Book Review: "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History" by Kurt Andersen

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History (2017)
Kurt Andersen (1954)
462 pages

the Enlightenment rationalists’ hopeful fallacy… : once granted complete freedom of thought, [Thomas] Jefferson and company assumed, most people would follow the paths of reason. Wasn’t it pretty to think so. (185)

If Kurt Andersen’s book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500 Year History had appeared before 2016, its title would have seemed needlessly polemical to many. Reading the book then, in what now seems like that distant past, would have most likely left one with a feeling of awe that the history he recounts had not led to extreme social disruption and dysfunction.

But discovering Andersen’s book today, in the wake of the political and social disintegration of the past few years, his title seems simply descriptive, an appropriate label for the present reality. And reading his book becomes a search for understanding, for explanation – how did we get here?

The book’s subtitle makes clear that Andersen traces the origins of how America went haywire back to the time of the earliest settlers. For their part, Puritans journeyed to America from Europe in search of a blank slate onto which to create a society that conformed to their extremely strict views; meanwhile, adventurers such as those at Jamestown came with fanciful hopes of becoming wealthy from the storied riches of the New World. Thus, Andersen writes:

America was the dreamworld creation of fantasists, some religious and some out to get rich quick, all with a feverish appetite for the amazing. … Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment’s empiricism, and you get our American mania for connecting all the dots, irrationality in rationalist drag. (427-428)

Willing to recognize the implications for his own behavior in an American system he has found to have gone haywire in so many ways, Andersen footnotes the particular passage above with the comment “I realize, given this book, I’m one to talk.” And, in fact, his text does quite thoroughly connect the dots, from the fevered dreams of those earliest settlers to the frenzied manias that characterize our present day derangements.

Through a compellingly argued series of short, five to ten page chapters, he details an inexorable rise in what he refers to as American fantacism. (Though Andersen doesn’t point this out directly, it jumps out from his telling how similar sounding are the words fantacism and fanaticism; certainly his history provides ample evidence that the pair represent profoundly interrelated concepts.) Integrating engaging details about specific personalities and groups into the broader currents of the growing fantastical thinking he finds coursing through America’s 500 year history, Andersen reveals how the realms of religious and socio-economic fantacism became increasingly intertwined.

The early Protestant settlers appear in Andersen’s telling to be guilty of the original sin, arriving in the New World convinced that “I believe, therefore I am right.” (15) The Puritans soon parlayed this conviction into increasing intolerance – and the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials which, while certainly brief and highly localized, become a telling portent of the wide spectrum of fantacism to come.

Andersen charts a subsequent, ongoing splintering in religious belief over the succeeding centuries and through to current times, as extreme groups of (generally Protestant) congregations of one generation broke-off to form their own sects or off-shoots, which in turn became too mainstream for some in a later generation, leading to a repeat of the process to found yet another group with even more fantastical dogmas. In that vein, he details the origins of not only the Mormons and the Christian Scientists, but the growth of evangelism, a movement later seen as too mainstream by their off-shoot the fundamentalists, and the appearance of Pentecostals (speaking in tongues).

A similar evolution played out for the descendants of those early settlers who arrived on the shores of the New World with visions of easy riches. Andersen traces how the original, fantastical belief in the bountiful presence of gold and silver in what would become the United States laid the groundwork for a psychological predisposition that fueled the rise of such things as patent medicines in the 1800’s, when

small and large businesses started selling all sorts of elixirs, tonics, slaves, oils, powders, and pills [t]he principal ingredient of many [being] agar or alcohol … [to variously] cure “deafness in 2 days” … “hunchbacks,” “acquired deformities,” and “early decay” … “asthma, diabetes, epilepsy and cancer.” (79-80) 

with a straight-line path onward to the homeopathic cures sold today. He describes how the selling of these patent medicines came, in the second half of the 1800’s, to be accomplished through showmanship, from early grifters and hucksters going town-to-town, to increasingly extravagant traveling shows involving such immortalized personalities as Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok.

Gradually, Andersen notes, these two paths of fantacism, the religious and the socio-economic merged:

[as] new churches were splitting off helter-skelter from almost-new ones, modern American Christianity and the modern American news media, advertising, entertainment, politics, and pharmaceutical industries all got their starts. Each was predicated on freewheeling blends of the fanciful and the real. Selling ourselves dreamy fabrications on a national scale became routine, part of the American way. What had been founded, in other words, was a synergistic and unstoppable fantasy-industrial complex. (112-113) 

One need look no farther than the present day news to witness the deplorable outcome.

Andersen identifies periods when the reach of fantacism expanded more rapidly, such as what he refers to as the “First Great Delirium” in the 1800’s, during which

new fantasies of every sort erupted – not just religious but cultural, pseudoscientific, utopian, and political, all variously radiant and lurid, feeding on another in a synergistic national crucible. (59) 

In the wake of the extremes of this period, reason and rational thinking managed to reassert itself to an extent in the early part of the 1900’s, somewhat slowing the march of fantacism. Then, however, came what Andersen calls the Big Bang, during the 1960’s and 1970’s: a step change in the scale and the destructive and disruptive power of fantasy thinking that has, he argues, led to the current corrosive and divisive social, cultural and political reality.

Andersen recounts having first recognized this connection during a lecture in Woodstock, NY, some four decades after the festival that put it on the map. It was a moment that galvanized his thinking about the implications of what he had previously viewed as seemingly disparate strands of American history, suddenly clarifying for him how the characteristics of America’s earliest settlers set the stage for developments that eventually created the cultural fireworks of the 1960’s, and finally culminated in the social disruptions we experience today. At that talk, he recalls:

a bearded man with white hair pleadingly asked why, did I suppose, had the revolution they imagined been won in so many social and cultural zones – civil rights, women’s right, gay rights, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, natural foods and medicine … but lost in the economic realm, with free-market ideas victorious? …

I had an epiphany, which I offered, bumming out everyone in the room. What has happened politically, economically, culturally, and socially in America since the sea change of the 1960’s and early ‘70s … isn’t really so contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece, for better or worse. …

What the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same coins minted around 1967. All the ideas we call countercultural barged onto the cultural main stage in the 1960’s and ‘70s, it’s true, but what we don’t really register is that so did extreme Christianity, full-blown conspiracism, libertarianism, unembarrassed greed and more. Anything goes meant anything went.” (173)

Thus, even as the anti-Establishment groups of the 1960’s fought for the their right to reject the status quo, to live as they wanted to live and demand the shifts in rights and norms that they believed were right and proper, the Establishment claimed the same right – to live and pursue their beliefs. Andersen argues that this “enabled a deep and broad believe-anything-you-want ethos that has powered the political right more than the left – and that extends way beyond politics … [giving] license to everyone in America to let their freak flag fly.” (174)

Support for Andersen’s emphasis on the 1960’s as the moment when the fantacism experienced escape velocity from grounded thought comes from a serendipitous source I tripped across as I finished the book and began writing this review: Krista Tippett’s fascinating interview with Vatican astronomers Father George Coyne and Brother Guy Consolmagno for her On Being program.  I first heard it some years ago – it originally aired on April 1, 2010 – but it popped up again recently in her podcast stream. As I listened to it again now, comments that had not particularly stood out for me when I first heard them jumped out in the light of having read Andersen’s book. The following is transcription I’ve made from the unedited version of the podcast, during a discussion lamenting the increasing tendency of so many toward a literal interpretation of the Bible as a refutation of science:

Consolmagno: The other interesting thing about the whole Galileo affair is, you read scripture, you read the description of say Genesis I, and it’s a flat world with a dome over it and water above and below the dome and its Babylonian science, basically. Nobody believed that by the time of Christ.

Tippett: Right.

Consolmagno: And certainly nobody believed that in Roman times. There was no Galileo trial, or crisis, when people moved from a flat earth to a Ptolemaic earth to a Telien Earth. The closest we can come is a wonderful phrase that Augustan wrote about in the year 400, in a book on the interpretation of Genesis, that said, it’s a scandal if a Christian tries to interpret the Bible this way and says things that everybody else knows is nonsense.

Coyne: It diminishes religious faith, religious culture.

Consolmagno: It diminishes the bible.

Tippett: And my understanding is that started to happen perhaps around the time of the printing press, the reformation – these things became popularized without all the sophisticated analysis that was actually a part of Christian tradition.

Consolmagno: Oddly enough, I think it really kicked in around the 1960’s.

Tippett: [Laughing] Ok…

Consolmagno: Because this kind of literalism, was certainly debated in the Enlightenment years, but it wasn’t a really big part of culture, until the culture wars of the 60’s. And part of it is that we live in this technical culture, where people want to read everything as if it’s the owner’s manual to a Volkswagen, and that’s the only kind of truth that they’re familiar with. They don’t understand that truth sometimes can only be expressed in poetry, because it’s too big for words.

Consolmagno and Coynes comments not only corroborate Andersen’s view of the 1960’s as a critical point of acceleration in the growth of literalist thinking among Protestant sects, but also the dismaying regression this represents from centuries of religious scholars and leaders.

Andersen goes on to note that, once social and political discussions shifted from a basis of factual and rational discussion to claims based on feelings and beliefs, it became perhaps inevitable that emotional reactions driven by uncertainties, anxieties and fears would lead to increasing acrimony, distrust and ultimately polarization. The authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt make a similar connection in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, in which they define and explore what they refer to as the “Three Bad Ideas” or “untruths.” The second of these, “The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning,” (borrowing the following from my review of their book, linked to at right)

they describe as the belief that how one feels about an event or situation provides a valid understanding of what has occurred. For someone condition to accept this belief, the feeling that an aggression has occurred means that by definition it has. The tendency becomes to view any sort of unwelcome behavior or statement in the worst possible light, defining even accidental and unintentional offenses as aggressions. This leads ultimately to the concept of so-called micro-aggressions, a view that apparently no miss-statement is too minor to be condemned.

And the situation has only been exacerbated by politicians, as well as business and social leaders, who discover they can encourage and exploit this polarization to their personal political and economic benefit.

Unfortunately, Andersen offers little concrete hope that a path back to a broad-based acceptance of rational discourse can be found. He argues that we must individually fight the good fight in this regard, noting that the future is not written. But the most he can do is to hope “that America may now be at peak Fantasyland.” (440)   Having “connected the dots” from 500 years of our history, however, his wishful thinking leaves me recalling a professor who years ago told me that ‘hope is the last resort of fools and dreamers’ – cold comfort in dark times. Andersen in fact notes that, examining even himself:

My life isn’t one of pristine, lab-pure rationalism, unleavened by emotion or superstition. Superrationalists are often prone to arrogance, hubris, a blindered devotion to markets or technology, an abandonment of the wholehearted search for meaning beyond science and economics. Flecks of fantasy are charming condiments in everyday existence. Like so much of life, it’s an instance of the Goldilocks Problem, avoiding the too-cold and the too-hot in favor of the just-right. But despite my dull faculties and primitive comprehension of the impenetrable mysteries of existence, I do try hard not to surrender to magical thinking. (435)

But that such self-understanding and rational intention were more widely shared.

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Andersen's interview with Sam Harris linked to at right.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Berta Isla" by Javier Marías

Berta Isla (2017)
Javier Marías (1951)
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (2018)
480 pages

In the popular imagination – fueled by an unending stream of books and movies – spies live lives filled with adventure and danger, moving from one harrowing assignment to the next. Whether portrayed as brooding loners or dashing playboys, it’s the circumstances of their missions that generally drive the stories, with their lives outside of work only tending to come up when in service to those main plot lines.

In Berta Isla, however, Spanish author Javier Marías turns these usual spy story tropes on their head, exploring the life of a spy from the context of the inevitable domestic sacrifices that result: the challenging requirement to keep family and friends in the dark about the reasons for unannounced disappearances from their lives, and the profound psychological impact of needing to rigorously compartmentalize one’s mind between the deceptive personas created for particular assignments and ‘normal’ life back home. Instead of a game of cat-and-mouse, the mystery that Marías pursues in this novel – and that in fact animates so much of his work – lies in how little we know, how little we in fact can know, about those closest to us, and even about ourselves.

And so it goes for the novel’s eponymous lead, Berta. As the story opens a new boy, Tomás Nevinson, enrolls at her school in Madrid, and for Berta it’s love at first sight. The pair soon begin dating, and when, after graduation, Tomás goes off to study at Oxford, they still manage to maintain their relationship, following a seemingly inevitable path to marriage, though they see each other for only a few weeks at a time each year. For Berta the future seems, if not clearly defined, then at least comfortably foreseeable; Tomás, too, anticipates contentedly his future with Berta, pursuing his studies with great success and imagining a comfortable and rather placid life: a staid career and a loving marriage.

Toward the end of his studies, however, a shocking event results in Tomás signing on with the British intelligence services, profoundly altering the course of his life. Upon returning to Madrid, and a nominal position at the British embassy, he and Berta soon do marry; but Tomás’ explicit orders to not tell even his new wife – much less his other family and friends – about his role as a spy, inexorably engulfs their marriage, and his broader life, in a fog of lies and deceit.

Tomás’ real job requires him to regularly return to London for what he tells Berta are conferences and training. At first she believes his explanations for these frequent trips, and for why she often cannot easily get ahold of him while he is away. But as the lengths of his trips grow so do her nagging suspicions, concerns only further fueled by the changes in his behavior that she cannot explain: the carefree boy she had known before Oxford has become moody and often distracted.

Then one day, in the wake of a terrifying threat, Berta tries desperately to contact her husband and discovers that he truly is unreachable, and for much longer than she would have imagined. Unable to ignore the many signs any longer, she confronts him when he again surfaces in Madrid, and finally learns the bare minimum he has been allowed, given the circumstances, to reveal to her.

Coming to understand that a significant part of Tomás’ life will always remain hidden from her and that each time he leaves it could be to face dangers she can only darkly imagine, she must confront the question of whether her deep love for the boy she once knew can be sustained with this man who has become so transformed and mysterious to her. Tomás too, struggles with the destructive consequences of his life of deception, not only on his marriage, but also on the people targeted in his missions, and, finally, on his own sense of himself.

In Berta Isla, as in so many of his earlier stories, Marías masterfully builds an engagingly intricate and compelling plot from what seems at first a relatively simple set-up. In Thus Bad Begins, for example, a young man is asked by his boss to observe and report back on a friend of the boss, based on a vague accusation of indecent behavior. In The Infatuation a young woman becomes infatuated with a couple she regularly sees at a café, and, when they no suddenly no longer show up, she becomes obsessed with finding out why. And, in The Man of Feeling, an opera singer sees two men and a beautiful woman sitting together on a train, and, when later encountering them again, implicates himself into their lives. In each of these stories, chance moments and encounters end up throwing the main characters’ lives off balance, forcing them to not only confront the inscrutable motives and desires of those closest to them, but also to recognize the often profound mystery of their own behaviors and motivations.

A novelty of the story Marías constructs in Berta Isla lies in the state imposed requirement on Tomás that he thoroughly partition himself between his work and the rest of his life. As the number of missions increases, each requiring its own particular persona, he comes to realize that this partitioning will only continue to become more difficult for him and that, beyond the inherent danger of his missions, he faces a life of increasing psychological strain, for both himself, and for his love, Berta.

The twists and turns in Berta Isla allow it to stand as an effective and engaging mystery story; but the fully formed characters of Berta and Tomás, and their struggle to work through the lives they’ve chosen, give the novel it’s heart. That said, relative to earlier works by Marías that I’ve read, I found his exploration of the human condition in this story less poignant, less personally impacting, as empirically indicated by the single quote I took from this story compared to the much larger number from earlier works I’ve read by him, as can be found here.

I expect this is a consequence of Marías’ focus in this novel on how state security service rules constrict Tomás’ life and actions, as well as through him those of Berta. Whereas Marías’ earlier novels explore the equally strict but often unstated and unrecognized social, cultural and historical conventions that constrain peoples’ behavior, in Berta Isla he turns to the extreme and destructive nature of the state demands on its intelligence service personnel, and the justifications and rationalizations these services sell their employees to convince them of the singular and world-changing importance of their work. Tomás struggles with the question of whether the consequences of the violence he has directly or indirectly, physically or psychologically, imposed on the targets of his missions has truly been beneficial. And these concerns also directly put into question for him the years of secrecy and dissembling that he has had to practice with Berta, as well as his friends and family, back home.

Citizens of nation-states want to be safe, and free from fear, but so many seem to conveniently overlook, or at least ignore, the stiff cost to those on the front lines who must often sacrifice so much to provide that safety, whether military personnel or the less visible security services. And even if we do consider it, as Marías does here, the reality is that the nature of espionage work in particular imposes a profound requirement of secrecy that makes any justification unquestionable, and the acceptableness of the consequences on those involved difficult, if not impossible, to fully understand and judge. In Berta Isla, built around an engaging story of two characters fighting to salvage a life together that has slid off the rails, Marías forces us to confront these costs of the structure of our modern civilization.

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Other reviews / information:


Other works I have read by Marías, though I read all but one before I began this blog of reviews:

• While the Women are Sleeping: A collection of short stories.
• When I was Mortal: A collection of short stories.
• A Heart so White: A novel of a man who upon getting married reconsiders his past.
• Dark Back of Time: A novel written as a kind of imagined biography; a study of human nature that will pull you in deeply and force you to consider ideas and fears you had tried to leave buried in your subconscious.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf