The Age of American Unreason
By Susan
Jacoby
(Vintage, 384 pages, $15.95 paper)
THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM in Washington about Sarah Palin is
that she lacks intelligence and curiosity. This, coming from a city
that considers Vice President Joe Biden to be a foreign policy
statesman despite his severe diarrhea of the mouth. Supporting
Palin was, to these critics, an act of antiintellectualism. That’s
a pretty smart way of saying, “You disagree with me, and I’m on the
side of smart people. Ergo, you’re dumb.”
Other than George W. Bush, who would want to be
anti-intellectual? Just think about it: Somewhere, at this very
moment, somebody is being stupid, probably even someone you know
and love. In fact, generally the people you know and love have
probably done more stupid things that you’re aware of than people
you don’t know. (If you’re ever asked about your association with
them, just say you’re doing community service. People will admire
you for your charity.) In her snooty history of American
anti-intellectualism, The Age of American Unreason, Susan
Jacoby documents stupidity as an ongoing historical trend. Turns
out, Americans are really good at sniffing out smart folk and
trying to run’em out of town. Jacoby is one to talk. She has
written an entire book sniffing at people she considers her
inferiors.
The book is reminiscent of a famous 1972 line by essayist
Pauline Kael. Shocked at Nixon’s victory in 1972, Kael explained
why it seemed so implausible: she said no one she knew voted for
him. This line is almost like a sociological study showing that
stupidity is the greatest characteristic among those who are not
Pauline Kael. I’m not going to give you the numbers, but I should
be emphatic on this point: there are a lot of people who are not
Pauline Kael.
Admittedly, it wasn’t a study any more than Jacoby’s book has
balance. This is provincialism wrapped up in the worst force
multiplier: arrogance. It is the worst because it discards any
dissenting voice not just as incorrect but unreasonable
and stupid. Very intelligent people do this all the time
(See also Jacoby, Susan), and the irony is that it reveals their
own brand of social stupidity. The physicist Richard Feynman once
said that you have to be ruthless in trying to prove yourself wrong
just so that you can be evenhanded.
Jacoby even recognizes that evenhandedness is a virtue. In her
introduction, she praises Richard Hofstadter as a “consensus
historian”:
I was struck by the old-fashioned fairness of his
scholarship—not the bogus “objectivity” or bland centrism” that
always locates truth equidistant from two points, but a serious
attempt to engage the arguments of opponents and to acknowledge
evidence that runs counter to one’s own biases.…Fairness was taken
for granted as a [sic] ideal for aspiring young scholars and
writers during the first half of the sixties.
This is pure myopia. At the time of Hofstadter’s prominence,
academia was a grueling, competitive place compared to where we are
now. The very process that forced “fairness” to become a virtue in
the first place, peer review, has become intellectually bankrupt in
light of the stunning lack of intellectual diversity in college
faculties. There’s also no longer a consequence for professors who
are unfair. If intellectuals are the vanguard of a
society, one that shapes public thought, Jacoby is loath blame them
for the coarsening of discourse. The culprits lie
elsewhere.
She’s convinced, after all, that we’re pitted against each other
in a world governed by “loud and relentless voices of single-minded
men and women of one persuasion or another.” (This is hardly a new
development. European monarchs were pretty loud and relentless,
except they would then start wars that had harsher
consequences and higher necklines than an MSNBC shoutfest.)
Jacoby laments that Americans are not considering what “the flight
from reason has cost us as a people,” and how ignorance affects
every issue. For example, she open-mindedly continues, “Americans
are alone in the developed world in their view of evolution by
means of natural selection as controversial.” Aha! It’s the
fundamentalists who have done this to us!
Only two paragraphs after emphasizing the importance of
fairness, she immediately ties fundamentalism (which she emphasizes
as “again, unique in the developed world”) to what she terms
“antievolutionism.” Yet it’s people such as Richard Dawkins and
others who argue that “natural selection” necessarily
rules out the role of God, since random mutation must be
random and cannot be guided by any force. Including God.
Is it fundamentalist for a Christian of no particular denomination
to find fault with such an overbroad statement that it’s not
possible for even God to design something? And are they
really objecting to evolution when they express such a
criticism?
To Jacoby, it all looks the same to her, because it’s not rooted
in reason, it’s based on faith. And faith is unreasonable, at least
if we’re to believe any theologian or if we are to watch a sermon
by Reverend Jeremiah “Chickens! Coming home! To roost!” Wright.
Jacoby’s liberal provincialism seeps into every aspect of this
book, and she lacks a sense of proportion. When the Soviet Union
launched Sputnik, for example, she remarks that it “bruised the
nation’s ego,” prompting Americans to place value on intellectuals
for “both national defense and bragging rights.” Well, it also
signaled to the U.S. that an imperialistic nuclear power had the
ability to enter space, and worse, the U.S. could not.
In fact, her approach to the intellectual fascination with
Communism is a strange dance. While clarifying it better than
liberals typically can, she still notes that it was “for most, only
a brief flirtation” one that elicited a “resentment resembling the
fundamentalist response to intellectuals who promoted
evolutionism.” Never mind that the revolution that attended the
birth of the Soviet Union was a particularly bloody and frightening
one, a theme that would continue in that country and those it
annexed for most of the century. To associate one self with
that crowd, and publicly, ought to raise a
certain amount of concern among passerby. This is too broad a brush
for Jacoby’s taste, and so she finds the intellectuals wronged by
the prejudice of the masses.
THERE ARE SOME DOOZIES IN HERE. Jacoby finds Unitarians are more
reasonable than Methodists, and that the latter religion really
only thrived on account of the (false) comfort it provided to
people living in the harsh frontier. She finds the lack of formal
education among whites in the south unconscionable, assuming that
they didn’t feel the need to on account of being “better” than
blacks. (This likely had more to do with their parents needing them
to help on the family farm.)
In other words, Jacoby, on balance, is imbalanced, offering
conjecture where some more research would have done fine. But what
could we have expected? This is the Age of Unreason, after
all.
