Making Sense with Sam Harris - #103 — American Fantasies

Episode Date: November 9, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Kurt Andersen about the American aptitude for unfounded belief, the religious lunacy of the Puritans, populist mistrust of authority, the link between postmodernism and religious fundamentalism, the unique history of American religious entrepreneurship, the Trump phenomenon, the effect of fame on politics, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming For today's conversation, I am speaking with Kurt Anderson. Kurt is a best-selling author, and he's written for Vanity Fair and the New York Times. He's also written for Time and The New Yorker. He also writes for television and film and stage. He co-founded Spy magazine. And he was at one point the editor-in-chief of New York magazine.

And he's the host and creator of Studio 360, the award-winning public radio show. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was the editor of the Harvard Lampoon. But most relevant for today's conversation, he's the author of a new book titled Fantasyland, How America Went Haywire. And we talk about it today. We talk about the American aptitude for unfounded belief. We talk about the way in which credulity inspired the founding of America, specifically the religious lunacy of the Puritans. We talk about media and the growing populist mistrust of authority, the link between postmodernism and religious fundamentalism. And inevitably, this all comes around to the Trump phenomenon, about which Kurt has much to say, also the effect of fame on politics, and there are other topics here. Anyway, we only had about an hour to discuss these things,

so this is briefer than most podcasts, but I think you'll find Kurt's take on the present moment quite interesting. And now I bring you Kurt Anderson. I am here with Kurt Anderson. Kurt, thanks for coming on the podcast. My complete pleasure. So I don't think we've ever met. I noticed that we've been to similar places like the Aspen Ideas Festival and places like that, but I'm not aware of having met. Am I right about that? I think you're right about that. Okay. Well, it's a pleasure to meet you virtually. Now, you have written a fascinating book, which I think will be more or less the totality of our conversation. The book is Fantasyland,

How America Went Haywire, A 500-Year History. And like a few people I've had on the podcast recently, you seem to have written a book that was just perfectly poised to capture what was about to happen. Obviously, you had to have been writing this long before thoughts about a President Trump were anything other than a punchline. And yet you have written really the backstory to our current moment in a way that is pretty remarkable. So congratulations on having such good luck as an author. Thank you. If I believed in Providence, I would figure I'd had it come my way. Absolutely. I started working on this book, started thinking about this book many years ago, and then started working on it 2013, 2014. And it was near the end, the appearance of Donald Trump as the impending nominee,

just as I was finishing the book, yes, seemed like, I guess, lucky timing is the phrase. Yeah. Well, if you were a man given to prayer, you might have been praying for the wrong thing at that point. Well, yes, indeed. And I remember early last year, waking up one morning when Donald Trump seemed to be about to wrapping, if not wrapping up the nomination, him being a plausible winner at that point and saying to my wife, well, I know this is horrible to say, but if he gets the nomination, it could be very good for this book. Yeah. Yeah. Well, again, it really is amazing to read through the lens of our current moment. I would argue it would have been a very different... This is something I said to Ken Burns when he was on. We were talking about his Vietnam documentary, which is this incredible time capsule experience

of just looking at the divisiveness of American politics in addition to the chaos of that war, and watching it through the lens of the present was very different than it would have been watching through, let's say, the first term of Obama's presidency. And that's also true with your book. I mean, obviously, there was many of the trends you talk about of American unreason, which we'll discuss, were present even there, but it's just, we really are at some kind of apotheosis of your thesis. No, that's exactly correct. And as I've said to people, as I've been talking about the book since it came out, everything I am arguing here, and certainly the history that I'm laying out and arguing here, would have been true. We still would have been in a pickle, by my lights,

been true. We still would have been in a pickle, by my lights, had Donald Trump not been elected president. But here he is, and a kind of poster boy, exhibit A for my history and for my theses, and makes it a lot easier to explain what I'm talking about to people, frankly. Well, so before we jump into the book, just give us a brief, potted history of your intellectual life. You've been a novelist and a broadcaster and a magazine editor. How do you describe what you've been up to? Well, because I've done a lot of things, and I still do a couple of things, I usually go with what's on my passport, which is writer. But yeah, I was a journalist, and then I became a magazine editor. I edited New York Magazine, started Spy Magazine back in the 80s, and then began writing novels at the end of the last century. And about the time I also started doing a radio show on public radio, which I still do. So I still write novels and I still do the public radio show. And Fantasyland is my first big nonfiction book. So that's basically the sum of it.

How often do you do your radio show? It's a weekly show. It's a weekly hour called Studio 360. Right, right. Okay, so the book is essentially a history of American credulity. And I'm sure we will emphasize the downside of this, but there is, as you point out, more than the downside. There is some silver lining to this American disposition to unite what on their face seems like very different trends, but they all sort of push in the direction of believing things strongly on insufficient evidence. We have religious commitments and crack pottery and entrepreneurialism and a capacity for self-reinvention

and a love of show business and celebrity culture and even conspiracy thinking. And all of these forces have brought us to this present moment. But before we dive into the negative aspects of all of this, can you say something about the silver lining for this American aptitude for unfounded belief? Well, unfounded or less than perfectly founded. I mean, there are benign aspects to this, certainly.

And there is even heroism. I can come to this place and I can build this thing or become this person or do this extraordinary thing, even though it's doubtful that you, the individual, will succeed in doing any of those things. But that sense of the impossible dream, that has all of its obvious good sides and has served us well as a country in many different respects. So I would say that's it. I would say certainly the freedom, until the freedom went too far in believing crackpotism and disbelieving evidence or choosing not to believe evidence, all of those ways in which America indulged every flavor of belief, true, false, crackpotish, brilliant, authoring this country from scratch, had many good sides. We could then get into all of the doubts about, oh, but you say this is good because they moved west because they believed it and they committed genocide against the Indians. And that's a different case. But I would say by and large, much of what I see as becoming highly problematic and leading us to the place

we've arrived at today was a net plus for most of our history. Let's start with the history, because this is a work of history you've written, and the roots of America, which really are seemingly in the DNA, literally in the DNA of the country, insofar as there was a kind of a selection pressure for a certain type of person to come here. There are two aspects to it, and that seemed to be intertwined very early around the founding, which was on one level, you had people driven essentially by the myth of El Dorado and the mythical city of gold. And then you had others who were driven by the myth of the

Garden of Eden, literally wanting to find it on earth. And so there was this twin motive of a kind of get-rich-quick scheme and a pilgrimage that attracted more than its fair share of religious maniacs. And it's these two groups, and they came in waves from England, as you point out, and with vast numbers of them dying for the privilege of searching for one of these two groups, and they came in waves from England, as you point out, and with vast numbers of them dying for the privilege of searching for one of these two things. And the people who were left, the people who made it, were really of this sort, the people who would take inordinate risk based on having been successfully advertised to, essentially a full advertising campaign for decades in England that proffered both of these fantasies to would-be colonists. And the people who were taken in were the founders of this country.

Well, you've put it exactly right. That's a beautiful summary. And certainly as a child, and even through high school, the history of those first European settlers that I knew were the Puritans in New England. And I was taught very little about the nature of their Protestantism and the fact that it was, for its time in the early 1600s, perceived among the Church of England people back in England as a primitive medieval form of their newish religion of Protestantism. So I learned very little about the gold hunters down south. But as you say, they especially died by the hundred and kept coming and dying and not finding gold. It took them more than a generation to be convinced that there was no gold to be had in Virginia. So those did seem like, I mean, not just kind of metaphorical nodes for our beginning, but the very real thing,

as you say, these two different forms of wishful, passionate belief in the either unprovable or untrue were our founders. And I really didn't know about, as you say, this essentially first global advertising campaign put on by the businessmen whose colonies these were, who had the charter from the Royal Charter from England to do some business here, build an empire. And so, yes, pamphlets, posters, and all kinds of advertising were put out in England to convince these people to come here. And as you say, it's not just a crack to say, and they self-selected for suckers, that is something historians before, legitimate historians, real historians, PhD historians before me have proffered as an

important defining quality of the early Americans. Yeah, I think you have a Daniel Borstein quote to that effect. Exactly. That it was just an explicit selection pressure for those susceptible to advertising. So let's say something about the religious commitments of the Puritans. We have this word, Puritanism, which does signify kind of an overweening attachment to biblical literalism and a fondness for something like theocracy. But people, I think, are not so in touch with the character of these founders. And in fact, you point out one moment where our confusion or revisionism is fairly surprising, that John Winthrop, the Puritan leader, is the author of this famous line about America being a city upon a hill. And when that phrase is invoked today, it really, it means that essentially we're an

example to the whole world of what happens when a diverse society really gets its act together. It's like, this is just the summation of almost enlightenment values, you know, succeeding and some kind of, you know, moral order. But in the context in which he uttered you know, moral order. But in the context in which he uttered these words, he was really talking about the fulfillment of end times prophecy. He was talking about Christ's imminent return to judge the living and the dead. And these were people who felt that was going to happen very soon.

Absolutely. And that this could be the New Jerusalem where that happens. And they thought of themselves as, yes, analogous to the biblical Israelites searching for the promised land, but not merely analogously. They literally thought this was going to happen and that the New World could be the epicenter of all that. The other thing about Puritans, when we talk about them today, or use that word today, of course, it almost exclusively is a synonym for prudishness and sexual restraint. And of course, yes, that was part of it, but not the most important or frankly interesting part of what the Puritans, and especially the Puritans who came to America, were all about. And I say the Puritans who came to America because there were plenty of Puritans in England and in continental Europe, but the ones who came here were this most zealous faction of a zealous faction of Puritans who were the zealous faction of Protestants. So yes, they absolutely believed in the end times coming very soon, and that they were the agents, God's agents, in coming to the

New World to see that through, as well as being great believers in signs and wonders and symbols and regarding oddly shaped roots and meteor showers as various signs that they were either on the right track or that God was displeased, depending on the day. Well, I'm a little torn about how to proceed in this conversation, because on one level, it would make sense to move through chronologically, almost decade by decade, and get your take on how we got here. But another path would be to focus on specific variables like religion or conspiracy thinking or postmodernism and talk about how these things interrelate. Do you have an intuition about the best way forward here? Well, I mean, I thought the best way forward for writing the book was to do it more or less chronologically. But doing it in those thematic ways, I'm entirely happy to do. That's the other way to do it. So I'm happy to do that. I do want to mention just a character among the Puritans who we barely know today. Most people don't know of her. Anne Hutchinson, who was this extraordinary character. I just think

she's a great story. So before we leave the Puritans altogether, I would love to talk a little about her because I find her so fascinating. Yeah, let's talk about Anne. She was a middle-aged mother of many, many children, well-to-do, came here in the early first waves of Puritans, settled in Boston, as they did, and lived in the good part of town, neighbor of the governor, but decided very early on that she felt herself essentially sainted and in touch with the divine in a way that all the male clergy and leaders were not, and began having essentially rump church sessions at her home that her husband allowed her to do, I guess. And they became very popular. And in addition to critiquing the sermons that were being given by the, of course, male Puritan leaders every Sunday,

she brought a whole other piece to the idea, to the Puritan Protestant Christian idea, which is that I can feel who's godly. I know who the elect are. I know who is with God and who isn't in this sixth sense way. And that because I feel it, it is true. Which, when we look at that in, you know, almost 400 years retrospect, it's so, she is, to me, a kind of prototypical American in that sense. And, of course, they banished her and threw her out, and she went and found her version of religious freedom down in Providence with Roger Williams. But her case is presented today correctly insofar as it goes with her as a beleaguered feminist heroine, which she was, by my lights, religious fever and extravagance, and again, did this other thing, which is, no, no, no, I am holy, I am a prophet, I feel these things, which was not part of the Puritan idea. So I just find her an extraordinary character, and in a way that the Puritans, even though much of their theology has become current again in American Protestantism, I find her as this extraordinary, way ahead of her time figure in representing a kind of religious practice and belief that came to define American Protestantism almost uniquely in Christendom. Yeah, well, she was a kind of religious entrepreneur, and others obviously

have followed, but she also did expose the way in which any religious cult, no matter how fanatical, is always vulnerable to the even greater fanaticism of one of its members. Yes, exactly. And that has been the story of American Protestantism, of being this very fissile thing with no center, no state church, and that as they grow, as the new denominations emerge, and they're all full of vigor and zeal and fanaticism, and then they cool down and new, hot, more fanatical and zealous sects grow up. And no, that is, in a nutshell, the history of American Protestantism. And you actually touch on some of the older history of Protestantism, which is relevant here, And you actually touch on some of the older history of Protestantism, which is relevant here this populist trend that led to the widespread disparagement of experts. In the case of the Protestants,

they were explicitly repudiating the expertise of the church. But this is something that just continues to this day, where you have access to media allowing for, both on the right and the left, a kind of kindling of doubt with respect to the established powers or established authorities. And it's a war that just rages generation after generation, where you just have these kind of waves of repudiation of, you know, what is, at least in the current generation's mind, you know, the considered opinions of those best informed on a given topic. But, you know, the media is always allowing for a kind of sea change or an attempted sea change against that opinion, rather often on the parts of people who are just reinventing reality for themselves. A lot of this conversation is unconstrained by

anything that has gone before. Exactly right. And indeed, who knows? Our descendants will know better in some hundreds of years if the digital revolution and the internet is as disruptive in the way that the movable type and the printing press in the late 15th century was, I have a feeling it will be and is. And certainly, as you're suggesting, it is this extraordinary, in the case of America especially, bookending of this technology, in the case of the printing press, that permitted Luther and Luther's ideas and the Reformation to happen. If he'd come along 50 years earlier, I don't think it wouldn't have happened. He wouldn't have been the guy, anyway, to make it happen because the press allowed books

to be printed and books in modern languages to be printed, and thus everybody, every believing Protestant to be in this priesthood of all believers, his or her own priest with his or her own Bible, interpreting it at will. And so, yes, there is this technology in then and now that are permitting these transformation of understanding of reality, and what you had then and now have in this kind of repetition or rhyme now is this part of Protestantism that they believe so strongly, and that Americans in general, beyond the fervently religious Protestants here, I think it is part of the American character, this anti-establishment feeling. And I don't need to trust the experts. I can figure it out on my own. And this anti-elitism, which it was certainly given oomph and power by our overwhelmingly

Protestant founders and forebears, but it is not just among those piously, devoutly religious Protestants today where that anti-establishment, anti-expert feeling is deeply rooted and passionately pursued. out before, you talk a lot about a synergy, a rather malignant synergy, between religious fundamentalism and its sort of anti-rational tendencies and movements very much in academia, postmodernism in particular, with its doubt about science and really doubt about reality itself. And those two trends on the left and right of the political spectrum have really married in a way to bring us to this moment where it seems most people feel entitled to have their own take on reality itself, whether it's informed or not by even the vaguest understanding of the scientific worldview or any other real intellectual trend that could deliver them facts. So it seems a legitimate project for most people to have a very strongly felt opinion

about cosmology or global warming or anything else about which they may have spent no time informing themselves and this does cut across political lines I think in the way that you described you want to you want to talk about that weird marriage if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot org once you do you to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content,

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