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I'm OK -- You're a Half-Wit

By Christopher Orlet on 3.21.08 @ 12:02AM

(Page 2 of 2)

Jacoby (author of a history of atheism) pins the blame chiefly on fundamentalist religion and resurgent anti-rationalism. Resurgent, because in the '50s -- that decade that is usually demonized and vilified for its bland, mindless conformity -- was on the contrary, the golden age of middlebrow culture, before rock and roll usurped jazz, before TV went brain dead, and millions of bourgeois Americans read the Book of the Month.

According to the author, it wasn't the rise of the '60s and '70s counter-culture, but the Reagan Revolution and its evangelical allies that are to blame for this latest round of anti-intellectualism.

Jacoby, not surprisingly, is unable to see the contradictions in her own deeply held convictions. Here is an elitist who envisions an egalitarian society. She longs for a more democratic, Jacksonian nation, but she also expects it to be peopled not by the rednecks who voted for Jackson, but the enlightened litterateurs who voted for John Quincy Adams (and lost).

Like all liberal snobs, Jacoby dutifully admires the poor and the working man, but cannot abide their colossal ignorance, their petty superstitions, their techno-savvy, their bigotry, and worse, their anti-intellectualism. Ultimately, one leaves this book with the suspicion that the only "folks" -- to use a word the author rails against ad nauseum -- the author can stomach are folks like herself, e.g., Upper Middle Class Overly Educated Atheists.

Jacoby claims she started out to write part two of Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Instead of a scholarly study of American culture she produced this bitter 356-page rant.

Now turn off your computer and go pick up a book, you big dummy.

Christopher Orlet is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator online.

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