The Age of American Unreason | Susan Jacoby | Contemplating Hofstadter and Jacoby

The Age of American Unreason | Susan Jacoby | Read, Analyze. Discuss.

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	The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby Pantheon, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 99 reviews view larger image
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Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.

Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.

At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.

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Contemplating Hofstadter and Jacoby

What is intelligence?

This is a question that stumped Richard Hofstadter in his 1963 Pulitzer Prize winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And I think it stumps Jacoby as well.

There are, most likely, many different kinds of intelligence. And even though Hofstadter never really arrives at a convincing definition in his book nor Jacoby in hers, they know that a higher value has been placed on earning than on learning in American life.

Education as an end in itself has never really been legitimized in this country. To many (perhaps most), learning is a means to an end and the end is a career, preferably a high paying one. As a result the education that most Americans want and the kind that they get is the kind that provides them with the skills that they need to succeed in the workplace. Therefore the education that most Americans receive is practical and vocational. Most of us are taught from an early age that American values like freedom, equality, and fairness are what makes America a great country but we are not taught that America does not always live up to its own promise because critique (which requires reasoning skills) of American practices past and present is considered unpatriotic. So even if we have plenty of intelligent people in this country, that native intelligence is fostered with specific goals in mind. We are not taught to be broadminded nor are we taught to be critical (let alone self-critical) thinkers.

We do have excellent universities in this country, but most students want to study subjects that will earn them big paychecks and status (those unspoken and so uncriticized American values). Knowledges that do not produce monetary dividends are not valued as much as those that do.

Is it any wonder that we are economically rich but intellectually poor?

It's impossible to say whether intelligence is something we inherit like our hair color or whether it can be learned; either way most Americans (regardless of intelligence level) choose a career path and learn a very specific trade or profession and do not have the time or take the time to become learned. To study things in depth and engage with issues the way academics do takes time, a lot of time, and it takes a familiarity with both the topic at hand and with thought in general and it certainly aids the thinking and reasoning process to have a well of knowledge acquired from a lifetime of reading and many many hours contemplating history, philosophy, social and political theory, literature...

Who has the time, and how many of us spend our leisurely hours in these pursuits? No wonder we make bad choices at the polls.

Except for those academics who get paid to think, no one really has the time to formulate views about our past and present and future based upon their own research. And so we reluctantly hand over power to those that we think we can trust. But who can we trust?

Our founding fathers were very learned men, but even in the eighteenth-century learning was a suspect thing in the minds of many Americans. For one thing, America was supposed to be founded on egalitarianism and so many were not comfortable being ruled by an intellectual class of men. Plus "learning" had a stuffy and conceited and elitist old world connotation that didn't attract new worlders who valued plain speech, populist wisdom, and leaders who looked and acted just like them.

Jefferson was perhaps our most intellectual leader, but many thought that he would have made a greater leader had he been less educated.

Most people, then and now, do not trust an educated leader if that educated leader does not have some practical experience that connects them to the common man and common concerns. Nice speeches are fine but most vote according to necessity (the dictates of their pocketbook)and they want a leader who will make the nation prosper, economically. The kind of intelligence that matters (to most) is the kind that can get things done. Those educated to the life of the mind are not necessarily the kind of men that get things done.

Finally, education provides comfort to those who like to think and find satisfaction in knowing the truth whatever the truth may be. But most do not find thought (the pleasures of the mind, of exercising reason) to offer them any comfort or certainty and so they seek comfort and certainty in some kind of ideology that makes what they value seem like an unchanging principle of God or nature.

Hence our country is ruled by political and media ideologues who make their appeal and build a constituency based on shared ethos rather than on clearly stated objectives.

If Americans cannot reason for themselves, then freedom is clearly in peril.

One of my favorite thinkers, George Santayana, left his position at Harvard because he thought that in America academic freedom was not possible. He felt American ideology influenced everything that his fellow Harvard philosophers (William James included) did. He despised the American boosterism in James writings. Born in Spain Santayana never sought American citizenship and left Harvard and America as soon as he had the means to earn a living through his books which built upon and extended many of Alexander de Tocqueville's ideas.

I think we have plenty of talent in this country, but we cannot wait for great leaders to mobilize our minds. For democracy to work we have to take responsibility for our own destinies and be our own guiding intelligence and voice of reason. Reason, not special interest or private passion, as Jacoby (and Hofstadter before her) so well argues, has to be the standard by which we measure ourselves and our country, as well as the star by which we steer.

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Read, Analyze. Discuss.

Title The Age of American Unreason
Author: Susan Jacoby
Rating ****1/2
Tags intellectuals, anti-intellectualism, education, critical thinking

I had watched Susan Jacoby on a couple of shows promoting this book and have been anxious to read it since, though it wasn't what I was expecting - it was something better. I had expected to be a collection of stories about the decline of knowledge in the country and a plea for change, and it is. By saying that it is something even better, I mean that she gives the reader the context of the current poor state of civic understanding and discourse. Part of the book is an intellectual history of anti-intellectualism in America (neat trick, that) as well as the history of intellectualism, and even of the place the two met for a while, the middlebrow culture of the Book of the Month Club and the Great Books of the Western World series.

Not surprisingly, Jacoby sees the key points in the decline of knowledge and understanding to be the decline in reading and in conversation, mostly attributable to the culture of infotainment which began with TV.

She explains herself much better than I can, so here is a pretty extensive quote from p. 297:

"Liberals have tended to blame the Bush administration as the problem and the source of all that has gone wrong during the past eight years and to see an outraged citizenry, ready to throw the bums out, as the solution. While an angry public may be the short-term solution, an ignorant public is the long-term problem in American public life. Like many Democratic politicians, left-of-center intellectuals have focused on the right-wing deceptions employed to sell the war in Iraq rather than on the ignorance and erosion of historical memory that make serious deceptions possible and plausible - not only about Iraq but about a vast array of domestic and international issues.

The general decline in American civic, cultural, and scientific literacy has encouraged political polarization because the field of debate is left to those who care most intensely - with an out-of-the-mainstream passion - about a specific political and cultural agenda. Every shortcoming of American governance, in foreign relations and domestic affairs, is related in some fashion to the knowledge deficit of the American public..."

I've believed critical thinking was the answer, but she points out that thinking critically requires some knowledge as well as the habits of rational thought.

She does stimulate some curiosity when she talks about that other industrialized cultures don't seem to suffer quite as badly. One assumes it is the educational system that works better, but it would be nice to know if, for example, other countries have lower statistics on amount of television watched. Dare I say it? She needs a blog to answer such questions, a suggestion she would not thank me for.

Please read it. Think about it. Discuss it with others. For these things Jacoby would thank you.

Publication Pantheon (2008), Hardcover, 384 pages
Publication date 2008
ISBN 0375423745 / 9780375423741

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Appendix to Hofstadter

I don't think there's any doubt that Jacoby's general thesis--that American culture is steadily moving away from Enlightenment ideals of rational judgment and embracing with a Toquevillian vengeance religious fundamentalism, "junk science," infotainment, anti-"elitist" politicians, and shoddy public educational standards--is more true than not. To her great credit, she goes to great pains, especially in the final five chapters, to document cultural and intellectual decline. (Besides, any number of books recently have made similar cases and cited similar data; see, for example, Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation or Rick Shenkman's How Stupid Are We?). Moreover, Jacoby offers some insightful comments along the way about the crisis of memory our society is undergoing, and the risk we face of dropping off into another dark age. Along with books such as Morris Berman's Dark Age America and Jane Jacobs Dark Age Ahead, Jacoby's really deserves to be read and taken seriously.

But at the end of the day, Jacoby's book is flawed. In the first place, it really seems to be two books in one. The first six chapters, a quick intellectual history of anti-intellectualism, is book #1. The final five chapters, a partial analysis-partial polemic concerning the present state of affairs, is book #2. The two don't hold all that well together in a single volume.

Second, as other reviewers have noted, either of the two books could've been better edited. Jacoby is windy, and tends at times to get on a roll that she just can't seem to cut short. Her disdain of the Baby Einstein merchandising, for example, is one of these tangents that deserves much less space than she devotes to it.

Ultimately, Jacoby's book doesn't need to be read straight-through. Discerning readers can pick and choose chapters, and then be inspired (hopefully) to pick up Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Many of Hofstadter's examples are dated, of course. But his brilliant analysis of the history, causes, and character of anti-intellectualism is still spot-on. Jacoby's book is a nice appendix to it.

Three and a half stars.

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