Excellent review of Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason

[Aviation Pro]

It's is becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. deserves what it gets. Thus, instead of President Gore we get President Insane (a regular fella with zero in the way of intellectual capital because a 50 + 1 majority want a Preznet just like them). It is also clear that Americans would rather rely on simple hope than engage in complex reality.

One more time, hope is neither a method nor a strategy.

Link here: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/02/15/susan_jacoby/print.html

America closes the book on intelligence

Our country is barely smarter than a fifth grader -- no wonder it's drowning in religious fundamentalism and political ideologues on both sides, argues Susan Jacoby.

By Laura Miller

Feb. 15, 2008 | For an author of serious nonfiction, success can lead to some surprisingly disheartening encounters with the reading public. Susan Jacoby's 2004 history of American secularism, "Freethinkers," was among the first in the recent wave of welcome books protesting the growing influence of religion in civic life, and universities and other institutions soon began asking her to deliver lectures. Jacoby jumped at the chance, only to find that wherever she spoke, "my audiences were composed almost entirely of people who already agreed with me." Instead of participating in the great public debate that she envisions as central to American culture, she was preaching to the choir. What's more, she learned, "serious conservatives report exactly the same experience on the lecture circuit."

A couple of years later, put up in a student dormitory after giving another talk, she found her environs "eerily quiet." Gone were the "high level of noise and laughter," the "late-night and all-night" conversations she remembered from her own undergraduate years. Instead, everybody was "on line or in an iPod cocoon." To top it all off, when she was invited back to her alma mater, Michigan State University, to receive an honorary award, she struck up a conversation with an honors student in the College of Communications Arts, only to find that the young woman had never even heard of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats. Apparently, even when students felt like talking they didn't know enough about their own disciplines to be worth talking to.

Such are the little disillusionments that vex a public intellectual's soul. Furthermore, as Jacoby sees it, they are telling the same story as those shocking polls that show most Americans can't list the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment or find Iraq on a map. All of it confirms her suspicion that "the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to a functioning democracy."

Richard Hofstadter's 1963 classic, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (a clear inspiration for this book), described anti-intellectualism as "older than our national identity" and deeply rooted in our history. Jacoby thinks the old American distrust of those who devote themselves to "ideas, reason, logic, evidence, and precise language" has been worsened by the conditions of contemporary life. There is, she writes, "a new species of semi-conscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic." People never read books, they can't concentrate on anything significant for more than a minute or two, and as a result they don't really think anymore. Lulled by the "pacifier" of "infotainment," their civic and political decisions emerge from a confused welter of laziness, reckless emotion and prejudice.

The chief manifestations of this newly virulent irrationality are the rise of fundamentalist religion and the flourishing of junk science and other forms of what Jacoby calls "junk thought." The mentally enfeebled American public can now be easily manipulated by flimsy symbolism, whether it's George W. Bush's bumbling, accented speaking style (labeling him as a "regular guy" despite his highly privileged background) or the successful campaign by right-wing ideologues to smear liberals as snooty "elites." Unable to grasp even the basic principles of statistics or the scientific method, Americans gullibly buy into a cornucopia of bogus notions, from recovered memory syndrome to intelligent design to the anti-vaccination movement.

"The Age of American Unreason" veers unevenly between well-argued debunkings of assorted crackpot claims and litanies of gripes that come dangerously close to diatribes. A former reporter for the Washington Post and program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, a rationalist think tank, Jacoby can certainly formulate concise ripostes to the likes of former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers, who suggested that the underrepresentation of women among the top ranks of the hard sciences must be due to innate gender traits. "What places Summers' speculative statements within the realm of junk thought," she writes, "is not the idea that there might be some differences in aptitude between men and women but his unsupported conclusion that such disparities if they exist, are more important than the very different cultural messages girls and boys receive about whether they can expect to succeed in science."

*snip*

Fundamentalism, however, is the real red-hot center of American irrationality, and Jacoby calls religious assaults on the theory of evolution "a microcosm of all the cultural forces responsible for the prevalence of unreason in American society today." She notes that in the summer of 2005 nearly two-thirds of Americans told pollsters that they believed creationism should be taught in schools alongside Darwinian evolution. The poll revealed what Jacoby characterizes as "an intellectual disaster as grave as the human and natural disaster unfolding in New Orleans" at the same time.

It's hard to quarrel with her on that one, and compounding the mess is the fact that most Americans don't even understand the religion they want to see defended: "A majority of adults, in what is supposedly the most religious nation in the developed world, cannot name the four Gospels or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible." For me, this startling information immediately brought to mind Stephen Colbert's interview with Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on "The Colbert Report." Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn't actually list the commandments he's fighting to enshrine. (Of course, the bill, a flagrant violation of the separation of church and state, was proposed only so that it could be shot down, thereby fueling the Christian right's preposterous claims of persecution.)

*snip*

The real problem with TV, and to a lesser extent the Internet, is that while some of it is excellent, much of it is not -- and all of it has become ubiquitous. As Jacoby astutely points out, reading does not "constitute a continuous invasion of individual thought and consciousness ... printed works do not take up mental space simply by virtue of being there; attention must be paid or their content, whether simple or complex, can never be truly assimilated." Unless you make a point of turning off the TV and putting the computer to sleep, they can easily fill up your day and mind, gradually atrophying the mental muscles uniquely exercised by reading. Abstaining, for many people, turns out to be as easy as bypassing a cupboard stocked with chips and cookies and snacking on carrot sticks instead. To hope that the American public will pick the nutritious but difficult over the easy and tasty is to bet on a losing horse.

*snip*

It's hard to imagine what could be more central to Jacoby's subject than the motivations of those Americans who chose what she describes as "willed ignorance" over reason. Isn't it likely that the recent resurgence of that ignorance arises from similar needs and desires? If there were some other way to address those needs (or fears), perhaps fundamentalism would be less appealing, and perhaps reason could be made more so. However, that would require admitting that people who are capable of reason will nevertheless sometimes pick an irrational course of action or belief. Rational people do this all the time, of course -- even intellectuals. But rationality has its own ideology, and one of its tenets is the conviction that, if given a fair chance, reason must always carry the day.

If you believe that, then you can only arrive at one conclusion, Jacoby's: It's not that Americans won't be rational, but that we can't. There's enough evidence of our poor schooling, susceptibility to pseudoscientific hucksterism and general cluelessness to justify that opinion, to be sure. But if that's really the case, then it really is down to a few brave souls, committing to a doomed battle to preserve that "saving remnant" and fighting the dying of the light.

[truedelphi]

1. She thinks she has problems - she at least gets paid and

Knows that someone somewhere values her.

Bu the average writer is still living on $ 6,000 a year or less from their writing. (Most writers have to do something else to survive.)

Unlike the former Soviet Union where poets are worshipped, here they are ignored.

The next Bill or Billie Shakespeare could well be holed up in an overly expensive attic in Boulder CO - with his or her plays to be destroyed immediately after their short miserable life is over.

[melody]

3. Well put, amen n/t

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Will have to look for that ... loved her "Freethinkers".

Will have to go look for that Hofstadter book too.