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: #1569 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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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."
Copyright © 2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

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

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.

I thought the idea was to apply reason
This is a book I should have liked. I picked it up enthusiastically when I read the jacket flaps, as it seemed to make an argument that I often find myself making -- more and more people decide matters on the basis of their preconceived biases with little regard for the facts. People don't like being troubled by facts when guesses, hunches, gossip, and drivel are so much easier and more amusing to digest.

As a college professor, I guess I qualify as an intellectual, although that word seems to have multiple surplus meanings, only some of which I consider an accurate reflection of who I am. But without question, I'm an advocate of evidence as a basis of reaching conclusions. I teach research methods to doctoral level students and write papers for scientific journals. I serve on editorial boards and have been a peer reviewer for public and private (nonprofit) research agencies. I take matters of evidence seriously.

So, why did I end up being disappointed in a book that seemingly advocates for the values I hold in such high esteem? Before answering that directly, let me say that there were parts of this book I did find informative and engaging. For example the discussion of how reason guided many of America's founders' view of the world, was handled skillfully (although I might not catch minor glitches because this isn't an area in which I have anything beyond a general level of knowledge). What disappointed me, however, was an apparent disregard for the role of evidence as the basis for other conclusions the author seems more than willing to treat as factual.

This may be best illustrated by a quote from p. 250, which closes a section discussing the impact of video media on young children: "Is more research required to tell us what is already known from medical studies of drugs and from millennia of educational effort -- that the impact of any substance or exposure, good or bad, is magnified by the length of exposure and that the effect is strongest on immature and therefore more malleable organisms?" So, here we have a book decrying unreason arguing that we shouldn't do research into a topic because received knowledge has taught us all we need to know about the matter. I consider the nature of inquiry to be ongoing, with further refinements in our understanding of various phenomena arising from continued scrutiny and questioning of prevailing beliefs. Jacoby's stance reflected in the quote is as fundamentally anti-intellectual as some of the ideas the author criticizes. First of all, video (of which I'm no particular fan, especially for the very young) is not a drug. Nor is medical research the most relevant, as we are considering behavioral and educational outcomes rather than health status per se in the discussion preceding the quoted statement. Millennia of educational effort, to use her term, have not helped us to perfect the process of education. Why should it be treated as having a higher yield in this particular instance? Her statement is an argument, not evidence. Also, it is factually incorrect to state that the impact of any substance or exposure is amplified by duration (although that will sometimes be the case). (Someone with a true respect for reason and the role of evidence as a basis for conclusions would shy away from the word "any" in a context such as this.) Furthermore, there are well documented (as well as intuitively obvious) counterexamples involving processes of habituation and adaptation, in which sensitivity to a stimulus is dialed down, not up, as a result of prolonged exposure. Our attention is channeled away from stimuli that are prolonged and relatively invariant. One summer, I worked next to an amusement park shooting gallery. I cringed and blinked with every shot fired for the first day or so. Then, I blinked but didn't cringe. Then I didn't blink. I'd habituated to the sound of a rifle being fired. The specifics aren't as important as the tone of the quoted statement. Nor is this particular dismissal of fact as a basis for conclusions the only instance in the book. (Nor, in fairness, is every conclusion unsupported.) But how can a claim such as this lodge itself in a treatise that targets unreason and denounces claims that lack a factual basis?

My sense was (and this is opinion on my part) that Jacoby is less comfortable with notions of evidence than with reason. Stated differently, her intellectual approach strikes me as more attuned to the humanities than the sciences or mathematics. Both reason and evidence are imperfect tools, of course. But there are differences. When the two clash, a scientist is inclined to be swayed by evidence, at least until better evidence comes along. In scholarly fields that have relied more heavily on reason than empirical evidence, this may be less true and I say that not as a criticism but merely an observation. When there is no definitive evidence, reason is likely to be an attractive and powerful alternative. While Jacoby praises the sciences as a means to establishing facts, she seems not to take a scientific approach to truth-seeking in some cases (like the one discussed above). Jacoby seems most comfortable in the intellectual milieu of the humanities, to oversimplify, perhaps.

Reason is good and we don't see enough of it. There, she and I would agree. But I hold evidence -- despite its sometimes transient nature -- as a higher approximation to truth. Of course, the two together are better than either alone. But Jacoby's casual attitude toward evidence really undermined her arguments for me. Had she taken the same stance and presented her ideas as opinion, with the benefit of supporting evidence where appropriate, I would have found little with which to quibble. But, in the context of asserting the intellectual laxity of Americans, her assertions, when not supported -- and occasionally contradicted -- by facts, really put me off.

To end on a positive note, one implicit goal of this book is to stimulate thought and discussion. It has succeeded. I'd rather read a book with which I disagree in part than one that fails to stimulate my thinking at all. This book did make me think, even if those thoughts were critical at times.