It seems pretty common to assume that we got terrible just recently — that there was a time when life was simpler and people were more authentic, and that the degeneration has come within our own lifetime. Our individual Near Backward begins with us as innocent babes, and we tend to assume that’s what society was like as well. But when we look around us, we see George Santos, the human chameleon of grift, as an avatar of our age. And we see constellations of people who are profiting off of inconceivable fame — why are we supposed to care what Kardashians are up to, anyway?

All this is new, right? Well, nope.

One of my favorite books when I started doing this historian business — remember, this was way back in the Eighties — was The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin. Originally published in 1961, it was a curmudgeonly view of the decline of American culture powered by the new medium of television. Real events, he believed, had been replaced by manufactured events and heroes by celebrities (anything sound familiar here?). The book’s most lasting contribution has been its definition of a celebrity: “a person who is known for his well-knownness.”

Well that’s still in my Near Backward, even if it isn’t in yours. But you can see the same kind of despair among cultural observers in the 1920s and 1930s. There was always a time when authenticity and good sense reigned — but not this time.

How about going back to the Enlightenment — the Age of Reason? At least that has to be, um, reasonable, right?

So this is a story about the Age of Reason. London was one of the centers of Enlightenment thinking, and one of the intellectual centers of London was the Royal Society, a club for scientists and philosophers. Sir Isaac Newton was one of the leading lights of the Society, so this was the heavy hitters of the day.

At one meeting of the Royal Society in 1704, the first successful vacuum pump was demonstrated — a genuine boon for many kinds of experiments. An opossum penis was dissected. And a young man who called himself George Psalmanazar gave a lecture describing his homeland — the faraway and little-known (to Londoners anyway) island of Formosa.

Today we know Formosa as Taiwan and we know more about it (even given the deplorable state of geographical education). Back then the island was the site of colonial ventures by Portugal, Spain, and Japan. Han Chinese had begun to move from the mainland as well, joining the indigenous population. The name Formosa had been invented by the Portuguese; it means “beautiful.” (For those of you to whom the phrase “deplorable state of geographical education” applies, we’re talking about an island off the coast of China.)

Like all the other lands being feverishly colonized at the time, Formosa for Europeans was the object of insatiable curiosity and abysmal ignorance. The English and French, for example, had never seen a Formosan or heard any description of the island. Hence the Society’s invitation to George Salmanazar.

It should be said right off that George Salmanazar was not, as he claimed, a native of Formosa. He seems to have been French. A master of languages, he passed himself off as Irish in his travels through France, Italy and Germany. When too many actual Irishmen challenged his identity, he switched to claiming he was Japanese, and then Formosan. When Jesuits who had been missionaries in Formosa said he was a fraud, he “converted” to Anglicanism and said the Jesuits were liars. That got him a ticket to England, where they hated Jesuits as much as he did.

His inventiveness was amazing — he created a spoken and written Formosan language, and national customs, dress and religion. The capital of his Formosa was Xternetsa. If people wondered about his blond hair and pale skin, it was because the upper classes of Formosa live underground. They drink green tea for breakfast, then cut the head off a viper and suck its blood.

Psalmanazar was challenged by some of the Fellows of the Society — notably Edmond Halley, the comet guy — but came out mostly unscathed and his fame continued to grow for a couple of years. He published a book which included the Formosan alphabet and the Lord’s Prayer in the language, plus descriptions and images of architecture and modes of dress — pastiches of various parts of the world. You can read it at https://archive.org/details/historicalgeogr00psal/page/194/mode/2up

It wasn’t long before the Enlightenment’s expanding knowledge of the world forced Psalmanazar to confess. He went off into more obscure occupations and the Formosa craze faded. But for a while, he was a true Age of Reason celebrity. He was known for his well-knownness — and the more outrageous his claims, the more famous he was. Maybe the difference between that time and our own is that, when he was proved to be a liar, people lost interest in him. Score one for the Far Backward, I guess.