A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit (Paperback)

by Eric Larsen (Author) "It's impossible not to be dismayed by how extraordinarily and dangerously soft we've become in our national culture..." (more)
Key Phrases: literary thinking, irreducible self, academic humanities, Age of Simplification, State Department, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Here, novelist and former literature professor Larsen has crafted a good old-fashioned argument-the kind that deals in reason, logic and empirical evidence-that takes on virtually everything in the current political, cultural and intellectual landscape of America, in order to figure out how the democratic republic has morphed, before his eyes, into an unthinking, unquestioning Orwellian dystopia. In three lengthy essays, Larsen diagnoses with considerable wit, outrage and tenacity the mass "blindness" that allows politicians and newsmakers to get away with passing off lies and half-truths as fact, and academia unknowingly to embrace indoctrination over education. For Larsen, the trouble starts with television's explosion in the '50s and the consequent rise of corporate mass media, followed by the steady consolidation of government and corporate interests. While television provides an endless stream of distraction and "don't worry about the government" platitudes, academics have misdirected their sense of social conscience into replacing traditional, intellectually vigorous studies-such as the study of literature-with an empty discipline that Larsen (among others) has labeled Victim's Studies-Women's Studies, Gay Studies, Black Studies, etc. Examining "issues" rather than ideas and putting the group before the individual, Larsen argues that these departments teach students not how to think, but how to feel-not to question, but to accept. To be sure, Larsen's position, as well as his loud, self-righteous approach, will anger many in the government, media and university, but his theses are all backed up by clear-eyed observation, copious evidence and meticulous literary commentary. Though Larsen can be terminally repetitive (he'd probably call this "being thorough"), and his grim prognosis for the country can overwhelm, his book is a rare intellectual page-turner: fascinating, convincing and consciousness-raising. It deserves to be read by anyone who thinks-or thinks they think-for a living.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description
America's citizens seem plagued by despair and frustration, much deeper today than the "malaise" President Jimmy Carter noted twenty years ago. Our political and social cultures are driven by issues morally complex and yet presented with simple-minded hostility. What's the matter with Kansas? What has happened to the once proud leader of the free world? How secure is our future? Does the republic stand or have we lost it already?

Born in 1941, novelist, critic, and teacher Eric Larsen sees his own lifetime as paralleling the arc of a national dissolution, and in three penetrating essays he describes an increasingly desperate situation. A blindness has set in, he argues, producing writers no longer able to write, professors more harmful than helpful, a replacement virtually nation-wide of thinking with feeling while the population seems unable to grasp even the remotest outlines of such dangerous, radical change. In the tradition of George Orwell, Upton Sinclair, Paul Goodman, and Christopher Lasch, Larsen offers an impassioned critique of where we once were, where we are, and where we're very soon going if we don't watch out.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (March 29, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593760981
• ISBN-13: 978-1593760984
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #937,787 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bulls-eye!, June 3, 2006

By	Thomas F. Doherty "Tom Doherty" (Madison WI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Eric Larson's A Nation Gone Blind is a passionately argued, meticulously documented assault upon the culture of political correctness which has, Larson argues, reduced the study of literature at the university level to politicized ritual. I cannot do justice to the elaborate case he lays out in each of these three essays, but he makes it clear that this is no arcane academic issue. He sees the abduction of the humanities by a generation of militant politicos (who, ironically, found their voices during the anti-war, anti-establishement sixties)as a manifestation of a pervasive blight within American culture. Our vitality as "free agents" has been sapped by group-think within the university and by obsessive consumerism and mass media mind-candy without, putting our democracy itself at risk. Thus, with our long tradition of "intellectual liberalism" now comatose and a radical minority in power, it is no wonder that we tend to doze with the pack as folly after folly, from Washington to Baghdad, flashes across our screens. This is indeed a rarity -- a book about ideas that manages to be a page-turner. It is as provocative, timely, and exhilarating as The End of Faith by Sam Harris -- another essential read for those still paying attention.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Author, heal thyself, May 27, 2006

By	DancesWithAnxiety "chewtoy to the Fates" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

This book undercuts its own urgency in at least a couple of notable ways.

The author reports having taught college-level writing for decades, and yet his own prose is some of the flabbiest I have seen outside a Freshman writing course. Here is a representative example:

"To my way of thinking, were such a situation to become actuality -- as it is becoming, may become, or has become -- it would indeed be for me the most important and meaningful thing not only about being an American, but also about being an American writer. And so I can't help but wonder, again, why not one of the fifteen essayists wrote about it, alluded to it, or gave the least hint or intimation or whisper or any evidence that they'd ever heard of it, seen it, experienced it, even so much as imagined its existence." (page 90)

Did the book go unedited? Without the extra tenses, surplus synonyms, and other prolixity, this ungainly 98 words could be a third as long with no loss of meaning. The book is riddled with excess of this sort, and it would be too charitable to take it as a means of achieving emphasis. Of all people, college-level writing instructors taking aim at slack intellectual standards should do better than this.

Turning to the substance of the book, a glaring problem is how Larsen lambastes literature departments for abandoning literature-as-art in favor of literature-as-politics or literature-as-philosophy, and then goes on to tease political and philosophical "issues" out of Hamlet, Candide, Oedipus Rex and other literary works. Personally, I find his readings of these works insightful and useful, but their placement in a book that argues against such readings (and demonstrates no concrete alternatives) severely muddles the thesis.

I give high praise for the clarity and cogency of the final essay, a defense of empiricism against the assaults of postmodern fancy and faith-based fantasy. There is a world beyond 'texts' and 'representations,' and the truth of that world cannot be found by genuflecting on a prayer mat, nodding at a wall, or kneeling before a cross.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Guilty of the Same Crime?, August 12, 2006

By	Dubarnik (Converse, TX USA) - See all my reviews

As I read Eric Larsen's book, I found myself riveted by his arguments. He clearly articulates, and even proposes solutions, to several of the root causes of the decline of American Culture. But the very importance of this work is diminished because it is not scholarly.

Never is Larsen more vital as when he writes about the destruction that television and the mass media has wreaked on American society and the ability of Americans to think critically. Early on in the first essay he explains how half-truths are sold as full-truths, the basis of the "Deciet" portion of his subtitle. A perfect example from today's news is to listen to George Bush blame the current middle east conflict on nothing more than Hezbollah's cross-border excursion and kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. That's a half-truth being sold as the whole truth. The conflict has a long and complicated history with numerous causes on both sides.

A quote from Alain Badiou's essay "Philosophy and Desire" from his book Infinite Thought supports Larsen: "Our world also exerts a strong pressure on the dimension of logic; essentially because the world is submitted to the profoundly illogical regime of communication. Communication transmits a universe made up of disconnected images, remarks, statements and commentaries whose accepted principle is incoherence....And what is perhaps even more distressing, presents the world to us as a spectacle devoid of memory, a spectacle in which new images and new remarks cover, erase and consign to oblivion the very images and remarks that have just been shown and said..."

Larsen has it right - we live in an age of simplification and deceit. George Bush gives us a variation of sorts on the idea the a lie well told and stuck to is as good as the truth. In this case, a half-truth repeated often enough and left unchallenged becomes the full-truth. Bush repeated this half-truth at a news conference held in Crawford Texas recently; as is his style, he repeated it repeatedly. Unfortunately, not one reporter challenged it. Critical thought is lost.

Throughout the book Larsen makes important points about the loss of empiricism, the rise of victim studies, the end of literary thinking, and the death of the meaningful self. But I'm not going to quote from the book - and there are many wonderful quotes to be had - to highlight the major problem I have with Larsen.

Larsen constantly commits the same sin that he deplores. He generalizes, he arm-waves, and he doesn't support his arguments with facts, footnotes, or a bibiliography! His over-generalizations are so glaring that they left me wondering just how widespread the problems are.

He talks about the advent of the "new professors" and the death of literary studies but never does he tell us who some of the most important "new professors' are, at what universities they teach, and how many university literature departments have they taken over. I find it very difficult to believe that the "new professors" are in charge at every campus and that literary studies are dead throughout higher education. But this is exactly the picture Larsen paints.

Larsen discusses the negative impact of mass media - he should cite a reference of two. Larsen decries the rise of consumerism - he should cite a reference or two. Larsen believes the rise of victim studies has hurt the humanities - he should cite a reference or two.

Larsen is surely intelligent, but he is not scholarly. He asks the reader to take his arguments on faith, with out providing sources for our own empirical research. This is exactly what he tells us we should NOT do. He says that we must think critically. But Larsen wants us to accept his unsupported generalizations based solely on his own stature, his own observations.

I can't end this review with out voicing my one point of major disagreement. Larsen sees no value in African-American, women, or gay studies as an independent area of scholarly pursuit. He feels that because all of these topics can be addressed with the fields of history, sociology, psychology and so forth, they should not be a separate area of study. Interdisciplinary Studies is the fundamental focus of a liberal arts education. It is a sad generalization to say the people who pursue a degree in African-American or Gay studies are trying to perpetuate or claim the suffering of the groups they are studying. Hogwash. Minority issues are legitimately studied in an effort to seek understanding and solutions to suffering. They can be, and hopefully are, studied by scholarly and academic means that make original contributions to knowledge, thereby legitimately warranting the specialization and the award of higher degrees.

Bottomline: This is an enormously important book. The points it makes are critical. We must think about these very issues and act upon them if we are to survive as a meaningful society.