★★★★ (3.8 of 5)

• Full Title: The Age Of American Unreason
• Author: Susan Jacoby
• Year: 2008 (mine was 2008 library hardcover)
• Pages: 318*
• Genre: Nonfiction, Social Psychology
• Publisher: Pantheon Books (Random House)
• ISBN 978-0-375-42374-1 (hardcover)
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* not including introduction, notes, bibliography, acknowledgements, or index)

 

Summary

Susan Jacoby — a Pulitzer Prize finalist and former reporter for The Washington Post — examines in this book the trend unique to the United States of virulent anti-intellectualism throughout the political spectrum, entertwined with anti-rationalism and religious fundamentalism. Since I very recently read Al Gore’s The Assault On Reason — published a year earlier and on mostly the same topic — I couldn’t help but compare the two books as I read this. The primary difference to me, aside from quality, is that Gore focuses more on the “marketplace of ideas” and misinformation, where Jacoby’s focus tends toward intellectualism.

Jacoby examines historical surges of anti-intellectualism in the United States and whether the latest resurgence is part of a cycle or something entirely new and more destructive. Additionally, she examines reasons why the U.S. seems to be the only developed nation where this is a major problem.

She lists three “vectors” of anti-rationalism: (1) mass media, (2) fundamentalist religion, and (3) “widespread failings of American public education and the scientific illiteracy of much of the media” — all of which intertwine. Some subplots covered along this journey include: the mixing of pseudoscience with real science (example: social Darwinism conflated with Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection) and the American public’s inability to tell the difference, historical roots of U.S. intellectualism and its antagonists, the rising and falling public support for intellectuals (including multiple Red Scares and the 1960s tumult), how all this was affected by the rise (and subsequent demise) of “middlebrow” culture, the oft-ignored “Other Sixties” when the so-called Silent Majority began to form in opposition to radicals, the eventual marriage of hard-right politics with evangelical Christianity, homogenization of pop culture via television, and the changing standards of education.

 

Praise

Jacoby appears to have crafted logically interlocked and defensible points backed by history and current events. She also realistically portrays the nation’s founders as split by disagreement on fundamental issues, and also how they are in some senses responsible for the topic under discussion (instead of obsequiously quoting them and pretending they would, as a block, agree with him if they were around today, as Gore did). For example, when examining the role of inferior education in the United States’ anti-intellectualism, Jacoby highlights “local control” — a close relative of “states rights” — and how it directly resulted in widely varying education standards in the young U.S. and discrepancies in funding that continue into the modern age.

There are also plenty of worthwhile quotations, many more than should be cited in a review like this. Here are a handful of examples:

“Discussing Armageddon as if it were as real as the Earth itself, the Time story was, on one level, an effort to capitalize on public fear and sell magazines. On a deeper level, though, the article exemplifies the journalistic conviction that anything ‘controversial’ is worth covering and that both sides of an issue must always be given equal space — even if one side belongs in an abnormal psychology textbook. If enough money is involved, and enough people believe that two plus two equals five, the media will report the story with a straight face, always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that ‘mathematicians, however, say that two plus two still equals four.’ With a perverted objectivity that gives credence to nonsense, mainstream news outlets have done more to undermine logic and reason than raptureready.com could ever do.”

—page 20

“In the land of politicized anti-rationalism, facts are whatever folks choose to believe.”

—page 29

“The victory of those in the revolutionary generation who wished the federal government to do nothing would cast a long shadow over American intellectual life, and contribute to the regional disparities in education that still exert a formidable anti-intellectual influence on American culture.”

—page 35

“The tendency toward specialization... was closely related to the American insistence that education be tailored to provide direct practical benefits.”

—page 37

“While an angry public may be the short-term solution, an ignorant public is the long-term problem in American public life.”

—page 297

“As both dumbness and smartness are defined downward — among intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike — it becomes much easier to convince people of the validity of extreme positions. Not only basic knowledge but the ability to think critically are required to understand the factual errors (as distinct from differences of opinion) that generally provide the foundation for policies at the far ends of the political spectrum.”

—page 298

Unlike my experience with Gore’s book, I found only one editing mistake (a “then” that should have been a “than”), and no obvious contradictions or factual errors.

 

Criticism

As with many books from academia and/or intellectuals, this one suffers from needlessly complex prose, though not as thick or tangled as that of, say, Christopher Hitchens. An example:

“If intellectuals are now beginning to look back on the work of mid-twentieth-century ‘consensus historians’ — of whom Hofstadter was an eminent example — with a renewed esteem, their respect may be the scholarly equivalent of the general public’s weariness with ideological polarization that has sanctioned not only the demonization of opponents but the trivialization of all opposing opinions.”

—page xvi, Introduction

Otherwise, I have only mild complaints, one of which is her eventual slide into blaming new-fangled technology. Fortunately, she didn’t take the same route as Gore did on this — he opened with it, and his anti-TV rants dominated his introduction. Jacoby was more subtle, bringing to bear highly sophisticated arguments and a wealth of actual studies into the harms of screen time. But still, she can’t help lamenting (I’m paraphrasing here): “We just don’t talk to each other like we used to.” While bringing legitimate complaints about how we use our TVs (or allow advertisers to use us via the TV), mobile phones, text messaging, blogging, and other changes, she can’t help but insist that these media are inherently harmful — which I don’t think she proved at any point.

Additionally — and this is less of a complaint and more of an observation — I began to wonder partway through whether Jacoby, in a different way from Gore, had missed something crucial due to her detachment from “the average American” (whomever that might be). For example, I think she too often conflated “intellectuals” — either as a collective or as individuals — with “intellectualism” (an inherently nebulous term), thus making it difficult to defend the latter due to the imperfections of the former. And, though she mentioned each generation of intellectuals falling prey to various broken ideologies (first social darwinism, and later communism, just to name a couple), I think she missed how much those infidelities contributed to the U.S. distrust of “elites”. Imagine the less educated among us saying “fool me once...”; we don’t want to follow a group that can be so easily duped by dangerous pseudoscience, even if we are, simultaneously, being duped by other dangerous pseudosciences.

 

Personal Note

This book cites a “Frederick Crews” at one point (and the same man wrote a blurb for the back cover), and of course it caught my eye because I have a maternal uncle named Fred Crews. However, my relative’s full first name is “Fredore”, not Frederick, and he is in almost every way the polar opposite of the man quoted by Jacoby.

 

Conclusion

I’m glad I read Gore’s book before this one, and I’m glad I read both within a few weeks of each other (I purchased both in 2019 at a local library’s used book sale). This book is far superior in almost every way, though not perfect and perhaps not as accessible to the average U.S. reader.

I would recommend this book to anyone — though it might help to have a dictionary handy.

 

 

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