On Fantasyland

I heard great things about this book from numerous people, and I was really hoping that it would live up to its expectations, but it didn’t. Now, this book is one of those books that I wanted to read, but I wasn’t going to go out of my way to procure a copy or anything. I have a large to-read list and this piece was nowhere near the top. It wound up in my hands when I was in Amsterdam last month and looking for something to read on my train ride back to Paris. I walked into the bookstore, and this one stuck out. It took me a little over a month to finish because I read it in bits and pieces, but I did it.

I will say, the middle third of this book was actually quite decent! Although Andersen’s historical vignettes seemed a bit myopic to me, the argument that he was making made sense. Essentially, this argument is, “the United States has always had a crazy, fantastical streak to it. This nuttiess began to rise quickly between the 1960s and 1990s, then shot up after that.” My first qualm is that I don’t think that the US has always been particularly crazy in comparison to other countries. We can talk about the Puritans all we want, but they were far from the only settlers who came to what is now the United States. Tobacco farmers in Jamestown arrived some fifteen years before them for example (perhaps the desire they had for wealth was a bit “utopian,” but it seems to me to better represent a period of early capitalism that gripped northwest Europe).

In the middle third, Andersen dives into the two counter-cultures of postwar America—right and left—and how they built off one another. For example, Andersen argues that left-wing acceptance of postmodernism did a great deal to push forward “fantasyland” (something I agree with), then the Right followed up by also accepting a postmodern worldview, especially when applied to religion (in spite of the criticisms religious conservatives make of postmodernism, it’s rather undeniable that they’re as postmodern as anyone else). He also looks at New Age-y woo, the birth of the Christian Right, the emergence of widespread conspiracy theorizing, and the dissemination of mass multimedia culture (television, for example). To summarize the rest of the book: “it all went down from there.”

However, I think that Andersen spends far too much time on religion in America. Of course, this is an important aspect of the cultural shift in the contemporary US, but treatment of religion (namely, Christianity) seemed to take up more than half of the book. When he wasn’t making his rare, but good, arguments, he seemed to take-up a holier than thou “later generations are bad while older generations were good” attitude. Maybe he’s right, but this book isn’t going to persuade anyone who doesn’t already agree with it. Rather than attempting to convince people who may be Evangelical Christians or deep into New Age-y stuff or postmodern academics or even center-right conservatives, Andersen chooses to distance himself from these groups and preach to his own choir (and I’m saying this as someone whose political views are quite close to Andersen’s). What’s worse, the whole book has a pessimistic tone (which is reasonable), but the conclusion of the last chapter did not seem to fit. Perhaps Andersen’s editor told him that he needed to end the book on a good note, but the cautious optimism Andersen has about the future seems insincere. If he thinks the future is going to be bad, he should say that.

In overall assessment, I’m sorry to say that this is one book that I do not recommend.