The Age of American Unreason | Susan Jacoby | Brilliant; makes you wish you'd paid more attention...

The Age of American Unreason | Susan Jacoby | Tracing the Decline of American Culture and the American Intellect

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	The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby Pantheon, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 98 reviews view larger image
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Brilliant; makes you wish you'd paid more attention in school

Jacoby uses her deep and nuanced knowledge of American history to lay out where we are falling well short of America's most cherished goals. Some reviews have complained the book is too long. But Jacoby's survey is so broad, and to do it justice strikes me as worth this level of detail. There's a lot of real gold in this book, and I did not find my mind wandering. One of my takeaways: it confirms for us that the vast sums of money we've chosen to pay for the education for our children (private school, I'm afraid) seems well spent. This book is an inexpensive and very modest substitute for the mediocre education most people received in the last 20-30 years, the author of this review included.

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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.

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