Fantasyland 9. Myths and infotainment

Posted on August 28, 2018 by

Preface. This is the last of the Fantasyland review series.

Links to the 9 parts of this book review:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

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Kurt Andersen. 2017. Fantasyland. How America Went Haywire.  A 500-Year History. Random House.

The Gold Rush: the start of impossible dreams, luck, and the shape of reality

For Americans, I believe, the Gold Rush was an inflection point, permanently changing the way we thought about impossible dreams and luck and the shape of reality. Maybe there would be an eternal heavenly reward, but life right here could become a fabulous romance, reality as marvelous as any tall tale. Personal reinvention was not just theoretically possible but suddenly happening wholesale.

Gold in California resurrected the distinctly un-Puritan ambition of the first Virginia settlers—the individual and piratical freedom to grab for instant wealth, with little or no adult supervision.

Right around the time Tocqueville arrived and the Gold Rush happened, its meaning expanded to encompass people starting every sort of business. “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.

The myth of the South: how Southerners came to think of themselves as civilized gentlemen and ladies who had been opposed forever by the same breed of unromantic fanatics

Following the first colonists in Virginia, the ones whose dreams of gold came to nothing, a generation of aristocrats arrived from England with titles to large American estates. They came because they’d been on the losing side in the English Civil War against…the Puritans. Just as Puritan was originally a slur against Protestants, the Puritans in turn had denigrated their opponents as imperious and snobbish Cavaliers, who adopted the name themselves. The transplanted Southern Cavaliers set about re-creating feudal Olde England in the New World, with black slaves instead of white serfs.

By the 1800s, of course, not many Southerners were either well-to-do or aristocratic, but the myth endured. And as the North grew still more northern—urban, calculating, censorious, grasping—and started phasing out slavery, the Southern myth was fomented and believed more devoutly than ever.

Southerners’ fictionalized self-conception was encouraged and shaped for decades by novels that enshrined the Cavalier myth and depicted the plantation system as idyllic.  Swallow Barn, published in 1832, was immensely popular. “I am quite sure they could never become a happier people than I find them here,” the narrator says of the fictional slaves on a Virginia plantation. “No tribe of people has ever passed from barbarism to civilization whose…progress has been more secure from harm, more genial to their character, or better supplied with mild and beneficent guardianship, adapted to the actual state of their intellectual feebleness, than the Negroes of Swallow Barn.

Walter Scott’s books—such as Ivanhoe, Waverley, and Woodstock, or The Cavalier—are overwrought, sentimental historical fictions of English and Scottish knights and lords and ladies of centuries past. There had never been an author more popular. He published a new novel every 18 months between 1814 and 1832, just as Southerners became desperate to justify and romanticize their slave-based neo-feudalism.

Mark Twain noticed this, and wrote in Life on the Mississippi: “Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments,” and the change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter’s influence than to that of any other thing or person. By his single might [he] checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion;…with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs…and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote….It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war…. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.

Twain’s conclusion still bears repeating: a particular set of historical fictions and fantasies led to secession and Civil War.

Southerners were driven by nostalgia for the time before slavery started becoming untenable. The overriding theme of the first great popular songwriter, Stephen Foster, was nostalgia for a South that he imagined from up north in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Southern Nostalgia brings the KKK into being

Robert Love Taylor, Tennessee’s former governor and future U.S. senator, lectured throughout the country on the glories of the Old South. “Every sunrise of summer was greeted by the laughter and songs of the darkies as they gathered in gangs and went forth in every direction to begin the labors of the day,” he’d say. “I never shall forget the white-columned mansions rising in cool, spreading groves. And stretching away to the horizon were the cotton fields, alive with the toiling slaves, who, without a single care to burden their hearts, sang as they toiled from early morn till close of day.” This was typical of the treacly, long-sigh fantasy visions of Old Dixie being propagated in the early 1900s.

In 1915 the director D. W. Griffith released a motion picture that was more cinematically ambitious, sophisticated, and compelling than any so far—the movie of the year, of the decade, hugely profitable. It was The Birth of a Nation, a shameless three-hour-long piece of propaganda for the mythical Old South and its Ku Klux Klan redeemers.

During the next decade, the popularity of the revived Klan exploded. Along with the hideous nostalgia for unquestioned white supremacy,

As a million and a half black people migrated from South to North during the 1910s and ’20s, four of the five states with the largest Klan memberships were Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. At its peak in the early 1920s, probably 5 percent of white American men were in the KKK. The meteoric rise and fall of the Klan aside, white Southerners’ myth of their own special goodness—honorable, honest, humane, and civilized guardians of tradition, unlike the soulless Yankees—did not wither. It endured in new forms in the new century, with Daddy’s and Granddaddy’s Civil War a noble and glorious Lost Cause that tragically failed to preserve their antebellum golden age. Slavery qua slavery? No, no, no, the war hadn’t really been about that; slavery was a detail. In fact, white Southerners had fought the war to defend their right as Americans to believe anything they wanted to believe, even an unsustainable fantasy, even if it meant treating a class of humanity as nonhuman.

Slavery’s spread was stopped, but not the nationwide spread of certain unfortunate Southern habits of mind, along with increasingly berserk versions of Christianity.

Mythologizing of American Leaders and others

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 best-known fact about Washington’s first 45 years, concerning the cherry tree—“I can’t tell a lie, Pa…. I did cut it with my hatchet”—was a lie in a bestselling biography that appeared months after he died. One of the best-known facts about his war service, the time he knelt in prayer at Valley Forge, was almost certainly untrue.

A bestselling work of fiction in the 1800s, The Legends of the American Revolution, 1776, included a story called “The Fourth of July, 1776.” A quasi-angel—“a tall slender man…dressed in a dark robe”—mysteriously appears among the Founders in Philadelphia and delivers a five-minute speech (“God has given America to be free!”) that makes them finally stop arguing and sign the Declaration. Then he mysteriously disappears. Americans from across the religious spectrum chose to regard that fantasy as historical fact, and they still do today.

As the Yale religious historian Jon Butler has written, the early United States was an “antebellum spiritual hothouse,” Christian faith blending freely with folk magic—belief in the occult, clairvoyance, shamanic healing, and prophetic dreams, much of it old folk superstition no longer constrained by Puritan doctrine and order. America was ripe for and rife with magical thinking of every kind.

Boone lived 37 years as a celebrity, surviving and thriving on the edge of the American wilderness as he made it progressively less wild, more pastoral. His life, authentic and extraordinary but also fictionalized even as he lived it, became for his fellow citizens a real-time, real-life fantasy of the ultimate American Natural Man, an early version of the kind of super-celebrity that Buffalo Bill would fictionalize and monetize a half-century after Boone died.

The American pastoral ideal also grew out of the new Christianity that considered itself more perfect because it was more pure and primitive. Americans’ loathing of Catholicism and later of monarchy devolved into a loathing of Europe and of cities as well. All of which made it easier for Americans to turn the lemon of the New World—the horrifying wilderness—into lemonade, to make the new nation one in which (tamed) nature was ever present. Americans wanted it both ways, the prosperity and comfort that required towns and cities and factories and railroads, but also the picturesque fantasy that one was still Boone-like, living near where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play.

Henry David Thoreau invented a certain kind of entitled, upper-middle-class extended adolescence. After college he hung around the nice Boston suburb where he’d grown up, taught some school, wrote the occasional essay, networked, became personal assistant and protégé to a famous local writer (Ralph Waldo Emerson), decided eating meat was bad,

Then, at 27, in 1844, he hatched a high-concept plan for a project that epitomized the pastoral fantasy that American suburbanites and hippies and country-home owners have reenacted ever since. On a wooded lot that Emerson owned, young Henry built a one-room cabin. He moved in on the Fourth of July—nice touch—and imagined he was an American hinter-lander, rustic and self-reliant, fully communing with nature, pure and virtuous.

Then, at 27, in 1844, he hatched a high-concept plan for a project that epitomized the pastoral fantasy that American suburbanites and hippies and country-home owners have reenacted ever since. On a wooded lot that Emerson owned, young Henry built a one-room cabin. He moved in on the Fourth of July—nice touch—and imagined he was an American hinter-lander, rustic and self-reliant, fully communing with nature, pure and virtuous.

Walden was the book of pensées he published chronicling his two years “in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself…and earned my living by the labor of my hands only….I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life….Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow—no gate—no front-yard—and no path to the civilized world.

In fact, his cabin, which his friends helped him build, was barely a half-hour walk from the prosperous old town where his mom and dad and a couple of thousand other people lived, and only a seventeen-mile trip on the new railroad from the third-largest city in America.

When Thoreau left Walden Pond to spend a couple of weeks in the true wilderness of northern Maine, he was horrified—“grim and wild,” “vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature.” After 800 days living deep and sucking out all the marrow of existence, he returned to town, helping run his father’s pencil-making business, living for the rest of his life at his parents’ big house on Main Street. 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.

In addition, Thoreau believed in fairies and astrology and thought the full moon enabled him to have out-of-body experiences. He and Emerson were Transcendentalists, the lightly Asian-flavored link between the bland, educated Protestantism of the American Enlightenment and the spicy potluck animism and mysticism efflorescing when I first read Walden. “Standing on the bare ground,” Emerson told an audience shortly before Thoreau published Walden, “my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifting into empty space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Humans are essentially good. All creation exists in a magnificent web of interconnection. Nature is God and God is nature. What’s not to like?

‘Live in the all,’?” Melville wrote to Hawthorne. What nonsense!… This “all” feeling…there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

Citizens in the 1800s with idiosyncratic ideals—political, economic, nutritional, sexual—set out into the countryside to form better, more perfect micro-nations within their new nation. More than a hundred utopian communities were established across the American countryside during the First Great Delirium.

The other settlements ranged in size from a dozen to hundreds of people, ridiculous and fascinating and adorable American fantasias. Except for the free-love Oneida Community, which had multiple branches in the Northeast and lasted for decades before morphing into a major cutlery and tableware company, they were short-lived—but in the late 1960s, at the birth of modern American Fantasyland, they reincarnated as communes.

The American Dream required living in a little house on the prairie, in the big woods, on the banks of a creek or shores of a lake. Or rather, as the 20th century proceeded, in some plausible facsimile of such a place. It was a perfect amalgam, nostalgia for the pioneer life along with a sense of spiritual purity. And so, going on two centuries after Thoreau played backwoodsman, most Americans today live in suburbs.

Fake News

The New York Sun was the great pioneer penny paper, and in 1835 it published an extraordinary six-part, 16,000-word series. Every day for a week, a battalion of newsboys—also an invention of the two-year-old Sun—shouted the extraordinary news on the streets of America’s largest city: famous astronomers at a new super powerful telescope in South Africa had discovered life on the moon! The moon had forests, oceans, lakes, rivers, birds, tiny bison and zebras, blue unicorns, giant shellfish, beavers walking upright and carrying young in their paws.  To venture to express a doubt of the genuineness of the great lunar discoveries, was considered almost as heinous a sin as to question the truth of revelation.

Three years later, long after the story had been exposed as an entirely fictional hoax, a New York writer remarked that “very many in our city [still] regard those revelations with more of reverence and confidence than any of the established truths in physics.

The second founder of infotainment

Barnum was America’s first great commercial blurrer of truth and make-believe, the founder of infotainment, but the second was Cody.

The true story of Cody’s life is like a work of fiction. For a dozen years, from boyhood into young manhood, he was a scout, soldier, buffalo hunter, and Pony Express rider on the Plains and in the West. Then at 23e, he featured as the title character in a highly fictionalized “true” story, “Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men,” published in a New York newspaper. And starting at twenty-six, the year he won the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading a squad of cavalry against some Sioux, Cody became a theatrical performer: he played himself in a play called Scouts of the Prairie—written by the author of the earlier newspaper story, who also published dime novels about Cody. Buffalo Bill had become a star. In his late twenties, he started publishing his own dime novels starring himself, and he toured the East in more theatrical productions playing Buffalo Bill—even as he continued working off and on in the far West as an Indian fighter.

In the summer of 1876, three weeks after General George Custer’s catastrophic defeat, Cody was riding the Plains with the army a few hundred miles to the southeast of Little Bighorn. One day, wearing his Buffalo Bill stage outfit—black velvet, red and lace trim, silver buttons—he killed and scalped a Cheyenne warrior called Yellow Hair. Within a few months, Cody was back east, touring a new play based on that event, The Red Right Hand; or Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer. Yellow Hair’s weapons and scalp were exhibited in each town where the show played. According to Cody, the show provided “ample opportunity to give a noisy, rattling, gunpowder entertainment, and to present a succession of scenes in the late Indian war.” Buffalo Bill was thirty, and from then on, for forty more years, he devoted himself exclusively to live-action cartoon portrayals of the “settlement” of the West.

Cody’s own extraordinarily successful traveling pageant, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, featured Indians playing Indians and white performers playing soldiers and settlers. Each reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand was immediately followed by Buffalo Bill—the actual person—riding in to reenact his killing of a particular Indian, played by an Indian. The show started in Omaha, in eastern Nebraska, in 1883; in the western part of the state, the Indian Wars continued. Cody enlisted the Lakota Sioux chief Sitting Bull, who’d been one of the commanders of the forces at Little Bighorn, to be his co-star.

His Wild West was the prototype from which movie westerns evolved. But the shows were even more importantly peculiar and unprecedented, a key milestone in our national evolution. 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.

During the 19th century, a new form of nostalgia emerged as an important tic in Americans’ psychology, an imaginary homesickness for places and times the nostalgists had never experienced and that had in some cases never existed. In politics, just when Americans started using the phrase olden times, Democrats were driven by nostalgia for the America of their youth, before large-scale capitalism.   Fenimore Cooper, the first famous American novelist, specialized in nostalgia for the earlier American wilderness, and Twain wrote his greatest books about the bygone America of his antebellum youth. So by the time Buffalo Bill became a professional fabulist in the 1870s, Americans were completely ready to accept the virtual reality of his Wild West tableaus. The nostalgia he stoked and served was new in several ways. It was jolly, giddy.

It was instantaneous. It was also anticipatory, nostalgia for the end of a western frontier that hadn’t yet ended—like the nostalgia of Southerners years before the Old South passed away. Buffalo Bill distilled the previous half-century of the Old West into a montage using actual participants and artifacts, for audiences who had mostly never been west of the Mississippi. Forever and everywhere in the world, the popular imagination tends to blur reality and fantasy over time, but now the two were being immediately and systematically fused.

We’d been a rough frontier nation the day before yesterday. From the turn of the century through the 1920s, new spiritual fads and kooky religious denominations arose, along with aversion to migrating hordes—Italians and Jews over from Europe, African-Americans up from the South. But to the self-confident mainstream, all those reactionary outbursts looked like last gasps, rear-guard actions by primitives, exceptions to smart-set modernity that proved the rule.

But in America, and pretty much only in America, that rationalism was viscerally opposed by lots and lots of people who didn’t cotton to the inrushing newness—fancy foreign art and ideas, jazz, movies, sexual looseness, racial equality, women’s suffrage—let alone science that contradicted their understanding of the first book of the Bible.

TV, movies, video-games, and other media encouraged fantasy even more

Starting in the 1900s, from coast to coast and seven days a week, Americans more than anyone on Earth could immerse in the virtuosic fantasies created and sold by show business and the media. This was a new condition. As we spent more and more fabulous hours engaged in the knowing and willing suspension of disbelief, experiencing the unreal as real, we became more habituated to suspending disbelief unconsciously and involuntarily as well.

My argument here is that movies (and then television, and then videogames and video of all kinds) were a powerful and unprecedented solvent of the mental barriers between real and unreal—not that that was Hollywood’s explicit intent

Americans were now being entertained and fooled and fed fantasy on several fronts. Such as advertising. Marketing had just acquired its modern meaning, and advertise, until recently a general term for publishing information, came to mean only the paid promotion of products (and ideas and people) by whatever mix of facts and fiction and dazzle did the trick and made the sale. Advertising became ubiquitous, produced by a huge, formal, American-dominated industry essential to almost every other industry. Patent medicines had been fantasy products advertised as cures for serious problems, but in the twentieth century, advertising gave mundane problems like hygiene new fantasy subtexts

Newspapers and most magazines had always sold advertising space, but the ads had been pretty strictly informational, small and printed in small type, and not the main revenue source for most publications—until the 1900s.

Even cheap newspapers cost a few cents. So when the magical new medium of radio came along, because there was no way to charge listeners, its founding American impresarios required some time to figure out a business model. The wheel they reinvented was the medicine show: they could broadcast a mixture of entertaining fiction (Amos ’n’ Andy, Mystery House, Let’s Pretend) and occasional information (news) and give it all away, because their actual business would be—d’oh!—charging companies to broadcast mixtures of information and entertaining fiction in the form of advertisements.

For the first time, most of the most famous Americans were not politicians or military men or writers or painters but actors—people renowned for pretending to be people they weren’t.

 

 

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Fantasyland 8. Religion the main factor in America’s descent into the darkness of superstition

Posted on August 26, 2018 by

[ This is the 8th of nine posts about Fantasyland.  Andersen believes all of the madness and superstition in America originally springs from our history of religiosity.

The scariest part of the insanity is that there are Christians trying  to make Armageddon happen ASAP so that they can be raptured into the sky and bring Jesus back, as depicted in the fictional Left Behind series (75 million sold). Now millions of Pentecostals, fundamentalists, evangelists, and charismatics (PEFC) believe the Antichrist is an actual person, who will unite the entire world under a satanic religion. So many of thought Obama was the antichrist that snopes.com felt compelled to state that this was false, and why it was false (for starters, Revelations never mentions an anti-Christ).  

It is also appalling is that religious leaders like Billy Graham and political leaders like President Reagan spoke many times about the end times being near. And the media was silent.

In the news:

2023 US businessman is wannabe ‘warlord’ of secretive far-right men’s network  The founder and sponsor of a far-right network of secretive, men-only, invitation-only fraternal lodges in the US is a former industrialist who has frequently speculated about his future as a warlord after the collapse of America. Heidi Beirich is co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism and an expert of the far right. She characterized the rhetoric on the website as “palingenetic ultranationalism”, a feature of fascism that proposes a revolution as a means of national rebirth.

The “possibilities involving violence” that APNs might face, Haywood writes include “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government, or some subset or remnant of it”. Further on, Haywood writes: “At this moment I preside over what amounts to a extended, quite sizeable, compound, which when complete I like to say, accurately, will be impervious to anything but direct organized military attack”, adding that “it requires a group of men to make it work … what I call ‘shooters’ – say fifteen able-bodied, and adequately trained, men.” These “shooters”, Haywood explains, “can operate my compound, both defensively and administratively”, meanwhile, “I have the personality, and skills, to lead such a group.”

Links to the 9 parts of this book review:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Kurt Andersen. 2017. Fantasyland. How America Went Haywire.  A 500-Year History. Random House.

Mainline Catholics and Protestants, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and so on are now outnumbered 3 to 1 by, as Tom Wolfe put it, “a little Hallelujah!…Praise God!..ululation, visions, holy rolling, and other non and anti-rational practices”.  Nearly all evangelical denominations are suffused with holy-roller, speaking in tongues, and faith healing.

By the 1980s, 40% of Americans were watching evangelical, fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and charismatic religious shows on TV. The audience for Pat Robertson’s show “the 700 club” was 7 million, three times larger than Fox today.

Christians make a huge deal about atheism, but only 7% of people were in 2014. Americans are more religious than any other developed nation with 80% saying they NEVER DOUBT the existence of god, and about 90% who believe in some sort of “universal spirit”.

The reason the Roman Catholic Church is far more sane than the Protestant churches is because “tenured grown-ups, from the Vatican on down, have consistently been in command, tamping down and pinching off undesirable offshoots.  Only 25% of Catholics consider the Bible to be the Actual Word of God, versus 50% of Protestants.  The Catholic church declared evolution to be true in 1996.

Most rational of all are the Jews, perhaps because they are more educated; 6 in 10 have college educations vs 1.5 in 10 of Christian Pentecostals, evangelicals, fundamentalists, and charismatics (PEFC from now on).

Armageddon

In the 1960s Billy Graham made this off the charts nutcase belief respectable, saying that the signs indicate these are the last days spoken of on the Scriptures, and that Armageddon and Jesus’s return were at hand.  By the 1980s, when President Reagan and some in his administration said the same thing, the news media was silent.

Basically in a single generation, belief in apocalypse and return of Jesus because the faith of a large fraction of Americans who viewed every new war in the Middle East as potential fulfillment of The Prophecies.  Each event was yet one more foreshock leading to the end, Armageddon.

Even before the madness began, Armageddon had already been fictionalized in the Left Behind series and the rapturing off of Christians to leave everyone else on Earth in Hell.  These books sold 75 million copies.  Many EFC believe that the Antichrist is a real person who will unite the entire world under a satanic religion, and 7 years after that the Christians will be raptured into the sky before the Messiah returns to beat the antichrist up, followed by 1,000 years of paradisiacal perfection under King Jesus.

58% of the PEFC believe Jesus will return by 2050. Only 17% of Americans said he definitely wasn’t coming back by then.

By the 1990s, Christian colleges that rejected evolution in favor of Creationism were able to get accredited, thanks to the 1991 Bush administration.

When it comes to evolution, 33% believe in a God-free evolution, 33% think that God took his time and maybe used evolution to create living creatures, and a third that God created humans.  Since the 1990s, the fraction not sure about evolution has TRIPLED.

Andersen splits Christians into the 2 camps.  The Horror-Story Christians see natural disasters as God’s punishment for our sins.  Here are some of Pat Robertson’s sinner stories: Stock prices dropped 3% because the government funded Planned Parenthood, Hurricane Katrina due to laws permitting abortion, tornadoes in the Midwest because he wasn’t hearing enough prayers, the Haitian earthquake deaths because their ancestors’ had made a pact with the devil, 9-11 was God angry about feminism, homosexuality, free speech, and paganism.

Happy Christians, especially charismatics, tell believers that prayer will bring them wealth now, on Earth, not a work ethic.  You can persuade God to make you rich!  You will never hear sermons or writings from the prosperity gospel about Mark 10:21 (Go sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heave), Matthew 6:24 (No man can serve 2 masters…Ye cannot serve God and mammon), Matthew 19:24 (it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God), or James 5 (Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you).

Ever wondered if you’re blessed with the ability to cast demons out of afflicted people?  Take the Wagner-modified Houts Questionnaire.  There are about 100 questions, such as: can you recover sight to the blind, tell whether person speaking in tongues is genuine, have heard demons speaking in a loud voice, or spoken to evil spirits who obeyed me.

Interestingly, the Catholic church believes that speaking in tongues are signs of satanic possession…

There are Christians who have spiritually mapped their region so that demons can be cast out of Satanic places like Planned Parenthood clinics, Mormon temples, Catholic churches, Masonic lodges, meditation centers, LGBTQ gathering spots, strip clubs, and shops selling tarot cards or dreamcatchers.  Spiritual warfare expert Wagner said on NPR’s Fresh Air that Satan has enlisted Emperor Akihito in exchange for the sun goddess visiting him and having sexual intercourse. Wagner also believes that many U.S. politicians are possessed.

Why, why, why are Americans so irrational across the board, from believing in astrology to angels and the Rapture?

The bottom line is that PEFC DOESN’T SELL outside of America.  In all other nations, prosperity and a sense of security correlate with less religious belief.

Here are some stats comparing the U.S. with other developed nations.

  • In 1968, only 5-14% of Scandinavians attended church once a week, versus 43% of Americans then.  In 2012, half of the U.K. said they had no religion.
  • A majority of Americans pray every day, but in the developed world it ranges from 10 to 20%.
  • In the U.S. 10% never pray, in the developed world 50%.
  • We believe more in Heaven and Hell than 20 other developed nations, only three match or believe in this more.
  • In nearly every developed country devil believers are tiny minorities.
  • 25% of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, 4-10% elsewhere.
  • As far as belief in evolution, 32 developed countries believed in evolution more than the U.S., which ranked only ahead of Turkey.
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Fantasyland 7. How America became the world’s biggest theme park

Posted on August 23, 2018 by

 

Preface. This is the 7th of 9 posts about Fantasyland. Some theme park quotes:

  • One of America’s first theme parks was created in 1894, Black America, with 500 pretend slaves advertised as “Fun for the Darkies” and the “Fun-Loving Darky Old Slavery Days”.
  • Suburbia and TV became so pervasive so fast we lost any sense of the radical peculiarity of our fantasy-drenched postwar way of life. The average American watches more than five hours of live television every day, consuming fictions and advertisements in a quasi-hypnotic state.

Links to the 9 parts of this book review:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Kurt Andersen. 2017. Fantasyland. How America Went Haywire.  A 500-Year History. Random House.

The first theme park: Black America

In 1894, Nate Salsbury, Buffalo Bill’s producer, created a mock plantation in Brooklyn called Black America and recruited 500 “Southern Colored People, actual field hands from the cotton belt” to occupy the 150 rustic slave cabins. The New York Times advertised it as “Fun for the Darkies” and “Fun-Loving Darky Old Slavery Days”. For two months they pretended to be enslaved, picking cotton bolls from a recently planted acre and processing them in a real cotton gin. Tens of thousands of white people watched “the labors that the Negroes of slavery days engaged in, and the happy, careless life that they lived in their cabins after work,” a New York Times reporter wrote. Black America was a hit, and it toured the Northeast before returning to Madison Square Garden in New York.

Suburbanization  

America’s century of wholesale suburbanization was another part of its happy fictionalization, a nation morphing into Earth’s biggest theme park.

In the 1930s Frank Lloyd Wright was not only channeling Americans’ disgust with the big bad city—“throw it away,” he said—but grandiloquently giving his stamp of approval to suburban life. “Our pioneer days are not over,” he wrote, because our new manifest destiny was to make America a coast-to-coast suburbia, what he called Broadacre City, “the only possible city of the future,” “this city for the individual,” with no higgledy-piggledy downtowns at all, each family in its own house on its own acre, every American transformed into “landed gentry,” the Jeffersonian fantasy realized at last.

Back east at the turn of the century, the Coney Island amusement parks were built adjacent to America’s largest city. In southern California in the early 1900s there was no huge existing city, so an ambitious new entertainment zone instead became urban protoplasm: just southwest of Los Angeles, by the beach, a real estate developer (and eccentric utopian) named Abbot Kinney built an amusement park around an artificial lagoon, with canals and gondoliers, calling it Venice of America. Other developers extended the conceit, building more canals; the whole storybook confection quickly started becoming an actual town, Venice, and in the 1920s officially part of Los Angeles.

One way to track the nation’s transmutation into Fantasyland is to look at where Americans moved during the 20th century. In 1900 only two of the 20 largest cities, New Orleans and San Francisco, had temperatures that seldom got below freezing. Today, 14 of the 20 largest cities are places where there ain’t no snow and the sun shines every day.

The 1950s were freaky and fantastical. Start with two defining pieces of the stereotypical American 1950s—TV and the suburbs. Both were expressions and enablers of our American appetites for immersive make-believe. After suburbia and TV became so pervasive so fast—Currier & Ives on the outside, private electric cinemas inside—we lost any sense of the radical peculiarity of our new fantasy-drenched postwar way of life. When my eldest sister was born, just seven years before me, a fraction of 1% of Americans had TVs; by the time I started school, there was a TV in practically every household.

Television’s supply of super realistic fantasies (including the ads) was free and abundant and required no reading, no trips to theaters, not even the imaginative work of listening to radio plays. By the end of the decade, the average American spent a third of his or her waking hours watching TV. Nowhere and never had more people spent more time consuming fictions and advertising, and never in such a continuous quasi-hypnotic state.

At the beginning of the century, two-thirds of Americans still lived in old small towns and on farms. By 1960, only a third did—and another third now lived in suburbia’s new simulations of old-time countrified America. As the land closest to cities became built up and saturated and more distant parcels developed, the implicit nostalgic model shifted from the New England village to the pioneer homestead.

No other developed country has such a huge fraction of its people living at such low densities on such massive amounts of land.

Disneyland and modern Las Vegas were born simultaneously. Disneyland had been inspired by disapproval of “questionable characters” and “honky-tonk” atmosphere. In the badlands three hundred miles across the Mojave Desert, Vegas was created by questionable characters to be honky-tonk,

Just as Disney did with amusement parks, the creators of the new Vegas took seedy American artifacts—gambling halls and roadhouses—and reinvented them as something grand. It was Adventureland for people who hungered after a different hormonal and neurotransmitter mix, one requiring high-stakes indeterminacy—the chance of getting instantly rich or laid, going broke or on a bender. Vegas and Disneyland were just two different new brands in the expanding line of the fantasy-industrial complex.

The proof of concept for its transformation into a satanic Disneyland happened during World War II, as tens of thousands of aviators came through for training at the Las Vegas Army Airfield.

Hefner’s genius was not just in providing more upscale make-believe—color pictures of unequivocally beautiful women shot by good photographers, skillfully retouched and printed on glossy paper—but in building out a 360-degree fantasy that seemed normal, an aspirational template for his wankers to reimagine their everyday lives fantastically.

One of Hefner’s brilliant innovations was to provide a few details about Playmates’ lives, the more banal the better—their hobbies, their favorite books and foods. The fantasy seemed more real. And the rest of the magazine allowed its readers (and “readers”) to imagine themselves living fantastically sexier lives. You are not a scared, lonely chump with dreary domestic responsibilities and a crappy job, every page told them. You are masculine and sophisticated and witty and suave and well dressed and cool, with good taste, in a fun America full of women eager to have no-strings sex with you.

While reading Casino Royale or Goldfinger, one knew that James Bond wasn’t real, whereas Playboy was mainly, nominally nonfiction. Its photo spreads of naked women, its advice columns, its articles about (and ads for) hot cars and cool bachelor pads and hi-fi and hep new cultural products, constituted an imaginary world presented as perfectly real and available. Reality and fiction were a total blur for Hefner.

A few years after inventing a magazine that allowed men to fictionalize themselves, Hefner stepped through his looking glass, turning his own life into a full-blown public fiction, with himself as its main character: the pipe, the bathrobe, the friendship with the Rat Pack, the Playboy Mansions, the harem of permanently youthful Playmates in residence, the whole shebang. Hefner and his magazine were ambivalent about the Beats. They were members of adjacent new Fantasyland denominations—sex! booze! bennies! jazz! selfishness!—but mutually contemptuous, not unlike the two-way suspicion between Christian evangelicals and Pentecostals. Hefner even coined and used the term Upbeat Generation to distinguish his affluent go-go sophisticates from the slackery beatniks.

 

Posted in Critical Thinking, Critical Thinking and Scientific Literacy, Human Nature | Comments Off on Fantasyland 7. How America became the world’s biggest theme park

Fantasyland 6. New Age, alternative medicine, and supernatural madness

Posted on August 20, 2018 by

Preface. This is the sixth of nine posts about this very important book on how and why a large percent of Americans have has been irrational for 500 years.

New Age and supernatural beliefs are the religion of people who can’t swallow Biblical or any other mythology.  

Links to the 9 parts of this book review:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

***

Kurt Andersen. 2017. Fantasyland. How America Went Haywire.  A 500-Year History. Random House.

The New Age, alternative medicine, and other Supernatural beliefs

At the end of the 1700s, with the Enlightenment triumphant, science ascendant, and tolerance required, craziness was newly free to show itself. “Alchemy, astrology…occult Freemasonry, magnetic healing, prophetic visions, the conjuring of spirits, usually thought sidelined by natural scientists a hundred years earlier,” all revived, the Oxford historian Keith Thomas explains, their promoters and followers “implicitly following Kant’s injunction to think for themselves. It was only in an atmosphere of enlightened tolerance that such unorthodox cults could have been openly practiced.

Kant himself saw the conundrum the Enlightenment faced. “Human reason,” he wrote in The Critique of Pure Reason, “has this peculiar fate, that in one species of its knowledge”—the spiritual, the existential, the meaning of life—“it is burdened by questions which…it is not able to ignore, but which…it is also not able to answer.” Americans had the peculiar fate of believing they could and must answer those religious questions the same way mathematicians and historians and natural philosophers answered theirs.

As modern science begat modern technology, the proof was irrefutably in the pudding: we got telegraphy, high-speed printing presses, railroads, steamships, vaccination, anesthesia, more. We were rational and practical. We were modern.

Snake Oil, Homeopathy, and alternative medicine charlatans

During the First Great Delirium, the marvels of science and technology didn’t just reinforce supernatural belief by analogy or as omens—they inspired sham science and sham marvels. Especially when it came to medicine. Many nostrums were the products of knowing charlatans, but many of the most successful inventors and promoters were undoubtedly sincere believers.

If the patients also had faith in the miraculous treatments, they could even seem to work. The term placebo had just come into use as a medical term.

America had hundreds of water-cure facilities, for instance. But then we lost faith in hydropathy and stopped wrapping people in sheets drenched in cold water in order to cure rheumatoid arthritis, heart and kidney and liver disorders, smallpox, gonorrhea, and dysentery. Yet from this nineteenth-century miasma emerged one school of quackery that became huge in America and never faded away. Homeopathy was the original “alternative medicine.

Of course, swallowing arsenic or other poisons could harm patients, but homeopathy had that figured out. The medicines were made by diluting the ingredients in water or alcohol, shaking the mixture (that is, “potentizing” and “dynamizing” their “immaterial and spiritual powers”), then diluting it again, shaking, diluting some more, on and on. The dilution ratios were (and are still today) so extreme—billions and trillions to one—that the finished elixirs are just water or alcohol, containing essentially none of the named ingredient. A typical recommended dilution is literally equivalent to a pinch of salt tossed into the Atlantic Ocean.

Homeopathy, its fake medicines prescribed to cure every disease, is a product of magical thinking in the extreme.

Such pseudoscientific practices harmed healthy people no more frequently than they cured sick people, but their popularity derived from and fed the big American idea that opinions and feelings are the same as facts.

Out of this cross-fertilization of pseudoscience and spirituality came new sects and eventually one whole new American religion. In the 1830s in Maine, a clockmaker and inventor with the irresistible name Phineas P. Quimby found out about mesmerism. He became a practitioner, hypnotizing sick and unhappy people and persuading them to feel better. Quimby’s work and philosophy were a wellspring of the New Thought movement, a nineteenth-century American precursor to both Scientology and the New Age movement of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. New Thought believers figured that belief conquers all, that misery and bliss are all in your head. Some disciples were specifically Christian, some weren’t, but they all pitched themselves as scientific as well as mystical, providers of practical tools for individual perfection.

An individual mesmerist or phrenologist or hydropathist could make a decent living, but selling professional services was not really scalable as a national business. Inventing a religion, as Mary Baker Eddy did, was one way to scale. Manufacturing and selling miraculous products was another, as American wheeler-dealers figured out in the 1830s and ’40s, when branded miracle cures became an industry. Small and large businesses started selling all sorts of elixirs, tonics, salves, oils, powders, and pills. The principal ingredient of many so-called patent medicines was sugar or alcohol; some contained opium or cocaine.

One typical small-time nineteenth-century medicine-seller was a man from upstate New York who traveled the country selling nostrums. “Dr. William A. Rockefeller, the Celebrated Cancer Specialist,” his sign announced. “Here for One Day Only. All cases of cancer cured unless too far gone and then can be greatly benefited.” (His sons John D. and William Jr. became businessmen of a different kind, founding the Standard Oil Company.)

Another of the elder Rockefeller’s medicines, dried berries picked from a bush in his mother’s yard, was prescribed to women; the berries’ important contraindication—not to be taken during pregnancy—appears to be a perfect con man’s way to market fake abortifacients.

Rockefeller was a typical small-time grifter. On the other hand, Microbe Killer, a mass-marketed pink elixir, which came in large jugs and consisted almost entirely of water, sounded plausibly scientific, the way mesmerism and phrenology and homeopathy had science-y backstories: germ theory was new science, and microbe a new coinage. Microbe Killer’s claims were extreme, simple, ridiculous: “Cures All Diseases.” The inventor built Microbe Killer factories around the world and became rich.

Benjamin Brandreth got even richer. At 25, as soon as he’d inherited his English family’s patent medicine business, he moved it and his family—of course—to America. Brandreth’s Vegetable Universal Pills were supposed to eliminate “blood impurities” and were advertised as a cure for practically everything: colds, coughs, fevers, flu, pleurisy, “and especially sudden attacks of severe sickness, often resulting in death.” One ad describes “a young lady” who’d been ill for years, “her beauty departed,” but after two weeks of swallowing Brandreth’s Pills, “her health and good looks recovered.” Brandreth advertised extensively and constantly in America’s new cheap newspapers. A few years after his arrival, a contemporary wrote that “Dr. Brandreth figures larger in the scale of quackery, and hoists a more presuming flag, than all the rest of the fraternity combined.” A decade later Brandreth was elected to the New York Senate, founded a bank, and had his pills mentioned in Moby-Dick.

In 1838 a prominent physician and public health innovator published Humbugs of New York.  He understood that in America, criticism and debunking were unfortunately fuel for the madness. “Persecution only serves to propagate new theories, whether of philosophy or religion,” he wrote. “Indeed, some of the popular follies of the times are indebted only to the real or alleged persecutions they have suffered…even for their present existence.

The author of another book of the era, Quackery Unmasked, nailed patent medicines as that industry headed toward its peak: The American people are great lovers of nostrums. They devour whatever in that line is new, with insatiable voracity. Staid Englishmen look on in astonishment. They call us pill-eaters and syrup-drinkers, and wonder at our fickleness and easy credulity; so that we have almost become a laughing-stock in the eyes of the world.

In 1815 news of peace reached New Orleans. A guy who heard it early made a deal to buy fifty tons of tobacco from a man who didn’t yet know the blockade was ending. The seller, feeling cheated afterward, sued the buyer, but in one of its most important early opinions, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided the plaintiff had no recourse: sorry, sucker, in this free market, buyer and seller beware. Telling less than the whole truth—hustling—had received a blanket indemnity. In commerce as in the rest of life, when it came to truth and falsehood, America was a free-fire zone.

By 1848, Americans’ appetite for the amazing and the incredible had been whetted by two decades of transformative technologies and by the manic fabulism of dime museums and medicine shows and newly sensationalist newspapers. A credulity about E-Z self-improvement—swallowing pills or feeling the Holy Spirit to end one’s suffering magically—had been normalized during the First Great Delirium.

We think of the Beats as un-American creatures, the anti-1950s exceptions who proved the rule. But they were highly American. For one thing, the founders became enduring pop celebrities. More important, their animating impulses grew out of that old American search for a sense of meaning that devolved into dreamy, grandiose unreasonableness.

This is what made the Beats such an American phenomenon. They were all about their mystical, individualist beliefs, and all in. They rejected bland rules to live lives of anti-materialist and quasi-religious purity. They were like some freaky renegade Protestant sect who didn’t focus on Jesus but otherwise took the original priesthood-of-all-believers idea to the max. The Beats’ self-conception descended from a particular American lineage—mountain men, outlaws, frontier cranks, lonely individualists, and narcissistic outsiders sounding their barbaric yawps over the rooftops of the world. The hippie dream that followed drew as well from a parallel lineage—Cane Ridge, the communes of the 1830s and ’40s, Transcendentalism, pastoralism, Thoreau. Both were enactments of classic American fantasies.

Like mesmerism and homeopathy in the nineteenth century, orgone therapy was an import from German Europe. Its inventor was the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a protégé of Freud—who finally concluded Reich was nuts: he “salutes in the genital orgasm,” Freud wrote a colleague, as “the antidote to every neurosis.” He got nuttier, announcing he’d discovered fundamental new substances—“bions” and, after he emigrated to the United States, “primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy,” the very source of human vitality. In America he was taken seriously for a while and not just by the Beats. His work was cited in the major medical journals. Cancer victims came to be cured in his orgone accumulators. Farmers paid him to point his “cloudbuster” at the sky to unleash atmospheric orgone energy and make it rain, and he also said it’d work to ward off extraterrestrial invaders. He believed  a secret cabal of highly placed allies in the federal government would save him from his enemies the Rockefellers, Communists, FDA, and Justice Department.  The feds ordered him to stop advertising and selling his quack medical devices; he refused; they prosecuted and finally imprisoned him.

American religious leaders have always sold their crazy ideas by spinning off independent enterprises to promote them.

The new age has done the same thing, with millions more businesses.  It too is a religion that has mystical and supernatural beliefs and a pursuit of truth, bliss, self-improvement, and prosperity.  There are hundreds of New age start-ups, sects, practices, and prophets.  It is Establishment even though it likes to think of itself as the opposite.  It is yet another part of the fantasy-industrial religions, where none of us “are sticklers for reason”.

But unlike most religions, there isn’t a single supreme being or messiah.

Fake medicine techniques also sold politicians

William Henry Harrison was the first fully merchandised candidate. He had grown up rich and was the nominee of the elites’ Whig Party. But his spin doctors sold him to voters as the opposite—a common man, a rough regular guy, with on-message campaign songs and chants, one about his “homespun coat” and “no ruffled shirt.” They branded him with life-size and miniature log cabins, and they gave out whiskey in bottles shaped like log cabins and shaving soap called Log-Cabin Emollient

His opponent’s upbringing really had been humble, but he was the incumbent president and thus could be framed as an elitist. Harrison won by a landslide.

What was working for patent medicines also worked for a political candidate. And essential to both were the new, large-circulation newspapers and magazines that much faster, bigger, steam-powered presses had made possible. 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.

From fake medicine to entrepreneur’s and hustlers

As with the American habit of wishfulness in general, a confirmation bias kicks in: from Ben Franklin to Mark Zuckerberg, the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops.

A part of every entrepreneur’s job is to persuade and recruit others to believe in a dream, and often those dreams are pure fantasies. A defining feature of America from the start, according to McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner, was the unprecedented leeway and success of its hucksters—“self-promoters, scofflaws, occasional frauds, and peripatetic self-reinventors,” as well as “builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers.” He writes that “Americans are, among other things, prone to be hustlers,

A large pool of hustlers to be successful, of course, requires a large population of easy believers.

Once there was an industry based on moving Americans west—the transcontinental railroads—a large and continuous stream of travelers and settlers was required to sustain those new entrepreneurial businesses. Which meant that the railroads and their allies needed to sell the settlers fantasies, as the original New World speculators had done to prospective Americans back in the 1600s. Occasional new discoveries of gold and silver could pull the most excitable, but the main lure was land, cheap or even free, and not just to tediously farm. All over the empty West, the promoters promised, land could make you rich.

A generation later more of my ancestors arrived in Nebraska from Denmark, right before the Panic of 1893. That financial panic, which triggered a huge economic depression, was caused in part by the unsustainable overbuilding of the western railroads and the popping of that railroad bubble. Which had been inflated by the western real estate bubble. Which happened even though just twenty years before, the Panic of 1873 had been caused by the popping of a previous railroad bubble. Americans, predisposed to believe in bonanzas and their own special luckiness, were not really learning the hard lessons of economic booms and busts.

Technology that seems magical and miraculous can encourage and confirm credulous people’s belief in make-believe magic and miracles.  Yhe Fox sisters communicated with a ghost haunting their house by means of a kind of knock-knocking Morse code. (Like so many of my nineteenth-century characters, they were in western New York State, the next town over from where Joseph Smith first spoke to God.) The Fox sisters became famous mediums and helped launch a national movement of “spiritualists” communicating with the dead.

If some imaginary proposition is exciting, and nobody can prove it’s untrue, then it’s my right as an American to believe it’s true.

P. T. Barnum was the great early American merchandiser of exciting secular fantasies and half-truths. His extremely successful pre-circus career derived from and fed a fundamental Fantasyland mindset.

His American Museum’s combination of fake and real was more pernicious than if he’d exhibited sideshow humbug exclusively. For decades, it was at the respectable center of the new popular culture, reflecting and reinforcing Americans’ appetite for entertaining fibs and a disregard for clear distinctions between make-believe and authentic. And as Neal Gabler notes in Life: The Movie, “by the mid-nineteenth century the popular culture here was much vaster than in Europe and had permeated society much more deeply.” Barnum’s humbuggery was influential.

The pseudo-pharmaceutical industry, already booming, took his pop cultural big idea and made it both narrower and broader. Each traveling medicine show was devoted to selling a particular manufacturer’s patent medicines, but the shows appeared all over the country, especially in small towns. Whereas Barnum’s business model was straightforward and traditional—buy a ticket, be entertained—the innovation of the medicine show was closer to that of the advertising-dependent penny press: pay nothing to be entertained by musicians, magicians, comedians, and flea circuses in exchange for watching and listening to interstitial live advertisements for dubious medical products

Posted in Critical Thinking, Human Nature, Religion | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Fantasyland 5. Why Americans are so prone to believing in conspiracies

Posted on August 17, 2018 by

Preface. This is the fifth of nine posts about this very important book on how and why a large percent of Americans have has been irrational for 500 years.

Links to the 9 parts of this book review:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

***

Kurt Andersen. 2017. Fantasyland. How America Went Haywire.  A 500-Year History. Random House.

Why American religion also led to a belief in conspiracies

For starters, consider Protestantism—an alternative system of truth-telling to replace the Vatican conspiracy’s false and corrupted version. The Puritans, oppressed by conniving elites, developed a self-identity focused on victim hood that sent them into American self-exile. When the Dissenters’ new American society promptly produced its own dissenters, the subversives and oppressors each saw the other as a conspiracy.

Christian religiosity itself, in particular our pseudo-hyper-rational 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. Like religious explanations, conspiratorial explanations of the world tend to connect all sorts of dots, real and imaginary, drawing lines to impute intention and design and purpose everywhere, ignoring the generally greater power of randomness and happenstance.

During their first century, Americans believed themselves beset by satanic conspiracies of witches and Indians.

Conspiracy thinking

The recipe for what came to be America—our peculiar history, our peculiar psychology, the symbiosis between them—was also specifically a recipe for a tendency to believe in conspiracies.

Fantastical conspiracy theories tend to imagine secret plots of colossal scale, duration, and power. Beliefs in American conspiracies in the 1800s, the Yale historian David Brion Davis has written, usually consisted of hard grains of truth connected with a mucilage of exaggeration and fantasy. But the central theme, which is so central to the paranoid style, is the conviction that an exclusive monolithic structure has imposed a purposeful pattern on otherwise unpredictable events. One suspects this conviction is a product of the liberal faith, inherited from the Enlightenment, that history can be shaped in accordance with a rational plan…. When the irrationality of events proves that the children of light have lost control, then the children of darkness must have secretly seized the levers of history….

Another result of America’s Enlightenment roots is that thick strain of skepticism. That reflex, to disbelieve official explanations, seems antithetical to religious belief and faith in hidden purposes and plans. 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.

During America’s second century, there were panics about foreign conspiracies—despotically inclined leaders in league with European monarchs, other despotic leaders in league with European revolutionaries. Americans learned of the all-powerful master cabal controlling the European subversives from a 1797 book called Proofs of a Conspiracy, about the Freemasons and Illuminati.

Dangerous nonsense, other conspiracy theorists insisted—the Illuminati conspiracy was imaginary, concocted by Alexander Hamilton in conspiratorial league with the British to incite American panic.

In 1798 Congress passed and President John Adams signed the Alien Acts, giving him the power to imprison or deport any suspicious foreigner—especially French ones, whose recent revolution, people said, had been an Illuminati undertaking.

Besides, the French were nearly all Catholic, and paranoia about the Vatican conspiracy to destroy our nation went into overdrive during the 1800s. The pope’s agents in America—that is, Catholics—were doubling every decade.

At the same moment, Americans also awoke, finally, to the elder Morse’s warnings about the Freemason conspiracy. Masonic lodges, which had started in England, were then more or less what they are now: adult fraternities, clubs where public-spirited men gathered to eat, drink, network, and perform goofy secret rituals. George Washington and dozens of signers of both the Declaration and the Constitution had been Masons. “Their Grand Secret,” the young Freemason Ben Franklin said, “is that they have no secret at all.

The abolitionists were just as convinced of an all-powerful conspiracy on the other side. In 1852 the abolitionist party’s presidential candidate saw that “the inexplicable labyrinths of American politics for the last sixty years,” including the War of 1812 and the dismantling of the national bank, were all explained as parts of the slaveholders’ perfect plot, because “the Slave Power, like the power of the pit, never lacks for a stratagem.” In the 1850s it seemed obvious to many Northerners that the current president and previous president had conspired secretly with the chief justice of the Supreme Court to entrench the Slave Power conspiracy.

Posted in Critical Thinking, Critical Thinking and Scientific Literacy, Human Nature, Religion | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Fantasyland 4. American churches go from crazy to insane and unhinged: 1800 to present

Posted on August 14, 2018 by

Preface. This is the fifth of nine posts about Fantasyland. This is a very important book on how and why a large percent of Americans have has been irrational for 500 years.

Evangelism threatens to create a non-democratic, authoritarian government, so the history of how nutty religious history has been since 1800 explains a lot about how evangelism could even exist. 

Links to the 9 parts of this book review:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

***

Kurt Andersen. 2017. Fantasyland. How America Went Haywire.  A 500-Year History. Random House.

In Kentucky in 1801, a Holy Fair was held with dozens of ministers. As many as 20,000 people arrived and stayed to hear the gospel, to be saved, to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime human carnival, an unprecedented lollapalooza.

Things really got rolling 24 hours in, as Saturday afternoon turned to dusk. Campfires and bonfires burned. Darkness descended. Preachers preached from trees and wagons, several at once. Dozens of ordinary people—women, children, anyone moved by the Holy Spirit—were self-appointed “exhorters,” shouting the truth of the gospel as they believed or felt or imagined or otherwise knew it. People screamed uncontrollably. People ran and leaped, barked and sang uncontrollably. People laughed and sobbed uncontrollably. Hundreds were overcome by “the jerks,” convulsive seizures of limbs and necks and torsos that sometimes resolved into a kind of dance. And of course, hundreds or thousands of sinners found Christ and repented.

An equivalent American gathering today, as a fraction of the U.S. population, would be more than a million people. As the Vanderbilt historian Paul Conkin and Harold Bloom of Yale have both noted, Cane Ridge was the Woodstock for American Christianity, an anarchic, unprecedented August moment of mass spectacle that crystallized and symbolized a new way of thinking and acting, a permanent new subculture.

More Baptist and Methodist preachers organized more camp meetings all over the country, but especially in the South, and more mobs of people assembled to go over the top and out of their minds.

They committed to a version of Christianity more thrilling and magical right now, as well as a sure-thing payoff for eternity. Thus the new American way: it was awesome, it was democratic, you’re a winner if you believe you’re a winner.

Like his pioneering predecessor Whitefield a century earlier, he understood that in America Christianity should be a kind of show business: “to expect to promote religion without excitements,” Finney wrote, “is…absurd.

The religious divergence of Europe and America became more pronounced, as Europeans swung toward the calm and reasonable, Americans toward the excited and fantastical.

By means of hundreds of end-is-nigh pamphlets and books and periodicals and tent meetings, Miller acquired almost a million American believers, as many as one in ten northeasterners. After 1843 came and went normally, Miller and company decided they’d miscalculated the date and changed it to the following April—no, wait, October, 1844. But October 22 turned out to be just another Tuesday. The disappointed masses who kept the faith broke into different factions, one of which was the Seventh-day Adventists.

But the big, long-lasting impact was the mainstreaming of the belief among modern American Christians that they might personally experience the final fantasy—the end of days, the return of Jesus, Satan vanquished. Around the same time, another Protestant minister was devising an even more complicated version of end-of-the-world prophecy. The Reverend John Nelson Darby, by means of two decades of cross-country preaching tours, permanently embedded the Bible’s end-time prophecies into the heart of American Christianity.

Darby recast the apocalypse in a far more appealing light—for believers. All so-called premillennialists agree that an ugly period of worldwide tribulation will be humankind’s existential denouement—war, famine, pandemic disease. But Darby more or less invented the idea of “the rapture,” a moment just before all hell breaks loose when Jesus will arrive incognito and take Christians away to heavenly safety to wait out the earthly horrors. Then He and the lucky saints return to Earth for the happy ending.

Americans often resist the idea that educated experts can tell them what is and isn’t true, but from the Puritans on, we’ve also been more than happy for scholarly fellow believers to confirm our beliefs and make them more impressively complicated. It is a modern wish for proof of one’s premodern fantasies. “The enduring appeal of prophecy belief for evangelicals,” as the historian Paul Boyer has written, is its “quasi-empirical ‘scientific’ validation of their faith.” Explainers like Darby “explicitly portrayed their endeavor…as a science.

The Shakers were among the more successful of dozens of smaller American sects and cults in this period, each led by an electrifying individual who claimed to have a direct line to God or His angels. A large fraction of Americans wanted or needed to believe they lived in an enchanted time and place, that the country swarmed with supernatural wonders, and that mid-nineteenth-century America was like the Holy Land of the early first century,

The All-American Fan Fiction of Joseph Smith, Prophet

Smith published the Mormon “bible” in 1830, the year after he dictated it. It’s a doozy. A heretofore unknown prophet named Lehi escaped besieged Jerusalem in the sixth century B.C.E. and sailed with his family and friends to the Americas, where their descendants founded a civilization. The civilization split into two warring peoples, one white and the other dark-skinned. The freshly resurrected Jesus Christ appeared among the white half, appointed twelve of them as his new, second set of apostles, and repeated the Sermon on the Mount. Thanks to Jesus’s visit, the light- and dark-skinned American nations reunited for a while, but then in the fifth century A.D. they went to war again, the darker people annihilating the whiter people. Smith’s interlocutor Moroni was one of the last whites alive when he buried the plates. (Smith said later that God told him American Indians are descended from the dark-skinned group.)

American Christians from the start tended toward the literal and hysterical and collectively self-centered. Joseph Smith met that bid and raised it a million. Like the American Puritans as well as the new millennialists of his own era, he prophesied that Armageddon was coming soon. “The heavens shall shake and the Earth shall tremble,” he said God had informed him, and for the unlucky, “flesh shall fall from their bones, and their eyes from their sockets.

The grandiose anything-goes literalism of his theology knew no bounds. He said that “God…has flesh and bones,” and he suggested that Jesus was conceived by means of literal sexual congress between God and Mary.

American Christians had always nudged the Bible in the direction of America. Smith made America a literal second Holy Land, settled by literal Israeli émigrés and visited by the literal Jesus Christ.

If one considers the Bible, in the main, to be historical fiction, then what Joseph Smith produced was a monumental and pioneering work of fan fiction, the most successful ever.* Fan fiction, as one scholar has written, is created by fans to “fill the need” among other fans for “narratives that expand the boundary of the official source products.” Smith’s official source products were the Old and New Testaments.

One could argue that the New Testament itself was a collaborative anthology of fan fiction inspired by the Old Testament—We’ll give Jehovah a son, part god and part human!) But it took hubris of a particularly entrepreneurial American kind for an individual to produce such a comprehensive work of fan fiction over the course of just a few years, one purporting to have been dictated in part by the original author, God himself. According to Smith, according to God, Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden was not the tragic Fall of Man but a good thing, because it enabled ordinary pleasure and joy, let humans be human.

The term fan fiction was coined in the 1960s to describe stories written by fans of a science fiction series, and Smith’s Heaven is very sci-fi. It has distinct quality levels, like American Express cards—one for run-of-the-mill people who don’t deserve Hell, one for good Christians, and a super-premium level for Mormons. There you’re not just one of a mass of a billion indistinguishable souls in some ethereal netherworld, but a king or queen of your personal planetary fiefdom as a resurrected immortal physical being, continuing to produce princes and princesses. God lives near an actual celestial object called Kolob, a definite number of miles away from Earth.

Plus, any dead friends or relatives can be posthumously baptized and sent along to Heaven as well. Better history, better future—and at least for men, a better present, now that sex with multiple women was no longer a sin but a holy commandment.

America was created by people resistant to reality checks and convinced they had special access to the truth, a place founded to enact grand fantasies. No Joseph Smiths emerged elsewhere in the modern world. And if they had, where else would so many responsible people instantly abandon their previous beliefs and lives and risk everything on the say-so of such a man making such claims?

The new American Christianity emphasized not just the ancient miracles but miracles right now, feeling the supernatural by believing in it strongly enough. We had become a country where millions of evangelical Christians were rising up breathlessly from the sinners’ “anxious bench” to channel the Holy Spirit and be born again instantly. We were a practical country, so along with moral lessons and promises of an eternal afterlife, churches in the early 1800s were providing instant solutions, miracle cures for feelings of meaninglessness and emptiness.

Quack alternative medicine affected Christianity too: the Church of Christ Scientist

Mrs. Patterson hurt her back in an accident. After reading the Bible’s account of Jesus curing a paralytic, she found her own injury cured. She set about inventing her own quasi-Christian pseudoscientific belief system, which she presented in a book called Science and Health. There’s only “belief in pain.” “We say man suffers from the effects of cold, heat, fatigue. This is human belief, not the truth of being, for matter cannot suffer,” and “what is termed disease does not exist.” And not just pain, not just illness, but dying and matter itself—none of it is real.

Mary Baker Eddy, and founded the Church of Christ, Scientist. Her followers, forming more than a thousand Christian Science churches in America within thirty years, were called not believers but scientists.

An individual mesmerist or phrenologist or hydropathist could make a decent living, but selling professional services was not really scalable as a national business. Inventing a religion, as Mary Baker Eddy did, was one way to scale.

Southern Christianity

Southerners turned ever more to their churches for definition as Southerners. Revised hymns and new stained-glass windows conflated Christian and Confederate imagery and themes. White Southern religious culture became kind of a rump Confederacy. Believers doubled down on the supernatural, looking toward a miraculous do-over, an ultimate victory on Judgment Day and in the hereafter. Instead of squarely facing the uncomfortable facts—slavery was wrong, secession a calamitous mistake—they shifted into excuse-and-deny mode. For a great many white Southerners, defeat made them not contrite and peaceable (like, say, Germans and Japanese after World War II) but permanently pissed off. Which in turn led them to embrace a Christianity almost as medieval as the Puritans’.

Christianity grows more extreme

In America, even as the moderns declared victory, the committed magical thinkers weren’t giving up. And they fell back on one of the original Protestant and Puritan reflexes: if the decadent elite was stigmatizing believers as bumptious zealots, persecuting them for their unfashionable faith, the believers would go even more hardcore.

During the first three decades of the 20th century, millions of backlashing Americans became more invested in the idea that God had dictated the Bible, that it was 100% nonfiction, and that reading between the lines was permissible only if it confirmed their belief that Christ would return soon to stop the torrent of modern demonic corruption once and for all.

Moody’s most important protégé was a corrupt and alcoholic Kansas lawyer and politician named Cyrus Scofield. After deserting his wife and children, he became an evangelical minister, cofounding his own Bible schools, launching his own correspondence course, and finally, in 1909, publishing his own Bible. This wasn’t a new translation; rather, he took the King James Version and, in his lawyerly way, filled almost half of each page with explanatory text, publishing his take on the new evangelical take on the meaning and timing of the scriptural stories and prophecies—including the calculation that God created the world in the autumn of 4004 B.C.E. All those footnotes made the most outlandish versions of Christian myth appear more bona fide. It was published by Oxford University Press and became a phenomenal bestseller.

Science had proved that humans descended from animals—which is tough to reconcile with a literal reading of Genesis, in which God forms man from the dust of the ground by breathing into his nostrils the breath of life. In the half-century since Darwin’s The Descent of Man, intellectually supple Christians around the world—the “modernists”—had reconciled Scripture with scientific evidence: the astronomers, geologists, paleontologists, and biologists were simply discovering the operational details of God’s miraculous creation.

So God in his amazing way created man, but not in a single day, and not by blowing on a dirt statue.

A large fraction of American Christians, however, refused to move beyond the picture of human creation they’d had as children. “I don’t believe your own bastard theory of evolution,” Billy Sunday snarled. “I believe it’s pure jackass nonsense.” In the winter of 1925, he preached for two weeks in Memphis, where 250,000 people (in a city of 200,000) turned out to hear him rail against Darwin and godless biology. Immediately the state of Tennessee enacted the strictest of several (Southern) laws that criminalized science’s bastard theories, making it “unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities…and all other public schools of the State…to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal.

As grassroots Christian beliefs grew more implausible in opposition to the liberalizing mainstream, some of the grass roots yearned for more implausible and flamboyant Christian practice

Forming their own churches, one-off and regional operations that shared a brand (the Church of God), but even more decentralized than the Baptists, with no national leadership or headquarters, every church free to do its own thing. This kind of self-franchising felt correct, more righteous and American. Members wanted to live strictly virtuous lives—without liquor or tobacco, without singing or dancing, without theater or movies. And at their services, they weren’t content just to hear sermons, get baptized, and pray. Indeed, maybe to compensate for the everyday asceticism, the lack of intoxicants and fun, they sought another sort of mind-altering and mind-altered entertainment: camp meetings, traumatic and ecstatic public conversions, faith healing. They were Americans, so they wanted more. They’d read in the Bible’s Book of Acts that some weeks after Jesus’s crucifixion, His apostles were temporarily granted supernatural powers to perform “wonders and signs”—the so-called Pentecost. Among those miraculous powers had been the ability “to speak with other tongues”—instant fluency in all the languages spoken at that time in multicultural Jerusalem.

Four hundred years after Luther said that “we are all priests,” Americans took the notion a hysterical step further: every believer could now be a prophet as well, each equal to one of Jesus’s apostles, commissioned to perform and reveal miraculous wonders and signs, and not just temporarily.

The two main founders of Pentecostalism were a pair of young evangelists, former Methodists by way of the Holiness Movement. Charles Parham had set up a little Bible college in Topeka for people “willing to forsake all, sell what they had, give it away, and enter the school,” where he taught that the end-time was near. On the very first day of the twentieth century, this twenty-seven-year-old put his hands on a student, a thirty-year-old woman, and, according to him, “a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking in the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days.” Although a local Chinese person said that what she spoke wasn’t Chinese at all, the believers believed, and soon more Topekans, including the minister and his clerical peers, were excitedly speaking dozens of different made-up foreign languages.

The new L.A. church, in a ramshackle building in Little Tokyo, was instantly successful. Thousands made their way downtown for the nonstop performances. Two weeks into the madness, the great 1906 earthquake leveled San Francisco and shook L.A.—a coincidence that encouraged the believers on Azusa Street to believe they were receiving bulletins from God about Armageddon and Christ’s return.

A North Carolina preacher who’d recently switched from Methodist to Holiness in order to accommodate his beliefs in faith healing and the imminent end-time crossed the country to witness the free-for-all in L.A. Immediately converted, he returned home and barnstormed the South to recruit other evangelical ministers for the new sect—who in turn set up Pentecostal denominations that endure today. Within a decade, the main Pentecostal denominations had millions of American members.

 

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Republican party platform: the most extreme ever

Posted on August 11, 2018 by

Preface. There are two articles below: the New York Times editorial on the 2016 Republican platform (they call Republicans Extremists too), followed by the 50 platform policies.

Basically, the GOP 2016 platform would make Christianity the official American religion, replace sex education with abstinence-only advice, privatize almost all areas of federal services, cut taxes and regulations for the rich and titans of industry, and impose a belligerent foreign policy and military build-up.

This is an EXTREME platform. The GOP 2016 policies would cut taxes of the rich (done), redistribute wealth from the middle class and poor to the already wealthy (done), repeal environmental laws (ongoing), remove gun controls (ongoing), shrink health care for tens of millions and all women (ongoing), and eventually privatize government services.

If the evangelists keep gaining more control over the Republican, one of their many goals is to abolish the first amendment and make Christianity the official American religion. This would require many things, such as Bible study in schools.  Goodbye democracy, hello fascist theocratic authoritarian plutocracy!

I’ve cut out some of the detailed description containing the exact language in the platform and organized the 50 platform proposals into categories.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

***

Editorial Board. July 18, 2016. The Most Extreme Republican Platform in Memory. New York Times.

For all the disruption and damage that Donald Trump has meant for Republicans, the party’s statement of its views in its newly written convention platform rivals him for shock value.

It is as though, rather than trying to reconcile Mr. Trump’s heretical views with conservative orthodoxy, the writers of the platform simply opted to go with the most extreme version of every position. Tailored to Mr. Trump’s impulsive bluster, this document lays bare just how much the G.O.P. is driven by a regressive, extremist inner core.

Mr. Trump’s anti-Muslim phobia and fantasy wall across the Mexican border are front and center, along with his protectionist views, which deny long-held positions of the party. No less alarming is a raft of planks that ideologues pushed through to banish any notion of moderation and present-day reality from the party’s credo.

This majority has triumphed in securing retrograde positions that include making no exceptions for rape or women’s health in cases of abortion; requiring the Bible to be taught in public high schools; selling coal as a “clean” energy source; demanding a return of federal lands to the states; insisting that legislators use religion as a guide in lawmaking; appointing “family values” judges; and rejecting the need for stronger gun controls — despite the mass shootings afflicting the nation every week.

The platform also makes homophobia and the denial of basic civil rights to gays, lesbians and transgender people a centerpiece, repudiates same-sex marriage, and more.

 

Rosenfeld, S. July 18, 2016. 50 Shockingly Extreme Right-Wing Proposals in the 2016 Republican Party Platform. What Trump, a GOP Congress and GOP-appointed Supreme Court would do to America. AlterNet.

Loosen gun controls nationwide.

Repeal environmental laws.

Redistribute the wealth to corporations and the rich at the expense of the middle class and poor

  • Tax cuts for the rich.
  • Deregulate the banks (by getting rid of Dodd-Frank and so on).
  • Stop consumer protection: Abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was “deliberately designed to be a rogue agency”, answering to neither Congress nor the executive.
  • Add work requirements to welfare and cut food stamps.
  • Loosen campaign finance loopholes and restrictions on dark money: “Freedom of speech includes the right to devote resources to whatever cause or candidate one supports. We oppose any restrictions or conditions that would discourage citizens from participating in the public square or limit their ability to promote their ideas, such as requiring private organizations to publicly disclose their donors to the government.”
  • Dramatically increase Pentagon budget
  • No change in federal minimum wage: set it at the state and local levels.
  • Cut government salaries and benefits
  • No increasing Social Security benefits by taxing the rich

Health Care & Privatization [ which also diverts money to the rich and impoverishes everyone else ]

  • Privatize Medicare, the health plan for seniors [ i.e. get rid of it ]
  • Turn Medicaid, the poor’s health plan, over to states.
  • Repeal Obamacare
  • Privatize federal railway service (get rid of Amtrak).
  • Privatize government services
  • Replace traditional public schools with privatized options 
  • Privatize student loans instead of lowering interest rates.

Abolish the first amendment

  • Make Christianity a national religion. [ in other words, replace democracy with theocracy.  Despite the constitution prohibiting this: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.  The intentions of the Founders are clear elsewhere, see this Atlantic article here. ]
  • Require bible study in public schools.

Women’s rights and health care

  • Pass an anti-choice constitutional amendment: “We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the 14th Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth.”
  • Appoint anti-choice Supreme Court justices.
  • End federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
  • Allow states to shut down abortion Clinics.

Energy & Climate Change

  • Open America’s shores to more oil and gas drilling.
  • Build the Keystone XL Pipeline.
  • Expand fracking.
  • Rather than bury nuclear waste, the Republican party proposes development of advanced reprocessing technologies. Mention of Yucca Mountain is conspicuously absent. [ I strongly agree with this. See this post here for why burying waste in Yucca Mountain and new facilities is the right thing to do ]
  • No tax on carbon products.
  • Ignore global climate change agreements: “The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution. Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy.”

Immigration & Voting

  • Make English the official U.S. language.
  • No amnesty for undocumented immigrants.
  • Build a border wall to keep immigrants out.
  • Require government verification of citizenship of all workers.
  • Penalize cities that give sanctuary to migrants.
  • Require citizenship documents to register to vote: “We support legislation to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote and secure photo ID when voting. We strongly oppose litigation against states exercising their sovereign authority to enact such laws.”
  • Ignore undocumented immigrants when drawing congressional districts.
  • Oppose efforts to end the electoral college: “We oppose the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and any other scheme to abolish or distort the procedures of the Electoral College.”

Sex

  • Replace sex education with abstinence-only approaches [ if you do a search on abstinence-only nearly all the results are from peer-reviewed journals showing this approach has been proven over and over not to work ]
  • Appoint anti-LGBT and anti-Obamacare justices.
  • Legalize anti-LGBT discrimination. 
  • Support traditional marriage but no other families
  • Oppose stem cell scientific research

Oppose executive branch policy making: “We condemn the current Administration’s unconstitutional expansion into areas beyond those specifically enumerated, including bullying of state and local governments in matters ranging from voter identification (ID) laws to immigration, from healthcare programs to land use decisions, and from forced education curricula to school restroom policies.”

Other platform policies

  • No labeling of GMO ingredients in food products.
  • Puerto Rico should be a state but not Washington DC
  • Restore the death penalty
  • Cancel Iran nuclear treaty and expand nuclear arsenal
  • Reaffirm support for Israel 
  • Give internet service providers monopoly control
  • Shrink unions and union labor.

 

Posted in Human Nature, Politics, Religion | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Republican party platform: the most extreme ever

Fantasyland 3. History of increasing craziness of U.S. religion from 1517 to 1800

Posted on August 6, 2018 by

Preface. In another post about critical thinking, “What percent of Americans are rational?”, I list the results of 10 polls about what Americans believe. Here are the questions about Christianity.  When there’s more than one figure, they’re from different polls:

  • Angels: 77%,  72%, 72%   88% of Christians, 95% of evangelical Christians
  • Creationism: 36%
  • Devil: 61%, 60%, 58%
  • Heaven: 71%, 75%
  • Hell: 64%, 61%
  • Jesus born of a virgin: 73%, 61%, 57%
  • Jesus is God or son of God: 73%, 68%
  • Jesus’s resurrection: 70%, 65%
  • Life after death: 71%, 64%
  • Miracles: 76%, 72%

Only 48% of people agree with the statement “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like humans today. The rest believe evolution happened via the hand of God.

A quarter believe that president Obama was, or is, the Antichrist. A quarter believe in witches. Remarkably, no more than one in five Americans believe the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables.

What follows are the parts of Fantasyland that cover the early history of Christianity in the U.S.   

Links to the 9 parts of this book review:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

***

Kurt Andersen. 2017. Fantasyland. How America Went Haywire.  A 500-Year History. Random House.

The Conjuring of America: 1517–1789.  I Believe, Therefore I Am Right: The Protestants

America began as a fever dream, a myth, a happy delusion, a fantasy. In fact, it began as multiple fantasies, each embraced around 1600 by people so convinced of their thrilling, wishful fictions that most of them abandoned everything—friends, families, jobs, good sense, England, the known world—to enact their dreams or die trying. A lot of them died trying.

After the launch of this new Christianity, the new printing enabled its spread. Luther’s main complaint had been about the church’s sale of phony VIP passes to Heaven. “There is no divine authority,” one of his theses pointed out, “for preaching that the soul flies out of the purgatory immediately [when] the money clinks in the bottom of the chest.

Out of the new Protestant religion, a new proto-American attitude emerged during the 1500s. Millions of ordinary people decided that they, each of them, had the right to decide what was true or untrue, regardless of what fancy experts said. And furthermore, they believed, passionate fantastical belief was the key to everything

Apart from devolving religious power to ordinary people—that is, critically expanding individual liberty—Luther’s other big idea was that belief in the Bible’s supernatural stories, especially those concerning Jesus, was the only prerequisite for being a good Christian. You couldn’t earn your way into Heaven by performing virtuous deeds. Having a particular set of beliefs was all that mattered.

Although Raleigh never visited North America himself, he believed that in addition to its gold deposits, his realm might somehow be the biblical Garden of Eden. English clergymen had calculated from the Bible that Eden was at a latitude of thirty-five degrees north—just like Roanoke Island, they said. And there was still more fresh (hearsay) evidence of divine magic in Virginia: a botanist’s book, Joyful News of the New Found World, reported that various plants unique to America cured all diseases. A famous English poet published his “Ode to the Virginian Voyage,” calling Virginia “Earth’s only Paradise” where Britons would “get the pearl and gold”—and plenty of English people imagined that it was literally a new Eden.

Alas, no. A large fraction of the first settlers dispatched by Raleigh became sick and died. He dispatched a second expedition of gold-hunters. It also failed, and all those colonists died.

In 1606 the new English king, James, despite Raleigh’s colonization disasters, gave a franchise to two new private enterprises, the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth, to start colonies. The southern one, under the auspices of London, they named Jamestown after the monarch. Their royal charter was clear about the main mission: “to dig, mine, and search for all Manner of Mines of Gold…And to HAVE and enjoy the Gold.   Two-thirds of those first hundred gold-seekers promptly died.

The gold fantasy wasn’t limited to colonists in the South. Those dispatched at the same time by the Plymouth Company, 120 of them, landed up on the Maine coast, also looking for gold

Unlike their Virginia compatriots, however, the English colonists in Maine quickly accommodated reality and admitted defeat. Half left a few months after arriving, the rest six months later. They were not credulous or imaginative enough to become Americans.

But…maybe they just hadn’t talked to the right natives! Or looked in the right places! In 1614 yet another Plymouth Company expedition sailed to New England, this one exclusively in pursuit of gold. They had an inside man aboard, a native who’d been captured and enslaved by an earlier Plymouth Company ship off Cape Cod. The Indian had spent his time in captivity in London learning English and the nature of his captors’ shiny-metal fixation, so he concocted a story just for them: There’s a gold mine on my own island, he lied, and I’ll take you back there to claim it. When the English anchored off Martha’s Vineyard, he jumped ship, and his tribal brothers covered his escape with bow-and-arrow fire from canoes. The Englishmen realized they’d been played and sailed home.

Down in Virginia, meanwhile, more than 6,000 people had emigrated to Jamestown by 1620, the equivalent of a midsize English city at the time. At least three-quarters had died, but not the abiding dream. People kept coming and believing, hopefulness becoming delusion. It was a gold rush with no gold. Fifteen years after Jamestown’s founding, a colonist wrote a friend to request a shipment of nails, cutlery, vinegar, cheese—and also to make excuses for why he hadn’t quite yet managed to get rich: “By reason of my sickness & weakness I was not able to travel up and down the hills and dales of these countries but doo now intend every day to walk up and down the hills for good Minerals here is both gold [and] silver.

But back in England the investors and their promotional agents continued printing posters, hyperbolic testimonials, and dozens of books and pamphlets, organizing lotteries, and fanning out hucksterish blue smoke. Thus the first English-speaking Americans tended to be the more wide-eyed and desperately wishful. “Most of the 120,000 indentured servants and adventurers who sailed to the [South] in the seventeenth century,” according to the University of Pennsylvania historian Walter McDougall’s history of America, Freedom Just Around the Corner, “did not know what lay ahead but were taken in by the propaganda of the sponsors.

The historian Daniel Boorstin went even further, 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.

In his London circles, Bacon said, it was all “gold, silver, and temporal profit” driving the colonization project, not “the propagation of the Christian faith.” For the imminent next wave of English would-be Americans, however, propagating a particular set of Christian superstitions, omens and divine judgments were more than just lip-service cover for dreams of easy wealth. For them, the prospect of colonization was all about the export of their supernatural fantasies to the New World.

Most supernatural religious beliefs aren’t falsifiable. The existence of a God who created and manages the world according to a fixed eternal plan, Jesus’s miracles and resurrection, Heaven, Hell, Satan’s presence on Earth—these can never be disproved.

Unlike Roman Catholicism, with its old global hierarchy and supreme leader, the new Protestant Christianity was by its nature fractious and unstable,

When official leaders lose their way, pious anybodies can and must decide the new improved truth on their own—that is, by reading Scripture, each individual determines the correct meaning of the Christian fantasies. The Protestants’ founding commitment to fierce, decentralized, do-it-yourself truth-finding and spiritual purity naturally led to the continuous generation of self-righteous sectarian spin-offs.

What really distinguished the Puritans from the mainstream were matters of personality, demeanor. To be a Puritan was to embody uncompromising zeal. (They were analogous to certain American political zealots today, who more than disagreeing with their Establishment’s ideas just can’t stand their reasonable-seeming manner.) Moreover, a good Christian life, the Puritans believed, was one consumed by Christianity. The most extreme of the

But changing where they lived didn’t change who they were—sticklers and malcontents. They lived in Leiden, a place full of all the normal real-world ungodliness of a large Dutch city. Leiden was also the center of a liberal sect of Protestants. In other words, the English Puritans in Holland were surrounded by a new species of disgusting heresy. For them, hell for now was other people who didn’t share their beliefs with full fervor.

America was founded by a nutty religious cult.

It’s telling that Americans know and celebrate Plymouth but Jamestown hardly at all. The myth we’ve constructed says that the first nonnative new Americans who mattered were the idealists, the hyper-religious people seeking freedom to believe and act out their passionate, elaborate, all-consuming fantasies. The more run-of-the-mill people seeking a financial payoff, who abandoned their dream once it was defunct? Eh. We also prefer to talk about Pilgrims rather than Puritans, because the former has none of the negative connotations that stuck permanently to the latter.

The Puritans are conventionally considered more “moderate” than the Pilgrims. This is like calling al-Qaeda more moderate than ISIS.* The Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans’ theology was really no less mad.

The Middle Ages are generally reckoned to have ended at least a century before America’s founding. By the 1620s in the Old World, literal belief in biblical end-time prophecies was fading, along with other medieval artifacts. But not among the Puritans. They took the Bible as literally as they could, especially this most spectacular piece of it. That the Catholics had for centuries downplayed end-of-the-world prophecies was, for Puritans, all the more reason those prophecies must be true.

Christ’s return and reign wouldn’t be some airy-fairy symbolic spiritual thing but a real kingdom on real Earth. And ground zero of the coming Apocalypse, God versus Satan, would be in America.

The Boston Puritans’ first leader, John Winthrop, was talking to his shipmates about the end-time.

His most important successor as a leader of the New England theocracy, Increase Mather, also preached “that the coming of Christ to raise the dead and to judge the Earth” might happen any minute now. Mather even had evidence: meteors or comets visible in the skies over Boston, for instance, could be signs of God’s unhappiness and “presage great calamities.” As the religious historian Paul Boyer says, “The Puritans really expected the end of time to come very, very soon.

Cotton, who’d been preaching sermons since he was sixteen, took over for his father as pastor of Boston’s main church. The younger man soon began issuing specific dates for the end of days and kept doing so for the rest of his life. Six years from now! Okay, thirty-nine years from now—no, wait, fewer than twenty! And when that year passed normally, Cotton Mather announced it would actually be the following year.

Enlightened and emboldened, her followers took to walking out of church in the middle of sermons by ministers they weren’t feeling. Anne Hutchinson, resident in America for only a thousand days, was leading a movement to make her colony of magical thinkers even more fervid. Protestantism had started as a breakaway movement of holier-than-thou zealots—and in the even-holier-than-thou zealots’ state-of-the-art utopia, they now had a still-holier-than-thou mystic militant in their midst.

Once a faction of the colony’s leaders signed on to Hutchinson’s more magical, passionate, extra-pure Puritanism, she became problematic.

Anne Hutchinson had gone rogue. She was charged and tried for defaming ministers

When her trial resumed the next day, she let it all hang out. It wasn’t just the Bible that guided her but the Holy Spirit—that is, God, speaking to her personally, just as He had spoken to people in the Bible. It was, she told them, “an immediate revelation….by the voice of his own spirit to my soul….God had said to me…‘I am the same God that delivered Daniel out of the lion’s den, I will also deliver thee.’?” Governor Winthrop and his forty fellow judges had assembled to convict her of something, and now she’d made it easy. Furthermore, she threatened them and their misguided regime with God’s own wrath: “Therefore take heed how you proceed against me—for I know that, for this you go about to do to me, God will ruin you and your posterity and this whole state.

“Mistress Hutchinson,” a once and future Massachusetts governor among the judges said during the trial, “is deluded by the Devil.” And a witness against her, one of her fellow shipmates on the passage from England, testified that she’d made “very strange and witchlike” pronouncements when they’d landed in America three years earlier. The court might have brought a conviction for witchcraft and executed

“This is the thing that has been the root of all the mischief,” Winthrop bellowed, pointing at her. And also: “I am persuaded that the revelation she brings forth is delusion.” We’re all irritating, self-righteous Christian nuts, he did not add, but good God, woman, even we have our limits.

Hutchinson is so American because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality. She’s so American because, unlike the worried, pointy-headed people around her, she didn’t recognize ambiguity or admit to self-doubt. Her perceptions and beliefs were true because they were hers and because she felt them so thoroughly to be true.

Anne Hutchinson lost her battle in Cambridge but would finally win the war. For the Puritan leaders, it was their way or the highway. But in America there was an infinity of highways and new places not so far away where outcast true believers could move.

The Quakers’ famous civic reasonableness—tolerant, democratic, pacifist, proto-feminist, abolitionist—tends to obscure their own founding zealotry: each person could directly commune with God, which variously took the form of prophecies, trance-like rants, and convulsions.

Individual freedom of thought in early America was specifically about the freedom to believe whatever supernaturalism you wished. Four centuries later that has been a freedom, revived and unfettered and run amok, driving America’s transformation.

A Puritan minister had warned that “Satan visibly and palpably reigns” in America “more than in any other known place of the world.” What? Yes, another Puritan leader explained, as Christianity had spread through Europe during the previous fifteen hundred years, taking market share, the devil at some point arranged for a swarm of Asian infidels to cross the Pacific Ocean to America—“

The American Indians, in other words, weren’t merely unbelievers—they were Satan’s soldiers.

For their first sustained war on Indians, however, the colonists recruited other presumed demons to help them exterminate a tribe of definite demons, the Pequots. The Pequot War’s most famous episode was a one-day massacre in 1637 of hundreds of native people, including women and children. According to Increase Mather, his side won this war fought before he was born due “to the wonderful Providence of God.

Over the next two generations, as the English population quintupled, exceeding the Indians’, the natives naturally grew…restless. As a result, after a half-century the settlers’ long-standing fantasy of a pan-Indian conspiracy became self-fulfillingly real: the natives finally did form a multi-tribal alliance to fight back. The public case for wiping out the newly militant Indians remained supernatural, however. For Christians who imagined themselves battling satanic beasts, conventional rules of war no longer applied.

Yet another Harvard-educated minister, serving as chaplain to one of Massachusetts’s military units, exhorted his soldiers to “kill, burn, sink, destroy all sin and Corruption…which are professed enemies to Christ Jesus, and not to pity or spare any of them.

Cotton Mather happened to see a cabbage root with two branches, which looked to him like swords and an Indian club—clearly a warning from God of this imminent new battle against the hounds of Hell, he preached, a “prodigious war made by the spirits of the invisible world upon the people of New-England…[by] the Indians, whose chief[s]…are well known…to have been horrid sorcerers, and hellish conjurers, and…conversed with demons.

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.

The scientific method is unceasingly skeptical, each truth understood as a partial, provisional best-we-can-do-for-the-moment understanding of reality. In their travesty of science, Protestant true believers scrutinized the natural world to deduce the underlying godly or satanic causes of every strange effect, from comets to hurricanes to Indian attacks to unusual illnesses and deaths. For believers in the new American religion, the truth was out there: everything happened for a purpose, and the purpose wasn’t so hard to suss out.

Edwards was all about obsessively believing and feeling the magic. He was, Mark Twain wrote to a pastor friend, a “resplendent intellect gone mad.

According to Edwards’s reading of Revelation, the golden age of Christianity wouldn’t begin for hundreds of years, and Jesus would still be the absentee overlord until he returned as the king of the remade planet another thousand years after that. Yet under such a “post-millennial” scheme, the glorious happy ending is so far in the future it might as well be…imaginary, metaphorical. Which is to say, for a lot of Americans, too boring. A religion that doesn’t get the believer’s blood pumping right now can be like a marriage without sex.

Edwards is known as the Last Puritan, he was also somewhat Anne Hutchinsonian, a mystic visionary, consumed by the Bible but also by the totally subjective visionary experience of holiness.

Five generations after the first Puritans arrived, the zealotry had diminished. Americans still read the Bible and went to church, but the religious boil had become more of a simmer. Reverend Edwards found he could turn up the heat, whipping proper New Englanders into ecstatic and agonizing deliriums that he and they took to be miraculous proofs of God.

More preachers awakened more congregations. Their listeners didn’t just pledge to stop sinning and believe more strongly in God. They didn’t just read and discuss the Bible and the sermons. In the middle of church services, respectable people felt the Holy Spirit, which produced “the Affections”—moaning, weeping, screaming, jerking, fainting.

Edwards, this sudden madness of the crowd was also evidence of the supernatural big picture manifesting. “?’Tis not unlikely,” he wrote, “that this work of God’s Spirit, that is so extraordinary and wonderful, is the dawning, or at least a prelude, of that glorious work of God, so often foretold in Scripture”—that is, the slow-but-sure final act. “There are many things that make it probable that this work will begin in America.

A Whitefield appearance was fabulous theater—but his was apparently authentic emotion, a channeling of the Holy Spirit, a reality show. Most of his audience arrived with disbelief pre-suspended, and his performances let them believe the fantasy. At least as much as Edwards’s and Wesley’s sermons, Whitefield’s preaching made people involuntarily twist and shout.  Whitefield was the pioneering multimedia evangelical marketer of himself. Newspapers advertised his sermons and published accounts of the ecstatic mobs he attracted. He published a successful autobiography at 26—the first of several. Within a couple of years of his arrival, Whitefield may have been the most famous person in America.

By quoting again and again the biblical passage where Jesus tells a chief rabbi that “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” Whitefield implanted in American Christianity one of its big ideas.

As the Great Awakening spread, the Christian Establishment loathed all the embarrassing emotional displays of me me me fanaticism—as one critic at the time wrote, these awful “perturbations of mind, possessions of God, ecstatic flights and supernatural impulses.” Sure, the religion was founded on stories of miracles and individual visions and revelations, but whoa…miracles and revelations right here, right now? To which the delirious mob responded yes, exactly. Whitefield wrote that the “screaming, trembling” that he and other evangelists provoked were surely just like the “sudden agonies and screaming” that Jesus provoked among His converts. “Is not God the same yesterday, today, and forever?” It was Anne Hutchinson’s argument all over again. Give us the magic now!

“The most distinctive characteristic of early American Methodism,” according to one of its modern historians, was “this quest for the supernatural in everyday life.” Early American Methodists thus put “great stock in dreams, visions, supernatural impressions, miraculous healings, speaking in tongues.” Of course, each preacher and believer of every sect knew that his or her idiosyncratic version of the truth was the truth.

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

Franklin and his fellow Founders’ conceptions of God tended toward the vague and impersonal, a Creator who created and then got out of the way.

John Adams fretted in a letter to Jefferson that his son John Quincy might “retire…to study prophecies to the end of his life.” Adams wrote to a Dutch friend that the Bible consists of “millions of fables, tales, legends,” and that Christianity had “prostituted” all the arts “to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud.” George Washington “is an unbeliever,” Jefferson once reckoned, and only “has divines constantly about him because he thinks it right to keep up appearances.” 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.” He considered religions “all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies,” including “our particular superstition,” Christianity.

When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”  Thus none of the Founders called himself an atheist. Yet by the standards of devout American Christians, then and certainly now, most were blasphemers. In other words, they were men of the Enlightenment, good-humored seculars who mainly chose reason and science to try to understand the nature of existence, the purposes of life, the shape of truth.

Adams was friends with the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose 1748 essay “Of Miracles” was meant to be “an everlasting. Adams was friends with the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose 1748 essay “Of Miracles” was meant to be “an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion.

“As long as there are fools and rascals,” Voltaire wrote in 1767, “there will be religions. [And Christianity] is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd…religion which has ever infected this world.

Christians, instead of seeing telegraphy, high-speed printing presses, railroads, steamships, vaccination, anesthesia and so on as part of the Enlightenment and moderating their beliefs, saw God in these developments, that these marvelous things had happened because well obviously—God was with us.

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Fantasyland Part 2. How America Went Haywire. A 500-Year History.

Posted on August 4, 2018 by

Preface. This is the second of nine parts about the book “”Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire.  A 500-Year History”, mostly the introduction.

Links to the 9 parts of this book review:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

***

Kurt Andersen. 2017. Fantasyland. How America Went Haywire.  A 500-Year History. Random House. 440 pages.

The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of his first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing populist character, performed a feature called The Word in which he riffed on a phrase. “Truthiness,” he said. Now I’m sure some of the “word police,” the “wordinistas” over at Webster’s, are gonna say, “Hey, that’s not a word!” Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart….Face it, folks, we are a divided nation…divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart…Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.

Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly. America had changed in this particular, peculiar way,

We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. What’s problematic is going overboard, letting the subjective entirely override the objective, people thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings were just as true as facts. 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. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, each of us free to reinvent himself by imagination and will.

Much more than the other billion or two people in the rich world, we Americans believe—really believe—in the supernatural and miraculous, in Satan on Earth now, reports of recent trips to and from Heaven, and a several-thousand-year-old story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago. At the turn of the millennium, our financial industry fantasized that risky debt was no longer risky, so many tens of millions of Americans fantasized that they could live like rich people, given our fantasy that real estate would always and only increase in value. We believe the government and its co-conspirators are hiding all sorts of monstrous truths from us—concerning assassinations, extraterrestrials, the genesis of AIDS, the 9/11 attacks, the dangers of vaccines, and so much more.

And that was all before we became familiar with the terms post-factual and post-truth, before we elected a president with an astoundingly open mind about conspiracy theories, what’s true and what’s false, the nature of reality. We have passed through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. America has mutated into Fantasyland.

By my reckoning, the more or less solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, believe with some certainty that CO2 emissions from cars and factories are the main cause of Earth’s warming. Only a third are sure the tale of creation in Genesis isn’t a literal, factual account. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts.

More than a third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of scientists, government, and journalists.

That the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of “natural” cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have recently visited (or now reside on) Earth.

A quarter believe vaccines cause autism and that Donald Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 general election, and a fifth that “the media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broadcast signals” and that U.S. officials were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

When I say that a third believe X or a quarter believe Y, it’s important to understand that those are different thirds and quarters of the U.S. population.

Why are we like this? That’s what this book will explore. The short answer is 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.

Despite his nonstop lies and obvious fantasies—rather, because of them—Donald Trump was elected president. The old fringes have been folded into the new center. The irrational has become respectable and often unstoppable

The proliferation of delusions and illusions concerning the large subjects that people have always debated—politics, religion, even science—is connected to the proliferation and glut of the fictional and quasi-fictional coursing through everyday American life.

Truth in general becomes flexible, a matter of personal preference. There is a functioning synergy among our multiplying fantasies, the large and small ones, the toxic and the individually entertaining ones, the ones we know to be fiction, the ones we kinda sorta believe, and the religious and political and scientific ones we’re convinced aren’t fantasies at all.

We like this new ultra-freedom to binge, we insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrong-headed fellow Americans abuse it. When John Adams said in the 1700s that “facts are stubborn things,” the overriding American principle of personal freedom was not yet enshrined in the Declaration or the Constitution, and the United States of America was itself still a dream. Two and a half centuries later the nation Adams cofounded has become a majority-rule de facto refutation of his truism: “our wishes, our inclinations” and “the dictates of our passions” now apparently do “alter the state of facts and evidence,” because extreme cognitive liberty and the pursuit of happiness rule. — THIS IS NOT unique to America, people treating real life as fantasy and vice versa, and taking preposterous ideas seriously. We’re just uniquely immersed. In the developed world, our predilection is extreme, distinctly different in the breadth and depth of our embrace of fantasies of many different kinds.

Our drift toward credulity, doing our own thing, and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less-developed country as well.

 

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Fantasyland Part 1. How America Went Haywire. A 500-Year History.

Posted on August 2, 2018 by

Preface. This a review of the “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire.  A 500-Year History”. If you want to understand what’s wrong with America, and be highly entertained at the same time, this is the book for you, one of my favorites.

Some of the crazy evangelist religious beliefs today are due to corporations (see “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America”), though people with fundamentalist religious beliefs of any kind are the most vulnerable to being manipulated, since critical thinking skills are discouraged.

Links to the 9 parts of this book review:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

***

Kurt Anderson. 2017. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.  Random House.

So what’s the harm?

It’s literally costing us our lives. The U.S. is 26th out of the 36 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), yet we are the richest nation that has ever existed, or ever will exist.  There’s no better sign of a country’s health and wealth than height. Americans used to tower over all other nations, now we are 40th due to poor health care and diets.  We are 108th of 140 nations in happiness.

Two hundred innocent people went to jail and lost their careers, businesses, and families after being accused of being satanic cult baby killers in the 1980s and 1990s (and meanwhile Catholic priests were getting away with raping children).  This was as bad, if not worse than the Salem Witch Hunt, which lasted just months.  But these satanic baby killing cult trials went on for a decade.  For example, these cases:  Kern County child abuse cases, McMartin preschool trial, Ricky Kasso, West Memphis 3, Little Rascals Day Care Center, Oak Hill satanic ritual abuse trial, Fells Acres Day Care Center preschool trial, and Pace memorandum.  A third of Americans saw Geraldo Rivera’s TV show where he estimated that there are over 1 million Satanists in America linked in a highly organized secret network dedicated to satanic ritual child abuse and satanic murders.  Americans agonized for 3 centuries over the Salem witch trial, but I haven’t read anything or heard anyone talk about this since then.  And there are still regular satanic ritual abuse conferences.

The loss of basic rights: birth control and abortion, Republican gerrymandering of districts to gain an unfair advantage, as well as Koch brothers and other dark money allowed after Citizens United, and so on.

Thomas Jefferson once said that as long as a belief didn’t pick his pocket or break his leg, he was fine with it.  But these nutty beliefs are picking our pockets (deregulation, cutting the budget of the FDA and other watchdog agencies) and breaking our legs (getting rid of affordable health care, not getting children vaccinated, alternative medicine, and in 2017 the Republicans want to cut SNAP, the food stamp program, that in 2012 fed 45 million people).

Superstition is fun, isn’t it?

For most of human history there was no choice but to rely on myths and superstitions. And if you read anthropology you’ll run across a great deal of information on what it is like. It sure doesn’t sound like any fun to me. To be religious / superstitious is to be in constant fear of bad spirits. For leaders to justify taxing and starving and killing others.  In many societies the death of a member is blamed on a someone in another village and the tribe attacks the town in revenge, killing even more people and starting blood feuds that can go on for decades or even centuries.  To feel at all times that a mistake could result in demonic punishment, to be told that you are responsible for a drought and consequent famine because you didn’t obey taboos to the letter, is to feel out of control, to live in constant fear.  More on this can be found in Carl Sagan’s book “The Demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark”.

The wacko beliefs in America go all the way back to our founding 500 years ago by people with religious beliefs so extreme they weren’t welcome in their own societies — for good reason. This is best described in Bernard Bailyn’s “The Barbarous Years. The peopling of British North America: the conflict of civilizations, 1600-1675”. My comment: Let’s hope we’re not doomed by our DNA, Andersen never says this.

In the good old days the centrist Republicans and media stepped in to nip nuttiness in the bud, such as the John Birch Society.  But now that media is profit driven, which means only presenting information that we the ignorant public want to hear, and no longer believes that serving the public good is a paramount duty, all hell has broken loose as Fantasyland spins out of control into more and more madness.

Even academia has abandoned reason as one of the pillars they stand for.  Heaven forbid they trample on any student’s right to believe in anything by criticizing it.  All truths are equal. My comment: Andersen covers how this came to be at great length, with a long history of scholars who brought universities to such depths.

And so the gyre keeps widening and spinning into self-induced madness, rather than toward the The Enlightenment as in nearly all other developed nations.

The Tea Party, National Rifle Association, and right-wing evangelist and fundamentalist churches have ratcheted up the insanity, and totally cowed the more middle-of-the-road, reasonable old school Republicans.  Chapter 40 is all about how the GOP went off the rails, responsible for much of this.

The GOP today are the first political party in history to explicitly endorse a religion.  Despite the efforts of the founding fathers to prevent this. The First Amendment is an explicit statement of separation of church and state.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe in conspiracies.  For example, consider Agenda 21, a United Nations 1992 Earth Summit paper full of ideas for sustainable development and improving the environment in areas like deforestation, protecting fragile environments, protecting biodiversity, controlling pollution, minimizing radioactive wastes, and protecting the atmosphere.  But FOX and the Republicans accuse Agenda 21 of being a plot for one-world totalitarian and Communist domination. The last two GOP platforms have had anti-Agenda 21 planks, and a dozen state legislatures have passed resolutions cursing it.

Nor are there enough rational congressional staff to advise our leaders at every level of government, because in the 1980s, Newt Gingrich began what is now the Republican practice of cutting the budget for staff. This is why politicians have to get advice from lobbyists instead.

Republicans are also especially good at cherry-picking: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs, and Ayn Rand is a blueprint for many of them (House speaker Paul Ryan and his son Ron Paul, Ronald Reagan, Justice Clarence Thomas, Alan Greenspan, and so on).

The overarching harm Republicans have done is to convince voters that the media can’t be trusted, to ignore facts about their policies – inflexible and absolutely hysterical like the gun lobby.  “Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: NO new taxes, NO regulation, ABOLISH the EPA, IRS, and Federal Reserve, FORBID funding of studies on guns or global warming.”

There’s simply no evidence that Democrats are doing as much harm or believe in as many bizarre conspiracies or religious beliefs.  Polls have shown this.  Those who accuse Democrats of being socialists conveniently forget that Denmark is a real country, and like other “socialist” Scandinavian nations are the happiest, healthiest, and wealthiest per capita nations on earth.

This nuttiness may even be a sign of collapse.  If you look at the Greeks, the age of reason only lasted for 200 of the 700 years they existed.  After that  period, Greeks returned to astrology, magical cures, and alchemy, perhaps because they found freedom too scary, and were too frightened by the idea that their lives and fates weren’t predestined or managed by gods – of being on their own.

America’s Age of Enlightenment also appears to have only lasted for 200 years, from roughly 1800 to 2000.

Below are some, but by no means all, of the fantasyland topics Andersen covers. Some of them will be discussed in the next 8 posts, but not all of them.

  1. Evangelical Christian’s involvement in national politics.
  2. Drug use: speed, weed, psychedelics, tranquilizers, etc
  3. Scientology and what their main beliefs are (will save you tens of thousands of dollars to learn from this book rather than take courses…)
  4. The McCarthy persecution of imaginary communists, with Hollywood cooperation, ruining the careers and lives of many innocent people.
  5. Preacher Billy Graham: “communism was master-minded by Satan”.
  6. Since the 1920s, a hundred evangelical Bible institutes, plus colleges had opened.
  7. Fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches multiplied.
  8. Eisenhower was baptized at age 63 while President, appeared at 1st National Prayer Breakfast organized by fundamentalist Christians, added “under God” into the 87-year-old Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” on the currency, made prayer a regular part of cabinet meetings
  9. Norman Vincent Peale: one of the first who marketed magical thinking about wealth and success, such as repeating bullet-point affirmations over and over
  10. Oral Roberts bought time on hundreds of TV stations to faith-heal people
  11. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network
  12. Jim Bakker & Tammy Faye
  13. Satan and the antichrist were taking over the world (the late great planet earth), which led to endless new satanic agents after that: China! Iran! Vaccines! Obama! Pope Francis! ISIS!
  14. Craziness existed on both the left and right. Anything goes meant leftist beliefs were just fine if you wanted to believe them, i.e. New Age shamans, astrology, ESP, homeopathy, healing crystals for particular invisible bodily chakra’s, non-christian faith healing via Reiki, channeling the spirits of the dead, channeling totally fictional people who never existed like Seth and Ramtha, getting touch with past lives.
  15. Dr Oz and half or more of everything he ever said on Oprah or his own TV show. He promotes miracle elixirs, homeopathy, imaginary energies, psychics who communicate with the dead, green coffee beans as a magical weight-loss cure, vaccines cause autism and other illnesses.
  16. Andrew Weil: Reiki, herbal, aromatherapy, magical energies.
  17. Alternative medicine. Replace the word “alternative” with “untested”.  Why can’t supplement companies and others selling snake oil who are earning billions of dollars afford to test what they’re selling, to not only make sure it’s effective, but SAFE?
  18. The Secret: the law of attraction. If you crave anything hard enough, it will become yours! This book sold 20 million copies! Guess what, the only reason a person doesn’t have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with your thoughts. Leave the details to the Universe about how it will happen.  But this magic can be wrecked by understanding the real world, such as watching the news or reading newspapers.
  19. Since reality was whatever you liked, this even more increased right wing extreme Christianity, full-blown conspiracism, libertarianism, unembarrassed greed, capitalist removal of regulations and taxes than beliefs on the left .
  20. Both left and right abandoned claims of reason and rationality.
  21. But the right used the anything goes idea to believe in far more dangerous and crazy things: gun rights, black helicopter conspiracism, climate change denial, biblical literacy, white supremacy, speaking in tongues, driving demons out of the possessed, Creationism and the denial of evolution, FEMA concentration camps, heaven, angels, hell, and Satan are REAL. Homeschooling and bible churches to teach creationism and keep children from being exposed to science.
  22. The setting of dates for The End of the World: the 2012 Mayan calendar, and too many cult and PEFC dates to list
  23. In the 1960s the idea that you could believe whatever you wish blossomed. Find your own truth. Mistrust authority. This empowered the right way more than the left.
  24. Esalen: a mother church for people who don’t like churches or religious but still want to believe in the supernatural. Especially other understandings of reality, such as Native American, Asian, or shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, Gestalt therapy,
  25. Mental illness as a superior way of perceiving reality and the dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities, science is a sinister scheme.
  26. Guru Maharaj Ji: followers were told that believers would be able to lift the Astrodome from the earth, and that Majaraj Ji would soon be revealed to be the One who was waited for by every religion for all times.
  27. The role of LSD and other drugs in helping to turn America into Fantasyland
  28. Flying saucer cults and abduction by aliens
  29. Starting in 1961, academics such as Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Tart, and too many mentioned in the book to list, promoted the idea that all beliefs and approximations of truth, science as much as fables or religion, are merely stories devised by people to suit their own needs or interests. Reality is itself a social construction of useful or wishful myths that members of society have been persuaded to believe. Superstitions, magical thinking, and delusions are as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science.
  30. In short, academia said that you can believe whatever you want, because it’s pretty much all equally true and false.
  31. Anthropologists decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected by considered equivalent to reason and science.
  32. Carlos Castaneda “Teachings of Don Juan”
  33. Parapsychology at UCLA, Princeton
  34. The war in Viet Nam longer than need be due to McNamara and Herman Kahn believing their shiny computerized approach was telling them the truth and solving complex military problems by feeding in the right variables. Lack of realizing that emotion drove the war far more than reason, as well as exaggerated fear of communism and concern for America’s superpower reputation
  35. SDS and other underground militant cells setting off hundreds of bombs and robbing banks
  36. John Birch Society. They believed 50-70% of the federal government was under the control of the Communist party, as well as academia, foundations, news media, the AMA, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Communism was a part of a greater global master conspiracy going back to the 18th century Illuminati. Even Eisenhower was obeying Communist orders, and had been for his whole life! But because the rise of the Birchers happened in the early 60s, before the forces of reason really started losing control, the mainstream media was able to quash it.  Especially by the establishment right, leaders of the conservative movement such as William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk.
  37. Not that it did any good. The book “None dare call it treason” authors accused a conspiracy of wealthy, educated, cultured insiders like the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, academia, mass media, and Illuminati were intent on creating a “world supra-government”.
  38. JFK conspiracies
  39. Christian home schooling to keep them within Bible-based bubbles of family and church
  40. Convicted their and embezzler Erich von Daniken’s book “Chariot of the Gods” which said that extraterrestrials had built the pyramids, Stonehenge, and more – this book sold tens of millions of copies.
  41. Fantasyland was further magnified by TV, movies, the internet, computer games, and other media. Disney land, civil war re-enactments, Middle Ages Society for Creative Anachronism.  Theme shopping malls, Old West steakhouses, Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores, and architecture. It permeates our society.
  42. Lotteries, gambling, pornography, cosmetic surgery, pro-wrestling, Celebrities, Reality TV,
  43. Casino fantasy themes – ancient Egypt (the Luxor), medieval England (Excalibur), 17th century Caribbean (Treasure Island), Renaissance Italy (Venetian) and so on.
  44. Adults wearing costumes at Halloween, reading comic books, fantasy sports and camps,
  45. True right-wing believers had a fundamentalist religious faith in markets, a knee-jerk opposition to the government making markets work more fairly and better, and taxes of any kind. Now selfishness could be cloaked as righteousness, as Gordon Gekko proclaimed in the fiction book “Greed is good”. Real people claimed their moneymaking lust and skill made the virtuous.
  46. Ronald Reagan who made it known he expected apocalyptic biblical prophecies to be fulfilled soon due to his Christian end-of-days beliefs since the late 1960s. His many end-time proclamations would have been a shocking national embarrassment a decade earlier.
  47. The end of the Fairness Doctrine, which allowed Rush Limbaughs national right-wing radio show to flourish in 1988, followed by Fox News.
  48. In 1992 when author Andersen was reporting in Time magazine about talk radio, Roger Ailes was at NBC (later Fox). Ailes phoned Andersen out of the blue to yell at him about an article that didn’t exist. He said “How would you like it if I sent a CNBC camera crew to follow your kids home from school?” My daughters were four and six.  Anderson replied “Wow, I’m sure Jack Welch, the CEO of GE which owned NBC, would be interested to hear that his new news executive is planning to stalk a journalist’s children.
  49. Limbaugh and Fox meant that media stopped serving an important Democratic function – the presentation of a shared set of facts.
  50. Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists. David Koresh took 75 of his disciples with him.
  51. Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber
  52. 9-11 was a government conspiracy
  53. Vincent Foster’s suicide
  54. Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM which hosts conspiracy theorists and promoters of political, paranormal, pseudoscientific, and apocalyptic beliefs of all kinds
  55. Alex Jones who rants against gun regulation, government subsidized healthcare, taxes, climate change is a hoax, Sandy Hook never happened and was staged with fake actors, cancer viruses in vaccines, and is followed by President Trump!!!!
  56. Conspiracies in The New World Order and Behold a Pale Horse about everyone from the Illuminate to the Federal Reserve in league to create a satanic one-world government as predicted in Revelation
  57. recovered memories of daughters that led them to accuse their fathers of raping them and participating in satanic rituals of human sacrifice and cannibalism, the invention of the fake diagnosis of multiple personality disorder,
  58. Shape shifting reptilian humanoids (see Time magazine’s article “The Reptilian Elite”
  59. A movement called the Third Wave or dominionism to replace secular laws and constitutions with Biblical laws and a fully theocratic nation
  60. Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and was a Muslim
  61. The Tea Party, Drudge Report, Infowars, Breitbart
  62. Spy magazine wrote dozens of articles about Trump from 1986 to 1993, exposing his lies, brutishness, egomania, and absurdity. In return he sent threating letters and called them in public “a piece of garbage”.  Trump is driven by resentment of the Establishment. He doesn’t like experts because they interfere with his right as an American to believe or pretend that fictions are facts, to FEEL the truth. He sees conspiracies everywhere. He exploits the myths of white racial victimhood.  He’s a spoiled, impulsive, moody, 70-year-old BRAT.  And many more pages about Trump that are great but too long to paraphrase.
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