This is super long and seemingly meandering in article form (it's adapted from a forthcoming book), but an interesting read about the struggle between rational and magical thinking, nonetheless. The near total proliferation of magical thought beyond all boundaries of politics or ideology, by my reading, is in part an outgrowth of the death of metaphor. We have had a reactionary cultural response to the age of irony, and well-meaning deference, sincerity, empathy, and credulity have conspired to replace objective shared reality with a collective ethic of solipsism--and then held that solipsism up as a virtue of progress! To get slightly silly with it: our various magical beliefs, and how wildly divergent and absurd they become the further away we get from once largely unquestioned beliefs about our various institutions, betray an underlying fear of something we are forced to confront thanks to our better understanding of the physical world--the monotheisms were always (at best) a useful metaphor, and not a one of us is going to live forever. And how we are aggrieved, because of it!
I think this piece also gets right up against a few things I've come to believe without it quite getting there, including the idea that the sudden radical democratization of information has only exponentially amplified a long-simmering crisis of representation. The thing that unites identity politics with Trump-ism is that crisis of representation--the feeling that our diminishingly small representative influence within our institutions is utterly out of joint (more than ever, by the numbers) with our sense of what should be. *Especially* in a country that promises that representation as its foundational ethos, and *especially* in a technological age that provides us all such individuated but connected megaphones and platforms. How we are aggrieved, indeed.
Andersen's prescription--keep fighting the good fight for reason and objective truths and honest conversation with friends and loved ones--is all well and good and heartily endorsed by me, but without solving the crisis of representation that gave us our current "politics," it's a patchwork, temporary fix at best.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
