Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1698 in eBooks
• Published on: 2008-02-12
• Released on: 2008-02-12
• Format: Kindle Book
• Number of items: 1

From Publishers Weekly
Inspired by Richard Hofstadter's trenchant 1963 cultural analysis Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism) has produced an engaging, updated and meticulously thought-out continuation of her academic idol's research. Dismayed by the average U.S. citizen's political and social apathy and the overall crisis of memory and knowledge involving everything about the way we learn and think, Jacoby passionately argues that the nation's current cult of unreason has deadly and destructive consequences (the war in Iraq, for one) and traces the seeds of current anti-intellectualism (and its partner in crime, antirationalism) back to post-WWII society. Unafraid of pointing fingers, she singles out mass media and the resurgence of fundamentalist religion as the primary vectors of anti-intellectualism, while also having harsh words for pseudoscientists. Through historical research, Jacoby breaks down popular beliefs that the 1950s were a cultural wasteland and the 1960s were solely a breeding ground for liberals. Though sometimes partial to inflated prose (America's endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism), Jacoby has assembled an erudite mix of personal anecdotes, cultural history and social commentary to decry America's retreat into junk thought. (Feb. 12)
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From The New Yorker
Identifying herself as a "cultural conservationist" (but by no means a cultural conservative), Jacoby laments the decline of middlebrow American culture and presents a cogent defense of intellectualism. America, she believes, faces a "crisis of memory and knowledge," in which anti-intellectualism is not only tolerated but celebrated by those in politics and the media to whom we are all "just folks." The Internet, for all its promise, is too often "a highway to the far-flung regions of junk thought." Meanwhile, twenty-five per cent of high-school biology teachers believe that human beings and dinosaurs shared the earth, and more than a third of Americans can’t name a single First Amendment right. In such an environment, Jacoby argues, the secular left and the religious right can have no fruitful dialogue on issues like the separation of church and state. She offers little hope that the situation will improve, opining that, despite increasing levels of education, "Americans seem to know less and less."
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Review
“Jacoby’s is a moderate, sensible, well-founded position, shared by many Americans, yet it somehow rarely got voiced amid the raging hyperbole of the culture wars. “
–Salon

“Jacoby deploys sharp insight on our present straits”
–Los Angeles Times

“Trenchant …One hopes her incisive book, just in time for the 2008 elections, will find an audience among the unconverted who will take her warnings seriously.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“A surprising and uncommonly sophisticated treatment of a familiar topic.”
–New York Observer

"The Age of American Unreason picks up where Richard Hofstadter left off. With analytic verve and deep historical knowledge, Susan Jacoby documents the dumbing down of our culture like a maestro. make no mistake about it, this is an important book."
--Douglas Brinkley, residential historian and author of The Great Deluge

"This is one of the most eye-opening books I've read in a long time. Jacoby charts the intellectual and cultural currents that have characterized the United States since its founding and explains just how and why Americans have recently become so, well, dumb. Anyone who cares about the future of our country will want to read it."
--Marcia Angell, editor in chief emerita, New England Journal of Medicine

"Jacoby has written a brilliant, sad story of the anti-intellectualism and lack of reasonable thought that has put this country in one of the sorriest states in its history."
--Helen Thomas, author of Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public

"Jacoby's fearless jeremiad, at once passionate, witty, and solidly grounded in facts, aries at a propitious moment, when many Americans are perceiving that ignorance conjoined to arrogance can be deadly. This book deserves to be widely read, and especially by concerned parents. As Jacoby insists, it is only within families that some immunity to mind-numbing 'infotainment' can now be acquired. First, however, there must be a will to resist--and if this stirring book can't rally it, nothing can."
--Frederick Crews, author of Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays

"To a country of underachievers and proud of it, this book delivers a magnificent, occasionally hilarious kick in the pants. Snap out of it, Jacoby says: Getting it right matters. Tough talk and wicked wit in the tradition of Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death."
--Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

Customer Reviews

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.

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.

The thesis is correct, of course, but skip the first 8 chapters.
With apologies to other reviewers, a 5-star or 4-star review of Jacoby's `Unreason' would require a winking unreason, although she has some very strong moments (chapters 9, 10, and 11 contain some rather interesting essays with which I generally agree). Apart from the stark inconsistencies, departures from reason, certain Hollywood-driven fictionalizations of historical events, sporadic bursts of emotionalism, and us-versus-them dogmatism (I'll touch on some of these below), I was most immediately struck by her self-certainty. She tells the reader of the voluminous great literary works that she had already devoured before entering high school. The reader should make no mistake--the author is a formidable "intellectual" and champion/guardian to lofty realms of "genuine intellectual" authority. Be awed folks (inside joke), we're here treading the paths of the author's "genuine intellectual elite." Funny things is, in reading some rather intelligent people, like Plato, Descartes, Kant, Leibniz (the smartest guy most smart people never actually read), Dostoevsky, Einstein, Gamow, Feynman, and so forth, I don't recall being forced to choke on their tantrums or visions of personal "intellectualism" (although we may say there is some of the latter in Plato). One can only smile thinking what Richard Feynman's reaction would be to Jacoby's nakedly impassioned authority-seeking! Despite her occasionally declared disdain for certain self-congratulating intellection-police, there can be little avoiding the fact that she seeks and assumes such rolls. As a related side bar, throughout most of the discourses it appears that her knowledge of science, and the issues that historically surround it, might have been gleaned from five minutes of watching a dramatically simplified presentation of the Discovery channel (although she does better in chapter 9). Of course none of this is to say that she is consistently wrong on all issues considered, I wholly concur on some points and go at least part way down many other of her paths.

Scholarly dispassion surfaces somewhat intermittently through at least 2/3 of this volume. In the mean time, Jacoby is ticked that folks are so given to calling people `folks'. She's disappointed that television doesn't provide better programming, but she's also aghast that people would watch much television--whatever, in abstract, the programming might potentially be. She's ticked that "lowbrow" types don't support their views with evidence and documentation--but it is quickly evident that she often doesn't mind proceeding without these tools of reason herself. She's disturbed that Americans are so greatly entertained by vulgar language, and likens this to `12 year olds laughing at farts' (I agree, by the way), but she's also miffed by the _lack_ of vulgarity in the language of `young Republicans.' She's annoyed with people esteeming Bob Dylan. While she decries the influence that entertainment products have on too many people's thinking, it is delusional to presume she is exempt on this count. Her multiple and extra-historical revisitations of the famed "Scopes monkey trial" trace more to the 1960 movie fictionalization, and to other popular literary and film alterations, than to the far more nuanced historical realities, a very good factual and non-triumphalist account of which is given by the late Harvard paleontologist SJ Gould (see Rocks of Ages, 1999). Jacoby's version amounts to the conveniently simplistic and non-questioning triumphalism that she rightly despises when it come from other quarters. William Jennings Bryan was _not_ the backward fundamentalist due to Stanley Kramer's film and Susan Jacoby's sermons, and while Jacoby rightly assails Social Darwinism as being a specie of anti-intellectualism, it was precisely the claims of Social Darwinism's academic authorities that alarmed the progressive Bryan (Harvard offered a major in eugenics--the consummate practical `scientific' application of Social Darwinism--until 1945!). Jacoby has no use for mere facts if they don't fit with her dispositions.

The swagger here is, sooner or later (in my case, sooner), hard to take, but I readily admit that I agree with many of her views. For example: (a) I too disdain TV and rarely watch it--but find no use in ranting against the fact that others embrace the intellectual numbness of it all it. People that must watch American Idol do not care what I (or Susan Jacoby) think about Idol or Entertainment Tonight or the entire vast breadth of the entertainment-gaga American wasteland. (b) I agree that "middlebrow"** popular American authors of earlier generations (think Michener [Tales of the South Pacific, Alaska, etc], who's works involved much hard-headed historical and scientific research) constructed `historical fiction' far truer to history than the sensationalized "historical fiction" of the present day (think Dan Brown's popular but stupefying perversions of "history" [The Da Vinci Code]). (c) I agree that the tsunami-like advance of instant gratification technologies, especially video gaming (discussed in chapter 10), is poison to intellect-engaging activities like reading and examining the past for insight into what is now happening in our larger world.
** Jacoby is hopelessly smitten with social and intellectual castes, labelings, and an expansive battery of "-ism"s; chapter 8 is a conflated War of Isms.

Well, an earlier draft of this review was lengthier, but I don't think that is necessary, so I'll end it here. If one wallows too much in this sort of "genuine intellectual" analysis, one risks soundings as cocksure as Jacoby does. But I'll finish on an `up note': skip the first eight chapters and you've got a shorter and more interesting book that flirts with a 4 star rating instead of an almost insufferably protracted 2 star book.