Kurt Andersons’ Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History is an unsettling read for unsettling times. I picked Fantasyland off the shelf because just like every other American, I believe the country is “haywire.” I feel compelled to attempt to understand how we got here. Fantasyland proved an uncomfortable read.
“America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem hunting witches to Joseph Smith creating Mormonism, from P.T. Barnum to Henry David Thoreau, to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump.”
If you believe strongly that one end or another of today’s political spectrum has a corner on irrationality or pseudo-reality, prepare to be challenged by reading Fantasyland. To read that America was “founded by a nutty religious cult” which had more in common with the Middle Ages may be distant enough, but after deconstructing recent years Anderson asserts that “supernatural belief is the great American gateway to conspiracy belief” and an inflated tendency to “view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”
Those who believe America angled off the rails because of the academic relativism of the 1970s which set the stage for our “squishy” lack of judgement and who saw the cultural excesses of the Age of Aquarius angled us to the moral poverty that now infects us may enjoy how Fantasyland deconstructs such phenomenon as the UFO craze, Chariots of the Gods, The Power of Positive (magical) Thinking, themed restaurants, GMO fears, pseudo-health movements and Oprah.
America has always been entrepreneurial with reality, religion and entertainment, he points out. That same tendency has also made us more entrepreneurial with truth, and now facts. “I do think American adults have come to think more fundamentally like children, and that does get problematic.”
“Why are we like this?” asks Anderson in the introduction, “because we’re Americans, because being American means we can believe any damn thing we want, that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause and effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible, and the incredible credible.”
The acceleration is real. Anderson points out “before the Web, cockamamie ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or widely, so it was easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. We careen into increasingly fragmented perceptions. Before the Web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long hard work of hundreds of full -time militants” or a Stalin like leader.
Anderson makes a reader aware that we seem to have forgotten the common sense of our parents and grandparents, who as Hemmingway would say, “had a bullshit detector” and recognized a huckster or shyster, even if they might allow themselves to be amused for a turn. “America was always the modern country, the practical country, the country that solved problems, that inspired and pushed the rest of the world to cast off vestigial folk customs in favor of rational, sensible approaches to organizing society and life.” By the end of Fantasyland, one has to ask if America still qualifies for that distinction.
Lately, we each tend to attribute our country being unhinged to either Barack Obama or Donald Trump depending on which fantasies to which we ascribe. Alert to all who have been distracted, our ideals and commonality are being skewered while we infight—and disturbingly we increasingly have no language or common agreement from which to stand.
My intuition has been telling me that the current craziness must be more deeply rooted than any recent election cycle, and yes, I found confirmation in that idea in Fantasyland. But I picked up Andersons’ book hoping for a tidy line of thought to explain how we got from an acceptance of creative American wackiness that doesn’t “as our founding libertarian Thomas Jefferson put it, ‘pick my pocket or break my leg” to a series of intermingled delusions that today seem to threaten to unhinge the entire American experiment. Anderson dresses down just about any angle from which we stand watching, handicapped by our relativism, tolerance and delusions, our smug righteousness. He doesn’t exactly tell us how to unwind the Gordian knot, other than showing that many common historic manias did pass.
America has been charmed by charlatans aplenty, we pay good money for it. Hello, Hollywood. There was a time not so long ago that fantasy was understood as such and put in proper proportions. We have democratized foolishness with the internet. Trends that led to our exposure are exhaustingly accounted in Andersons’ 462-page history of the U.S. We have leveraged fantasy, entering it willingly to create our own realities, and now reality is really not shared.
One other difference that makes today so acute Anderson points out is that we have never had a President so adept at turning us on the institutions of this country, and so effectively on ourselves. One might just begin to feel we need an authoritarian leader to straighten this all out for us. As Anderson says, “Despite the nonstop lies and obvious fantasies –rather because of them—Donald Trump was elected president.” So many lies are being tweeted that it is difficult to know which ones to address. We don’t even know which direction to point.
We have lost the vertical hold (sorry millennials, Google it), to which deceased Senator Monyhan repeatedly addressed to in the 1980s and 1990s that “people were entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.” As Anderson quips, “because until then (pre-Internet 1990s), it hadn’t seemed like a serious problem in America.” The book expansively reveals otherwise.
There is nothing “feel good” about Fantasyland. That is kind of the point. We retreat too quickly to a child-like need for instant gratification today as adults whether in our personal lives or in our political lives. We are not good at being uncomfortable and getting to know each other with our warts. We don’t listen long-and-hard enough to question ourselves and perhaps arrive at a hard-earned truth. Do we even know how to search for truth outside of the internet? We would rather have it fed to us. And it is being fed to us. The book is a little like that disturbing professor you had in philosophy or a foundational science class who kept asking, “how do you know that you know that?”
And that laziness, my friends, is one whopper of an opportunity to which much of our modern world has been shaped, and business, politics, media, are all enabling our continued drive to fantasy. There is more money to be made in our fantasy than in our reality.
What do I think about the prism through which Andersons’ Fantasyland has shed light on American history? To quote Will in the movie “Good Will Hunting” talking about Howard Zinn A Peoples History of the United States, “It’ll knock your socks off.”
