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Title: The Age of American Unreason
ISBN: 0375423745
Author:
Susan Jacoby
Publicate Date: 2008-02-12
Publish: 2008-02-12
List Price: $26.00
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $13.96
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $6.98
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1: An Embarrassing Diatribe
During her discussion of the history of religion in America, Ms. Jocoby writes,
"It seems more likely that poorly educated settlers on the frontier were drawn to religious creeds and preachers who provided emotional comfort without making the intellectual demands of older, more intellectually rigorous Protestant denominations--whether liberal Quakerism and Unitarianism or conservative Episcopalianism and Congregationalism."
What evidence does she present that those living in the American frontier were poorly educated vis a vis those in New England? None.
And so it goes throughout this silly book.
Ms. Jacoby presents nice little tales--myths really--about American history and cites absolutely no evidence to support his questionable assertions.
Ms. Jacoby is an intellectual fraud, and Pantheon Books should be ashamed of itself for publishing his bilious drivel.
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2: Should be required reading.
I saw Susan Jacoby on PBS and knew I had to read this book. The first thing about this book that turned me off but didn't turn me away is the unnecessary use of fancy words. Before you think about reading this book, make sure you have a gargantuan vocabulary, and / or a dictionary and thesaurus (I had my dictionary in hand). I'll assume this use of fancy words is to fit the theme of intellect. It's funny that Susan uses this quote from Dwight Eisenhower, "An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows." If Ms Jacoby wanted her book read by more people, which would be the point of such a book, she should have made it more reader friendly, unless again that was her point. To my defense and people like me, simply because you do not know the meaning of such large numbers of words used in her book doesn't mean that person doesn't have a high level of intelligence. For example, I have a degree in Computer Science and possess a large knowledge of general science and Astronomy. I also love to read and love to learn. If I wanted to be a snob I could spit out math equations and computer terms with language that would make non-computer and non-science "folks" (LOL) heads spin. But if I want non-computer and non-science types to be interested in and listen to what I have to say I don't need them distracted by words. I will say this, reading The Age of American Unreason has most definitely increased my vocabulary and I like that. And I agree with Ms Jacoby and I wish this book could be required reading in High School.
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3: 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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4: 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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5: 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.
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