Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On Faithful Truthiness

Umberto Eco spotted it first in the 1980’s: The United States exists in a condition of hyperreality, within which the authentic cannot be distinguished easily from the fake (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...). In fact the fake is preferred to the authentic: it costs less, it’s more accessible, and its easier to clean. But Alexis de Tocqueville sensed it as a possibility 150 years earlier in his experience of the enthusiastic insincerity (or insincere enthusiasm; its difficult to distinguish) of the population (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...). Americans, who never had a terribly firm grip on their perceptions of the world, were showing clear signs of profound and destructive self-delusion about things like slavery and the sustainability of a polity based on mutual regard. Andersen’s book provides confirmation of Eco’s hypothesis, and a rather comprehensive history, perhaps more comprehensive than necessary, to justify de Tocqueville’s suspicions.

Andersen’s book is a study in American cultural epistemology. Epistemology is the study of the validity of the stories we tell ourselves about the world. The first principle of epistemology is that the map is not the territory. In other words, no matter how convincing, or plausible, or logical, or factually supported, whatever story we tell ourselves about the way the world is, is just that: a story. And the story is not reality. The story remains a story. And no story is worth dying, or killing, for. Americans, more than any other people on the planet have difficulty is grasping this principle and its import. There is no second principle.

Gullibility is the result of failure to pay heed to this principle. Folk get confused. As Mark Twain noticed, they substitute feeling for thinking, which creates a hell of a mess. American gullibility is unbounded according to Andersen. If you print it in the tabloid journals, or say it on the AM radio stations or cable television channels, or publish it on the internet media, they will come. Not everyone will come at once but, according to reliable statistics, the majority of Americans believe any number of bizarre and unfounded nonsense. Abe Lincoln got it wrong: Most Americans can be fooled most of the time, even if its rarely by the same huckster. Some get hobbled by the gun lobbyists; others worry about the spread of satanism. Sometimes an individual collects a number of such fantasies. He’s the obvious nutcase. But those with a more limited portfolio - say Obama birthers who are convinced that WWF wrestling isn’t rigged, and who believe that Epstein was murdered by Hillary - are just normal.

Perhaps there is a genetic component in the American propensity for wild fantasy. The country has been traditionally ‘sold’ elsewhere as one sort of paradise or another. Inherited gullibility in prospective immigrants might well be a factor in succumbing to the hype. Andersen quotes the historian and onetime Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, suggesting that “American civilization [has] been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe in advertising.” Perhaps the concentration of such a characteristic is the real origin of Madison Avenue.

But given the likely dilution of the American gene pool over centuries, some other explanation seems necessary. Andersen tends toward the theory that Americans have been drinking their own ideological bathwater for so long that they actually believe that they have the right to believe anything they want to just because they can. Of course the corollary to this, as John dos Passos pointed out, is that they also believe that their neighbour has no right to know more than they do.

This would explain the perennial American anti-intellectualism and the equation of expert knowledge with dictatorial power (See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...). Americans resent knowledge about the world that they don’t have. They do not consider the hard-won knowledge of others through scholarship or dedicated experience to be equivalent to their own quick-fire insight and casual explanation about a situation. This is their peculiar version of Occam’s razor: ‘if it hasn’t occurred to me before, it’s not worth knowing about.’ Ayn Rand’s strange philosophy of the lonely and persecuted corporate hero is typical of this culture and explains her popularity, even among intellectuals (or perhaps especially among intellectuals since their trade is in ideas, mainly their own).

Trump of course is the perfect cultural as well as political representative of his fellows. He resents and rejects any factual assertions not his own. He constructs fantasies continuously and publicly. This behaviour is considered not just acceptable but also admirable by about half the country. They live in his stories. After all, they had suspected for years that immigrants were the source of the country’s drug problems, that black people have themselves to blame for racism, that the Christian religion is under attack, that white folk are treated like second-class citizens. Trump confirms their every casual insight worked out laboriously over straight-talking in the bar, the diner, the bible study group. Or for that matter at the country club poolside and in the corporate boardroom. American gullibility is not class-conscious. Anti-vaxxers, neo-libbers, creationists are generally better formally educated but equally impervious to rational discussion.

Andersen thinks that the mere availability of stories in America is part of the problem. This of course is nonsense. Every literate culture produces fiction. Whatever stories are told in America are told round the world, and have been for quite some decades, if not centuries. Rather, Americans are unique because they believe the stories that they hear and tell are not just true but real. They have no determinate criteria for truth other than their ‘gut;’ but that’s enough. Truth demands faith, and faith implies intransigence. There can be no compromise, no modification of the truth. Truth is sacred, that is to say, the affirmation of the implausible stories of politicians, businessmen, and media personalities are a quasi-religious duty. Such faith naturally implies that learning is not possible. When the truth is possessed, it no longer need be sought. And error, that is the object of the faith of others, has no right.

Andersen does more than imply that the Christian religion, particularly Protestantism, has a lot to answer for in shaping this peculiar obduracy of the American mind. But what he doesn’t see is that it is not the specific Christian doctrines or their variants that are central to the American attitude of obstinate adherence to silliness; it is the presumption that faith itself is a virtue appropriate to a democratic society. Unwavering, unthinking faith in one’s interpretation of authorised texts is easily transferable into similar idiosyncratic faith in the ideals and institutions of American politics and civil life. Such faith, it turns out, is inimical to the democratic political process as well as to the civil cohesion of the country.

Faith fragments any society, except where its particular tenets are imposed by force. And this, of course, is precisely what the evangelicals and right-wing pundits would like to do today - by law if possible but through violence if necessary. This is the essential logic of faith: Truth must prevail over reality. But secularists and the Left have also been engaged in the same faith-based game for as long as the country has existed. “We hold these truths to be self-evident...” has proven a rather dangerous Deist conceit. Nothing about America is self-evident except the willingness to insist what that might be against one’s neighbour.

I know, I know: not all Americans are like this; and only 48% of the population voted for Trump. But the unit of analysis in Andersen’s book and my comments is not the individual American but the collective culture of America. This is a culture dominated by ideologies, religious and secular stories which appear to be popular to the extent they are absurd, and in which absurdists have faith. In a democratic society, the absurdists, as swing voters, have come to decide elections. They also sell well in a society that appears bored with itself. It is perhaps a central American fantasy that these people are marginal in the culture. The message of Andersen’s book is that they are not and have never been. They are what the place is built on and run by - its true believers.

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