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: #2631 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-12
• Released on: 2008-02-12
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

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

Nothing original in it, yet nowhere near as good as Hofstadter's book, to which Jacoby obviously wants her book compared
Her introduction and chapter one simultaneously attempt to tie her book to historian Richard Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) while making a case for the United States' supposedly "new anti-intellectualism." To her, anti-intellectualism is not new, but it has taken new forms. Her approach is a combination of history; commentary on popular culture; specifics of religion, education, politics, and the mass media; and critiques of social science. Thus, the book's topics mostly overlap with Hofstadter's book, which was strictly a history, divided into four sections on anti-intellectualism in U.S. religion, U.S. education, U.S. business, and U.S. politics, respectively. And if Jacoby never directly addresses anti-intellectualism among business executives or corporations, she offers enough about commercial influences on U.S. culture to say business and economics were included. The title of Jacoby's first chapter, "The Way We Live Now: Just Us Folks," even reminds one of Hofststadter's first chapter, "Anti-intellectualism in Our Time."
But the similarities to Hofstadter's book are not extensive, and should not be overstated. Hofstadter's book was and is a masterful history (even if it has been significantly criticized), while much of Rigney's book is on more or less current events, or at least past recent enough to not yet be "history" with a capital H. Hofstadter's first chapter, and his other discussions of then-current events (such as paragraphs on President Kennedy late in Chapter 8) seems insincere, even forced, as if his publisher or his conscience or someone else told him that his book couldn't start with his largely theoretical second chapter and had to hold out some hope. One must give Jacoby credit for displaying no false optimism, as the facts and arguments in both her book and Hofstader's don't warrant any, false or otherwise, even if one finds her one-sidedly negative.
Knowledge sociologist Daniel Rigney (1991), among others, have pointed out that the major U.S. "institution" ripe for studying anti-intellectualism in, in both impacting and reflecting U.S. culture, and not addressed by Hofstadter, was the mass media, and Jacoby doesn't make this omission. Sooner or later, her book gets around to newspapers, magazines, television, radio, movies, the Internet, music, and videogames.
But Jacoby's book pales by comparison to Hofstadter's book. Her chapter on "junk thought," which she defines as "anti-rationalism and contempt for countervailing facts and expert opinion," is (as she almost dismissively says about scientific and social scientific studies showing differences between males and females) mostly just that. That's not to say she doesn't make some good points, only that she often doesn't do it very well. While another reviewer suggested that New Yorker Jacoby needs to exit her apartment and interact with bright students at an excellent university, she apparently also needs to get out of the city. Like The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (1987), by Russell Jacoby (no relation that I'm aware of), her book sometimes implies that what happens among New York City intelligentsia affects, or is at least known by, the rest of America. While New York City boasts a disproportionate amount of intellectuals, and intellectual products and services, clearly both Jacobys equally need to learn that, unless an intellectual has a ready audience of thousands or more, often what happens in New York City stays in New York City.
Granted, her book includes several solid chapters by fact, argument, and writing, the best of which probably are chapters four, five, and eight. And, overall, it is well written as books go these days, although one could pick a few nits with an author who professes to be a stickler about English, including obsessing about the word, "folks."
However, as much as it tries, Jacoby does not grab the reader the way that Hofstadter did and still can. He was the education historian who wrote that John Dewey "has been praised, paraphrased, repeated, discussed, apotheosized, even on occasions read" (p. 361). And "American education can be praised, not to say defended, on many counts; but I believe ours is the only educational system in the world vital segments of which have fallen into the hands of people who joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise" (p. 52). And "the schools of the country seem to be dominated by athletics, commercialism, and the standards of the mass media, and these extend upwards to a system of higher education whose worst failings were underlined by the bold president of the University of Oklahoma who hoped to develop a university of which the football team could be proud" (p. 301). Jacoby never equals Hofstadter's combination of knowledge and writing skill, let alone his wit, nor is she more than rarely original, in terms of subjects, sources, or analysis.
If there is a major "institution" that Jacoby failed to address, like Hofstadter and mass media, it is sports, what Hofstadter 45 years ago(!) referred to on college campuses as "the cult of athleticism." Today, every U.S. mass medium is clogged with sports, including the average daily newspaper devoting nearly a quarter of its news space to sports (double or more than of any other content area), while advertisers avoid it like the plague and the Newspaper Management Center finds sports only the ninth most popular newspaper part among subscribers. Yet Jacoby, who manages a swipe at every other nonintellectual and anti-intellectual aspect of American life, totally missed it.
Finally, her literature review was surprisingly limited and sometimes a bit odd. Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) gets a passing comment and is not listed in bibliography. Major authors on intellectual history or education and culture, such as Jacques Barzun, Oscar Cargill, Henry Steele Commager, the other Jacoby, and Neil Postman are overlooked, not to mention a long list of lesser ones (such as mine, for full disclosure).

The Age of American Faithlessness
As others, I picked up this book with great anticipation, hoping to find an objective text on the slow descent of intellectualism in America. Unfortunately, I was left disappointed by Ms. Jacoby's disdain for everyone other than herself and her near-clones. Anti-everything is not intellectualism.

I'm so thoroughly nauseated by the quantity of anti-Christianity being pumped into modern literature these days. At least I can count on books like "The God Delusion" and "God is Not Great" to disclose their intentions outright, before I waste my time. This book masquerades as a piece of researched modern philosophy, and quickly spirals downward into a remarkably under-researched, ostensibly biased rant against 'anti-rational religion.'

"What is most disturbing, apart from the fact that millions of Americans already believe in the imminent end of days, is that the mainstream media confer respectability on such bizarre fantasies by taking them seriously... [a Time magazine article] gave no space to those who dismiss the end-times scenario as a collective delusion based on pure superstition...ideas that ought to be dismissed as the province of a lunatic fringe."

Ms. Jacoby gives this rhetoric the heading of "Modern American fundamentalism," all the while denigrating what is actually age-old, global, mainstream Christianity. Not the same thing, and how ignorant on her part to make no distinction between the two.

She goes on to say that anti-evolutionism is anti-intellectualism, and that "this level of scientific ignorance cannot be blamed solely on religious fundamentalism," but must also be blamed on the "poor quality of public science education." Clearly no one with a proper science education could believe in intelligent design.

If you believe in anything at all that defies logic or has yet to be proven by a self-declared intellectual such as Ms. Jacoby, don't waste your time on this poor application of fantastically correct grammar.

Tracing the Decline of American Culture and the American Intellect
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. Jay-Z, J. Lo, O.J., Jon Benet, and Jolie. America's Got Talent, Baby Borrowers, Wife Swap, Wipeout, Greatest American Dog, American Gladiators, and I Survived a Japanese Game Show. Creationism, Biblical literalism, open disdain for the "reality-based world," dying newspapers, aliteracy, innumeracy, and anti-intellectualism. Video game addiction, YouTube narcissism, withdrawal into personalized iPod worlds, sound bites, Baby Einstein, ten-second attention spans, and high school graduates who can't read, spell, write, do math, or understand history. An incurious, marginally aphasic President disturbingly detached from the real world. How did it come to this (and so much more)?

In THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, author Susan Jacoby sets out on an arduous and depressing, yet ultimately rewarding, journey through the history of American (anti-) intellectualism. Her objectives is to shed light on the most paradoxical of questions about America: How did a society founded on the secular Enlightenment principles of science and reason devolve into one that disparages and at times even proudly rejects those very concepts?

In her opening chapter, Ms. Jaboby surveys the current state of American anti-intellectualism, placing particular emphasis on Biblical literalism and the creationist/intelligent design movement. She then moves chapter by chapter through a chronological retracing of American history, beginning with Emerson and the "Second Great Awakening" in the early years of the 19th Century. This is followed by the pseudoscientific social Darwinist and Communist movements of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The "Red Scare" between the World Wars set the stage for a further surge of anti-intellectualism that culminated in the McCarthy hearings in Washington. The McCarthy hearings were complemented by the rise in the 1950's of a new, middlebrow culture characterized by Encyclopedia Brittanicas, the Book of the Month Club, Great Books, and television dramas and knowledge-based quiz shows.

Despite this historical review, by far the bulk of Ms. Jacoby's work focuses on the period since the counterculture revolution of the 1960's. It is at this point that her critical sweep broadens enormously to capture university ethnic and gender studies, mass marketing of youth culture, the semi-legitimizing of junk science into junk thought, renewed religious fundamentalism, new technologies that have shortened attention spans and diminshed serious reading and thought, and the dumbing down of political rhetoric and public life generally. Each of these trends has, in Ms. Jacoby's view, contributed to Americans' declining cultural literacy and their increased tendency to reject scientific or logical reasoning in favor of irrational, simplistic, religious, and/or emotional appeals.

Ms. Jacoby's presentation is demanding but quite approachable, erudite in its approach and scope without crossing into the realm of academic jargon. While she draws heavily on historical fact and the statements of her intellectual predecessors, she also occasionally personalizes her discussion with anecdotes from her own experience. Reading THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON feels a bit like reading Gibbon's classic analysis of the death of the Roman Empire, although here the death is more one of reason and the intellect rather than that of a government or its commerce. Nevertheless, one comes away with a sense of inevitability, a recognition that the forces of technology, marketing, religion, and a lowest-common-denominator-seeking media constitute an irresistible tsunami of anti-reason.

Ms. Jacoby's conclusions are rather pessimistic, and her recommendations are limited. Nevertheless, THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON is an enlightening look at the path America has taken to bring us to a point where late night comedians can celebrate "stupid human tricks," a crushingly dim President, and the factually clueless "man (and woman) on the street." In her final pages, the author notes, "It is possible that nothing will help." In that, she is sadly but probably correct.