The Age of American Unreason. How down have we dumbed?

By Susan Jacoby
March 30, 2008

Recently added to the list of impending dooms - global warming, a retro-1930s economy, seven more months of sleeping children in campaign ads - come stern warnings from The New Yorker and The New Republic on the death of the printed word. Be it newspapers, magazines, or an archaic instrument called the book, Americans in general, and young ones in particular, are bypassing them with alarming consistency. Novels and serious nonfiction rarely fly off the shelves at our waning independent bookstores. Newspaper circulation is declining; book review sections like the one you're reading are prompting some critics to consider more relevant lines of work like, say, barrel staving. Couple this with the ascendancy of the ever-streaming blogosphere, wireless devices that seem to do all but direct a funeral, and we've entered perilous times indeed.

The vulgarians may be at the gates, but they're "2 bize txtn" or playing water polo on their Wiis to prevent our intellectual culture from plunging further into the muck. That's sort of how Susan Jacoby sees it in her engaging and unrepentantly (and often unbearably) crotchety history of American anti-intellectualism, "The Age of American Unreason."

Part intellectual history, part polemic, "American Unreason" laments the demise of our intellectual life and catalogs the ways it has been assaulted from above and below. None of it, mind you, springs solely from the usual suspects like rock music, an unfortunate genre of television, or some inevitable moral free fall. Rather, its roots are embedded in our republic. This is the most substantive and interesting angle of this polemic. Consider as Jacoby does the failure of our Founding Fathers to set a national educational curriculum in the Constitution, allowing states to set standards that vary with the region's political tide. Couple this with the fact that in a republic of yeoman farmers where the myth and reality of the self-made man hold sway, those inclined toward ideas for their own sake are often viewed with suspicion at best.

The McCarthy era conflated intellectuals, especially those in the academy, with Marxism and communism. This charge has managed to stick well into the post-Cold War era even while competition for spots in elite colleges, those reviled institutions of leftist brainwashing, has never been fiercer. Such ironies are not lost on the author. What Jacoby does not fully explore are the ways in which many intellectuals seem content in their own irrelevance.

Jacoby is a delight to read when she's playing the part of intellectual historian turned polemicist. Take her evisceration of straw-dog arguments of the right, particularly the shared notion among conservative revisionists that the movements of the 1960s were a unified resistance. She's equally enjoyable taking down those on the left who would have future generations believe that Manhattan Stalinists of the '40s and '50s exerted the kind of cultural clout now enjoyed only by the likes of Time Warner.

Continue to read:
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2008/03/30/how_down_have_we_dumbed/