SURVIVALISTS AND PREPPERS are wacky and sad. But: I do my thing and they do their thing, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. The fantasies they sincerely believe and elaborately enact don’t really affect my life or yours.
And those fantasies are among the last I’ll discuss at length that don’t in some important sense, as our founding libertarian Thomas Jefferson put it, “pick my pocket or break my leg.”
During the American Revolution, uniformed jackbooted tyrannical British thugs arrived at Jefferson’s self-reliant (and slave-dependent) mountaintop Virginia fortress, Monticello. But he had run away in the nick of time, retreating to his second redoubt eighty miles away. There in hiding he completed his one great book, Notes on the State of Virginia.
In the chapter about religion, Jefferson reminded his readers that some of colonial America’s official, government-sanctioned churches had persecuted and even executed heretics. Therefore, he declared, the new government must neither ban nor embrace any particular religion. Let people believe whatever they want, because “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
I agree. I tend to agree too with Jefferson’s assertion in the same passage that “reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error,” as well as his conclusion elsewhere that much of “our particular superstition,” Christianity, is “made up of the deliria of crazy imaginations.”
By my reckoning, way too many Americans now bother with reason hardly at all, give themselves over too much to the deliria of crazy imaginations, believe too many untrue and impossible things, and are losing the ability and the will to distinguish between real and unreal. Not that they don’t have the right.
So: live in your bunker with a decade’s worth of twenty-serving cans of teriyaki rice and beef. Pretend you live in a little house on the prairie and shop once a week on the make-believe Via Condotti nearby. When you’re not managing your imaginary NFL all-star team, imagine you’re serving as an officer in the Second Connecticut Heavy Artillery Regiment at the Battle of Cold Harbor. Get ready for Jesus’s return. Impersonate mad Dr. Mundo’s summoner in League of Legends, an aristocratic aesthete on Instagram, a truth-telling troll on Twitter. Fantasize that you were born with those perfect artificial breasts. Speak in tongues. Read and believe the books by people who say they died and went to Heaven. Dress like a wizard or a feudal baron. Believe that believing you’ll get rich will make you rich, that burning sage cleared your house of evil spirits, that humans were supernaturally created in a flash the day before yesterday, that alien beings taught us to build computer chips. Go crazy.
You have every right. And snug and smug in my own Urban American Redoubt, I have every right to disapprove of my fellow Americans who’ve decided that reason and empiricism are just some of many ways of understanding the world, no better than any other, that everyone is entitled to her truth and his truth. I am free to practice what the liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof scolds writers for doing, to take a “sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself” even though “mockery of religious faith is inexcusable”—and then I can raise him one, sneering at his mockery of Christians who believe their faith requires them to oppose marriage equality. And he or they or whoever may all disapprove of me. We’re Americans! Hurrah.
The great compromise between the American religious impulse and the American Enlightenment in the 1700s permitted any and every conceivable sect to bud and blossom. Fine. But that principle isn’t working so well anymore. The fanciful and religious and cryptoreligious parts have gotten overripe, bursting and spilling their juices over the Enlightenment-reason parts, spoiling our whole barrel. Holders of any belief about anything, especially and incontrovertibly if those beliefs are ascribed to faith, are