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The Age of American Unreason Review by Chris Muir Susan Jacoby
New York. Pantheon Books. 2008.
$26.00/Hardcover

Since its inception in 2005, comedian Stephen Colbert’s satirical news show The Colbert Report has been a welcome antidote to what Susan Jacoby, in her new book The Age of American Unreason, describes as proliferation of ‘junk thought.’ When Colbert interviewed Jacoby on the show, he jokingly accused her of stealing his own neologism:

You describe something called junk thought, where people only know what they want to know while facts that challenge their belief are brushed aside. I believe that is called truthiness (April 22, 2008)

Both Colbert and Jacoby are tapping into a widespread feeling that ‘reality-based’ thinking, rationality, and Enlightenment values are in trouble in the very country that was supposedly founded on these ideals. In her book, Jacoby addresses these concerns and seeks out causation, making essentially three main arguments:

1. Americans are becoming dumber and, worse yet, don’t seem to care;
2. The causes of anti-intellectualism are partly historical, but largely due to what she describes as the “culture of distraction;”
3. Cultural conservation is needed to bring intellectualism back into ascendance.

Her first point is unassailable, if not entirely novel. Jacoby records intellectualism on the decline across a broad spectrum of American life, from familiar sources like evolution denial to esoteric theories of feminist science. The second two arguments are a mixed bag. Between excellent history and a wonderful apology for the merits and pleasures of intellectual life, Jacoby makes several serious and occasionally bizarre misjudgments. Nevertheless, anyone concerned with the intellectual state of affairs in the US should find much more area of agreement than dissent in the book, as the overall message is correct.

I. Jacoby’s greatest strength throughout the book is her command of history. Rather than repeat conventional wisdom, which is often false, she brings forth much research showing that Americans have become less intellectual and rational in recent decades. She begins by documenting how not so long ago average Americans aspired toward bettering themselves through education:

The fifteen-year period after the end of the Second World War has frequently, and mistakenly, been portrayed as a cultural wasteland…Statistics tell a different story. In 1960, there were twice as many American symphony orchestras – 1,100 – as there had been in 1949. The number of community art museums had quadrupled since 1930. Recordings of classical music accounted for 25 percent of all record sales by the end of the fifties, compared with under 4 percent today…Finally, these were the years of the paperback book revolution, a development of fundamental importance to middlebrows because middlebrowism was, above all, a reading culture” (pg. 105)

In stark contrast, today’s remaining outlets for serious literary and art criticism, such as book reviews, are being continually cut by media outlets, and—according to a recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts— fully 43% of adults under 44 did not read a single book last year (NEA 2007) [link the NEA 2007 text to: http://www.nea.gov/research/ToRead.pdf]. In 1968, Robert Kennedy could begin a speech quoting Agamemnon; in 2008, most politicians today end with the cliché “God Bless America”. Scientific and mathematical literacy aren’t faring any better. The recent Discovery Channel documentary series “When We Left Earth” wonderfully documents the reverence with which the American public treated the scientists and engineers who sent man to the moon. Many scientists and sciences today are treated with deep skepticism (evolution, climate change, and stem cell research are the prime punching bags), while the language of science is all too easily co-opted for ideological agendas. As John Allen Paulos showed in the book by the same name, innumeracy is rampant, with disastrous consequences for those trying to interpret a deluge of seemingly conflicting data on medicine, economics, politics or anything else that involves crunching numbers.

II. Whence comes unreason? Once again, Jacoby’s historical accounts shine through. For example, she shows that early political decisions established educational discrepancies between the South and the rest of the county that persist today and account for some of the resistance to intellectualism in that region. Her treatment of the 1960s is provocative. She is as vitriolic toward academic activists that eschewed the classical authors, who were derisively termed DWEMs (Dead White European Males), as she is of the nascent, revisionist political alliance between conservative elites and fundamentalist Christians that emerged. However, she lays the brunt of the blame on the perceived ‘culture of distraction’ - the TV, video games, Internet sites, and other infotainment bearing technologies that she claims prevent contemporary Americans from following intellectual pursuits. While the time spent on and content of popular media is deplorable, Jacoby fails to acknowledge the promise and proven success of the Internet and other forms of New Media (see below). Her diatribes against iPhones and eBooks are gratuitous. The problem with her argument is that correlation is not causation. That electronic media has increased as intellectualism has declined is true, but it’s curious that technology has not seemed to affect other countries in a similar fashion. Even within the US, I suspect that the most anti-intellectual and irrational demographics also tend to utilize electronic media, with the exception of TV, less than average.

III. Following from her critique of the culture of distraction, Jacoby advocates cultural conservation—preserving the intellectual legacy and achievements of our forefathers. Cultural conservation is an admirable goal, but Jacoby sees only old methods—reading books in libraries, viewing art in museums, etc.—as the only way to preserve old ideas. By focusing on how technology is eroding culture, she overlooks many potential allies. The democratization of information on the web can and has allowed unprecedented access to classic works, repositories of music, art, and data, and the entire pantheon of collected human achievement. Of course, the web is also spewing forth junk thought at a record clip. The reality is that both traditional forms of intellectualism, like books and classical music, and nascent technologies that could enhance culture are the common prey of unreason. The democratization of information is a good thing; the democratization of interpretation, where logic and evidence are generally pesky inconveniences, is not.

Ultimately, Jacoby’s mission is an important one, and we would live in a more vibrant world if her advice were taken. The finer points of disagreement can be tended to once the hemorrhaging has abated. How we get from here to there is still largely unclear.