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The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
June 13, 2008 in book reviews
In the mid-20th century, so I’ve been told, middlebrow culture aspired to high-falutin’ secular thought. It was all science and Plato back then. And look at us now! What’s happened to us?
Susan Jacoby, the curmudgeonly author of The Age of American Unreason, blames it on Americans’ patriotic objection to intellectual thought.
In this update to Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (sweet jacket, by the way), Jacoby lists the three founding beliefs of the anti-intellectual church:
- Experts are usually foreigners, and thus, they are alien to the American body politic.
- The educated minority is always trying to impose its views on the affable majority.
- The educated class is an enemy of religion.
So according to Jacoby, most folks see smart people as non-believing pinkos. Maybe this is why “elite” has turned from a compliment into an insult. With eerie prescience, Jacoby predicted that elitism would probably resurface as a political negative in the next presidential race. And what do you know? It has! Barack Obama, symbol of the “elite,” has been cast as “out of touch” with the American people. Putting aside my opinion on whether or not Obama is the better presidential candidate, wouldn’t we want a candidate to be elite and out of touch with the American people? Wouldn’t we want our president to be, bluntly, better than we are?
The Age of American Unreason wisely reminds us that the past is the key to the present. Why do we need to be reminded of this? Because in an age when thought is seen as the opposite of action, rather than something that precedes or goes hand-in-hand with action, we need to be reminded to keep up with our history lessons. As Jacoby points out, “It is the ignorance and erosion of historical memory that make serious deceptions possible and plausible.” The war in Iraq isn’t our first unpopular war, and with our paltry collective memory, it won’t be our last.
Susan Jacoby is also excellent on the subject of junk thought and the impossibility of banishing it from our lives—its inconsistencies can only be pointed out to our interlocutors, but they can’t be dispelled. The nastiest part about pseudoscience is that irrational arguments can’t be disproven. The tenacity of junk thought calls for intellectual responsibilty: the spurious arguments that veil themselves in intellectual jargon only serve to undermine the effectiveness of intellectuals. In other words, “junk thought with an intellectual patina fosters anti-intellectualism.”
What does this mean for bloggers (like me)? I’ll spare you the mincing words of Jacoby’s disdain and summarize: leave the writing to those with PhDs.
While we work on obtaining our advanced degrees, we also ought to be better at reading both sides of the story. Jacoby rightfully points out that we can’t have intellectual robustness until we read as many opposing viewpoints as complementary viewpoints:
“That kind of curiosity, which demands firsthand evidence of whether the devil really has horns, is essential to the intellectual and political health of any society. In today’s America, intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, whether on the left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo.”
Point taken. Looks like it’s time to throw in some Commentary in with that Harper’s.
What do we stand to lose from the surround sound of homogeneity? Well, consider first why we use “the media” as a singular noun. Jacoby quotes Todd Gitlin to chilling effect: “Through all the confusion we sense something like a unity at work…Even as we click around, something feels uniform.” The TV may have 400+ stations, but there’s only one show on.
I know this all sounds like a downer, and I would argue that The Age of American Unreason is needlessly hopeless and uninspiring. Think of what we’ve gained, culturally, since the advent of a visual culture: we’ve learned an entirely new vocabulary of visual and cinematic iconography. We’ve gained the emotional proximity of seeing far-away locales, rather than picturing them on a map. Video has made the news that much more real, even as Jacoby accuses us of relying on video to distance us from real life.
Video is only one of the abstractions that Susan Jacoby blames for the rise of anti-intellectualism. She blames it on the South. She blames it on the youth. She blames it on religion; she blames it on rock ‘n roll. Jacoby’s Satan would undoubtedly be a teenager from Alabama listening to Jesus rock. While she isn’t partisan in her politics, Jacoby takes elitism to hurtful, unhelpful lengths. I’d like to remind Jacoby that older does not always mean better. E-mail is not “an early sign of the enfeeblement of print culture.” Just because interpersonal communication has moved to a less preservable format does not mean that letter-writing sensibilities have stalled. Those who would write letters write lengthy e-mails (and lengthy blog posts). Those who don’t write lengthy e-mails probably wouldn’t have written a letter worth preserving 50 years ago. I’m sure some of you out there can vouch for the inaccuracy of Jacoby’s assertion: “Neither I, nor anyone I know, turns to e-mail with anything like the sense of anticipation and pleasure that used to accompany my opening of the mailbox.” I don’t know about you, but it’s exciting even to open my work e-mail every morning. 40 new e-mails overnight! I’m so popular!
Similarly, Jacoby praises Robert Kennedy for quoting Aeschylus during a public address after the assassination of Martin Luther King. But she damns those politicians who would quote Bob Dylan. I say, if the sentiment behind the quote is just as complex, who cares who the source is? The same problem crops up again when Jacoby discounts the value of cultural analysis. Students are reading popular fiction in their literature classes! she bemoans. She should, instead, be a proponent of cultural analysis so long as the teaching of pop culture is accompanied by sophisticated modes of dissection. I don’t care if you’re reading Harlan Coben; if you’re reading it with an active mind, there are valuable insights to be made.
Nevertheless, despite Susan Jacoby’s obvious prejudices against everything she is not (zing), The Age of American Unreason opened my eyes. Even if you disagree with some of Jacoby’s pointed barbs, this will be the most you’ve engaged with a book in a long time.
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Susan Jacoby would get along really well with Dad.