FANTASYLAND: HOW AMERICA WENT HAYWIRE

Anyone looking at the present political situation in the USA will probably agree that the country has become increasing fantasy prone: i.e., divorced from reality. [Does consensus reality exist]? The second subtitle of Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland – "A 500-year history" – tells us that he views Americans as having been enamoured of fantastical dreams since around 1517 when European colonisation of "America" first got underway. Canadian and Mexican culture is excluded from Andersen's scrutiny. The escapist fantasies so characteristic of what is now the USA have had many historical manifestations: the promise of heaven on Earth through the manifest destiny right to grab 'free' land, the get-rich-quick lure of "gold in them thar' hills" the rugged individual's conviction that they are little beholden to governance, taxation or social contract institutions. These wishful aspirations persist today and manifest in various bizarre cultural characteristics including extreme evangelism, libertarianism, Hollywood celebrity cults, plastic surgery, reality TV, and a president, majority party and a populace riddled with factions enamored of conspiracy theories and the promulgation of 'spin' that has spiraled out of control into fake news.

It may help us understand why Americans are different, and in their own eyes "special," if we recognise that 400-500 years ago there was "a kind of natural selection…[of]…people…willing to believe in advertising." That is, as Francis Bacon noted, colonisation was driven by "gold, silver and temporal profit" not the propagation of the Christian faith" [whatever those professing faith might claim]. These people were mostly protestant, with various often quirky, anti-establishment views. Andersen summarises the traditional view that the Puritans founded America, in search of religious freedom, by saying "America was founded by a nutty religious cult." Echoing ancient, Jewish tradition they saw America as the New Jerusalem, the New England, the promised land. Timing is everything, and ironically beginning in the 1600s 'Age of Reason' as Europe produced Shakespeare, Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Descartes, Hobbs, Locke, Spinoza, Kant and Voltaire "America was a primitive outlier" with a populace "free to believe whatever supernaturalism" they wished. Such freedom to think whatever you want, what Melville called insisting on "the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion" would become "a credo of Fantasyland." Andersen often lauds such pro-European, pro-reason sentiments as an antidote to American delusions and various "Great delirium[s]" that arose from the creation of various cultish religious denominations.

In the late 19th century as cowboys and cavalry decimated the remaining Native American cultures William Cody (Buffalo Bill) created his Wild West Show, the forerunner of the Hollywood western. So show business and the "fantasy-industrial complex" was created to sell "dreamy fabrications on a national scale" a "routine part of the American way." Between 1911 and 1919 movie releases increased from 2 to 646, 90% of which were American. Most famous Americans were no longer real politicians, writers, artists but rather actors "people renowned for pretending to be people they weren't." What more might we say about Hollywood's role in fantasy generation? With Disneyland as perhaps its most iconic manifestation of dreams and fantasy "California is America squared." For those who believe, as I do, that language betrays many an obvious and subtle cultural change, such phrases as suspension of belief speak to "discriminating between the actual and the unreal." Words that conveyed skepticism like hogwash, balderdash, humbug, bunkum, hooey, claptrap and malarkey were used less and less while words like incredible, unbelievable, unreal, fabulous and fantastic no longer had derogatory or unrealistic connotations, but were instead terms of praise, similar to wonderful, glorious outstanding or superb.

Left-leaning liberals and progressives, labels used more widely in America than Europe, often for intelligent authors like Andersen, have a tendency to regard conservative, right-leaning, gun-toting, fundamentalist types as deluded deniers of reality. The trouble with such sweeping labels is that when applied by progressives to conservatives, the latter tend to be offended and they 'double down:' meaning they become more entrenched in their right-leaning, anti-somebody culture and more inclined to believe that it is the other side – the left – that is conspiratorial and deluded. This emphasises the cultural divide and cultural wars phenomena so virulent in America today. Everybody seems inclined to anti-something-ideology, even if it is anti-negativity. Educated intellectuals - especially on campus - are mostly left-leaning, often labeling themselves as agnostic progressives. They mostly live in cities and well-to-do suburbs and consume progressive media. Residents of poor, rural areas, many inclined towards traditional fundamentalist or evangelical beliefs, live more isolated existences where extractive industries like coal are in decline, along with the infrastructure. They may feel forgotten, cheated and nostalgic for a lost past, a lost American dream world, or simply for more satisfying cultural experience, something city dwellers may equally well crave. Conservatives do not necessarily blame robber barons or wealth inequality.

The culprit may be amoral "progress" that has left them behind, and who but progressives are to blame, especially if conservative politicians or atheist-fearing preachers stir fear by pointing the finger to the left. Andersen reminds us that religious historian George Marsden famously said "A fundamentalist is an evangelist who is angry about something." The extreme right, including the National Rifle Association, points the fingers at the press and intellectuals, forgetting that the truly world shaking stories of cultural sea change have not popped up in the 24-hour news cycle, but have rather taken years of dogged investigative research and changing generational awareness to bring to light.

The previous paragraph paraphrases Andersen's thesis rather than quoting snippets directly. It is underpinned by the sentiment that discernment and education avoids the most deluded departures from reality. This thesis, and the evidence that Google searches increasingly bring up more and more conspiratorial fake news is consistent with the arguments put forth in Head in the Cloud (reviewed in Network 12x) that in a very complex world we need to be educated and contextually savvy. I was interested to learn of a study that "the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be the belief in end time prophecies." [I once witnessed two supermarket employees tell each other, in all earnestness, that they would be among the ~140,000 Christians to be beamed up in the forthcoming rapture, as the world ended! Have such fantasy beliefs became what we might call a sociological reality]? Thomas Jefferson once said that in the New United States "reason is left free to combat" every sort of "error of opinion." He was evidently a left-leaning optimist.

Andersen opines that "Europeans had highly developed regional and national societies before they bolted on Protestantism. America on the other hand was half created by protest extremists..." This is a cogent historical perspective, and flattering for Europeans. One must agree that American politics is riddled with questionable Protestant ideology, but I depart from Andersen when he throws out the baby with the bathwater. He repeatedly dismisses homeopathy as new age nonsense and gives short shrift to the Gaia hypothesis. [I would argue, though my audience is much smaller than Andersen's, that he has gone too far in dismissing what he categorises as "supernatural" versus "natural" phenomena. In a topsy-turvy world undergoing a sea change, it is true that things often make little sense, and that fantasy delusion should be called out. I may be wrong, but, as Jean Gebser argued, the magical and mythical consciousness structures may erupt at any time within the rational world. This is how new, unexpected paradigms emerge. SMN members often lament extreme reductionist scientism, but hopefully discriminate between fruitful and dead end pathways]. SMN members may also take issue with Andersen's suggestion that "the supply of clinical psychologists, caregivers desperate to find the source of their clients' unhappiness tripled from the mid 1970s to 1990," somehow marks a descent into fantasyland. There are many reasons for such shifts in clinical emphasis. Psychology is an inherently-dynamic, evolving field attempting to make sense of subtle energy influences on the psyche in human behavioral-cultural, not "supernatural," contexts.

Andersen's book deals competently with the cultural, socio-political, economic and political history of the USA, certainly topical subjects, reminding Americans that they too often live where the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred, and often tinged with whacky religious dogma. While he is right to point to these environmental influences on the shaping of the American cultural landscape into the fantasy-industrial complex, and the danger of letting fake news dull our sensitivity to the value of truth, there are [I believe] more fundamental forces at work. Admittedly these are broadly defined as psyche, the evolution of consciousness, humankind's perennial search for spiritual meaning (Americans say the inalienable right to pursue happiness). They say one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. William Irwin Thompson, who spoke of "post religious spirituality," also once said a shift in consciousness may herald a dark age. Certainly by definition, new light illuminates previously shadowy areas. Gebser spoke of integral consciousness integrating all consciousness structures (magical, mythical etc.,) in order to arrive at transparency. One way to realise a newly transparent reality paradigm is to dismantle the old, perhaps by exorcising fantasy (Jefferson's "error") and tackling the fake news and vested interests of the conspiratorial old guard and the wishful delusions of new age prophets head on. If you want secure ground, stick with the perennial Buddhist philosophy that all things change: that is "reality ain't what it used to be" and likely never was!