The Age of American Unreason (Hardcover)

by Susan Jacoby (Author)
Key Phrases: american unreason, middlebrow aspirations, junk thought, United States, New York, Soviet Union (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Inspired by Richard Hofstadter's trenchant 1963 cultural analysis Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism) has produced an engaging, updated and meticulously thought-out continuation of her academic idol's research. Dismayed by the average U.S. citizen's political and social apathy and the overall crisis of memory and knowledge involving everything about the way we learn and think, Jacoby passionately argues that the nation's current cult of unreason has deadly and destructive consequences (the war in Iraq, for one) and traces the seeds of current anti-intellectualism (and its partner in crime, antirationalism) back to post-WWII society. Unafraid of pointing fingers, she singles out mass media and the resurgence of fundamentalist religion as the primary vectors of anti-intellectualism, while also having harsh words for pseudoscientists. Through historical research, Jacoby breaks down popular beliefs that the 1950s were a cultural wasteland and the 1960s were solely a breeding ground for liberals. Though sometimes partial to inflated prose (America's endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism), Jacoby has assembled an erudite mix of personal anecdotes, cultural history and social commentary to decry America's retreat into junk thought. (Feb. 12)
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From The New Yorker
Identifying herself as a "cultural conservationist" (but by no means a cultural conservative), Jacoby laments the decline of middlebrow American culture and presents a cogent defense of intellectualism. America, she believes, faces a "crisis of memory and knowledge," in which anti-intellectualism is not only tolerated but celebrated by those in politics and the media to whom we are all "just folks." The Internet, for all its promise, is too often "a highway to the far-flung regions of junk thought." Meanwhile, twenty-five per cent of high-school biology teachers believe that human beings and dinosaurs shared the earth, and more than a third of Americans can’t name a single First Amendment right. In such an environment, Jacoby argues, the secular left and the religious right can have no fruitful dialogue on issues like the separation of church and state. She offers little hope that the situation will improve, opining that, despite increasing levels of education, "Americans seem to know less and less."
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (February 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375423745
• ISBN-13: 978-0375423741
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (117 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #21,818 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

134 of 146 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A painful, unflattering look in the mirror, February 23, 2008

By	Eggcrate "glodphlex" (New York City) - See all my reviews

Jacoby is at her best when she reasons close to the facts, documents her claims, and builds logical sequences from those facts. She is at her worst when she engages in speculative, broad brush generalizations that seem to be presonalized impressions.

Her book has the texture of being written from two mindsets, one more objective and untimately far more informative, and the other, more subjective and tendentious without the assurance that those impressions are carefully grounded in evidence.

Because of this dual natured, dual flavored style some reviewers have accurately sensed the weak side of Jacoby's thought processes and taken umbrage. Which isn't entirely unfair, only incomplete and one sided criticism.

Where Jacoby shines, and when she shines she shines brightly, is the spot on deconstruction of the "belief path" that America has taken over the last three decades from the Reagan Revolution, some would say the seeds were planted in the Nixon administration (this with Nixon's calculation that the religion card could be played for maximum political advantage) until the NeoConservative debacle of the present.

Jacoby makes a strong case that Americans are not inherently stupid, anti-rational, or ahistorical clamoring rubes (although a superficial reading of her book could leave one with that emotive sense of her thrust), rather that the American media, American educational structure, and the introduction of disruptive technologies have colluded to produce an atmosphere so sterile and lacking of nutrition that Americans are growing up as stunted, incomplete, intellectually damaged citizens dangerously unprepared for the global tasks we will soon face.

This is a most terrible actuality to see as it truly is. The average, average mind you means that a good percentage are above this number, watch seven hours of television in a 24 hour period, what's worse is that the average American now watches indiscriminately, using television as an escapist drug, not as a source of information. Her evidence (which I badly wish she had closely documented and footnoted) is that today the viewer will watch 7 hours of television regardless of what is being broadcast. In other words, the viewer doens't care what is on, only that there is something marginally viewable. One must wonder, when does vegatation become outright addiction of the same power as opiate addictions ?

This stuporous, bovine, cud chewing, glazed over, hypnotic fog appears to be matched with a near contempt for science, rigorous logic, reasoned philosophy, or even the conversational reference to any of the above. When a high percentage of science teachers are unaware that large reptiles ceased to inhabit the Earth and mammals began their ascent at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, thus humans and dinosaurs could not possibly have lived at the same time, if you can imagine, and assuming her statistic is accurate, that 25% of high school biology teachers actually believe in Human-Dinosaur cohabitation.... the only thing one can conclude is that our educational system is so broken it would take another massive meteor impact to change anything, as the phase goes, "Houston, we have a problem"...

Yes, we do... a serious dysfunction that goes all the way to the core of our society...

Regardless of its imperfections, Jacoby has written an essential book for taking stock of this social-political-educational moment in American history, and we would be fools not to begin asking hard questions as to who and what we have allowed ourselves to become as a people.

129 of 144 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking the temperature of contemporary American culture, February 18, 2008

By	A.W.G. (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

Susan Jacoby's beautifully written and convincingly argued book should be sine qua non reading for ALL parents, as well anyone who has anything to do with education. She clears away any doubts one might entertain about the benefits of even the most "educational" videos for young children, backing up her points with evidence from reliable sources. According to a recent study carried out by the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital, overexposure to videos like "Brainy Baby" may actually be impeding language development in babies.
The book's acute analysis of political "communication" and media punditry should also be required reading for anyone who aspires to make an informed and wise choice in the crucial political battle currently being fought for the future of our nation. Her observations are all the more interesting in light of the current attack on "eloquence" in political speech--with its specious implication that one cannot be eloquent and effective simultaneously.
There are purely intellectual pleasures as well to be had from Jacoby's wonderfully ambitious reach into American history. I particularly enjoyed her investigation of the idea that, from the very beginning, our democratic culture rested on a contradiction: [Jacoby, 37] "The health of democracy, as so many of the founders had proclaimed, depended on an educated citizenry, but many Americans also believed that too much learning might set one citizen above another and violate the very democratic ideals that education was supposed to foster."
I particularly recommend the downloadable vodcast of Jacoby's interview with Bill Moyers [Feb. 15th] http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html . Given the very substantial interest the book has already sparked, there may be some hope for us yet.

88 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I thought the idea was to apply reason, July 17, 2008

By	Robert F. DeVellis (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a book I should have liked. I picked it up enthusiastically when I read the jacket flaps, as it seemed to make an argument that I often find myself making -- more and more people decide matters on the basis of their preconceived biases with little regard for the facts. People don't like being troubled by facts when guesses, hunches, gossip, and drivel are so much easier and more amusing to digest.

As a college professor, I guess I qualify as an intellectual, although that word seems to have multiple surplus meanings, only some of which I consider an accurate reflection of who I am. But without question, I'm an advocate of evidence as a basis of reaching conclusions. I teach research methods to doctoral level students and write papers for scientific journals. I serve on editorial boards and have been a peer reviewer for public and private (nonprofit) research agencies. I take matters of evidence seriously.

So, why did I end up being disappointed in a book that seemingly advocates for the values I hold in such high esteem? Before answering that directly, let me say that there were parts of this book I did find informative and engaging. For example the discussion of how reason guided many of America's founders' view of the world, was handled skillfully (although I might not catch minor glitches because this isn't an area in which I have anything beyond a general level of knowledge). What disappointed me, however, was an apparent disregard for the role of evidence as the basis for other conclusions the author seems more than willing to treat as factual.

This may be best illustrated by a quote from p. 250, which closes a section discussing the impact of video media on young children: "Is more research required to tell us what is already known from medical studies of drugs and from millennia of educational effort -- that the impact of any substance or exposure, good or bad, is magnified by the length of exposure and that the effect is strongest on immature and therefore more malleable organisms?" So, here we have a book decrying unreason arguing that we shouldn't do research into a topic because received knowledge has taught us all we need to know about the matter. I consider the nature of inquiry to be ongoing, with further refinements in our understanding of various phenomena arising from continued scrutiny and questioning of prevailing beliefs. Jacoby's stance reflected in the quote is as fundamentally anti-intellectual as some of the ideas the author criticizes. First of all, video (of which I'm no particular fan, especially for the very young) is not a drug. Nor is medical research the most relevant, as we are considering behavioral and educational outcomes rather than health status per se in the discussion preceding the quoted statement. Millennia of educational effort, to use her term, have not helped us to perfect the process of education. Why should it be treated as having a higher yield in this particular instance? Her statement is an argument, not evidence. Also, it is factually incorrect to state that the impact of any substance or exposure is amplified by duration (although that will sometimes be the case). (Someone with a true respect for reason and the role of evidence as a basis for conclusions would shy away from the word "any" in a context such as this.) Furthermore, there are well documented (as well as intuitively obvious) counterexamples involving processes of habituation and adaptation, in which sensitivity to a stimulus is dialed down, not up, as a result of prolonged exposure. Our attention is channeled away from stimuli that are prolonged and relatively invariant. One summer, I worked next to an amusement park shooting gallery. I cringed and blinked with every shot fired for the first day or so. Then, I blinked but didn't cringe. Then I didn't blink. I'd habituated to the sound of a rifle being fired. The specifics aren't as important as the tone of the quoted statement. Nor is this particular dismissal of fact as a basis for conclusions the only instance in the book. (Nor, in fairness, is every conclusion unsupported.) But how can a claim such as this lodge itself in a treatise that targets unreason and denounces claims that lack a factual basis?

My sense was (and this is opinion on my part) that Jacoby is less comfortable with notions of evidence than with reason. Stated differently, her intellectual approach strikes me as more attuned to the humanities than the sciences or mathematics. Both reason and evidence are imperfect tools, of course. But there are differences. When the two clash, a scientist is inclined to be swayed by evidence, at least until better evidence comes along. In scholarly fields that have relied more heavily on reason than empirical evidence, this may be less true and I say that not as a criticism but merely an observation. When there is no definitive evidence, reason is likely to be an attractive and powerful alternative. While Jacoby praises the sciences as a means to establishing facts, she seems not to take a scientific approach to truth-seeking in some cases (like the one discussed above). Jacoby seems most comfortable in the intellectual milieu of the humanities, to oversimplify, perhaps.

Reason is good and we don't see enough of it. There, she and I would agree. But I hold evidence -- despite its sometimes transient nature -- as a higher approximation to truth. Of course, the two together are better than either alone. But Jacoby's casual attitude toward evidence really undermined her arguments for me. Had she taken the same stance and presented her ideas as opinion, with the benefit of supporting evidence where appropriate, I would have found little with which to quibble. But, in the context of asserting the intellectual laxity of Americans, her assertions, when not supported -- and occasionally contradicted -- by facts, really put me off.

To end on a positive note, one implicit goal of this book is to stimulate thought and discussion. It has succeeded. I'd rather read a book with which I disagree in part than one that fails to stimulate my thinking at all. This book did make me think, even if those thoughts were critical at times.