A Great but Flawed Look at the America Today

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	• The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby Pantheon, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 78 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Get this woman to write more!

Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, her previous book, was a masterpiece, made clearly evident given the pervasiveness in which other authors have cited that book. Freethinkers was a history of secular thought in America while Jacoby's new book, The Age of American Reason, provides a current day snapshot on the results that occur when much of America shuns rational thought in favor of either ideological dogma, both right and left, and/or sheer intellectual laziness. This snapshot is presented within the context of our past where Jacoby treats us to a journey from the past to the present in each chapter which covers different topics all related to non-rational thinking and its impact on society.

Jacoby as a historian and thinker is worthy of our attention so I recommend this book along with Freethinkers. Given that this book is more topical, I doubt it will be read much years from now though I believe it's still worthy of our attention during this era (I predict Freethinkers will continue to be a valuable treasure that will used for many years to come).

Jacoby is knowledgeable about the history of enlightenment thinking and our founding ideals, topics that run through most chapters as a common thread. She uses the approach to thinking of our founding framers and other great leaders of the past as a benchmark to current day approaches. For example, she compares current political speech to FDR's fireside chats broadcasted across America on the radio. FDR treated Americans with respect while also challenging them to study up on the geography and geopolitics in play during WWII. This compares favorably when Jacoby analyzes the type of communications we receive from modern-day presidents where obvious, non-shallow questions are always avoided and they assume we're idiots that are easily manipulated.

The topic of our leaders talking down to us comes from her first two chapters which covers communications from our political leaders to the public. My initial response was that was hardly a good topic to start this book if you were looking for a persuasive argument that would cause America to consider a change in our behavior, it seemed too petty to me. Seeing Jacoby interviewed by Bill Moyer on this topic did little to persuade me otherwise. However, soon after reading that chapter, I heard Romney's and Obama's speeches on religion.

Romney offered a false history of America, assuming we'd be ignorant to his lies. His speech seemed to have the objective of plagiarizing the impact that Kennedy's speech had on the same topic while at the same time offering raw meat to social conservatives in order to gain political capital with them. Few were fooled while Tim Russert tore Romney apart on his Meet the Press appearance for lying in the speech. Obama's speech soared to heights not experienced by me in public life since Reagan and MLK last spoke to America and quickly showed this Republican what a special talent he was in this day and age. That experience had me rereading the first chapter with newfound respect for how important Ms. Jacoby's point was - that if America was going to regain our competitive advantage in the world after the Bush years, that we will require a more demanding voter who swiftly rejects those that pander and lie to us, while embracing those whose policies are based on sound assertions and are willing to give it to us in a nuanced, truthful manner rather than in soundbites meant to obfuscate - even if we don't agree with them, i.e., better to pick a smart person we disagree with than support an idiot who tells us what the lowest common denominator wants to hear.

Each chapter of American Unreason is presented as a discrete essay covering a different topic, in fact each of them could have been an excellent Atlantic magazine article, which leads me to hope that some good media outlet will snap Jacoby up and allow America more access to Jacoby's excellent analysis beyond her occasional books. A few of the topics covered are as follows:

Communications - how politicians never really answer to anyone while media outlets rely on ever-shorter sound-bites while also failing to correct false assertions made by the people they cover. E.g., those that claim they are a champion of individual rights while advocating for a constitutional amendment that discriminates against gay people and their children and other family members - follow ups are never asked by the media to portray this obvious contradiction (my example, not necessarily Jacoby's).

Social pseudoscience from the left and the right, mostly starting in the late 19th century and how it's affected today's culture, e.g., the right's embrace of social Darwinism was an especially interesting section of this chapter.

America mutates from glorifying its best and brightest to a more middlebrow culture, turning elitism into a bad word. This topic shows Jacoby's predictive powers given how this is currently a political issue after publication of this book. Jacoby reminds the reader that America's greatest were mostly elitists aspiring to ambitious ideals.

"Junk thought" - particularly her attack on liberal learning institutions providing equal time to matters Jacoby finds trivial to forming and bettering western thought (like classes on popular movies and pop music).

Cultural Distraction - which is also getting more notice in the popular press recently, especially this month's Atlantic magazine article on the Googlization of America. This is where I part ways with Ms. Jacoby; her understanding of the utilization of the Internet appears to be based more on her inexperience and lack of time and search skills on-line than any empirical evidence. Certainly her criticisms are valid on how its mis-used and the quality of some of its content, but because she herself has obviously not devoted the time to find the resources that make the Internet a much more productive forum for learning about specific topics relative to finding the right book, I would argue her critique is based on too narrow a context - i.e., her own experience as an obvious non-techie.

In summary - a great book to savor, the discreteness of its topics allows the reader to read a chapter and then set the book aside for future review or even to read the book in a haphazard manner, no matter how a reader approaches this book, it's worthy of everyone's library.

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The Way We Never Were?

Susan Jacoby's book is suffused with nostalgia for a time in America when the life of the mind was more valued than it seems to her to be today. Her evidence, however, is largely anecdotal. She refers, for example, to her experience, as a young woman in the 1960s, of writing long "snail mail" letters to a lover in South Africa, chronicling the zeitgeist of her place and time, and how he did the same. She praises this languid and sensuous form of communication, then contrasts it with the emotional flatness that she feels sending off electronic e-mails today, which she notes are rarely responded to with any degree of passion or detail.

Her thesis, in short, is that contemporary electronic communication, from TV and the Internet, to mass advertising, has drawn America away from nature, books, and the life of the mind. She perceives, correctly, that Steven Johnson's book of just a few years back, "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter," threatens her thesis, and she attempts, in her first chapter, to dispatch it quickly. But rather than address the substantive claims and supports that book offers, she maligns it with little more than innuendo, contempt, and derision. But Johnson's book is, whatever else you may think of it, suffused with a good deal of empirical data, and Jacoby chooses to simply ignore it and move on.

I share Jacoby's sadness that the life of the mind is not broadly valued, but I don't share her belief that it was ever valued all that much more than it is today. The nostalgic aspect of her book is thus the weakest part of it because she is doing something inherently unreasonable, accumulating anecdotes that do not add up (at least for me) to a compelling support for her claim. It was, afterall, William F. Buckley who said, long before the Internet and TV preachers presumably made us all stupid, that he preferred that the country be trusted to the first fifty names in the Boston phone book to the faculty of Harvard. Contempt and distrust of intellectuals and the elite, like the poor, have been with us always. Jacoby, who has written a book on Greek tragedy, surely knows Aristophanes' "The Clouds," a funny and disturbing send up of the atheist intellectuals of ancient Greece.

For all my complaints, however, the book is worth having and reading, if, for no other reason, to draw fresh intellectual air from someone who loves the life of the mind. But let's not kid ourselves. The average person in 1950 probably could no more locate Iran on a world map than a person can today.

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A Great but Flawed Look at the America Today

Susan Jacoby's book has two basic parts. First Ms. Jacoby examines the historical roots of America's penchant for resisting intellectuals and intellectualism. Second, Ms. Jacoby fumes about the changes in our culture since the '60s.

The first portion of the book is without a doubt an excellent investigation and discussion of 75% of 'how we got to where we are now.' The second part of Ms. Jacoby's book is essentially 'The '60s and the o...more Susan Jacoby's book has two basic parts. First Ms. Jacoby examines the historical roots of America's penchant for resisting intellectuals and intellectualism. Second, Ms. Jacoby fumes about the changes in our culture since the '60s.

The first portion of the book is without a doubt an excellent investigation and discussion of 75% of 'how we got to where we are now.' The second part of Ms. Jacoby's book is essentially 'The '60s and the other 25% of how we got to where we are now' and is a bit more problematic for me.

Her basic premise for 'The '60s' is that the youth of the era, the baby boomers, divided themselves into two opposing camps. One was either a member of the counter-culture (a hippie) or of the counter-counter-culture (an anti-hippie) and the two sides haven't agreed on anything since then. To me, this seemed pretty logical. How many Republicans still see every liberal as a [...]

Her examination of how the Culture Wars, efforts to combat the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the Evangelical Movement promote unreason all rang true for me but, like most of the people reading The Age of American Unreason, Ms. Jacoby was preaching to the choir.

Where things bogged down for me was when Ms. Jacoby sounded a bit too much like every other geezer out there ranting about 'kids these days.' I'm less than half of Ms. Jacoby's age and at times she seemed too willing to condemn our culture simply because it is now very different from what it was when she was growing up.

Youth culture, technology and the studying of pop culture in college classes is not the end of the world Ms. Jacoby thinks it is. Yes, email has destroyed the letter. Yes, the vast majority of us are dependent on spell check. College classes studying 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' don't carry the gravitas of classes on Shakespeare or Chaucer or even Bram Stoker. I would argue that if a student can approach 'Buffy' with the same close reading and analysis she or he would have approached 'Cantubury Tales' that student has both learned to think about all the media they consume and has gained the skills to apply that mindset to 'the classics.' I digress...

Changes in how we transmit our thoughts and who sets our tastes in clothes do not, however, do anything to decrease our trust in experts or explain why Americans are peculiar in our celebration of being 'just folks' and our pride in our ignorance. This isn't to say that Ms. Jacoby doesn't address those things, but 'you kids stay off of my lawn!' attitude weakens her arguments.

In the end, The Age of American Unreason is a valuable and timely look at who we are as Americans. Sadly, it's scholarly style and mildly combative stance (and the fact that it's a book and not a TV show) ensures that those who need to hear Ms. Jacoby's message most will be completely unaware that it exists.

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Going to heck in a handbasket

I really liked the author's previous book, "Freethinkers," and I'm naturally sympathetic to most of the positions she takes in this book. However, I almost wasn't able to finish this. Anticipation and enthusiasm fades as the book slogs along, and the reader realizes it's essentially another litany of the standard Loyal Opposition arguments about What's Wrong With America. I perked up at the history of Middlebrow Culture--never knew that was a real thing. But I wish I'd encountered it as, say, a long Harper's magazine article than as a gold nugget I had to pan for. By the end of the book she's devolved into doing a deft imitation of a cranky old man shouting at the television. I mean, not enough classical music reviews in newspapers?!? Come ON. Who CARES.

Plus, her sentences are often too long, her language just short of academic jargon. Here's a random example, plucked off a random page: "Those who take a dark view of the intellectual and political consequences of of the eclipse of print are obliged to establish their bona fides by disclaiming any resistance to the proposition that the computer had effected not only a technological but an intellectual breakthrough in the march of human progress." As I say, not QUITE opaque, just hooded with too many Latinate words and excess hypotaxis. It wears a guy out after a while. I sometimes felt vaguely like I was reading something I'd been assigned.

There's a fair amount of good stuff here--she's in her element in the section about "New Old Time Religion" (but then aren't Fundamentalists carp in a barrel for her audience?) and there's good stuff in "Junk Thought." But overall I found the book flawed and tiring in its relentlessness. Even the author seems to get tired of her own arguments by the end: by then her underlying thesis has become something suspiciously like "Americans are going to heck in a handbasket because they didn't study what I studied and they don't know what I know and they don't read the TIMES on paper over morning coffee like I like to do." I mean, I can't see the decline of civilization in the lack of classical music reviews in newspapers, and I LISTEN to classical music.

Books are long, life short, and all in all I don't think I can recommend this one.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.

Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.

At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.

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