Customer Reviews

Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy: The Failure of Reason and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century

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I am guessing the other reviewers had a few axes to grind. I bought and read this book about 10 years ago. I thought it was an excellent book at that time. Now, 10 years later, after all of the recent economic and social disasters it appears the author was actually somewhat prophetic. An eye opener and an outstanding book.

This book comes with a forward by Neil Postman, who is an excellent, sensitive, and insightful author. Sadly, Wood himself just doesn't measure up to the greatness of Neil Postman. The academic or lay reader would do much better in picking up Postman's own _Technopoly_ and going from there. Finding references in the index to Michael Novak and Peggy Noonan, my initial enthusiasm for the book dropped like a rock. Although he raises a few good points here and there, there are other authors who raise them more coherently and are more free of .... Neil Postman once advocated that critical readers learn to develop an internal "... detector" when they read. Well, my ... detector was going off left and right as I plowed through Wood's text, I'm sad to say. Some authors I'd recommend INSTEAD of Wood include historian David F. Noble, Richard A. Brosio, Noam Chomsky, Kirkpatrick Sale, and especially Theodore Roszack's _The Cult of Information_ which is almost on the same par with Postman's outstanding best work,_Technopoly_.

There is a knee-jerk resistance to socialist, left-progressive critiques and insights about political economy all through out this book, and it maintains what seems to me a shockingly naive & plucky "Libertarian" (e.g. in the political party sense rather than philosophical sense) tone all throughout that is extremely grating. Some of Wood's "suggestions" at the end of the book are praiseworthy, but many of them are completely undermined by some of the other suggestions raised by Wood (a chronic problem of many liberals, which is why I opt for left-radicalism personally). Still other suggestions made by Wood are just plain awful or stupid or both. Wood either has no comprehension of the real nature of power or is very self-deluded about it. Much of the work reads not unlike Walter Lippman from the 1920s, and it's hard to say, reading some passages, if Wood really believes in democracy at all; His mood displays an overall defeatist outlook than one of real moral outrage...there is even a hint of smug elitism in parts of the text. All in all, this is a well meaning but very muddled book and will confuse the lay reader more than help him/her. It's mostly a waste of time. Other authors have said the best of what Wood has to say much better than he.

To be fair, the text IS somewhat dated, too, so Wood's gushing on about "telecommuting" and "distance ed" sound REALLY naive in today's world. These early "promises" of the early 1990s have borne mixed and often rotten fruit in our day. Read David F. Noble's _Digital Diploma Mills_ (2002) for contrast and see what I mean.

This book proposes that "Intellectualism" was the cause and effect of the "Enlightenment," but that it has been replaced by "post-intellectualism." Wood defines intellectualism as consisting of a search for knowledge, critical thinking, social criticism, and broad liberal arts, all of which he said have been replaced by ignorance, "dumbth" (a decline in analytic thinking), establishmentism (reluc-tance to change the status quo), and specialization, respectively. Wood, who refers to Richard Hofstadter (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-intellectualism in American Life) only once, believes that "post-intellectualism" started with the dilution of universal education in the 1870s (that at a time when only about 2 percent of the population had a high school diploma!), and continued with the 1890s labor movement, the burgeoning popularity of movies and television (in fact, a major reason for Wood's "post-intellectualism" was the replacement of the "Written Word" by the "Electric Media"), and the growing role of government during the twentieth century.
Wood's book is not a worthy successor to Hofstadter. Although he can point to hundreds of phenomena that he claims are post-intellectual, or at least along the trajectory from intellectualism to post-intellectualism, Wood fails to provide a convincing body of evidence for most of his specific charges. Against mass media, he makes a laundry list of such plausible but unproven accusations: artistic exploitation; corruption by commercial support and special interests; being wracked by mergers; a lack of substantive content; the construction of [unrealistic] "reality"; damage to democracy; the promotion of escapism; the propping up of elites; invasions of privacy; an overemphasis on, or promotion of, violence; and being partially responsible for copycat crimes, suicides, aggressive behavior, desensitization, "mean world syndrome," and "narcotizing dysfunction.") I don't doubt that these are effects of mass media, at least among some people, some of the time, but Wood writes as if they all have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and he provides anecdotal evidence, if that, about such effects.
Most importantly, however, his cause-effect relationship between an "intellectual" world and a "post-intellectual" world is ultimately not clearly supported, nor is the unavoidable implication that the United States was once an "intellectual" country.