌsimyəˈlākrəm ˌsimyəˈlakrəm/ I. noun 1. an image or representation of someone or something
imprimatur.
imprimatur /ˌimprəˈmädər imˈpriməˌt(y)o͝or/ I. noun 2. [in sing.]—a person's acceptance or guarantee that something is of a good standard • the original LP enjoyed the imprimatur of the composer.– origin mid 17th cent.: from Latin, ‘let it be printed’ from the verb imprimere
“The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.” —H. L. MENCKEN, in the Baltimore Evening Sun (1925)
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that states and towns could legally require citizens to be vaccinated against smallpox and other infectious diseases—that Americans’ constitutional right to believe and promote whatever they wished did not give “an absolute right in each person to be, in all times and in all circumstances, wholly free from restraint.”
During World War I, people of German ancestry became suspect. Nearly one in ten Americans was a German immigrant or the child of one. There were riots, a lynching, and between 1910 and 1920, the miraculous disappearance of almost a million German-born Americans from the census rolls.
In the 1920s he underwrote the U.S. publication of a half-million copies. He also conceived and published a four-volume set called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem; the young Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler read the German translation and became Henry Ford superfans. But after Americans condemned Ford and started boycotting his company, he promptly apologized and backed off, and U.S. anti-Semitism began its steady twentieth-century decline.
Henry Ford
The Birth of a Nation, a shameless three-hour-long piece of propaganda for the mythical Old South and its Ku Klux Klan redeemers. It was the first movie to be shown at the White House, and it played in New York City for almost a year.
At its peak in the early 1920s, probably 5 percent of white American men were in the KKK.
