Review: The Delusions of Crowds

 The Delusions of Crowds is the latest book by William Bernstein, a retired neurosurgeon turned financial advisor with some success. The book covers both religious delusions and financial delusions. Bernstein, of course, is very credible when it comes to financial delusions, from the housing bubble to the dot com bubble, to Enron's collapse. I wish he'd write an addendum covering the crypto insanity that's obviously full of fraud, though maybe Molly White has it covered well enough.

The religious delusions are, believe it or not, quite new to me, despite having grown up in a methodist mission school that couldn't wait to propagate hell-fire-and-damnation, anti-D&D propaganda, as well as telling growing kids that Star Wars was evil because Yoda's explication of the force was inspired by Zen Buddhism. (Growing up surrounded by Buddhists, the school's religious authorities lost their credibility with me on that last bit --- I've had a deep suspicion of the Abrahamic religions ever since)

What the book taught me that I didn't know is the prevalence of the dispensation Christianity end times narrative, with a large number of the religious right having bought into it. If you've ever wondered why the most anti-semitic population on the far right nevertheless are such strong supporters of Israel, this is why:

The current polarization of American society cannot be fully understood without a working knowledge of the above dispensationalist narrative, which strikes the majority of well-educated citizens with a secular orientation as bizarre. In contrast, for a significant minority of Americans, this sequence of prophesized events is as familiar as Romeo and Juliet or The Godfather, and the appeal of televangelists such as Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart rest solidly on their dispensationalist credentials...The centrality of Israel, and particularly the rebuilding of the Temple, to this belief system has profoundly affected U.S. Middle East policy. Uncritical American support for Israel’s expansion of West Bank settlement and its apparent abandonment of a two-state solution can be traced directly to the advocacy of evangelicals, so-called Christian Zionists, who now exert far more influence than Jewish Zionists. Indeed, the opening and closing benedictions at the May 2018 dedication of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem were given by two dispensationalist ministers. One of them, Robert Jeffress, once claimed that Hitler had helped plan the Jew’s return to Israel; and the other, John Hagee, had deemed Hurricane Katrina God’s punishment for New Orleans’s sinfulness. (kindle loc 228, 234)

The book covers the start of the dispensationist religious movement, its roots in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, various Christian sects (including that of David Kouresh), and of course, Islamic extremism, which is the mirror image of Christian extremism:

Given that the roots of apocalypticism are found in both the New and Old Testaments, and likely have earlier roots in Fertile Crescent polytheism, it is not surprising that the doomsday scripts of both extremist Israeli Jews and the Islamic State have more than a passing resemblance to that of Christian dispensationalists, differing only in who plays the heroes and who plays the heavies. Today’s Muslim apocalypticists almost uniformly consider Jews to be the Antichrist, and the remarkable ability of the Islamic State to attract recruits from around the world to the killing fields of Syria and Iraq rested in no small part on an end-times narrative drawn directly from the hadith, the sayings of Muhammad. (kindle loc 254)

 Some of the earlier dispensationalist works actually predicted the creation of the state of Israel, which obviously makes their other random prophecies sound more likely to be true. The author does point out several examples of cases where end-times prophecies failed, and the so-called prophets doubled down multiple times over several years only to be discredited at the end, so not all end-times prophets get what they want:

The dispensationalists had already identified two occurrences that would mark the end of this hiatus and the resumption of time and God’s renewed attention to the Jews, and so bring about the end-times: the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the reassembly of the Roman Empire into the Antichrist-led European ten-nation confederation. While Darby left behind dozens of volumes, his unreadable prose confined his readership to a small core of literate and determined true believers. On the other hand, not only did Anderson’s prose go down like fine claret, but his accurate prediction of the return of the Jews to Palestine in The Coming Prince electrified his later twentieth-century readers...Even today, Anderson’s prediction of the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine astounds. The same, alas, cannot be said of his prophecy of a renewed Roman Empire, which has embarrassed Christian fundamentalist prophecy ever since. For example, a century and a half after Richard Graves identified the post-1815 rise of European constitutional monarchies as the new Roman Empire, dispensationalists would do the same for the European Union, which has thus far failed to produce the Antichrist or form a strategic alliance with Israel, let alone invade it. (kindle loc 4759, 4771)

 You might be tempted to believe that this type of fantasy is restricted to the kooky far right, but the book points out several republican presidents actually appeal to the people who believe this stuff:

President George W. Bush’s address to the nation announcing military action in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 nicely illustrated this divide. To the secular ear, it struck a tolerant, anodyne tone almost devoid of religious content, and mentioned Islam only in terms of American open-armed acceptance of and good wishes toward its nearly two billion adherents. Evangelical listeners, on the other hand, heard a rather different message in phrases such as “lonely path” (Isaiah), “killers of innocents” (Matthew), and “there can be no peace” (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Chronicles, Isaiah) that suggested the wrath of a Judeo-Christian God. Religious scholar Bruce Lincoln observed that such phrases were “plainly audible to portions of his audience who are attentive to such phrasing, but likely to go unheard by those without the requisite textual knowledge.”540 Bush’s speech was a loud and piercing dog whistle; as put by Christianity Today after Lincoln published those words, “Sadly, we’ll no longer be able to secretly nod and wink to each other as Bush talks.”541 (Bush himself is noticeably silent regarding dispensationalist beliefs; officially a Methodist, most observers classify him as mainline Protestant.)542 The prevalence of the dispensationalist delusion in the United States also separates this country from the rest of the developed world, and carries with it the potential for catastrophe. (kindle loc 5487)

 This book was published in February 2021, more than 2 years before the Oct 7th atrocities committed by Hamas. Ordinarily you would expect Americans to not care (Israel has no oil, neither does Palestine), but the book clearly points out that even as far back as Jerry Falwell's time, there was a religious movement to support the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank:

Asked why Israel had the right to occupy Gaza and the West Bank, he answered simply, “God said so.”596 The piece ended with Falwell, who remarked, There are about 200,000 evangelical pastors in America, and we’re asking them all through e-mail, faxes, letters, telephone, to go into their pulpits and use their influence in support of Israel and the prime minister.597 No one, though, exemplifies the shift of fundamentalist influence onto the potentially cataclysmic arena of geopolitics as does Pat Robertson, whom diplomat and journalist Michael Lind labeled “the single most important purveyor of crackpot conspiracy theories in the history of American politics.” (kindle loc 5827)

 Why are Americans so susceptible to religious crackpot theories and conspiracy stories? Bernstein doesn't hesitate to point out that the Americans are easily the worst educated of developed nations, and unlike our closest analogues, the British, we do not supply educational public programming as a counter-weight to the entertainment industry. So our public is particularly ill-informed:

The United States consistently ranks near the bottom of developed nations for the OECD’s PISA international educational evaluations, and when compared with the citizens of other developed nations, Americans know depressingly little about both their own country and the rest of the world. The latest PISA cycle, completed in 2015, showed American students ranked fortieth, well behind the likes of Slovenia, Poland, Vietnam, Russia, Portugal, and Italy, let alone top scorers like Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea.618 A study from 1994 throws this problem into sharp relief: fully 37 percent of Americans got all of five representative basic facts about the world wrong, versus only 3 percent of Germans. (Of Spaniards, 32 percent got all five wrong; of Mexicans, 28 percent; of Canadians, 27 percent; of French, 23 percent; of British, 22 percent; and of Italians, 18 percent.) Italians and Germans who didn’t attend college outscored Americans who did...“American television is noteworthy for the cognitive busyness of its jump cuts, advertisements, and staccato style, and cognitive busyness makes it harder for some people to absorb information.” The authors dryly noted that American researchers are “generally reluctant to ask too many factual questions for fear of embarrassing the respondents, who might terminate the interview or become too flustered to answer other questions.” This may explain why the Germans did so well, since they were far more likely to be regular newspaper readers than those in the other six nations studied...In the United States, the media’s mission centers more on entertainment than education, whereas Scandinavian governments vigorously support high-quality news and informational programming. The U.K., which possesses both a prestigious and well-endowed public news outlet, the BBC, and a prosperous private media sector, occupies a position midway between the United States and Scandinavian nations....the knowledge gap between Americans of high and low educational status was much larger than in the other three nations studied: A poorly educated Briton, Dane, or Finn knows far more about the world around them than a poorly educated American.623 It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the poorly educated in the United States, relative to those in other countries, are uniquely susceptible to dispensationalist narratives that even the most educationally disadvantaged in the rest of the developed world resist because of their better grasp of everyday facts. (kindle loc 5962, 5972, 5983, 5988)

What's worse, in recent years, evangelicals have increasingly had a prominent role in America's military as well as political establishments. 

You might be wondering why I put so much emphasis on the religious delusion part of the book, as opposed to the financial delusions. Well, the financial delusions (such as bitcoin or cryptocurrency) might cost you to lose your money and your retirement, but it's unlikely to destroy the world. The end-times delusion, however, can easily cause people to believe that it's their religious duty to bring about the end times, and of course, our modern technology allows us to bring about the end times through nuclear or other means. I'm surprised that this book doesn't get more attention, but that's probably because of Bernstein's writing style --- he is turgid and never uses short words when he can use long ones, and I believe the financial delusions part of the book fully dilutes the impact of the warnings he brings about religious delusions. After all, the dot com bubble collapse did gift us a ton of dark fiber that was later put to use by Google and follow-on companies. But there can be no recovery from an end-times plan put into action by religious people believe themselves to be doing God's work.

I consider this book important and well worth reading. It explains much in American politics as well as America's attitude towards Israel amongst the far right.