Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

This book strongly contends that American society is being dominated by an alarming pairing of government and corporations with the mass media as their propaganda arm and, furthermore, that institutions of higher learning, especially humanities departments, contribute to an overall dumbing down of our culture. The purpose of the mass media is to entertain and obfuscate, appeal to emotion over thinking, not distinguish half-truths and lies from the truth, and above all promote unrestrained consumerism. In such an age of simplification, as the author so labels it, it is entirely possible for a presidential candidate to seize an election and power via a judicial coup and to invade a nation of no consequence with scarcely a ripple of protest from the American citizenry.

While there can be little dispute that there has been a general degradation of the perceptiveness and independence of the American people, the author undermines his claim for reasoned judgment by indulging in an apparently long held desire to skewer his fellow writers and professors of literature. Now retired, there is no holding back. He contends that literature should be "experienced" by individuals, not groups, and that attempts by professors to ascribe meaning, especially of social or political import to an afflicted group, are counterproductive for the education of the student. However, given the subtle social and political control, acknowledged by the author, that is exerted by powerful entities in the current world, one would think that he would applaud efforts to understand the social and political context of the authors' worlds, the settings of their stories, and any relevance to the current world. Such understandings do not preclude further interpretation and experience with the works. He seems to feel that the incorrect teaching of literature directly translates into a non-thinking public.

More understandable is the author's concern with the widespread introduction of various departments devoted to the study of women, blacks, gays, etc. That has been done concurrent with the rise of political correctness on college campuses. He suggests that these studies are based primarily on these distinct groups being seen as victims. The concern is that such studies produce a limited and stilted result.

The book consists of three chapters or essays. There is considerable overlap and repetition with the author meandering over the terrain of a simplified and dumbed down culture and what he believes is the contribution of higher education to that general state. But he hardly exhausts what could be considered. For example, one might want to ask why a university is even necessary to read literature; he does emphasize the individual experience. What's his view on unnecessary credentialism? He claims that the culture starting being dumbed down in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. Of course, not uncoincidentally, that was the beginning of the television era, the main component of the mass media. However, what is the evidence for the greater enlightenment of the public prior to that time? The author does not indicate what a wise people should now be doing, short of not electing George Bush. How should a wise people recapture their society from the corporate-government-media complex?

The book is thought provoking, but it is largely devoted to settling scores with colleagues that he thinks have agendas or, worse, are supportive of victimology studies. After a while, the harangue gets old.

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.

Mr. Larsen is right. This Nation has been blinded by the white light (and made deaf by the white noise) of dogma, media, specious pedagogy. We've traded a goldmine of intellectual tradition left to us by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickensen, James, Gertrude Stein, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway etc. for "a handful of dust."

It's hard not to agree with most of Larsen's peripheral points-- the violently corrupt Bush regime, the dumbing down of mainstream culture, alnd the rise of the corporate state. His major point that academia has replaced thought with feeling, is harder for non-academics like me to evaluate, but certainly merits looking into. So why then did I have to struggle to even finish the book.

For one thing, the work needs a strong editor's hand. The same points are repeated over and over until it really does become "ad nauseum". And since the points are usually derrogatory in substance and over-simplified in appearance, the piling-on is not only tiresome but counter-productive. The impression is that each of the three chapters started out independently but ended as strung together, redundancies and all. These points badly need to be whittled down and sharpened, not belabored again and again.

Perhaps the book's most pervasive flaw is knowing where characterization ends and reality begins. This blurring is most apparent in Chapters II and III, circa 200 pps. In those pages Larsen targets those responsible for bringing on "The Age of Simplification", the chief cultural malaise of our time. The main source of the malaise lies in a replacement of thought with feeling, and is located in academe, more specifically in the humanities departments, and especially in ethnic and gender studies departments where an attitude of "victimology" reigns.

Over and over readers are told that these fields have replaced thought with feeling, and have based their endeavors on a 1960's sense of historic wrongs by allowing buzz-words and doing good to replace intellectual openness and substantive argument. For all I know, he may be right. The problem is that nowhere is he specific-- nowhere does he site specific examples of this academic corruption, nowhere are those ostensibly responsible allowed to speak for themselves, and nowhere is there even a footnote or a bibliographical reference taking us to points outside the text.

In short, sweeping generalizations are allowed to pass unsupported by reference either inside or outside the book's unbounded claims. As a result, a general reader, such as myself, has difficulty distinguishing a reality beyond the sweep of Larsen's categorical assertions. More ironically, how can a reader determine whether Larsen is not himself guilty of vast over-simplifications. I suspect there's merit in his stream of denunciation. The trouble is he appears to have allowed deeply bitter feelings to over-whelm the keen analytical skills displayed in his stimulating discussion of Oedipus, which serves as a succinct metaphor for a nation gone blind.

I suspect something like this sense of alienation from his chosen field (literature) has brought about the self-enclosed world of the text. It's almost solipsistic. Consider the exaggerated emphasis placed upon the self as the liberating force from our Age. Page 125, for example, asserts that "this individual self is the single most essentially crucial thing in the entire universe-- for without it there would be Nothing Else Whatsoever." (I've capitalized words he's italicized.) So much then for a world that pre-exists the self-- a rather remarkable assertion of an idea usually associated with 18th century German Idealism. Or consider p.131's sweeping claim of "the imponderable limits of, and the limitless Value of the self." Unless he pulls an Hegelian superself out of the dialectical hat, these are extreme claims, indeed, for the individual self as ordinarily conceived.

Be that as it may, there's a blurb on the volume's cover characterizing the text as a "different kind of jeremiad ". All in all, I'm afraid the book at times exceeds that intensity, becoming periously closer to a solipsistic rant. Frankly, I expected better.

brilliant, fascinating, entirely convincing. even when it was depressing the hell out of me, i couldn't put it down.

Wow! Where to begin?

For starters, I could not agree more with the reviewer from May 27, 2006. The author just stumbles and chokes on so many unnecessary words it is breathtaking. Here is another lengthy example:

"The arts are the means for a people or nation to see through the false, the clichéd, or the tendentious, to see through the propagandistic, the trumped-up, hyperbolized, popularized, falsified, or glamorized, and to see thereby what a people or a nation really is, what's important about it, what's true about it, what's good and what's bad about it, what characterizes it at its most valued, true and revered level of being." [pg. 83]

It is one of the most painful run-on sentences I have ever read! So, according to the author, the arts are responsible for allowing "a people" (or "nation," just in case) to see through no less than nine false things in order that they may see five really important things. Regrettably, the entire book is written this way.

Second, the author's logic and criticisms are unconvincing, and have in them many of the very faults he is attempting to expose in other's writing.

If the author's message - that feeling and emotions have replaced rational thinking - is important to you then you may find something useful in this book.

Unfortunately, I could not find anything useful.