About.com Rating



Has it ever seemed to you that not only are Americans a bit dumb sometimes, but that they also seem to prefer to be dumb? Have you ever gotten the impression that Americans are disdainful of intellectual pursuits, complex ideas, and thought that requires real work? Well, you should have because it's true — anti-intellectualism isn't just alive and well in America, but it's gained the high ground. There's arguably more anti-intellectualism in America than intellectualism, which spells trouble for American politics, culture, and future.

Summary

Title: The Age of American Unreason
Author: Susan Jacoby
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0375423745

Pro:
•  Connects a lot of cultural dots, exploring a long-term cultural development over many areas

Con:
•  Sometimes relies more on anecdotes than social science research

Description:
•  Argues that American culture has been more and more anti-intellectual
•  Explores the ways in which expectations and performance have dropped
•  Argues that the trend has occurred across all aspects of culture, politics, etc.

 

Book Review

People with some inclination towards intellectualism and more sophisticated thinking would naturally like to know more about how this development has occurred, but it's a very complex issue to get involved with. It would be very easy to come up with simplistic, formulaic answers to what has to be a complex interaction of many different cultural phenomena — which, of course, would just prove to a symptom of the very anti-intellectualism we're talking about. So what would be the point?

This isn't a trap Susan Jacoby falls into with her book The Age of American Unreason, a detailed exploration of American culture and cultural trends from the end of World War II through the present day.

Jacoby argues that there is no one source of our problems, but the sources should be fairly obvious. Chief among them are advertising-driven mass media and increasingly fundamentalist religion. While building her case against these two, Jacoby doesn't just explore how they undermine virtues like literacy an the ability to handle complex thinking, but also how absent those values really are in contemporary society.

Even if you start the book with an attitude of depressed cynicism about American life, you will be significantly worse by the end. That's not a criticism, though if you don't want to be depressed you should probably find another book to read. Jacoby reveals a lot of hard truths about America and we shouldn't be afraid to face them, however depressing they might be. After all, we have no chance of improving the situation if we are unable or unwilling to deal with how matters stand currently.

One bit of evidence Susan Jacoby uses is the difference in speaking patterns between presidents today and their predecessors. Politicians as recently as the 1960s actually expected Americans to think about what was being said and tried to inspire them to think better of themselves — to strive higher, to make sacrifices, and to improve the future. President Bush consistently refers to everyone as just "folks,' doesn't ask for sacrifices, and doesn't try to inspire people to work through complex intellectual problems. Indeed, he appears completely uninterested in having such thoughts himself.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised, given how conservatives have worked to transform the label "intellectual" into an epithet like "liberal," which is sad given how this has been done by conservatives who are "intellectuals" themselves. It has been politically useful for them to scapegoat intellectuals as a means for attacking liberalism, but in the process they have undermined an important aspect of culture in America.

Americans have never liked "elites" very much, seeing them as antithetical to democracy, but that's never been an accurate view of intellectuals. Even worse, the notion of "intellectual" has become ever more broad — whereas it once might have been limited to a few in universities or government, it now seems to include anyone who thinks there is culture that's better than the basest of poplar culture. I have to wonder if anyone who reads more than a couple of books a year is now an American "intellectual," relatively speaking.

America was founded on the basis of several strands of European intellectualism: the Enlightenment, rationalism, Deism, and republican democracy among others. How can this America survive if the very notion of intellectualism itself is dismissed, never mind actual intellectual pursuits themselves? Thomas Jefferson pointed out that "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Americans, unfortunately are very ignorant — and worse yet, proud of their ignorance. They know little and want to know less; in the process they are likely to lose much of what they have.

Developing American government and public institutions required a lot of hard intellectual work and requires at least as much work to maintain. Once people give that up, neither their government nor their institutions will be in their hands anymore. Ironically, American disdain for intellectuals as antithetical to democracy may lead to a cadre of elite who do have the ability to take over. They won't have to destroy democracy because it will have already been given up by the voters themselves.

There are many painfully ironic reviews on Amazon.com where people say that the thesis is interesting, but the book should have been "200 pages shorter" (leaving a little more than 100 pages of actual text), that the author has good points to make but "uses a lot of $2.00 words to make them," and laments how acceptance of evolution can be litmus test for a rational outlook. I wish I could think that these were all intentionally ironic, I have trouble believing this. If these reviewers really read the book, they didn't understand what it meant.

We do, however, need to understand this book because it reveals so much of what's wrong with contemporary American culture. There's so much that needs to change, but I'm really not sure how any of it can be fixed. At the very least, it will probably require as many decades to fix as it did to break, which means that even if we knew what to do and started immediately, it would be quite a while before we returned American culture to a more even and reliable footing.