The Age of American Unreason
Susan Jacoby
(Pantheon, 356 pages, $26)
Reasonable men may debate whether we need another book testifying
to the dumbing down of America. On my bookshelf I find several
titles addressing the topic from both sides of the aisle: Jacques
Barzun’s House of Intellect, Dwight Macdonald’s
Against the American Grain, Richard Hofstadter’s
Anti-intellectualism in American Life, the more recent
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and Allan
Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Their lure is
strong and undeniable.
As is the promise of discovering some new evidence of or
insights into our culture’s alleged hostility toward intellectual
pursuits. Just don’t expect to find any in Susan Jacoby’s The
Age of American Unreason.
“American is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of
intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism,”
Ms. Jacoby asserts. I’ll go along with that, though it’s not like
this strain is a new discovery.
Ralph W. Emerson remarked upon it in 1837, when, in “The
American Scholar” he observed that, “The mind of this country,
taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” In his study of
Celtic folkways in the Old South, Grady McWhiney tells how northern
and European visitors to the southern states were amazed at that
culture’s disdain of Victorian morality, the WASP work ethic, and,
especially, book learning.
Arguably the cultural battle between elite, lettered Yankees and
rowdy southern crackers commenced when Andrew Jackson challenged
John Quincy Adams for the presidency in 1828 and won.
As Michael Graham notes in Redneck Nation: How the South
Really Won the War, despite temporary setbacks in the War of
Northern Aggression and Civil Rights Movement, the hillbillies have
been winning ever since.
JACOBY’S TESTIMONY that Americans are hostile to intellectual
pursuits includes their denial of global warming (I mean global
“climate change”), the teaching of intelligent design, the
prosecution of the Iraq War, (though not the Afghanistan War) and a
general disdain for the word “intellectual.”
You see the thread here. These are items long atop the
conservative agenda. That’s because for Jacoby anti-intellectualism
in American Life is synonymous not with — as McWhiney or
Hofstadter would have it — the southern cracker culture, but with
conservatism.
Jacoby complains that conservatives “have turned the word
intellectual into a dirty word,” particularly conservative
intellectuals like Tom Wolfe who once quipped that “an intellectual
is a person knowledgeable in one field who only speaks out in
others,” or Richard Posner who said that “a successful academic may
be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters
about which he is an idiot.”
Of course, the word is good enough in and of itself. It is
rather the clowns who masquerade as public intellectuals — the
Chomskys, the Naomi Kleins, the Gore Vidals — who have dragged a
perfectly fine word through the muck.
A video-playing teenager educated at a locally controlled public
school (another bane to Jacoby’s existence) could easily refute her
thesis. And that is the problem with the book. For a supposedly
serious study, the thing has no balance. No symmetry.
Thus the task happily falls to her book’s many critics. As the
reviewer Carlin Romano has pointed out, it is to America where the
world’s smartest and wealthiest send their students. America
receives the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes. New York, not London,
Paris or Cairo, is the literary, cultural as well as financial
capital of the world.
Not only are there more television channels appearing each year,
but the number of new books published in the U.S. increases
annually. There were 291,920 new titles and editions
published in 2006.
AS THE AFOREMENTIONED titles by Barzun and Bloom indicate, cultural
conservatives too have genuine concerns about the state of American
culture. But while some may fret about video games and girls going
wild, they are likely to blame liberal social engineering failures
and abandonment of traditional mores for our cultural ills.
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.
