#103 — American Fantasies
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Summary
Kurt Anderson 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, and writes for television and film and stage. He co-founded Spy Magazine, and was at one point the editor-in-chief of New York Magazine. 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, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History. And, like a few people I ve had on the podcast recently, he seems to have written a book that was just perfectly poised to capture what was about to happen. We talk about the American aptitude for unfounded belief, the way in which credulity inspired the founding of America, specifically the religious lunacy of the Puritans, and the growing populist mistrust of authority. And, inevitably, this all comes around to the Trump phenomenon, about which Kurt has much to say. And there are other topics here. This is briefer than most podcasts, but I think you ll find Kurt s take on the present moment quite interesting. Thanks for coming on the show, my complete pleasure. -Sam Harris and . And if you enjoyed what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber! or become a supporter by becoming one of our listeners. We don t run ads, and therefore, you ll be made possible entirely through the support of our sponsorships. We re making possible entirely by the kindness of our subscribers. We do not run ads on the Podcast, we re made possible by the podcast, and we re making sense by the Making Sense Podcast, which means we ll be making sense of you, too, by listening to the podcast. We ll talk about what we're doing here. We love you, we care about you, you get it, you care about it, we know that we re listening, too much of it, and they care about that, you re not only that, too of that, right? - Thank you, Thank you to you, Sarah, Sarah s -- Sarah s: , & so on and so on, etc., etc., so much so that you ll help us make sense of this podcast, right, so much more.
Transcript
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For today's conversation, I am speaking with Kurt Anderson.
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Kurt is a best-selling author, and he's written for Vanity Fair and the New York Times.
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He also writes for television and film and stage.
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He co-founded Spy Magazine, and he was at one point the editor-in-chief of New York Magazine.
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And he's the host and creator of Studio 360, the award-winning public radio show.
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He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was the editor of the Harvard Lampoon.
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But most relevant for today's conversation, he's the author of a new book titled Fantasyland,
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We talk about the American aptitude for unfounded belief.
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We talk about the way in which credulity inspired the founding of America, specifically the religious
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We talk about media and the growing populist mistrust of authority, the link between postmodernism
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And inevitably, this all comes around to the Trump phenomenon, about which Kurt has much
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Anyway, we only had about an hour to discuss these things.
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So this is briefer than most podcasts, but I think you'll find Kurt's take on the present
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I noticed that we've been to similar places like the Aspen Ideas Festival and places like
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Now, you have written a fascinating book, which I think will be more or less the totality
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The book is Fantasyland, How America Went Haywire, A 500-Year History.
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And like a few people I've had on the podcast recently, you seem to have written a book that
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was just perfectly poised to capture what was about to happen.
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Obviously, you had to have been writing this long before thoughts about a President Trump
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And yet you have written really the backstory to our current moment in a way that is pretty
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So congratulations on having such good luck as an author.
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If I believed in providence, I would figure I'd had it come my way.
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I started working on this book, sort of thinking about this book many years ago, and then started
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And it was near the end, the appearance of Donald Trump as the impending nominee, just
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Yes, seemed like, I guess, lucky timing is the phrase.
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Well, if you were a man given to prayer, you might have been praying for the wrong thing
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And I remember early last year, waking up one morning when Donald Trump seemed to be about
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to wrapping up, if not wrapping up the nomination, him being a plausible winner at that point, and
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saying to my wife, well, I know this is horrible to say, but if he gets the nomination, it could
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Well, again, it really is amazing to read through the lens of our current moment.
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I would argue it would have been a very different, this is something I said to Ken Burns when
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he was on, we were talking about his Vietnam documentary, which is this incredible time
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capsule experience of just looking at the divisiveness of American politics in addition
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And watching it through the lens of the present was very different than it would have been
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watching through, let's say, the first term of Obama's presidency.
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I mean, obviously, there were many of the trends you talk about of American unreason, which
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But it's just, we really are at some kind of apotheosis of your thesis.
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And as I've said to people, as I've been talking about the book since it came out, everything
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I am arguing here, and certainly the history that I am laying out and arguing here, would
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We still would have been in a pickle, by my lights, had Donald Trump not been elected
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But here he is, and a kind of poster boy, exhibit A, for my history and for my theses, and makes
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it a lot easier to explain what I'm talking about to people, frankly.
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Well, so before we jump into the book, just give us a brief, potted history of your intellectual
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You've been a novelist, and a broadcaster, and a magazine editor.
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Well, because I've done a lot of things, and I still do a couple of things, I usually go
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But yeah, I was a journalist, and then I became a magazine editor.
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I edited New York magazine, started Spy magazine back in the 80s, and then began writing novels
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And about the time, I also started doing a radio show on public radio, which I still
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And so I still write novels, and I still do the public radio show.
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And Fantasyland is my first big nonfiction book.
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Okay, so the book is essentially a history of American credulity.
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And I'm sure we will emphasize the downside of this, but there is, as you point out, more
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There is some silver lining to this American disposition to unite what on their face seems
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like very different trends, but they all sort of push in the direction of believing things
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We have, you know, religious commitments and crack pottery and entrepreneurialism and a
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capacity for self-reinvention and a love of show business and celebrity culture and even
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And all of these forces have brought us to this present moment.
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But before we dive into the negative aspects of all of this, can you say something about
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the silver lining for this American aptitude for unfounded belief?
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Well, unfounded or less than perfectly founded.
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I mean, there are benign aspects to this, certainly.
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I can come to this place and I can build this thing or become this person or do this extraordinary
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thing, even though it's doubtful that you, the individual, will succeed in doing any of
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But that sense of the impossible dream, that has all of its obvious good sides and has served
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us well as a country in many different respects.
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I would say certainly the freedom, until the freedom went too far in believing crackpotism
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and disbelieving evidence or choosing not to believe evidence, all of those ways in which
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America indulged every flavor of belief, true, false, crackpotish, brilliant, was good
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when it, until it wasn't, until it became a kind of uncontrollable kettle boiling over.
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So I would say the creating this extraordinary country out of nothing, authoring this country
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We could then get into all of the doubts about, oh, but you say this is good because they moved
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west because they believed it and they committed genocide against the Indians.
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But I would say, by and large, much of what I see as becoming highly problematic and leading
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us to the place we've arrived at today was a net plus for most of our history.
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Let's start with the history because this is a work of history you've written.
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And the roots of America, which really are seemingly in the DNA, literally in the DNA of the country,
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insofar as there was a kind of a selection pressure for a certain type of person to come
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And that seemed to be intertwined very early around the founding, which was on one level,
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you had people driven essentially by the myth of El Dorado and the mythical city of gold.
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And then you had others who were driven by the myth of the Garden of Eden, you know,
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And so there was this twin motive of a kind of get-rich-quick scheme and a pilgrimage that
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attracted more than its fair share of religious maniacs.
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And it's these two groups, and they came in waves from England, as you point out, and
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with vast numbers of them dying for the privilege of searching for one of these two things.
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And the people who were left, the people who made it, were really of this sort, the people
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who would take inordinate risk based on having been successfully advertised to, essentially
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a full advertising campaign for decades in England that proffered both of these fantasies
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And the people who were taken in were the founders of this country.
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And certainly as a child, and even through high school, the history of those first European
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settlers that I knew were the Puritans in New England.
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And I was taught very little about the nature of their Protestantism.
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And the fact that it was, for its time in the early 1600s, perceived among the Church of
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England and people back in England as a primitive, medieval form of their new-ish religion of
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So I learned very little about the gold hunters down south.
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But as you say, they especially died by the hundred and kept coming and dying and not
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It took them more than a generation to be convinced that there was no gold to be had in Virginia.
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So those did seem like, I mean, not just kind of metaphorical nodes for our beginning,
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As you say, these two different forms of wishful, passionate belief in the either unprovable or
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And I really didn't know about, as you say, this essentially first global advertising campaign
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put on by the businessmen whose colonies these were, who had the charter from the royal
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charter from England to do some business here, build an empire.
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And so, yes, pamphlets, posters, and all kinds of advertising were put out in England to convince
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And as you say, it's not just a crack to say, and they self-selected for suckers.
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That is something historians before, legitimate historians, real historians, PhD historians
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before me have proffered as an important defining quality of the early Americans.
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Yeah, I think you have a Daniel Borstein quote to that effect.
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That it was just a explicit selection pressure for those susceptible to advertising.
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So, let's say something about the religious commitments of the Puritans.
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You know, we have this word, Puritanism, which does signify kind of an overweening attachment
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to biblical literalism and a fondness for something like theocracy.
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But people, I think, are not so in touch with the character of these founders.
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And in fact, you point out one moment where our confusion or revisionism is fairly surprising,
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that John Winthrop, the Puritan leader, is the author of this famous line about America
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And when that phrase is invoked today, it really, it means that essentially we're an example
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to the whole world of what happens when a diverse society really gets its act together.
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It's like, this is just the summation of almost enlightenment values, you know, succeeding
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But in the context in which he uttered these words, he was really talking about the fulfillment
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He was talking about Christ's imminent return to judge the living and the dead.
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And these were people who felt that was going to happen very soon.
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And that this could be the new Jerusalem where that happens.
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And they thought of themselves as, yes, analogous to the biblical Israelites searching for
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They literally thought this was going to happen and that the new world could be the epicenter
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The other thing about Puritans, when we talk about them today, or use that word today, of
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course, it almost exclusively is a synonym for prudishness and sexual restraint.
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And of course, yes, that was part of it, but not the most important or frankly, interesting
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part of what the Puritans and especially the Puritans who came to America were all about.
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And I say the Puritans who came to America because there were plenty of Puritans in England
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But the ones who came here were this most zealous faction of a zealous faction of Puritans who
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So yes, they absolutely believed in the end times coming very soon and that they were the
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agents, God's agents in coming to the new world to see that through.
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As well as being great believers in signs and wonders and symbols and regarding oddly
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shaped roots and meteor showers as various signs that they were either on the right track
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or that God was displeased, depending on the day.
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Well, I'm a little torn about how to proceed in this conversation because on one level, it
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would make sense to move through chronologically, you know, almost decade by decade and get your
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But another path would be to focus on specific variables like religion or conspiracy thinking
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or postmodernism and talk about how these things interrelate.
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Do you have an intuition about the best way forward here?
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Well, I mean, I thought the best way forward for writing the book was to do it more or less
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But doing it in those thematic ways, I'm entirely happy to do.
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I do want to mention just a character among the Puritans who we barely know today.
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Anne Hutchinson, who was this extraordinary character.
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So before we leave the Puritans altogether, I would love to talk a little about her because
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She was a middle-aged mother of many, many children.
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She came here in the early first waves of Puritans, settled in Boston as they did, and lived in
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the good part of town, neighbor of the governor, but decided very early on that she felt herself
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essentially sainted and in touch with the divine in a way that all the male clergy and leaders
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were not, and began having essentially rump church sessions at her home that her husband
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And in addition to critiquing the sermons that were being given by the, of course, male Puritan
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leaders every Sunday, she brought a whole other piece to the idea, to the Puritan Protestant
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Christian idea, which is that I can feel who's godly.
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I know who is with God and who isn't in this sixth sense way.
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And that because I feel it, it is true, which when we look at that in, you know, almost 400
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years retrospect, it's so, she is to me a kind of prototypical American in that sense.
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And, of course, they banished her and threw her out, and she went and found her version
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of religious freedom down in Providence with Roger Williams.
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But her case is presented today correctly, insofar as it goes, as this, with her as a beleaguered
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feminist heroine, which she was, judged by all these guys, and being deprived of her religious
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But she was, she essentially one-upped the, the Puritan religious leaders in terms of
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their, by my lights, religious fever and, and extravagance, and, and again, did this
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other thing, which is, no, no, no, I am, I am, I am holy, I am a prophet, I feel these
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things, which, which was not part of the, the Puritan idea.
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So, I, I just find her an extraordinary character, and, and in, in a way, in a way that the Puritans,
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even though much of their theology has become current again in American Protestantism, I
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find her as this extraordinary way ahead of her time figure in, in representing a kind
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of religious practice and belief that came to define American Protestantism almost uniquely
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Yeah, well, she was a kind of religious entrepreneur, and, and others obviously have followed, but
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she also did expose the way in which any religious cult, no matter how fanatical, is
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always vulnerable to the even greater fanaticism of one of its members.
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And, and, and that, that has been the story of, of American Protestantism, of being this
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very fissile thing with, with no center, no, no state church, and, and that as, as they
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grow, as, as the new denominations emerge, and they're all full of vigor and zeal and, and,
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and fanaticism, and then they cool down and, and new, hot, more fanatical and zealous sects
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grow up. And no, that, that is, in a, in a, in a nutshell, the history of American Protestantism.
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And you actually touch on some of the older history of Protestantism, which is relevant
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here, because it was clearly enabled by the birth of the printing press. And so the power
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of the media really is coincident, and the emergence of media as a powerful force to shape
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public opinion is coincident with the Protestant Reformation. And both are coincident with this
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populist trend that led to the widespread disparagement of experts. In the case of the
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Protestants, they were explicitly repudiating the expertise of the church. But, you know,
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this is something that just continues to this day, where you have access to media allowing for,
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both on the, on the right and the left, a kind of kindling of doubt with respect to the established
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powers or established authorities. And it's a war that just rages generation after generation,
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where you just have these kind of waves of repudiation of, you know, what is, at least in the
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current generation's mind, you know, the considered opinions of those best informed on a given topic.
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But, you know, the media is always allowing for a kind of sea change or an attempted sea change
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against that opinion, rather often on the parts of people who are just reinventing reality for
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themselves. A lot of this conversation is unconstrained by anything that has gone before.
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Exactly right. And indeed, I, who knows, we'll, we'll know, our descendants will know better in some
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hundreds of years if the digital revolution and the internet is as disruptive in the way that the
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movable type and the printing press in the late 15th century was. I have a feeling it will be and is,
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and certainly as you're suggesting, it is, it is this extraordinary, in the case of America, especially
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bookending of, of this technology in the case of the printing press that permitted Luther and Luther's
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ideas and the Reformation to happen. If, if, if he'd come along 50 years earlier, I don't think it
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would, it wouldn't have happened. He wouldn't have been the guy, anyway, to make it happen because the
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press allowed books to be printed and books in, in, in, in modern languages to be printed and, and thus
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everybody, every believing Protestant to be the, in this priesthood of all believers, his or her own
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priest with his or her own Bible, interpreting it at will. And, and so, yes, yes, there is this
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technology in then and now that are permitting these, these transformation of understanding of
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reality. And what you, what you, what you had then and now have in this kind of repetition or rhyme now
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is, is this, this part of Protestantism that they believe so strongly and, and that all,
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that Americans in general, beyond the, the, the, the, the fervently religious Protestants here,
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I think it is part of the American character, this, this anti-establishment feeling, and I don't need
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to trust the experts. I can figure it out on my own. And, and this anti-elitism, which, which it was
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certainly given oomph and power by, by our overwhelmingly Protestant founders and forebears, but it is not just
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among those piously, devoutly religious Protestants today where, where that anti-establishment, anti-expert
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feeling is deeply rooted and, and passionately pursued.
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Well, one thing you point out in the book, which is fairly surprising, I don't know if other people
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have pointed this out before, you talk a lot about a synergy, a rather malignant synergy, between
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religious fundamentalism and its sort of anti-rational tendencies and movements very much in academia,
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post-modernism in particular, which with its, you know, doubt about science and really doubt about reality
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itself. And those two trends on the left and right of the political spectrum have really married in a way to
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bring us to this moment where it seems most people feel entitled to have their, their own take on
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reality itself, whether it's informed or not by even the vaguest understanding of the scientific
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worldview or any other real intellectual trend that could deliver them facts. So just, it seems a legitimate
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project for most people to have a very strongly felt opinion about cosmology or global warming or, or anything
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else about which they may have spent no time informing themselves. And this does cut across political lines, I
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think, in the way that you describe. You want to, you want to talk about that weird marriage?
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Sure. Yeah, it is a weird marriage and one that I, it had been passively suggested here and there, but I
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