Blame the Reformation
by Tom Sullivan
New Age meets Spinal Tap, my 1997 de minimis opus.
In the “do your own thing” 1960s, rednecks beat up hippies. By the 1970s, hippies had joined Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade.” About the time Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time, the left had rejected objective reality and embraced alternative ones and alternative religions. By then, country singers were wearing mullets and the hippie beatings stopped. So America began its trip through Alice’s looking glass on its way to losing its mind, explains Kurt Andersen (although I added the mullet part). The host and co-creator of “Studio 360” is the author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire—A 500-Year History. A lengthy excerpt has been adapted for the the September issue of The Atlantic:
America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, and by hucksters and their suckers, which made America successful—but also by a people uniquely susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem’s hunting witches to Joseph Smith’s creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Trump. In other words: Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.
Conservatives who for decades decried the relativism born of the liberalizing 1960s have embraced it like long hair on their country singers. And with it truthiness, Stephen Colbert’s mocking descriptor for truth born of the gut, not the head.
By the 1980s? By the 1980s, Andersen writes:
America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down.
Until in 2016, we elected president a reality show host devoid of government experience and with no ethical or moral core, a man unmoored from the truth and objective reality itself. A reflection of our times, Andersen believes.
It is an easy premise to buy for those who have lived through these last decades. The 1980s saw moral panics over satanic ritual abuse and childhood sexual abuse uncovered through “recovered memories.” People complained of multiple chemical sensitivity, perhaps a real syndrome and perhaps a species of anxiety disorder. Ronald Reagan promised he would slash taxes, expand military spending, and balance the budget all at the same time, and we believed. He promised trickle down economics, and we believed. He would build a defense net named Star Wars.
The Reagan presidency of the 1980s was “a triumph of truthiness and entertainment,” Andersen writes. Once the 1960s established the relativeness of truth, the American right found liberals were not the only idiots who could be made useful. Andersen argues conspiracy theorists of both the left and the right for a long time “have been on the same team.” His diagnosis?
The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.
The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them. Before the internet, crackpots were mostly isolated, and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the web, just like actual news. Now all of the fantasies look real.
It is this working out of the American ideal of individualism that has run amok, Anderson believes, and created an environment in which, contra Daniel Patrick Moynihan, people feel entitled to their own facts. Yet I would argue that the 1960s figure so prominently in Andersen’s narrative only because the tumultuous decade occurred in many of our lifetimes. Perhaps since Andersen’s subtitle is “A 500-Year History,” he goes back as far as I do. I blame the Reformation:
Say what you will about the excesses of Rome and the papacy (and not to ignore Constantinople), prior to the Reformation there was some central authority to define Christianity for much of the West, to set standards and protocols, if you will. The Reformation may have decentralized the faith and brought it closer to the people, but it also meant by the late 20th century that any American huckster with a flashy suit, an expensive coif, a sonorous voice, and a black, Morocco-bound, gilt-edged, King James red-letter edition could define Christianity pretty much any damned way he pleased. And did. Who was to say he was wrong?
That do-it-yourself spirit extends as well to Americans’ understanding of their founding documents. Every born-again, T-party convert carries a pocket Constitution and becomes an instant expert and his own defining authority on what is and isn’t the true American faith. It’s the American Dream: every man his own Supreme Court; no priestly judicial caste interposed between a man and his God.
Sheriffs Joe Arpaio, David Clarke, and other “constitutional sheriffs,” for example.
Add to that, as I wrote last year, conservative radio host Charlie Sykes who told Business Insider that years of right-wing talk radio have essentially destroyed the truth function of facts. Whereas liberals used to be accused by the right of relativism, decades of conservative talk radio attacks on the press (and science) have slowly dissolved objective reality on the right. Sykes says:
“We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers. There’s nobody. Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood,” he explained. “The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that. ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bullshit.’”
But the Internet age has taken us deeper down the rabbit hole we started digging in the 1960s. “Every screwball with a computer and an internet connection,” Andersen writes, and every crazy, right-wing uncle with an email list, I might add, became a vector for propaganda. Truth is no longer something sublime, but profane if it is not our own. Facts are suspect. The only ones that matter on the right now are “true facts.”
(Insert your own Schwarzenegger reference here.) In 1995, Barbara and David Mikkelson felt compelled to start Snopes, a.k.a., the Urban Legends Reference Pages, to defend truth from the tidal wave of propaganda and conspiracies the Internet unleashed.
I was spending my weekends at the time following the New Age, going to spirituality trade shows, watching huckster-believers hawk their healing potions and therapies while speaking of magical “energies” and channeling the dead. I created and never published a mock New Age business magazine based on those observations. I called it “Mantra-preneur.”
From belief in aliens to government conspiracies, whether it is the “the Corporate State” on the left or “the Deep State” on the right, both political poles abandoned the Enlightenment for a new, personalized Dark Age of unreason and magical thinking. Andersen notes, for example, “The belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.” Before Glenn Beck played it up FEMA camps before debunking them. In fact, a liberal friend swore it was true. Her friend had seen for herself “windowless” white rail cars for hauling political prisoners to the FEMA camps parked in the local rail yard. Here they are:
Norfolk Southern “camp cars,” rolling hotels for rail maintenance workers.
By the time Donald Trump ran for office, the alt-right had built its own alternative truthiness. Rush Limbaugh led the way, beginning in 1988, helped along by the right’s gutting the federal Fairness Doctrine. Andersen writes, “Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.”
But there is something still deeper I saw during my dive into the New Age. There was a certain “cargo cult” quality to it. Practitioners I met were for the most part therapists and artists, not scientists. They were disconnected from science, yet fascinated by it, folding terminology borrowed from quantum physics into their mystical beliefs to give them the veneer of credibility, as though their faith couldn’t stand on its own. Enlightenment science had stripped the mystical from their world, leaving them adrift, and they wanted that magic back. I wrote in 1993:
For all the talk about spirituality among devotees, the term faith is glaringly absent from the New Age lexicon. Perhaps that is because faith is not scientific. Perhaps because since Enlightenment positivism we have bought into the notion that science is the only intellectually respectable way of knowing the world. Nineteenth century Christian evangelicals, threatened by science’s march towards demythologizing the natural world (and by Darwin, specifically), worried that God would be its next victim. They responded not by reasserting the mystical nature of their faith, but by claiming biblical inerrancy. Where science and the Bible disagreed, science was in error. In so doing they reduced their sacred text to a textbook. They abandoned the spiritual high ground to play for the hearts and minds of believers on the field of scientific rationalism. In the process, they distilled out of their faith much of the mystical essence that had made it compelling for two millennia.
What they forgot, and perhaps what the new metaphysicians have forgotten, is that what makes faith so powerful is that it is not rational. Faith and reason are related, but different, processes. Faith is not irrational; it is beyond reason. It is supra-rational. Kierkegaard realized reason can only take one so far before a blind leap of faith is necessary to reach God. New Age spirituality is an attempt to reclaim that mystical connection with the divine, but they are in danger of repeating the fundamentalist error. The power devotees seek is not to be found in mechanisms of natural science or spiritual gadgetry: not in stars, not in potions, beams of light, vortices, crystals or other dimensions. Real spiritual growth has nothing to do with science or cookbook dogmatism. New Age believers have mistaken spirituality for faith.
Perhaps what Andersen misses is the mystery behind the conspiracy theories is not just an American compulsion for self-expression, but a human one for connection. Again, this is from 1993:
People are desperate for something in which they can believe. Communities have disappeared, replaced by subdivisions and condominiums. Terrorism and human rights abuses are more visible than ever. Anything you eat, drink or breathe might produce cancer. Science has reduced life to a cold set of mechanistic principles, demythologizing the world and stripping life of the meaning our myths once conveyed. The world seems to be coming apart and we are powerless to stop it. Nothing feels right anymore.
Is it any wonder people need something, some way to get control in their lives, some way to overcome our sense of powerlessness and paranoia? (Empowerment has become a hot term lately, both in enlightenment and legislative circles.) But in the absence of feeling that we can affect changes in our lives, we find solace in the notion that that power might exist somewhere else. It is as if we awakened to find ourselves locked in the trunk of a car careening down a mountain road. We desperately need to believe someone is behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is more comfort than no one at all.
A common response to such powerlessness is the conspiracy theory. The U.N.’s black helicopters, the international Jewish conspiracy, the Vatican, the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, the oil companies, the CIA and others offer us someone to blame for the world’s problems – without having to take any responsibility ourselves. Identifying others as the source of evil empowers us, in an odd way, by convincing us that if we could just eliminate them, things would improve. Just ask the Klan.
In New Age thinking, more benign conspirators pull strings behind the scenes. The government may be hopeless and Jesus may have lost credibility, but our alien mentors, spirit guides and secret circles of Wise Guys are directing humanity to a brighter future. A host of channelers, gurus, practitioners and facilitators have selflessly come forward to guide us into their empowering presence. Stripped of our myths by science, people have scrambled frantically to reconstruct the interior landscape from a pastiche of mystical icons – from pyramids to crop circles to UFOs – and a faith in beneficent higher beings that reassures us that someone is in control, even if that someone is not us.
Alvin Toffler theorized that too much change in too short a time can produce physical illness. Maybe. And maybe not just physical illness. Carl Jung spoke of a collective unconscious. If it exists, perhaps it is not so adaptable to rapid change either. What might it look like to go through life in the 21st century with a collective unconscious lagging a couple of centuries behind the times?
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