There’s something about reading a book by someone who is incredibly intelligent that is unlike any other reading experience. I wish Susan Jacoby could write a book every year. And I certainly wonder about how much worse things have become in the United States in the eight years since the book was first published. The Age of American Unreason recounts the many ways that American citizens have been spiraling downward in intelligence, all of them manifestly worse in 2016 than they were at the dawn of the Obama administration. In fact, I used to think that the term anti-intellectual seemed a bit harsh in the way that it seemed to cast what I perceived as the gradual diminishment of intellectual life in America as something that was purposefully being resisted. What I was thinking--to use Jacoby’s reasoning about writing--was really along the lines of a-intellectualism. But in the past year, especially given the current politics on the right, the prefix anti- now seems especially accurate. Jacoby’s writing captures all of this subtlety and more. She’s intellectual without being pedantic, engaging without pandering, and edifying without being boring. It’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time, and equally devastating in exposing the erosion of the joy of intellectual thought in a country that is increasingly becoming free in name only.
Jacoby’s book begins with an introduction that stands as a lengthy thesis on the problems themselves, some of which I’ve written about before, especially the decline in reading, scientific knowledge, and passivity with which American lives have become little more than mere existence. She sums it up with this idea:
America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and
anti-intellectualism . . . This condition is aggressively promoted by everyone, from politicians
to media executives, whose livelihood depends on a public that derives its opinions from sound
bites and blogs, and it is passively accepted by a public in thrall to the serpent promising effortless
enjoyment from the fruit of the tree of infotainment.
It’s a chilling prognosis, and her twin analogies, both to medicine and the bible, are equally appropriate. The mutant strain of unreason that is infecting the country is running rampant through a populace that seems powerless to protect itself. Public education, once thought to be a bulwark against ineptitude of the mind, has been so thoroughly infected that colleges and universities have had no other choice than to succumb as well. And her invocation of the bible is wonderfully shifted to make the object of human desire not knowledge, but useless facts and information that only serve to make people dumber.
Her first chapter took me by surprise, in that it deals with language, specifically the use of the word “folks” by politicians to replace “people.” Initially it seemed to be a fairly insignificant attempt by candidates to ingratiate themselves with voters in order to get elected, and her replacement of the word in famous speeches by Lincoln and Roosevelt seemed a little too obviously hyperbolic. What I hadn’t expected, though, was this quote from George Orwell--one of the masters of the English language--using his own analogy that cast her argument in an entirely new light.
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more
completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English
language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the sloven-
liness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
When contemplating the “slovenliness of our language” it becomes clear that the damage done to our communication skills through text messaging and Twitter has created a vicious circle in which foolishness of thought has become the norm and slovenly language the only way people have of expressing it. At the end of Orwell’s statement, a sentence Jacoby left off, he states, “The point is that the process is reversible.” It might have been back in 1946 when Orwell wrote this, but it seems almost impossible today with the complete and utter saturation of American culture by infotainment. The most obvious example of this is embodied in the presumptive Republican nominee. Donald Trump’s speeches have not only been analyzed and found to be written at an eighth-grade level, but Trump’s grammar is the worst ever used by a major political candidate. It takes no imagination at all to wonder what kind of language his supporters use and why he appeals to them. In speaking about listeners of has-been radio host Don Imus, she could have just as easily been talking about those who support Trump today: “Part of [his] audience was undoubtedly composed of hard-core racists and misogynists, but many more who found his rants amusing were responding in the spirit of eight-year-olds laughing at farts.”
I have always felt organized religion to be utterly antithetical to serious thought, as the very idea of faith to an imaginary deity makes absolutely no sense to free thinking individuals. Nevertheless, as Jacoby points out, this is a brand of emotional anti-intellectualism that is perfectly wedded to our image-driven society. “Religion comes across most powerfully on video when it is unmodified by secular thought and learning, makes no attempt to appeal to anything but emotion, and leaves no room for doubt.” But more than just the medium, the media itself is culpable in supporting the presupposition that belief in god is societal given. This comes in the form of Christianity as an accepted norm in news reporting, and manifests itself in specific events like the belief that the attacks on September 11th were a sign of the biblical end times, which “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.” The most obvious of these fictional controversies has been promulgated by the willfully ignorant who continue to espouse creationism in the face of scientific fact.
Creationism is based on the belief in a god that is no different from Zeus, Odin, or Ra, while scientific fact is based on observable and mathematical proof that has been validated through reproducible experimentation. What Jacoby does so magnificently here, is to bring these ideas back around to Orwell’s observations on language.
The general theory of evolution by means of natural selection is a settled issue for the main-
stream scientific community. The right wing religious mantra that evolution is “just a theory”
rests not only on religious faith but on our national indifference to the specific meanings of
words in specific contexts.
Steadily falling classroom expectations have had a disastrous effect on our country and an
equally disastrous impact on those public school students who eventually decide to go into
teaching. Victims of poor teaching themselves, they have no models on which to base their
own teaching other than those they experienced as students . . . This, then, is the beginning
of a cycle of failure in which teachers who were not taught how to write when they were in
school now lack the confidence to teach it themselves.
To complete her argument near the end of the first chapter she calls upon Bill Moyers, from a speech in which he castigated the Bush administration for their anti-intellectual policies and a willingness to align themselves with the religious right in a way that is an anathema to an increasingly secular society but proved beneficial enough at the ballot box to justify its behavior.
For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview
despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology
couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger:
voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
From here, Jacoby takes a look back at the country’s intellectual history and begins with “the paradoxical cultural and political forces that . . . combine a deep reverence for learning with a profound suspicion of too much learning.” In a way, it almost seems as if there never was an American intellectual history. The men who began the American experiment were English, if not by birth then by temperament and upbringing, even though isolated on the North American coast away from the mother country. Alexis de Tocqueville, our first clear-eyed European observer, had this to say about the American intellect:
The religion professed by the first immigrants and bequeathed by them to their descendants,
simple in its forms, austere and almost harsh in its principles . . . is naturally unfavorable to the
fine arts and yields only reluctantly to the pleasures of literature . . . If the Americans had been
alone in the world, with the freedom and the knowledge acquired by their forefathers and the
passions which are their own, they would not have been slow to discover that progress cannot
long be made in the application of the sciences without cultivating the theory of them . . . This
intellectual craving, once felt, would very soon have been satisfied . . . [But] among [the English]
they found distinguished men of science, able artists, writers of eminence; and they were enabled
to enjoy the treasures of the intellect without laboring to amass them.
Thus the underpinnings of the nation began with religion, antithetical to intellectual thought, and were further retarded by a reliance upon British arts and letters that necessarily slowed the creation of colonial counterparts. It’s ironic that what Jacoby calls “the end of the beginning of the American intellectual journey” is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call to abandon all allegiance to English thought and that if the American “plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” The independence of mind is clearly a worthwhile goal, but Jacoby poses the question, “how can the national culture exist without the tutelage of its betters?” Part of the problem was the ever-expanding frontier in America that continually pitted the woodsman and farmer of the West with the intellectual and business interests of the East, continually reinforcing the divide between vocation and intellect. “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 . . . The sort of education most valued by ordinary Americans was meant to train a man for whatever practical tasks lay at hand.” Then, as today, however, it is fundamentalist religion that continues to weaken American intellectual life. The “refusal to adapt to any secular knowledge that conflicts with its version of revealed religious truth . . . has been the most enduring and powerful strand in American anti-intellectualism.”
Jacoby is not, however, merely interested in intellectualism for intellectualism’s sake, and is quick to point out that just because someone espouses intelligence does not make them rational. Plenty of right-wing intellectuals have used their knowledge to ends that were less than beneficial for the majority of citizens. So, “while not all intellectuals are rationalists, nearly all anti-intellectuals are anti-rationalists. Supernaturalist fundamentalism is by definition anti-rational, because it cannot be challenged by any countervailing evidence in the natural world.” The adherence to anti-rational beliefs, then, serves another purpose. Believers of all stripes, be they from organized religion or any number of fringe spiritualities, have a need to justify their existence in some way. And because most of them have neither the inclination nor the ability to improve their minds by thinking, they cling to irrational beliefs to bolster their own self-importance. “The very irrationality of their faith is seen as proof of emotional and spiritual superiority.” Jacoby sees the very anti-intellectual leanings of evangelical religions as attractive to those very settlers of the West whose hardscrabble lives had little time for introspection. And in the founding of the country on the idea of religious liberty she also sees a great irony that, “the American experiment in complete religious liberty led large numbers of Americans to embrace anti-rational, anti-intellectual forms of faith.”
In the figure of Episcopal minister William Sumner, Jacoby finds the forerunner of today’s neo-con movement. “Because Sumner was able to invest his pseudoscientific theories with scientific authority and a aura of rationality,” he must be considered “the philosophical forerunner of the right-wing public intellectuals who have exercised similar influence in American society since the early 1980s.” In the same way that the representatives of the wealthy elite in this country use pseudoscience to argue against everything from health care and gun control, to environmental protection and climate change, people like Sumner were able to argue “that the gross economic inequalities of the Gilded Age were mandated not only by natural selection but by the Bible.” But the reality has been, especially since the days of the robber barons, that the rich manipulate circumstances to benefit themselves, so that they in no way resemble anything “natural,” and thus their claims are patently false. Thorstein Veblen--a student of Sumner’s--had this to say in 1899: “The institution of a leisure class, by force of class interest and instinct, and by precept and prescriptive example, makes for the perpetuation of the existing maladjustments of institutions, and even favours a reversion to a somewhat more archaic scheme of life.” Sound familiar? The right is always trying to roll back progress, ostensibly to a purer and simpler time, but the motive is always to get back to a time that benefitted them even more. In the very words of Darwin himself, “if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and the helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”
By the turn of the twentieth century the capitalist upper class had learned how to wield misinformation more effectively to their advantage, and after social Darwinism had been discredited they moved on to communism and managed to corral all left-leaning intellectuals into a cabal that they painted as anti-American. The successful revolution in Russia before the end of the First World War, though it had nothing to do with genuine communism,
. . . prepared the way for a more lasting public mindset in which the politics of liberal intellect-
uals were regarded most charitably as expressions of naïveté about enemies of the American
way of life--one more manifestation of the general gullibility of eggheads--and most harshly as
a form of treason . . . the depth of the suspicion vary considerably according to the political
climate; but the negative image of the intellectual as pinko is always available for political
exploitation during periods of social stress.
And of course religion, never one to be left out when there’s a good anti-rationalist argument to be made against their perceived enemies, had to pile on. Thus the Red Scare also resulted in “the insertion of anti-communism into American cultural conflicts that had previously viewed as homegrown battles between traditional religion and secularization.” This is key to understanding how the anti-intellectual minority was able to wage its war of unreason on into the next century. Darwinism, at first, had “always been seen by its opponents as ideological and metaphysical rather than scientific.” After all, one’s belief in Darwin didn’t actually change the way things appeared. But by combining Darwin’s theory with Russian Bolshevism and communist ideology, opponents of intellect in the electorate were now able to create a new enemy, the scientific expert. This melding of perceived enemies to traditional American values, “tapped into the vague resentment most people feel toward experts on whom they depend but whose work they do not understand.” What seems clear from Jacoby’s chapter on communism is that the intellectual left became complicit in their own undoing by the right because of their need to justify their belief in communism at the time, whether they eventually changed their stance or not. To the average, uniformed, American this clearly meant that they couldn’t be trusted, “and reinforced the old American suspicion that knowledge itself could be a dangerous thing.” The left has been fighting this battle ever since.
But the intellectual left continued to make things more difficult for themselves in the decades following World War Two. As a reaction to the tremendous growth in college attendance, by returning veterans on the G.I. Bill and a more prosperous middle class sending their children to undergraduate schools, the middle class in general was more inclined toward self-improvement. This manifested in the purchase of encyclopedias and experiments like Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler’s Great Books series, as well as a desire to read literature of all kinds, attend museums, or even watch more edifying television programming. But pompous dismissal of these middlebrow efforts, as they would come to be called by an increasingly effete intellectual class, only served to drive a wedge between the two groups that was quickly exploited by the capitalist class and remains to this day.
The disintegration of denigration of the middlebrow are closely linked to the political and class
polarization that distinguishes the current wave of anti-intellectualism . . . What has been lost
is an alternative to mass popular culture, imbibed unconsciously and effortlessly through the
audio and video portals that surround us all. What has been lost is the culture of effort.
According to Jacoby, what middlebrow culture had to offer was a non-confrontational view of the world that emphasized the importance of scientific and rational though, yet still allowed everyone to keep their religion and their bible--as long as they didn’t take the thing literally. As such, it was a substantial buffer between the twin anti-rational theories of unrestrained capitalism and fundamentalist religion. Despite the significant economic implications for today, this is the real tragedy of the demise of the American middle class. “Because middlebrow culture placed a high value on scientific discoveries and progress, its degeneration has played an important role in the melding of anti-intellectualism with the fundamentalist war on science during the past three decades.” What really killed the middlebrow motivation for self-improvement, however, was television, and its effect cannot be understated. It was able to transform a primarily reading-based culture into one that could only be satisfied by the ease of visual imagery in less than a generation. “Although few cultural observers saw it coming, all print media were already struggling to survive in the lengthening shadow of television . . . Middlebrow culture--so long an instrument of self-education for those who aspired to something above the lowest common denominator--had nowhere to go but down.”
What happens next is something about which I would like to read much more, the undermining of the traditional core curriculum in universities. Naturally conservatives want to paint this as yet another left-wing conspiracy to erode institutions of higher learning, but the truth is much more complex. What students--a vocal minority of them--were protesting at the time was the marriage of universities to the military-industrial complex, as well as the obvious classist and racist policies of the schools. In that context, the changes in curriculum were merely the most visible attempts by the schools to demonstrate their commitment to change for the better. But liberals were no happier about the change than anyone else. “Many of the best known leaders of the New Left initially sounded as disillusioned as conservatives would in later years about what they considered the academy’s betrayal of traditional scholarly ideals.” Ultimately, Jacoby places the blame on weak-willed administrators who were afraid that attempting to negotiate the inclusion of ethnic and gender studies into the standard curriculum would look like uncritical support of the status quo to those demanding change.
But she also blames equally weak-willed faculty. Many of those faculty members who typically defended the traditional curriculum were part of the problem, racist, white patricians who were an anathema to their more liberal colleagues. The thought of fighting side by side with them to keep the classics forced many liberal professors to abandon their ideals for political reasons. “What is clear, however, is that liberals and conservatives were no more interested in talking to one another on campuses in the sixties than they are today.” The end result, regardless of who is to blame, is a college education that is far less than it should be and, returning to the decline of public education, one that continues to have ramifications for the future. In a fitting epitaph to the college degree, Jacoby states,
Thanks to the erosion of cores studies, it is now possible at many institutions of so-called
higher learning for a student to receive a degree in psychology without having taken a mid-
level biology course; for an African-American studies major to graduate without reading the
basic texts of the “white” Enlightenment; for a business major to graduate without having
studied any literature after her freshman year. And all of these college graduates, should
they choose to become teachers at any level of the educational system, will pass on their
narrowness and ignorance to the next generation.
At the same time, the bible belt continued to notch itself ever tighter, even going so far as to bring fundamentalist Protestants in league with conservative Catholics rejecting the progressive reforms of the Vatican in the sixties, both reacting strongly to emblematic causes like the Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion in 1973. But the most pernicious trend to take hold in the sixties was the apolitical consumerism directed at the youth market, one that had become a lucrative demographic as the decade progressed. “A popular culture driven almost entirely by the preferences of the young discourages the making of important intellectual and aesthetic distinctions . . . demonstrated by the conviction of millions of the young that their product choices, unlike those of an older generation brainwashed by ‘Madison Avenue,’ were expressions of free-spirited individuality.”
Jacoby’s discussion of youth culture dominance begins with pop music of the sixties, in which critics began to refer to musicians as poets but has continued with the same distinction accorded to rap artist of the new millennium. Here begins a breakdown in the aesthetic standards of criticism that started with the destruction of college liberal arts curricula and ends with what I call the democratization of thought that allows anyone with a smart phone to foist their uninformed opinions upon the world. “Resistance to the idea of aesthetic hierarchy is unquestionably one of the most powerful cultural legacies of the sixties.” And, of course, much of the blame rests with public school education, which has continued to this day to marginalize the arts in favor of a science and math rich curriculum that will prepare children to compete in the global economy, something that removal of the arts has failed to accomplish. The ability to make aesthetic judgments based on objective criteria, it turns out, is not superfluous. She also talks about the cult of celebrity that began during the decade, in which news wasn’t news without a famous spokesperson to quote. But in the end, it all comes back to words. “The real importance of the sixties in American intellectual history is that they marked the beginning of the eclipse of the print culture by the culture of video.”
What I was most eager to get to was Jacoby’s next chapter on junk thought. “It cannot be stressed enough that junk thought emanates from both the left and the right . . . fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.” But again, public education comes in for its share of the blame. As facts and figures are thrown around by those who want to eliminate life-saving vaccinations for children, or continue destroying the planet through practices that contribute to climate change, many Americans lack the ability to make sense of scientific statistics, or to rationally understand that these people are using faulty logic and unconnected cause and effect to make their arguments. Scare tactics bolster their predictions, and without the ability to discern fact from fiction too many people believe in the fiction. In some respects, however, people are not to blame, when reporters and news organizations repeatedly report false statistics and illogical conclusions, thus giving the manipulators even more credence when they cite those sources as further evidence. More insidious, however, is the obvious beneficiary of this kind of disinformation. “Many of these [campaigns] are financed or have close ties to right-wing news organizations and corporations with an interest in debunking scientific findings that suggest a need for government regulation.”
This is a comment that bears closer scrutiny. There is a tendency to lump politicians and corporate leaders in with the anti-intellectual citizens who support them, but that is being incredibly naïve. Jacoby makes this important observation about what is really going on with Republican leadership--if you can even call it that. “Junk thought should not be confused with stupidity or sheer ignorance, because it is often employed by highly intelligent people to mislead and confuse a public deficient in its grasp of logic, the scientific method, and the basic arithmetic required to see through the pretensions of poorly designed studies.” In many cases, it must be pointed out, those studies are poorly designed on purpose in order to support whatever unscientific theory the corporate right and their political puppets are attempting to foist upon an increasingly unintelligent public. The reason that junk though works for those with an agenda is as old as the country itself. Because religion discourages thought, it places a premium on feeling, emotion, gut-level reaction. In fact, intelligence has long been denigrated in our society where instinct has been elevated over intellect for centuries. Maddeningly, the very act of debunking junk thought actually works in its favor because of this bias, and when this kind of anti-rational thought is proven wrong, it “only encourage[s] the public to give more weight to emotion and opinion than to the contrary evidence set forth by hard-hearted scientists.”
In her next chapter Jacoby takes on the media directly. This is something that has been getting a lot of attention lately as presidential candidates--and even President Obama--have been taking the news media to task for sensationalist reporting. But the world has changed; at least it has for those who spend their days with their noses buried in their cell phones. There was a time in this country when reporters could change popular opinion, and their investigations could uncover truths that made sense to people as a whole. No more. The only thing that plays with the digital age viewer now is 24 hour scandal programming--and it doesn’t change anybody’s mind anymore.
The nation’s newspapers, as well as mass-circulation magazines, have never been know for
their high intellectual quality . . . The real difference between today’s video and yesterday’s
print is not content but context--a context in which the proliferating visual images and noises
of the video/digital age permeate the minute-by-minute experience of our lives . . . The willed
attention demanded by print is the antithesis of the reflexive distraction encouraged by the
infotainment media.
The media has always been a for-profit endeavor, and today the media does what it has always done, it’s just that the thin façade of objectivity has finally been stripped away. Rather than deliver entertainment in the guise of news, the guise is gone. What we’re left with then is news that fails to tell us anything newsworthy. As such, media content itself has become meaningless which, again, can be evidenced in the campaign of Donald Trump. It, quite literally, doesn’t matter what he says or does. He’s still running and people are still voting for him. In the same way that many young people at the time of the 9/11 attacks thought they were seeing special effects when the World Trade Center buildings collapsed, people today vote for Trump as if they are voting for a contestant on a reality TV show. As much as politicians or intellectuals rail against media’s content, Jacoby takes the stance that even if the content were to change, nothing else would. “The media really do constitute a self-renewing, unified organism that cannot be contained or modified in any fundamental sense by lopping off some of the more malignant clusters of cells.” Even if the news media all reverted back to some imagined time when news was truly objective, the only thing that would change is that people would stop watching it. People don’t turn on the TV to watch the news, they watch the news because it’s on TV.
Of course, every minute that people are plugged into their preferred infotainment device is a minute less that they have to read or converse. With every passing year the amount of reading that people engage in decreases, and even more so among young people. One of the obvious distractions for young people is video games, and she refutes several arguments by supporters of the “culture of distraction” and their ideas about the benefits of that particular pastime. “It has often been asserted that video games, because they demand so much trial-and-error experimentation from the participants, offer a perfect way to introduce young people to the scientific method.” This is patently ridiculous. Jacoby, however, only focuses on the reward aspect of the games, in that “life[’s] rewards, if and when they come at all, do not pop up with the regularity of icons in video games.” While this is certainly true it’s not only the reward that fails to replicate life, it’s the risk. It doesn’t matter how violent the game might be for the player’s screen avatar, if it’s killed or dies just reboot and start again. As far as video games are concerned, there could be nothing that is less like real life. And in terms of what is actually being learning by playing these games, when the game gets too tough kids can simply throw down the joystick and quit. That’s the real lesson that is being absorbed by video game players, and it doesn’t seem to change after they become adults. But once again, it is big business that is really in control as they attempt to do away with books altogether by moving video game learning into public school classrooms and shutting down print-based neural pathways altogether in order to create a perfect society of video-junky consumers.
Arguments that the Web is a text-based medium are specious as well. “The Internet surely does offer a text as well as a video highway, open to anyone who can use Google, but text and intellectually substantive reading matter are hardly identical.” In fact, in another frightening development there is a movement to “sample” text in the same way that rap and hip-hop artists have been doing for years, with a vision that text will be able to be gathered together like playlists on an iPod and constitute an entirely new work. Jacoby’s flat reply to that idea is simple. “The process also has another name: plagiarism.” As young people to an increasingly greater extent see text not as ideas contained within the covers of a book but as nothing more than a commodity, like the cereal inside of a box, they lose all sense of what it means for someone to think and communicate thoughts in writing. But verbal communication has been equally imperiled, and to a far greater extent today than when Jacoby wrote her book. The process began with television, where conversations tend to be about what is on the screen, but has bolted downhill to the point where everything from dinner conversations in restaurants to discussions in classrooms takes a backseat to whatever inane chatter is being texted to someone’s cell phone. Young people today will even interrupt sex in order to check their phones. A more pathetic example of Pavlovian conditioning is difficult to imagine.
Conversation, dialogue, and discussion have been mutated in the same way as text has in the digital age. Jacoby’s comment about substandard online verbal skills in 2008 can now be seen on the nightly news as a regular part of the political process. “Whether the comments are reasonable or obviously loony, they bear no resemblance to a real conversation, in which identifiable people are held responsible for what they say and are even, on occasion, asked for facts to back up their opinions.” Politicians are identifiable, however, and the fact that they are not being held accountable for what they say makes it appropriate that Jacoby’s last chapter concerns the dumbing down of public life. And in Jacoby’s mind there is no difference between the politicians themselves or the news media that covers them. “Politicians, like the members of the media, are both the creators and the creatures of a public distrustful of complexity, nuance, and sophisticated knowledge.” With college graduates today far less educated than high school graduates of the fifties, and the Internet and cell phone sucking the attention of adults as well as young people, it’s little wonder that pandering to an uneducated electorate or audience has become the order of the day.
The dim flicker of hope when Jacoby wrote her book, the election of Barack Obama in the wake of the utter debacle that was the Bush presidency, has certainly been smothered in recent months with the rise of Trump, et al, as well as the embarrassing and incomprehensible behavior of Bernie Sanders, who continues to trash Hillary Clinton in a way that is sure to alienate his supporters against her when he loses the Democratic nomination. But, as always, the American public’s inherited suspicion of intellect continues to be fueled not only by political but corporate interests. “During the past thirty years, the old liberal intellectual establishment has been joined by, and in certain crucial respects outsmarted by, a conservative intellectual establishment with a permanent base in right-wing think tanks and foundations underwritten by the fortunes of conservative businessmen.” The assault continues to this day, as liberal intellectuals are painted as the enemy by conservatives and blamed for every failed Republican policy that has increased the bottom line for corporations and gutted the middle class, and an increasingly a-literate and anti-rational society believes them. “As both dumbness and smartness are defined downward--among intellectuals as well as nonintellectuals--it becomes much easier to convince people of the validity of extreme positions.”
Public education takes a final well-deserved hit as Jacoby recounts the things Americans don’t know, especially when it comes to the branches of government, the Constitution, the judiciary, or even basic geography. This should be something that unites both left and right in a common cause, but it doesn’t. “Right-wing intellectuals, particularly those involved in government, constantly bleat about the lamentable state of cultural literacy in America, but what they mean is their version of cultural literacy and American history.” There is equal blame to go around, however, as Jacoby castigates “left-wing multiculturalist intellectuals” along with their “hard-line conservative” brethren on the right. At the same time, in its never-ending quest for customers, “media lords are trying to meet readers at their own level of cultural and civic literacy instead of attempting to raise the level of public knowledge and discourse.” And yet the cruel irony is that the message the public gets from politicians and the media alike is just the opposite. “Like most politicians, most media opinion makers choose to pretend that dumbness is not being defined downward and to flatter Americans by telling them that they and their children are really the smartest, best-educated generations ever to inhabit this nation.”
Jacoby’s call in her last chapter for a form of intellectual conservation in this country begs the question of what there is left to preserve, given that her assessment from eight years ago has only become worse. “Anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism flourish in a mix that includes addiction to infotainment, every form of superstition and credulity, and an education system that does a poor job of teaching not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.” The evidence of that is the pendulum swing that she observed from the extremely anti-rational Bush administration to the election of the “reality-based” Obama presidency is now being reversed. And it seems that the country can’t help itself. Once a Democrat spends eight years in office correcting all the mistakes by their Republican predecessor, the public can’t seem to resist putting another jingoistic anti-intellectual in office whose entire term will need to be counteracted in order to put the country back in order again. Obama’s appeal in his first victory speech for the country to “resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned us for so long,” has been largely ignored and things are far worse than when he first took office. It’s to Jacoby’s credit that even in this moment of hope she was less than convinced he could succeed.
Given the losing track record of politicians who have tried to educate voters about complicated
issues during the last twenty years, it remains a long shot, even during this potentially receptive
period of national self-doubt, to bet on the emergence of a higher standard of reason and know-
ledge . . . Even the best political leadership can only nudge the public in the right direction; it
cannot generate the will to overcome intellectual laziness.
Her prescription for conserving what little intellectualism we still posses, seems as effective as it does impossible to achieve. “The first essential step is a negative: we must give up the delusion that technology can supply the fix” for our technological addiction. It won’t. That is something individuals must do on their own, and it has a dim prospect of success. Second, intellectuals need to take just as aggressive stances as their anti-intellectual opponents. “It should be the goal of all public intellectuals to exert their influence, insofar as it exists.” Again, this is something the liberal left--with the possible exception of Barney Frank and Bernie Sanders--has never been able to do successfully. The inadequacies of what passes for a college level education today, long a subject of my own concern, are also singled out for reform. “The job of higher education is not to instruct students in popular culture but to expose them to something better.” But her own reality-based thinking is never far from the realistic chance of success of these obvious solutions: “It is possible that nothing will help. The nation’s memory and attention span may already have sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived by the best efforts of America’s best minds.” That is my suspicion as well.
In many ways Jacoby’s book takes a pessimistic view of our fellow American citizens, and rightfully so. But that doesn’t mean it was written in the spirit of divisiveness or derision. The subtext of the entire work is one of hope, that as bad as things may seem on the surface that there must be some way to solve the problem. In looking at her initial medical analogy of anti-intellectualism as a disease it implies the desire for a cure. And, as always, to affect a cure we first need knowledge. We need to know exactly what the problems are and look at them with a sober, objective eye. In this respect the importance of knowledge cannot be overestimated, and in Jacoby’s book there is plenty to be had. The Age of American Unreason is easily the best book on the subject, even eight years later, that I have come across. Though the problems seem even worse today they are still the same problems, and therefore the potential for a solution still exists. Whether or not it can be solved, however, remains to be seen. At any rate, I want to thank Susan Jacoby for her excellent work and recommend it to everyone who mistakenly thinks there is no problem. But for everyone, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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