From Snake Oil to Theranos
Enchantment and the American Gods
1721
The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr Ibis in his leather-bund journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored. For the most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself. It is a fine fiction …that America was founded by pilgrims, seeking the freedom to believe as they wished, that they came to the Americas, spread and bred and filled the empty land .
The above quote is by Mr Ibis (a character based on the Egyptian deity Thoth) from Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods (published in 2001 and adapted as a TV series in 2017). In this book, we find old gods such as Odin, Loki, Kali, Czernobog stuck in America, out of their godly duties. They hustle and find something else to do. For instance, Mr Ibis and Mr Jacquel (manifestation of the Egyptian god Anubis) work at a mortuary in Cairo (pronounced Kay-ro), Illinois. Odin lives in motels, Czernobog in an apartment smelling like over boiled cabbage. They are still powerful but in different ways. And most importantly, they are now “American Gods” — brought in by the immigrants and travellers enchanted by the opportunities and freedom. Like America and her immigrants, the Gods evolve and our understanding of what we believe and worship too.
In another section of the book, the new idols and altars are described in the following way: (remember Gaiman wrote this between 1999-2001):
‘Who are you?’ asked Shadow.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Good question. I’m the idiot box. I’m the TV. I’m the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I’m the boob tube. I’m the little shire the family gathers to adore.’
‘You’re the television? Or someone in the television?’
'The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.'
'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.
'Their time, mostly ... Sometimes each other.'
We also find “Technical Boy” (personification of the internet) — one of the “new gods” in war with the “old gods”. We can now update our list of Gods and beliefs and add social media, Web3, metaverse. The object and the altar change while the essence still holds. The cultural kool-aid that we all drink now always evolving, through a new set of idols. Technology thus becomes an unarticulated aspect of global market capitalism and a dominant form of modern religion and spirituality.
Along with time honoured tradition of worship, we also find snake oil salesmen and women throughout history. We have always been enchanted and mesmerised by their rhetoric and charisma. The pioneers of the Internet and modern technologies now join this rank.
The recent ruling on Theranos also provides an interesting avenue to understand enchantment. This ruling came in the middle of a pandemic, with plenty of misinformation and pseudosciences around. Pseudoscience could be regarded as another form of enchantment.
On one side, we have Elizabeth Holmes enchanting Silicon Valley and a multitude of investors through science which turned out to be a kind of pseudoscience (here’s a 2015 article entitled Silicon Valley is confusing pseudo-science with innovation).On the other hand, we have anti-vaxers and all sorts of snake oil like remedies as solutions for COVID. What connects these two? It is not really about the science and the data. It is more about understanding our humane nature, psyche and how we deal with magic, myths and enchantment. It is about understanding which American Gods we are now worshipping.
Maybe this is what Francis Collins (former director of the National Institute of Health) was trying to get at during an interview:
You know, maybe we underinvested in research on human behavior. I never imagined a year ago, when those vaccines were just proving to be fantastically safe and effective, that we would still have 60 million people [in the United States] who had not taken advantage of them because of misinformation and disinformation that somehow dominated all of the ways in which people were getting their answers. And a lot of those answers were, in fact, false. And we have lost so much as a result of that.
Maybe? Underinvested? I think that is an understatement.
I want to connect our current moment with the idea of (dis)enchantment. The basic argument that we are all familiar with goes like this (it is a bit West Anglophone centric and has been critiqued in various ways — see references below): before the Protestant Reformation, the world (again from a European perspective) was full of magic and myth — so called “enchantment”. Not only the world was full of magic our deities shaped our human affairs. Some of these ideas of enchantment got enshrined within Christianity but with the reformation, we started to see the rupture. And with the advent of science and technology, we discovered the real rational world. The enchanted world can no longer fit within the new realm of verifiability and explainability. The gods then are out of jobs (another new enchantment of verifiability and explainability is AI — see Arvind Narayanan’s talk on How to recognize AI snake oil).
We know this simple narrative is not the real story. From enchantment to disenchantment to re-enchantment — this is just another myth that helps us cope with modernity and various other preoccupations.
As we have tried to reexamine our relationship with enchantment, it is important to understand human behaviour and why we always fall for the snake oil guy (often it is a guy — Elizabeth Holmes is maybe an exception?). How do we fall for these schemes? Do we need to stay away from enchantments and convince ourselves that science and rationality will prevail? Is more education the solution? Maybe?
In a 2021 book entitled, On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience, Michael D. Gordin makes the point that pseudoscience probably will never go away:
Science Education is a wonderful thing, and I am entirely in favor of it. It seems unlikely, however, that improvements in scientific literacy would stamp out the fringe. Consider the flat Earthers: every single one of them learned about the spherical shape of our planet in school, yet it has not prevented the birth of a new movement. Expansion of scientific literacy would not change the attraction of fringe doctrines for many individuals, though it might change which doctrines they found compelling — more Bigfoot perhaps, less alchemy.
His conclusion is not to eliminate pseudoscience but to grapple with it and understand it. I do wonder how “fringe” are we talking about here? If something like Theranos can happen maybe movement coming out of pseudosciences are not on the fringes at all.
We are always in the middle of a weird mix of science and magic. We evolve — from alchemy to Bigfoot to Theranos. From Clark Stanley to Elon Musk. This is in a way modernity’s predicament — scientific thinking and rationality can produce technologies that can help us but also can engineer excessive zeal for ideas that can be labelled as fringe (Gordin makes the point that people in the fringe movement think that they are doing science). Religion, magic, pseudoscience won’t go away. The idea of the rational world is also another myth that builds our social imaginary. There are similar other “uninspected, unimagined, unthought” myths we live by. The reason we get attached to American Gods and the likes of Gates, Jobs, Holmes and Musks of our times is that myths condition our experiences, shape how we perceive the world and our place in it. It is a “A City upon a Hill" that we are still looking for. To say that we are all disenchanted maybe is ok but maybe enchantment is our default mode. Let’s try to understand enchantment instead of getting rid of or fixing it.
References and further reading
The Origins of “Snake Oil” in Nineteenth-Century American Medical Culture
A brief history of American Pharma: From snake oil to big money
For some reason while writing this week’s item, it reminded me of Pynchon’s Against the Day
Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism: This is a book that looks at the religion/science mix and the issue of disenchantment: “Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.”
Fantasyland: HowAmerica Went Haywire by Kurt Andersen.
The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Another book that complicates the whole enchantment to disenchantment narrative. Also see this journal article: “Beyond Disenchantment: Science, Technology, and New Religious Movements” in the journal Nova Religio by Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm and Grant W. Shoffstall.
The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick by Jessica Riskin. Also kind of in the theme of enchantment and re-enchantment. Here the topic is agency and nature: “The conflict between passive- and active-mechanist approaches maintains a subterranean life in current science, shaping debates in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This history promises not only to inform such debates, but also our sense of the possibilities for what it means to engage in science—and even what it means to be alive.”
Society against quackery. Netherlands vereniging tegen kwakzalverij (going strong since 1881).