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The Unreason of The Age of American Unreason
Susan Jacoby's new book demonstrates a keen grasp of anti-intellectualism in American culture, but is hindered by a left-wing partisan slant that's anything but reasonable.
With the primaries in full swing, Americans are discussing the “issues” more than most usually do in an effort to decide which candidate should be given the honor and challenge of stewarding the republic. But how much do issues or the people we appoint to address them really matter if our intellectual capabilities as a society are impoverished? Can our leaders pass cerebral muster? And even if they can, who would be able to tell? The problem of the declining American intellect is addressed, at times with a sharp eye for novel developments in devolution and at others with a frustratingly partisan slant, in Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason.
Jacoby acknowledges her debt to historian Richard Hofstadter from the start, as more than a few of her accounts of what she views as our shared history of stupidity parallel his 1963 Pulitzer Prize winner, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. That isn’t to say she is repackaging Hofstadter as much as she is augmenting his narrative. Jacoby’s most salient contribution is to have taken each era in our history and drawn out those developments that bear most directly on the current state of affairs — most specifically, the new age of infotainment.
Jacoby addresses a great many issues, from the role of religion in politics to what she deems “junk thought” — a specialized form of often politicized ignorance proffered by both the lazy and the ideological, the left and the right. But she is at her strongest when she’s charting the decline of printed words and of Americans’ desire to possess and consume them. From her descriptions of life in the days of the founding all the way up through those of the mid-20th century, an unmistakable theme arises that reaches its clearest expression in Jacoby’s account of “middlebrow culture.”
During the heyday of the middlebrow, Jacoby recounts, a group of institutions came into being which facilitated the upward cultural mobility of those living outside the influence of urban cosmopolitanism and highbrow education. Things like the Book of the Month Club and the Encyclopedia Britannica were vehicles of information that opened minds to a larger world, but they were especially noteworthy because they signaled a high watermark in what she christens “the culture of effort.” Not only were Americans more likely to value and pursue an expansion of their knowledge in subjects like art, politics, and history, the medium of print is structurally significant since print media cannot affect one who does not make the effort to pick up a magazine, book, or encyclopedia. This is not the case today.
Herein lies the most compelling distinction Jacoby draws between then and now, as she contrasts the era of the middlebrow with the current age of visual, video, and infotainment. The strange aspect of our new predicament is that video media now make up a significant component of our habitat as human beings. Nobody, including Jacoby, wants to argue that the viewing of internet videos and television is compulsory. It isn’t that we’re forced to consume video and TV culture; it’s that we are now in a position where one must develop a mechanism that chooses to modify our habitats — an act that itself requires some exertion of effort. But it’s clear that, far from promoting resistance to the hegemony of the visual and passive, many are doing precisely the opposite. Jacoby points to trends such as the fawning over the Baby Einstein concept, which reinforces rather than disrupts the uninterrupted flow of images that increasingly accepts infotainment as environment.
One of the most disappointing things about The Age Of American Unreason is that it could have spent more time speaking to these pressing and current issues, since Jacoby offers a conceptual coherence absent many rants about cultural decline and “the media.” Instead, these novel and exciting forays into the new are punctuated by less coherent, less compelling attacks on elements of American political culture such as McCarthyism, neoconservatism, the most recent Bush administration, and the war in Iraq. This is not to say that there is no place in a study of American unreason for criticizing the persons, events, philosophies, and policies that one deduces are unreasonable. But it is the bias of partisanship more than the bias of reason that seems to guide many of these parts of the book.
One example of this is the position that Jacoby takes against Allan Bloom as she attacks his interpretation of the movements of the 1960s. Bloom’s seminal polemic The Closing of the American Mind falls squarely in the lineage of the history of unreason to which Jacoby is contributing. As such, one might expect to hear, in addition to her disagreements with his feeling that most student protesters in that era of social activism were lazy and drunk on their own power, a simultaneous recognition of kinship with Bloom’s project. Perhaps even a veneration of some of Bloom’s more graceful insights — of which there are plenty — would have been in order. Instead, Jacoby informs us, after quoting one of Bloom’s less becoming opinions, that she can think of no better example of why the right is never to be taken at face value in their discussion of the 60s. How does this logic work, one wonders? Would it be equally acceptable to take a claim about the 60s from a left-wing author with which one agrees and derive from its supposed truth the conclusion that one can think of no better reason to always trust the left?
Jacoby doesn’t entirely fail to criticize the left. She recalls time spent in the Soviet Union that made her understand and appreciate American liberty. She admits that the left has politicized junk science and fostered trends within academia that serve to trample over reason and quell healthy debate. She notes, in particular, certain strains of feminism. But how, one wonders, can there be a discussion of American unreason that fails to confront the wooly-headed postmodern philosophy that dominates literary theory classes and much political discourse of the left? Noam Chomsky managed to say that the British journalist and blogger Oliver Kamm’s criticism of him showed that he was complicit in state crimes — this from a man touted so often as “the world’s greatest living intellectual.” Scan the index for mention of Chomsky’s name and you’ll find nothing.
For an author who possesses such rare and welcome indignation and distaste for the forces of religious reaction, Jacoby’s failure to confront more comprehensively the rather complicated fact that the most strident opposition to the world’s most venomous form of religious totalitarianism has come not from the left but from the American right is also problematic. Chapters of her book could have been devoted to parsing the conservative arguments against Islamist terrorism, many of which sometimes fail to show any respect for reasoned argument or Enlightenment principles. Likewise, there are gutters teeming with leftist apologists for holy violence that constitute some of the most frightening and degenerative affronts to the intellect that U.S. society has seen since the stubborn Stalinists of the 20th century.
Jacoby is fond of asking how a person living in America today can know X and not Y, how they can value things so valueless while failing to appreciate the most precious — but mostly how they can fail to criticize glaring transgressions against reason and good sense. Great questions, but they might be posed to her as well: the track record of the American left in recent years has blemishes at least as hideous as those of the right, but that track record is not met with nearly the bluster that she gives to what she repeatedly refers to as “the right wing.”
The repetition of these words wouldn’t be nearly so disturbing if they weren’t so common in the text and if they didn’t so outnumber the appearances of “left wing.” One gets the sense that, for Jacoby, referring to something as “right wing” is an epithet, which is a problem for anybody hoping to approach a book like this for a sober assessment of what wrong turns America has taken since its inception as one of the grandest — and most successful — experiments of the Enlightenment. As one who is generally disowned by “the right wing” for being a snarling liberal and by “the left wing” for being a neocon apologist for imperialism, I have always taken a great refuge where category is concerned in Robert Conquest’s recommendation that, rather than beating worn-out steeds to death, we should forget about left and right and seek a United Front Against Bullshit. Jacoby’s book most certainly offers invaluable ammunition to this Front, but there are unfortunately times where it feels more like an attempt to revive those horses and ride them into the partisan sunset. In those moments, the book seems to miss its own point, leaving the Front to once again lament its frustrating dearth of firepower.
Josh Strawn is a writer and musician based in New York. His band is Blacklist.
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12 Comments
1. Harry Schell:I read Jacoby’s article in the LA Times over the weekend, summarizing her theory.
I am a typical white middle aged guy, into God and guns. I opine very regularly on bloga and to editors of newspapers…three letters were published in LAT last year, one so far this year, FWIW.
I usually address letters to columnists of articles I comment on, if possible. Some respond, most don’t. Even if there are glaring errors of fact or logic. None seem interested in engaging in debate.
Same especially for anti-gun writers such as Laura Washington, who continues to misinterpret the 2nd Amendment and deny the impact of “shall issue” programs regularly.
Certainly there are people on the right who are similarly not interested in engaging. Most of the ones I meet are tired of talking to blank stares or being called racist/sexist/hating Gaia, etc.
Obama’s utter clueness about marginal tax rates and capital gains is a good example of why debate is so hard. The playbook he runs out of has no interest in contrary data. There is no way to debate faith in Marxist doctrine, because it is not about results but about hate, class and envy.
How does one discuss “hope”? Base a campaign on it, generate lots of emotion…but the discussion Jacoby seems to want is impossible.
Leftists are not all at fault, but they have to get over their idea that any disagreement is evil. Otherwise there will not be discussion.
And I agree that is not a good state of affairs.
It takes two to tango…
Apr 22, 2008 - 7:31 am 2. tehag:I haven’t read and probably won’t read the book. Did she draw upon Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) and Neal Stephenson (In the Beginning Was the Command Line).
IMHO, American anti-intellectualism has been vindicated by the behavior of the intellectuals who justified Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and now Chavez and Osama. The are too numerous to list but include (in English) Shaw, Wells, Webb, Chomsky; (in German) Heidegger; (in French) Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, etc. etc.
Middlebrow has declined because the emperor of highbrow has no clothes. Bluntly: there is no reason to pursue ‘highbrow’ politics and literature because these justify and lead to mass murder and oppression.
tehag
Apr 22, 2008 - 8:34 am 3. P. Ami:@tehag
By your reasoning, there is no point in eating as eating makes you fat. For every theft of intellectual expression by Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Castro… there has been the borrowing by Ghandi, King Jr., Churchill, Roosevelt, Reagan…
Society requires Rashi, Aquinas, Confucius and plenty more intellectuals who will posit their ideas for improving human interaction based on theories. It is the role of Conservatives to challenge theories, balance them against orthodoxy, and to judge them pragmatically.
Apr 22, 2008 - 11:56 am 4. Mortimer:Tehag, and Allan Bloom has been hijacked by social activists who are as every bit as anti-intellectual and bullying as the people Bloom mocked,
Apr 22, 2008 - 1:32 pm 5. dirigible:Meanwhile, the right is now promoting a junk movie called “Expelled” made by a middlebrow third tier Hollywood flunky that posits that not only is their a conspiracy in Science against very unscientific Intelligent Design, but that even learning about Evolution leads inexorably to Auschwitz. Well, people had been breeding dogs and observing the wolf eating sheep for a long time, but anyone with any moral sense would not use these items as a basis for society.
Also, Science demands more proof and reasin than throwing up your hands and saying: “This is too complicated to occusr naturally, so it proves that an intelligent designer (good old God did it).
Yes, this business of clearing the intellect of BS is trickier than most think. The path certainly won’t be found to the Left. Or to the Right. After pondering the problem for decades, I tend to think that it lies slightly to the right of center. But in a few more decades I may change my mind again.
Apr 22, 2008 - 3:14 pm 6. tehag:>by your reasoning
Huh? Even if I likened eating to following intellectual’s theories of society, human nature, and government, clearly a starvation diet, that is, the separation of intellect and government, is preferable to letting intellectuals run the place. Less indulgence in greasy, fatty, sugary foods leads to a longer life; less indulgence in faddish or incompetent theories leads to a better government.
> theft of intellectual…
Alas, there was no theft: intellectuals threw themselves whole-heartedly, fully, and without reservation into supporting mass murder in the pursuit of the Jew-free or bourgeoisie-free europe. If only it were theft. The problem isn’t, for example, that Lenin (an intellectual) misused the ideas of Shaw (another intellectual), it’s that Shaw vigorously defended Stalin and lied about the nature of Stalinism. In a Venn diagram of intellectuals and honesty, the overlap is very small.
> Aquinas, Confucius..
I concede that once a millennium or so, a decent, humane intellectual arises. What Aquinas has to do with intellectuals 800 years after his death and who cannot be said to be disciples of his, escapes me: I’d be happy to have dinner with Aquinas and listen to and perhaps entertain some of his theories of government and society. Wells, Shaw, Sartre, Chomsky… aren’t fit for a bowl at the local kennel. They are regarded as the brightest lights of morality and reason in our time and, unfortunately, they are. They and their works should be regarded with suspicion and hostility.
> Evolution leads inexorably to Auschwitz
Definitely one of the dumbest claims I’ve seen since… well, the last time I listened to Sartre, Chomsky, Moore, Spurlock, Heiddegger, Derrida, Strauss, DeMan…
tehag
Apr 22, 2008 - 4:40 pm 7. sbourg:To HARRY SCHELL: Beautiful remarks. I would add, that any book by some leftist like Jacoby, on “anti-intellectualism” is nothing more than mental gymnastics with no grounding, if there’s no understanding of the excessive role of govt as promoted by the left, and the stealing of half our earned income by mostly leftist legislators over the past 75 years. We can dance around 6 ways til Sunday, but if Jacoby and the left don’t understand that over-taxation is an economy-killer, then we’re all sunk. The collegiate-snobbery of the left is appalling. And……they often work at universities and govt entities that have deferred-taxation on egregious benefit levels such as retirement pensions and post-retirement health-care………so that they receive a larger proportion of “pay” that is virtually untaxed during their working careers. This is NOT by accident. But it shields them from the confiscatory taxation they take from us in the private sector, with our much more modest “benefits”. Therefore Mr. Schell….. you’re exactly right about Obama’s and the left’s utter cluelessness on how current tax rates are WAY too high as they currently are……and if they’re raised, then God help us. -SBourg
Apr 22, 2008 - 5:00 pm 8. John Moore:Ben Stein (Expelled) is neither middle-brow nor incapable of reason. As one who has read his writings for many years, I believe him to be highly intelligent. He is a lawyer, a frequently published writer, an economist and an actor. His father was the famous economist Herb Stein.
Furthermore, although I believe Intelligent Design is wrong, it is far more learned and reasoned than Creationism.
Apr 22, 2008 - 6:54 pm 9. Mortimer:Mr Moore,
Apr 22, 2008 - 9:24 pm 10. Mortimer:I do not find any fault for someone who believes that God or some other super human entity created life. That is an utterly acceptable and deep question of Theology and Philosophy. However, Unless one was to unearth some superhuman being with the blueprints of life, it is not a Scientific question because there is like, no proof. But to castigate Scientists for doing their job, which is looking for logical answers to natural phenomena, then linking a theory of Biology to the mass murder of Jews and others is the mark of a low grade, dishonest intellect. He may possess a good education and above average IQ, so does Chomsky and Heidegger. Ben Stein has never risen above the level of the average right wing blogger. Funny how cons like you love to spew on Hollywood types except when they are cons
I know I am on this “Expelled” trip. But to add to the discussion at hand, I believe in general, the left wing intellectuals’ level of dishonesty and stupidity far exceeded the rights’ in the last hundred years. The embrace of various totalitarian movements that didn’t respect the human rights of the people is crime against humanity. Besides, whole schools of social science were created by the left to advance their causes yet were never properly vetted in any scientific way. Such as, does poverty cause crime or the reverse?
But as far as the popular punditocracy, the intellectual level and honesty of the ones on the right has dropped considerably over the years to the level of gossip magazine; cheap shots and name calling. For example, I disagree with Alan Colmes on most issues but I’d rather listen to his show than his partner’s, who seems to be all about stupid slogans, vacusos claims of greatness and whatever Drudge or Rush served up for today’s outrage.
Apr 22, 2008 - 9:35 pm 11. FP:Why are people (uneducatable, crude vicious as they ever were) to be ‘respected’?
Especially how does it benefit the “right”?
In amercia the “consevatives” are the liberals. And the liberals are children and “dark poltical objective” aliens (non natives exploiting the upside down world conundrum that is americanism).
Apr 23, 2008 - 4:50 am 12. Night Owl:I am of the opinion that education and knowledge alone do not a great thinker make. We are all hampered by our prejudices and preconceptions based on our particular upbringing, and our emotions. In addition, the human intellect in handicapped by that which it does not understand, (one example: how it’s own brain works). And to reduce the uneasiness caused by the primitive fear of the unknown, imaginative beliefs arise, and false conclusions are often drawn. Sometimes the imaginative beliefs can lead down the path to new discovery and greater knowledge; but often as not they are incorrect paths leading nowhere.
The great thinkers are the ones who are aware of their own biases and limitations, and take them into account when forming an opinion. The average person seemingly cannot do this, as he/she is not conscious of the contents of his own mind and how it arrives where it does; and thus we have, and have always had, few truly great thinkers. This mind-blindness is probably the biggest source of the “unreason” that is, and has always been exhibited among otherwise intelligent people. I don’t see the problem going away any time soon, as long as we humans possess incomplete comprehension; therefore I think we are wise to question most of the so-called intellectuals, and to especially be wary of the self-proclaimed intellectuals of any ideological leaning.
Apr 24, 2008 - 8:39 am