Product Description

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.

Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.

At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.

Customer Reviews:

• A Blow to the Use of Reason
  I've not read a book where I agreed with the thesis as much, and then disagreed completely with the means to get there. Other reviews have touched on this, but to add a few comments on the research for this book:
  
  1. The use of two convenient statistics to prove a point that can easily be countered by other data is rampant in this book, and detracts from the book's weight. Example: The author asserts that because Southerners tend to have worse educations, they are more likely to hold religious beliefs that are in the Christian fundamentalist camp, and believe in Creationism. There is no evidence presented that education and religious affiliation have a strong correlation. I would be just as accurate to claim that hush puppies force a choice in religious branch. (There is ample evidence that education is poorly related to fundamentalism in ALL religions btw.)
  
  2. The search for demons to blame for why we are frequently irrational is laced with folly. Humans are irrational by nature, and we fight tooth and nail with our baser instincts daily to rise above it. The book seems to want to rationalize unreason more than define its true roots.
  
  3. I'm not that uncomfortable with the pedestal that the author puts intellectuals on. I thought I was in the ballpark of an intellectual, but if Ms. Jacoby's definition is my watermark, can I be something else please? We can be intellectuals and irrational at the same time.
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• The Contemporary Decline of American Culture As Noted by Susan Jacoby
  "The Age of American Unreason" combines author Susan Jacoby's elegant historical analysis with ample references to modern American culture in making an excellent, often persuasive, case in explaining how and why American culture is literally at its nadir now. And yet, her fine book doesn't have the polemical logic and focus found in two other books published this year, Kenneth R. Miller's "Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul", and Robert S. McElvaine's "Grand Theft Jesus". I strongly suspect that this may be due to the vast scope of Jacoby's book, which covers everything from the rise of scientific illiteracy and the advent of pseudoscientific nonsense like Intelligent Design and other flavors of creationism, to the political alliance between Fundamentalist Protestant Christian zealots and the conservative wing of the Republican Party. It may also be due, alas, to Jacoby's penchant for relying upon anecdotal memories of her youthful past in the 1960s, which, when compared and contrasted with her elegant historical analyses of American culture in the mid and late 19th Century, doesn't seem as persuasive.
  
  Jacoby mourns the passing of a "middlebrow" culture which manifested itself in the forms of popular lectures on science attended by hundreds in the late 19th Century, to the publication of Will Durant's "The Story of Civilization", and the airing of classical music broadcasts by major radio and television networks. Instead, it has been replaced by a "lowbrow" culture noted for its corrosive effects on American culture. This includes not only the advent of rap music, but perhaps, more importantly, the de facto "segregation" of American studies into ethnic and gender studies which promote, not discourage, exclusion in American college and university classrooms. A "lowbrow" culture that has also embraced junk thought, ranging from, of course, the popularity of so-called "scientific" creationism, especially Intelligent Design, to those who have been advocating against mandatory immunization of children for measles. A "lowbrow" culture that is more widely disseminated than before, due to the rapid rise of the Internet, which Jacoby, not surprisingly, is quite critical of.
  
  So, the reader may ask, what should be done to stem the rising tide of ignorance? In an all too brief closing chapter, Jacoby argues on behalf of "cultural conservation". Cultural conservation will succeed only if Americans turn away from a "culture of distraction" and embrace instead, concepts and facts that are firmly rooted in reality (For Jacoby one recent notable example of this is Judge John Jones' ruling at the conclusion of the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District Trial, in which he noted explicitly how and why his decision critical of both the school district and Intelligent Design creationism was based upon expert testimony from scientists like Brown University cell biologist Kenneth R. Miller and University of California, Berkeley paleobiologist Kevin Padian, among others.). And yet, Jacoby notes, her plea for "cultural conservation" may be too late, simply because the United States has become so firmly entrenched in a "culture of distraction" that is noted more for its obsessive worship of celebrities than for trying to adhere at all to any semblance of rational thought. Jacoby's massive tome is bound to provoke liberals, as well as conservatives, for its dire analysis of the present state of American culture; whether it will be as persuasive as other, earlier works like Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", remains to be seen.
  
  
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• Strident but with good points
  This book isn't perfect: Jacoby's tone is somewhat arrogant and strident and it becomes tedious after about 150 pages. But she does make a lot of good arguments: Americans are becoming more ignorant, the election of a nitwit like Bush was disgraceful, and the rise of pseudoscience, anti-intellectualism and religious fundamentalism are scary. (And this was written before Sarah Palin became a national figure!) To me, the best part of the book is when Jacoby explores the phony vaccine-causes-autism "debate", a key example of demagoguery and ignorance leading to the triumph of junk science. For all its faults, this is a book worth reading....more info
• pedantic, and depressingly comprehensive - no solutions
  I don't know what I was expecting. I'm aware of the dumbing down of America -- and I've seen it getting worse. The author tells about the history of "unreason" in America -- cycles in the past, and why she thinks the current cycle is different. Unfortunately, she describes the problem and gives many examples of the problem from the worst of the Bush era, which, for me, was an extraordinary time of surprise at how low we could go. She describes example upon example of how the dumbest and most emotionally irrational among Americans have gained the upper hand at nearly every level of government -- from school boards fighting over teaching Christian Mythology as "fact" in schools, to national standards to focus only on passing a test suitable for challenging those with an 80-IQ. Unfortunately, it does nothing to challenge or focus higher standards for the average 100 IQ child nor the very important higher 120+ IQ children who likely will be the business leaders and engineering creators in the next generation.
  
  The book, for me, just went on and on, about how low we had fallen, and I kept hoping for a ray of light. Given the book was published in the sunset years of Bush-II's reign, I can understand the sense of hopelessness and despair.
  
  I felt too much weight was given to historical examples of America dumbing down -- even though the author thought she was providing a needed historical perspective to show why the current phase of dumbing down was more pernicious than any previous stage. I didn't need the convincing. I don't think anyone who chooses to read this book will need so much convincing. I can't imaging anyone reading this book who would not also be part of the choir in the first place. Given that, I'd hope for some words about how to change, or something more positive.
  But this book really describes a desperate state of American cultural dumbing down that's simply depressing and doesn't seem to offer anything in terms of solutions.
  
  It might be valuable if you are new to the concept of American dumbing down and want an exhaustive history up to the current (later Bush years), but for anyone who has tried to maintain their intellectual attention with reading and education over the years (long past the required formal training and outside of any formal job-required training), most of this will be unsurprising and will tell you that things are as bad or worse than you thought they were and there is no end in site.
  
  Even now, under a new presidency, many educational stimulus bill sections were cut by order of the republicans (most of whom voted against the final bill anyway). In a similar way it was sad to see Obama's stimulus package pared down to cater to the Republicans just to avoid a Filibuster on their part -- but still win virtually none of their votes. It's like they watered it down enough not to Filibuster it, but they still won't support any stimulus package with Obama's name on it -- even if the setup and need for the package came out of their own "holy leader's" (Bush's) actions and legislation.
  
  It was hard to finish the book -- I admit... I started skimming the pages through some of the driest historic portions, as well as the elaborate re-tellings of examples from the Bush era... The later, maybe because they were too fresh in my mind, and the former because it's so depressing to see not only how American just doesn't seem to learn. We continue to repeat lessons of history and it doesn't look like the future will be any brighter. In fact, if recent experience on seeing repeated scientific studies performed over multiple years and re-released as "new" each time, it's like there is no memory of work or studies that has come before. At some point during the Bush years, people stopped reading about new advances and seemed to go about reproducing the same knowledge and same studies multiple times with no references to previous studies -- sadly indicating that much publication of knowledge happening today is being recorded into a "write-only" media of some giant internet archive. But no one doing the work has time to read or comprehend the information being produced.
  
  So I see only an acceleration of non-growth -- almost a stopping of growth, as those capable of understanding the causes and doing research can no longer build on what has come before.
  
  The author complains that people of differing views don't read each others works, but it's worse than that -- even people of similar views don't have time to read works of those with similar views. It's only publication that is rewarded, not processing and tying together knowledge. So I think the author misses the sadder connection that knowledge that would benefit given "intellectuals" isn't even getting attention from the audiences that would receive the benefits.
  
  Low stars, because it was overall depressingly informative with no hope for the future.
  
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• Weak on details but essentially correct in thrust
  Susan Jacoby is absolutely right in her observations about American culture. Taking her cue from Richard Hofstadter's book "Anti-intellectualism in American Life", she lays out many things in this book that truly needed to be said.
  
  The raw materials for making an excellent case for the decline of American intellectual life are strewn all about us. Assembling this argument is just too easy. It is perhaps for this reason that Jacoby's book - regrettably - has something of a wandering, unfocused quality to it. Faced with an unchallenging task, she seems only to have half-risen to it. As I will try to show below, there is a strange mixture in this book of both pedantry and incomprehensiveness - the first instantiated by too great a focus on single words, the second by a gap-toothed bibliography.
  
  So - if you'll forgive the prolixity of this review, here are the strengths and weaknesses of Jacoby's book:
  
  
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ IN FAVOUR: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  
  The following are the most obvious cultural problems facing American society today which Jacoby deserves full credit for highlighting.
  
  1. Resistance to reason, as chiefly manifested by a drive to have biblical anti-science taught in schools;
  
  2. Polarization of opinion and ideology, such that 'intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, whether on the left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo' [p. xx]. This is a trap which Jacoby's critique at least sets out to avoid.
  
  3. Lowering of intellectual standards in schools and the concomitant coarsening and trivialisation of the media;
  
  4. Declining literacy and a corresponding lack of intellectual curiosity. (According to Jacoby's sources, in America 'four out of ten adults read no books at all (fiction or nonfiction) in the course of a year' [p. 250];
  
  Another meritorious feature of the book is the manner in which - taking as its starting point a speech made by Ralph Waldo Emerson at Harvard in 1837 - it takes the trouble to explore two centuries of American thought. This is an important strategy in determining 'how we got to where we are now'.
  
  
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ AGAINST: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  
  1. The book's opening argument is lamentably weak. Jacoby wastes pages bewailing the prevalence in our public speech of the word 'folks'. This is an extremely constricted surface area upon which to explore a symptom of cultural or intellectual decline. It is an argument against a noun. And it is not the only one: Jacoby progresses to parsing the use of the word 'troops' and later mounts an attack on the term 'the Movement' by listing (without quoting a single source) all the allegedly bad things which have been attributed to it [p. 136]. This is an approach which is at once pedantic and lazy. (Later, as we will see, Jacoby becomes quite heated over the use of the word 'vacationlike'.)
  
  2. Jacoby writes an entire chapter entitled "Blaming it on the Sixties", but her bibliography is missing two of the most important books which have done just that. They are:
  
  * Roger Kimball, "The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s changed America";
  * Joseph Conlin, "The Troubles: a jaundiced look back at the movement of the 60s"
  
  This means that she has missed the opportunity to tackle some of the more cogent arguments made about this period. (And as I will show later, she has to quote Allan Bloom's critique of the sixties out of context in order to mount an adequate attack on it.) Another symptom of Jacoby's crenelated bibliography is the absence therein of historian Daniel J. Boorstin's "The Image, or what happened to the American Dream", which predated Hofstadter's book by three years and had a great deal to say about pseudo-information, celebrity culture and junk thought. Thus its omission from a book which discusses many of the topics it first raised is odd. Another book she seems to have missed out on is Morris Berman's 2001 jeremiad "The Twilight of American Culture" - which is interesting because both Berman's book and Jacoby's use the same quote from Thomas Jefferson as their opening epigram.
  
  3. Jacoby cites the argument that television is not a corrigible medium because its culturally deleterious aspects cannot be offset by simply adding more 'quality' programming. She states that 'this view was first expressed by Neil Postman in his prescient 1985 jeremiad "Amusing Ourselves to Death"' [p. 13]. In fact, this case had already been made by Jerry Mander in his 1978 book "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" [see p. 265 et seq], and it's by no means certain that Mander got there first.
  
  4. Jacoby makes a deservedly trenchant critique of Social Darwinism, a school of thought much favoured by the wealthy during the Gilded Age, as it seemed to explain their success by appeal to an immutable law of nature. But then Jacoby cites with approval William Walling's assertion that 'The duty of man is not to study how evolution creates, but to create evolution' [p. 78]. If this were a valid argument, then it would surely lead us to practice genetic engineering, an anti-humanist enterprise which is the very apogee of eugenics (like Social Darwinism, another dreadful late-nineteenth-century intellectual fetish). Such genetic engineering - which of course would initially only be available to the wealthy - would actually create a permanent genetic aristocracy and thereby *synthesize* and reify the very Social Darwinism which Jacoby so plainly detests. This point was well made in Bill McKibben's 2003 book "Enough: Genetic Engineering and the End of Human Nature".
  
  5. Some passages exhibit astonishing moral carelessness:
  
  'In 1969, it did not bother me in the least that the military-industrial complex responsible for the Vietnam War was the same military-industrial complex sending men into space; this inconsistency was part of coming of age in the sixties, and anyone who says that he or she was unmoved by Armstrong's walk on the moon is either lying or was stoned at the time.'
  [p. 218]
  
  A fit of crankiness is not an argument; contempt for the rabble is not a refutation; and 'I'm not bothered' is a wholly inadequate response to the aerial devastation of Indochina which cost over two million Vietnamese lives.
  
  
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ APPENDIX: EQUIVOCATION ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  
  Here's an example of a wilful distortion where Jacoby's claim to impartiality between Left and Right breaks down:
  
  Jacoby quotes a lengthy passage from Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind, in which Bloom has some critical remarks to make about the moral dilettantism of the Freedom Riders - students who in the early sixties visited Southern states to press home the issue of civil rights for the Black citizenry. According to Jacoby, Bloom 'heaped scorn on white students from the North who participated in the civil rights movement in the South.' Bloom does so by stating that:
  
  '[I]t is undeniable that the enthusiastic support of these changes by university students in the North played some role in creating the atmosphere that promoted the righting of old wrongs.'
  [p. 333/4]
  
  Confused? You should be. Jacoby's excerpt from Bloom's 'scornful' passage does not begin there. Instead it excludes this remark and begins *one sentence later* with the following:
  
  'It consisted mostly in going off to marches and demonstrations that were vacationlike, usually during school term, with the confident expectation that they would not be penalized by their professors ...'
  
  Bloom goes on to add that 'they did not have to pay any price for their stand, as did those who had to stay and live there.'
  
  After this sentence Jacoby inserts an ellipsis into the passage before allowing Professor Bloom to continue. The text which the ellipsis occludes is as follows:
  
  'Nor did they partake in the hard and low-profile labours of those who studied constitutional law and prepared legal briefs, those who spent lonely and frustrating years, whose lives were truly dedicated to a cause. I do not wish to denigrate the students' efforts, and people should not be blamed for inclinations that are truly good ...'
  
  Jacoby then adds that 'I know of no other passage - certainly none in as influential a book - which so clearly exemplifies why the word of the right cannot be taken at face value' before launching into an attack mainly on the use of the word 'vacationlike'.
  
  This was a nimble piece of surgery in which Ms. Jacoby took both the quote out of context and the context out of the quote. She removed the sections of Bloom's passage which (1) contrasted the students' 'histrionic morality' with the hard moral graft of those who were seriously committed to change and were in it for the long haul; and which (2) demonstrated that Bloom was fair-minded enough to give the students their due for at least trying. After all, if Jacoby had not concealed the more moderate parts of Bloom's argument, she could scarcely have gone on to claim (as she does with gusto) that Bloom was 'a professor whose disdain for all social protestors was so pervasive.' [p. 145]
  
  And the 'vacationlike' nature of this moral crusade? Well, it is surely attested to by the very brevity of the campaign itself. As Joseph Conlin noted in his brilliant critique of 'the Movement':
  
  'One had to get back to one's University housing in September, and there was no Freedom Summer II. What was the use in being part of a social drama if, unlike the dramas in foreign films and coffee-house poetry, it could not be brought to a cathartic conclusion in one episode?'
  [Joseph Conlin, 'The Troubles: a jaundiced glance back at the Movement of the sixties', Franklin Watts, New York, 1982, p. 111]
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• Stupidity Abounds
  I ordered Susan Jacoby's THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON and Ken Barker's GODLESS together and found both very interesting and significant--certainly helpfull in understanding current American run-dumb politics. I was impressed enought to order a second set to send to my acquaintance the editor of The American Rationalist.
  
  Unfortunately, books by atheists and secular humanists are usually just read by other atheists not by people who don't seriously consider their religious beliefs and thus remain delusional--thinking that Bronze-Age myths are reality. Our Enlightenment Founding Fathers would cheer Jacoby and Barker, I certainly do.
  
  Jacoby examines the history of American evangelism and anti-intellectualism. The failure of our schools to teach critical thinking is a disgrace. Rather than sensible national standards, we have podunk schoolboards. I witnessed the cutting out by razor blade the chapter on reproduction in a public high school's biology text, per order of the schoolboard. Witness ongoing attempts to include creationism in biology classes--understanding biology demands a knowledge of evolution.
  
  On all measures of social pathology America is either on the bottom or near it. Surprise, evangelicals have a higher divorce rate than atheists.
  
  My recent suspense novel THE PROFESSOR AND THE DOMINATRIX also reveals religion to really be sanctified nonsense and deadly to our survival as reasonable people. Mark Twain was a reasonable American. He said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
  
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• Tracing the Decline of American Culture and the American Intellect
  Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. Jay-Z, J. Lo, O.J., Jon Benet, and Jolie. America's Got Talent, Baby Borrowers, Wife Swap, Wipeout, Greatest American Dog, American Gladiators, and I Survived a Japanese Game Show. Creationism, Biblical literalism, open disdain for the "reality-based world," dying newspapers, aliteracy, innumeracy, and anti-intellectualism. Video game addiction, YouTube narcissism, withdrawal into personalized iPod worlds, sound bites, Baby Einstein, ten-second attention spans, and high school graduates who can't read, spell, write, do math, or understand history. An incurious, marginally aphasic President disturbingly detached from the real world. How did it come to this (and so much more)?
  
  In THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, author Susan Jacoby sets out on an arduous and depressing, yet ultimately rewarding, journey through the history of American (anti-) intellectualism. Her objectives is to shed light on the most paradoxical of questions about America: How did a society founded on the secular Enlightenment principles of science and reason devolve into one that disparages and at times even proudly rejects those very concepts?
  
  In her opening chapter, Ms. Jaboby surveys the current state of American anti-intellectualism, placing particular emphasis on Biblical literalism and the creationist/intelligent design movement. She then moves chapter by chapter through a chronological retracing of American history, beginning with Emerson and the "Second Great Awakening" in the early years of the 19th Century. This is followed by the pseudoscientific social Darwinist and Communist movements of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The "Red Scare" between the World Wars set the stage for a further surge of anti-intellectualism that culminated in the McCarthy hearings in Washington. The McCarthy hearings were complemented by the rise in the 1950's of a new, middlebrow culture characterized by Encyclopedia Brittanicas, the Book of the Month Club, Great Books, and television dramas and knowledge-based quiz shows.
  
  Despite this historical review, by far the bulk of Ms. Jacoby's work focuses on the period since the counterculture revolution of the 1960's. It is at this point that her critical sweep broadens enormously to capture university ethnic and gender studies, mass marketing of youth culture, the semi-legitimizing of junk science into junk thought, renewed religious fundamentalism, new technologies that have shortened attention spans and diminshed serious reading and thought, and the dumbing down of political rhetoric and public life generally. Each of these trends has, in Ms. Jacoby's view, contributed to Americans' declining cultural literacy and their increased tendency to reject scientific or logical reasoning in favor of irrational, simplistic, religious, and/or emotional appeals.
  
  Ms. Jacoby's presentation is demanding but quite approachable, erudite in its approach and scope without crossing into the realm of academic jargon. While she draws heavily on historical fact and the statements of her intellectual predecessors, she also occasionally personalizes her discussion with anecdotes from her own experience. Reading THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON feels a bit like reading Gibbon's classic analysis of the death of the Roman Empire, although here the death is more one of reason and the intellect rather than that of a government or its commerce. Nevertheless, one comes away with a sense of inevitability, a recognition that the forces of technology, marketing, religion, and a lowest-common-denominator-seeking media constitute an irresistible tsunami of anti-reason.
  
  Ms. Jacoby's conclusions are rather pessimistic, and her recommendations are limited. Nevertheless, THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON is an enlightening look at the path America has taken to bring us to a point where late night comedians can celebrate "stupid human tricks," a crushingly dim President, and the factually clueless "man (and woman) on the street." In her final pages, the author notes, "It is possible that nothing will help." In that, she is sadly but probably correct.
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• American Age of Unreason
  This is a well researched and written book. Excelent footnotes. A good read for any thoughtful person interested in an educated citizenery....more info
• Too angry to be an intellectual approach to anti-intellectualism
  I wanted to agree with Jacoby's book when I first saw the title. It's something I've sensed in a culture where Britney Spears' court cases and the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby make mainstream news over stories that affect millions of lives far more directly. However, by the end of the book she becomes so blinded by hatred of things she sees as anti-intellectual that she stops backing up her points and becomes guilty of the very problem she's critiquing.
  
  First, the beginning of the book, covering the history of anti-intellectualism was quite good. Sources were sparse, but a journey through the earlier ages of American unreason was very intriguing.
  
  However, by the time she gets to the ills of the day, she begins to trip over herself. After spending several pages on the problems and ills of "Junk Thought" (one of the few chapters where she writes out somewhat specific criteria for anti-intellectual thought), she comes back the next chapter commenting on some statistics with "These statistics are probably underestimated, given the absence of consciousness inherent in the reflexive consumption of anything."
  
  Why does she assume causality on the statistics she cited a sentence before? Why does this statement not have a footnote? Is she using "probably" simply to insert an opinion without justification? I personally had to put the book down after this sentence to recover from her lack of reasoning.
  
  However, my mood only fell further as she went on to decry the evils of the Internet and video games as distraction based technologies. These are her opinions, and while I disagree with them, her lack of sourcing leaves me to simply leave her at her word rather than argue with it.
  
  The conclusion of the book is equally depressing, with no real plan for action other than greater leadership from politicians and intellectuals to stand up publicly against unreason. How thoughtful.
  
  In short, it's got some good history on anti-intellectualism in America, but don't look for actionable items or even working definitions of present day anti-intellectualism here....more info
• Get this woman to write more!
  Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, her previous book, was a masterpiece, made clearly evident given the pervasiveness in which other authors have cited that book. Freethinkers was a history of secular thought in America while Jacoby's new book, The Age of American Reason, provides a current day analysis on the results that occur when much of America shuns rational thought in favor of either ideological dogma, both right and left, and/or sheer intellectual laziness. Jacoby's perspective covers a different topic per chapter, where the present-day rejection for optimal thinking is presented within the context of how we evolved from the past to our present day embrace of intellectual mediocrity amongst many large groups of Americans.
  
  Jacoby as a historian and thinker is worthy of our attention so I recommend this book along with Freethinkers. Given that this book is more topical, I doubt it will be read much years from now though I believe it's still worthy of our attention during this era. I predict Freethinkers will continue to be a valuable treasure that will heavily referenced for many years to come by other scholars.
  
  Jacoby is knowledgeable about the history of enlightenment thinking and our founding ideals, topics that run through most chapters as a common thread. She uses the approach to thinking which was heavily utilized by our founding framers and other great leaders of the past as a benchmark to compare to our current day approach to making sense of the world. For example, she compares current political speech to FDR's fireside chats broadcasted across America on the radio. FDR treated his fellow American citizens with deference and respect while also challenging them to study up on the geography and geopolitics in play during WWII. This compares favorably when Jacoby analyzes the type of communications we receive from modern-day presidents where obvious, non-shallow questions are always avoided and they assume we're idiots that are easily manipulated and gullible to nonsensical soundbites (e.g., the oft-stated "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman" - a totally irrelevant point when considering the denial of property, contract, liberty and equal protection rights of other citizens).
  
  The topic of our leaders talking down to us comes from her first two chapters which covers communications from our political leaders to the public. My initial response was that was hardly a good topic to start this book if you were looking for a persuasive argument that would cause America to consider a change in our behavior, it seemed too petty to me. Seeing Jacoby interviewed by Bill Moyer on this topic did little to persuade me otherwise. However, soon after reading that chapter, I heard Romney's and Obama's speeches on religion.
  
  Romney offered a false history of America, assuming we'd be ignorant to his lies. His speech seemed to have the objective of plagiarizing the impact that Kennedy's speech had on the same topic while at the same time offering raw meat to social conservatives in order to gain political capital with them. Few were fooled while Tim Russert tore Romney apart on his Meet the Press appearance for lying in the speech. Obama's speech soared to heights not experienced by me in public life since Reagan and MLK last spoke to America and quickly showed this Republican what a special talent Obama was in this day and age. That experience had me rereading the first chapter with newfound respect for how important Ms. Jacoby's point was - that if America was going to regain our competitive advantage in the world after the Bush 43 years, that we will require a more demanding voter who swiftly rejects those that pander and lie to us, while embracing those whose policies are based on sound assertions and are willing to give it to us in a nuanced, truthful manner rather than in soundbites meant to obfuscate - even if we don't agree with them, i.e., better to pick a smart person we disagree with than support an idiot who tells us what the lowest common denominator wants to hear.
  
  Each chapter of American Unreason is presented as a discrete essay covering a different topic, in fact each of them could have been an excellent Atlantic magazine article, which leads me to hope that some good media outlet will snap Jacoby up and allow America more access to Jacoby's excellent analyses beyond her occasional books. A few of the topics covered in the book are as follows:
  
  Communications - how politicians never really answer to anyone while media outlets rely on ever-shorter sound-bites while also failing to correct false assertions made by the people they cover. E.g., those that claim they are a champion of individual rights while advocating for a constitutional amendment that discriminates against gay people and their children and other family members - follow ups are never asked by the media to portray this obvious contradiction (my example, not necessarily Jacoby's).
  
  Social pseudoscience from the left and the right, mostly starting in the late 19th century and how it's affected today's culture, e.g., the right's embrace of social Darwinism was an especially interesting section of this chapter.
  
  America mutates from glorifying its best and brightest to a more middlebrow culture, turning elitism into a bad word. This topic shows Jacoby's predictive powers given how this is currently a political issue after publication of this book. Jacoby reminds the reader that America's greatest were mostly elitists aspiring to ambitious ideals.
  
  "Junk thought" - particularly her attack on liberal learning institutions providing equal time to topics Jacoby finds trivial to forming and bettering western thought (like college classes on popular movies and pop music).
  
  Cultural Distraction - which is also getting more notice in the popular press recently, especially this month's Atlantic magazine article on the Googlization of America. This is where I part ways with Ms. Jacoby; her understanding of the utilization of the Internet appears to be based more on her inexperience and lack of time and search skills on-line than any empirical evidence. Certainly her criticisms are valid on how its misused and the quality of some of its content, but because she herself has obviously not devoted the time to find the resources that make the Internet a much more productive forum for learning about specific topics relative to finding the right book, I would argue her critique is based on too narrow a context - i.e., her own experience as an obvious nontechie vs. any actual shortcomings of worthy material that exists online.
  
  In summary - a great book to savor, the discreteness of its topics allows the reader to read a chapter and then set the book aside for future review or even to read the book in a haphazard manner, no matter how a reader approaches this book, it's worthy of everyone's library.
  ...more info
• The Way We Never Were?
  Susan Jacoby's book is suffused with nostalgia for a time in America when the life of the mind was more valued than it seems to her to be today. Her evidence, however, is largely anecdotal. She refers, for example, to her experience, as a young woman in the 1960s, of writing long "snail mail" letters to a lover in South Africa, chronicling the zeitgeist of her place and time, and how he did the same. She praises this languid and sensuous form of communication, then contrasts it with the emotional flatness that she feels sending off electronic e-mails today, which she notes are rarely responded to with any degree of passion or detail.
  
  Her thesis, in short, is that contemporary electronic communication, from TV and the Internet, to mass advertising, has drawn America away from nature, books, and the life of the mind. She perceives, correctly, that Steven Johnson's book of just a few years back, "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter," threatens her thesis, and she attempts, in her first chapter, to dispatch it quickly. But rather than address the substantive claims and supports that book offers, she maligns it with little more than innuendo, contempt, and derision. But Johnson's book is, whatever else you may think of it, suffused with a good deal of empirical data, and Jacoby chooses to simply ignore it and move on.
  
  I share Jacoby's sadness that the life of the mind is not broadly valued, but I don't share her belief that it was ever valued all that much more than it is today. The nostalgic aspect of her book is thus the weakest part of it because she is doing something inherently unreasonable, accumulating anecdotes that do not add up (at least for me) to a compelling support for her claim. It was, afterall, William F. Buckley who said, long before the Internet and TV preachers presumably made us all stupid, that he preferred that the country be trusted to the first fifty names in the Boston phone book to the faculty of Harvard. Contempt and distrust of intellectuals and the elite, like the poor, have been with us always. Jacoby, who has written a book on Greek tragedy, surely knows Aristophanes' "The Clouds," a funny and disturbing send up of the atheist intellectuals of ancient Greece.
  
  For all my complaints, however, the book is worth having and reading, if, for no other reason, to draw fresh intellectual air from someone who loves the life of the mind. But let's not kid ourselves. The average person in 1950 probably could no more locate Iran on a world map than a person can today.
  ...more info
• Going to heck in a handbasket
  I really liked the author's previous book, "Freethinkers," and I'm naturally sympathetic to most of the positions she takes in this book. However, I almost wasn't able to finish this. Anticipation and enthusiasm fades as the book slogs along, and the reader realizes it's essentially another litany of the standard Loyal Opposition arguments about What's Wrong With America. I perked up at the history of Middlebrow Culture--never knew that was a real thing. But I wish I'd encountered it as, say, a long Harper's magazine article than as a gold nugget I had to pan for. By the end of the book she's devolved into doing a deft imitation of a cranky old man shouting at the television. I mean, not enough classical music reviews in newspapers?!? Come ON. Who CARES.
  
  Plus, her sentences are often too long, her language just short of academic jargon. Here's a random example, plucked off a random page: "Those who take a dark view of the intellectual and political consequences of of the eclipse of print are obliged to establish their bona fides by disclaiming any resistance to the proposition that the computer had effected not only a technological but an intellectual breakthrough in the march of human progress." As I say, not QUITE opaque, just hooded with too many Latinate words and excess hypotaxis. It wears a guy out after a while. I sometimes felt vaguely like I was reading something I'd been assigned.
  
  There's a fair amount of good stuff here--she's in her element in the section about "New Old Time Religion" (but then aren't Fundamentalists carp in a barrel for her audience?) and there's good stuff in "Junk Thought." But overall I found the book flawed and tiring in its relentlessness. Even the author seems to get tired of her own arguments by the end: by then her underlying thesis has become something suspiciously like "Americans are going to heck in a handbasket because they didn't study what I studied and they don't know what I know and they don't read the TIMES on paper over morning coffee like I like to do." I mean, I can't see the decline of civilization in the lack of classical music reviews in newspapers, and I LISTEN to classical music.
  
  Books are long, life short, and all in all I don't think I can recommend this one....more info
• Almost a complete waste of time
  I was eager to compare Jacoby's views with those of Steven Johnson in "Everything Bad is Good For You." Unfortunately, I found her work lacking in simple academic rigor. She commenced to ridicule Johnson's book for the audacity of its title (is she actually judging this book by its cover?)and misrepresent his main thesis- popular culture is not a replacement for traditional learning, but it is becoming more cognitively stimulating instead of less. Moreover, the elements of much modern entertainment are precisely those that are cognitively challenging rather than opiating.
  
  After being subjected to self-righteous indignation over "The DaVinci Code's" fantasy (as if to conjure up a historically suspect murder mystery is somehow both anti intellectual and just plain stupid) and her moral vitriol spilled over admitted speculation, I finally threw in the towel. As a supporter of left-leaning intellectualism, and a teacher, I just couldn't stomach the hypocrisy and paucity of substance. The only value I found was a lesson many on the left could acknowledge regarding a knee-jerk urge to label everyone that doesn't agree as anti-intellectual by dint of their disagreeing with one's self-avowed and vaunted intellectualism. ...more info
• irrationality
  Don't be misled by the raised expectation of rationality in this book. I found it very self-righteous without any self-criticism of how we got were we are today. A lot of name dropping/calling and statistics, but no rational analysis from first principle I had hoped for. First public education is lauded as the cause in drop of illiteracy from 17% to 11% from 1878 to the eve of WWI. The number of schools in this period multiplied from 80 to 11000. But why use the euphemism: public education? The key difference compared to the education that came before is that it is coercively financed. So a lot more teachers got a job through coercively financed education than otherwise would have been the case. These teachers would no doubt have praised the state that pointed the gun that gave them their jobs. So why conveniently stop on the eve of WWI with the analysis? If the author would have continued, she might have stumbled upon the fact that these literate kids did not really get their education for free, they were now indebted to the state for their education and had to murder for their president's wars. `Walk up that hill and be killed or die right here' Does it matter if you die illiterate or literate?
  The author does not discuss how to make the rational step from morality that states that theft and murder is wrong for common folks, but suddenly does wonders in the hands of `great' men. So no wonder she praises FDR's fireside chats and how he asked everyone to buy a map to see where there kids were killing and getting killed, to pay back their new deal `raw deal'. As long as a president can quote Epicures, it's ok if he starts a war that killed millions. So when she is criticizes GWB, it is not because of a war he started based on lies, which caused the death of over a million people, it's because he mispronounces the word `nuclear'. At no point the author seems to feel empathy for human beings. There is high brow, low brow and middle brow culture, pinkos and egg heads and it's all about which of them should control the machinery of coercion.
  So maybe all the criticism on the youth of today and the superficial media, with their disdain for intellectuals is because the youngsters unconsciously realize, that you get nothing for free. Maybe they realize that somehow 50 trillion USD in unfunded liabilities got dumped on them by their parents and grandparents who were so high on `social reform', as long as it was paid for by selling their kids in future debt and tax slavery.
  Maybe they realize that they have to spill blood and have their blood spilled over the financial fall out of this foolish idea that good can come from the barrel of a gun, if only pointed by the right people.
  Maybe youngsters realize that intellectuals misused the trust common folks had in them, to sell them out to the coercive machine that employed them. State subsidized artists, state employed economists, state protected unionized teachers with coerced customers, they all failed to mention that the past 100 years the biggest chance of getting killed on this planet was by your own government and the 2nd biggest chance of being killed is by your neighbors government. You will have a tough time finding this not so unimportant piece of statistics in this book.
  Maybe that is why youngsters put on their headphones and retreat in superficial media shows.
  
  While the author criticizes the irrationality of religion, no link is made between the al powerful god and the al powerful government of the empire. Why is religion retreating in Europe and Canada but not in the hart of the empire? You have to obey God in the sky and the president in Washington. They both have a book with rules and can use their enormous powers for the good as long as you comply with their book
  
  Even the author has noticed public education has become a mess. But she no doubt does not trace it back to the compulsion and coercion at its base, but to the statement that the wrong people controlled it. If they only knew how to quote from Epicures or pronounce the word `nuclear' ....
  Well, this review from a non native speaker, so sorry if the English is a little crooked. I'm from Europe where the coercive educational system is especially praised by the author. It has produced intellectuals that invented communism and fascism.
  For those youngsters who really want to learn rational thought: search for UPB by the other FDR.
  ...more info
• disturbing and thought provoking
  I was listening to the Sibelius Symphony N. 2 on my iPod today and thinking about this book. In the fourth movement, a lovely theme emerges from a swirl of background sound, rising to an inspiring climax. The instrumentation constantly changes: first the strings have the theme, then the woodwinds, then the brass. The background shifts, becoming more complicated, more agitated. The emotional effect on the listener can be shattering.
  Why do I bring this up? It's because listening to this kind of music, and even more playing it, has become a dying art. Instead, we have mindless raps, white noise, offensive lyrics, horrible junk that has hijacked the term "music.' (for more on me and my book The Nazi Hunter: A Novel, go to www.alanelsner.com)
  In this important book, Jacoby examines why Americans are becoming more and more ignorant, distrustful of science, of intellectuals, of knowledge itself. She reserves special scorn for religious fundamentalism with its easy reliance of unprovable and disproved notions -- but she does not argue exclusively from a liberal perspective. She also has plenty of criticism for outlandish educational theories and nutty university faculties.
  Jacoby traces the history, which goes back to the earliest days of America, of distrust of science, fervent and unreasonable religious fundamentalism and hostility to learning in general and intellectuals. President George W. Bush stands at the apex of this horrible trend -- it produced him and he upholds it. "America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism," she argues.
  The result: "A lazy and credulous public increasingly unwilling or unable to distinguish between fact and fiction."
  Americans don't read much and are reading less and less. We devotees of Amazon.com are the minority. American kids more and more are addicted to the Internet. They grow up watching a flickering screen instead of reading books. This discourages them from thinking or fantasizing outside the box.
  In no area has this been more damaging than in America's refusal to admit to the facts of global warming or to do anything about it. This week, the Senate finally began discussing legislation to begin tackling the problem. Naturally, the Bush White House said it would veto it.
  As the New York Times said today, "The Bush administration has worked overtime to manipulate or conceal scientific evidence ... to justify its failure to address climate change."
  It says an internal investigation by NASA's inspector general concluded that political appointees in the agency's public affairs office had tried to restrict reporters' access to its leading climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen. He has warned about climate change for 20 years and has openly criticized the administration's refusal to tackle the issue head-on.
  Interestingly, the papers are also reporting today that General Motors wants to get rid of its Hummer division.
  "I think G.M. is basically declaring the S.U.V. dead," said John Casesa, managing partner of the auto consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group in New York. "The trend away from these vehicles is irreversible."
  Thank God sanity is finally reasserting itself but it is so late. We have lost eight valuable years.
  Americans like Bush overwhelmingly still believe in the "literal truth" of the Bible, which most have never read. They believe in the Genesis account of creation, doubt the 'Big Bang' theory to the extent they have heard about it and still do not accept the theory of evolution.
  The very word "intellectual" has become a pejorative shorthand for "leftwing extremist."
  We have opted for a culture of easy, immediate gratification. In politics, voters want their immediate needs met and don't care about the long term. They don't understand complicated arguments and concepts -- they don't want to and they can't because they lack the ability to read and think and discuss concepts that can't be summed up in one bumper sticker.
  This is a deeply disturbing and pessimistic book. It's a must read - for those of us who still can....more info
• Few surprises, but worthwhile
  The Age of American Unreason
  Jacoby would make a good conversation companion, I think. She is well versed in the history of ideas and mass culture and she is a felicitous writer. However, here she does not offer many new insights (though there are some) about the purported demise of the intellect in contemporary American culture. Mostly she treads worn paths: television and video games as nemeses, the foibles of religious fundamentalism, the erosion of academic standards, demonization of intellectuals as elitists, and so on.
  
  I was somewhat surprised that E.D. Hirsch and the "cultural literacy" movement did not appear in her index, because that is mostly the line that Jacoby follows. Nor does she entertain possible critiques of her position. For instance, I thought of the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who stresses the class distinction function of "high culture." I like her defense of the "middlebrow" and mostly agree with her that its apparent decline is lamentable -- although it was also predictable that it would be nibbled away, especially from below (for example, consider the predictions of Dwight Macdonald and the Frankfurt School).
  
  In spite of these criticisms, the book is substantive and entertaining. Perhaps unfortunately, if you choose to read The Age of American Unreason you will probably already agree with Jacoby. Most of those she is complaining about are not likely to be big readers. ...more info
• I thought the idea was to apply reason
  This is a book I should have liked. I picked it up enthusiastically when I read the jacket flaps, as it seemed to make an argument that I often find myself making -- more and more people decide matters on the basis of their preconceived biases with little regard for the facts. People don't like being troubled by facts when guesses, hunches, gossip, and drivel are so much easier and more amusing to digest.
  
  As a college professor, I guess I qualify as an intellectual, although that word seems to have multiple surplus meanings, only some of which I consider an accurate reflection of who I am. But without question, I'm an advocate of evidence as a basis of reaching conclusions. I teach research methods to doctoral level students and write papers for scientific journals. I serve on editorial boards and have been a peer reviewer for public and private (nonprofit) research agencies. I take matters of evidence seriously.
  
  So, why did I end up being disappointed in a book that seemingly advocates for the values I hold in such high esteem? Before answering that directly, let me say that there were parts of this book I did find informative and engaging. For example the discussion of how reason guided many of America's founders' view of the world, was handled skillfully (although I might not catch minor glitches because this isn't an area in which I have anything beyond a general level of knowledge). What disappointed me, however, was an apparent disregard for the role of evidence as the basis for other conclusions the author seems more than willing to treat as factual.
  
  This may be best illustrated by a quote from p. 250, which closes a section discussing the impact of video media on young children: "Is more research required to tell us what is already known from medical studies of drugs and from millennia of educational effort -- that the impact of any substance or exposure, good or bad, is magnified by the length of exposure and that the effect is strongest on immature and therefore more malleable organisms?" So, here we have a book decrying unreason arguing that we shouldn't do research into a topic because received knowledge has taught us all we need to know about the matter. I consider the nature of inquiry to be ongoing, with further refinements in our understanding of various phenomena arising from continued scrutiny and questioning of prevailing beliefs. Jacoby's stance reflected in the quote is as fundamentally anti-intellectual as some of the ideas the author criticizes. First of all, video (of which I'm no particular fan, especially for the very young) is not a drug. Nor is medical research the most relevant, as we are considering behavioral and educational outcomes rather than health status per se in the discussion preceding the quoted statement. Millennia of educational effort, to use her term, have not helped us to perfect the process of education. Why should it be treated as having a higher yield in this particular instance? Her statement is an argument, not evidence. Also, it is factually incorrect to state that the impact of any substance or exposure is amplified by duration (although that will sometimes be the case). (Someone with a true respect for reason and the role of evidence as a basis for conclusions would shy away from the word "any" in a context such as this.) Furthermore, there are well documented (as well as intuitively obvious) counterexamples involving processes of habituation and adaptation, in which sensitivity to a stimulus is dialed down, not up, as a result of prolonged exposure. Our attention is channeled away from stimuli that are prolonged and relatively invariant. One summer, I worked next to an amusement park shooting gallery. I cringed and blinked with every shot fired for the first day or so. Then, I blinked but didn't cringe. Then I didn't blink. I'd habituated to the sound of a rifle being fired. The specifics aren't as important as the tone of the quoted statement. Nor is this particular dismissal of fact as a basis for conclusions the only instance in the book. (Nor, in fairness, is every conclusion unsupported.) But how can a claim such as this lodge itself in a treatise that targets unreason and denounces claims that lack a factual basis?
  
  My sense was (and this is opinion on my part) that Jacoby is less comfortable with notions of evidence than with reason. Stated differently, her intellectual approach strikes me as more attuned to the humanities than the sciences or mathematics. Both reason and evidence are imperfect tools, of course. But there are differences. When the two clash, a scientist is inclined to be swayed by evidence, at least until better evidence comes along. In scholarly fields that have relied more heavily on reason than empirical evidence, this may be less true and I say that not as a criticism but merely an observation. When there is no definitive evidence, reason is likely to be an attractive and powerful alternative. While Jacoby praises the sciences as a means to establishing facts, she seems not to take a scientific approach to truth-seeking in some cases (like the one discussed above). Jacoby seems most comfortable in the intellectual milieu of the humanities, to oversimplify, perhaps.
  
  Reason is good and we don't see enough of it. There, she and I would agree. But I hold evidence -- despite its sometimes transient nature -- as a higher approximation to truth. Of course, the two together are better than either alone. But Jacoby's casual attitude toward evidence really undermined her arguments for me. Had she taken the same stance and presented her ideas as opinion, with the benefit of supporting evidence where appropriate, I would have found little with which to quibble. But, in the context of asserting the intellectual laxity of Americans, her assertions, when not supported -- and occasionally contradicted -- by facts, really put me off.
  
  To end on a positive note, one implicit goal of this book is to stimulate thought and discussion. It has succeeded. I'd rather read a book with which I disagree in part than one that fails to stimulate my thinking at all. This book did make me think, even if those thoughts were critical at times....more info
• History of the United States, Volume II
  Susan Jacoby has written a masterpiece in interpretation of modern U.S. history. I lived through many of the decades she has so eloquently and succinctly unravelled and had no idea what was actually going on until reading this piece. It is the best, most lucid, most rational explanation of the current intellectual and cultural crisis in the U.S that I have yet seen, and I have seen many. It makes a wonderful companion to her earlier work 'Freethinkers: A history of American Secularism', which I like to think of as History of the United States, Volume I....more info
• Rediscoving Reason
  "The Age of American Unreason" is an excellent account of the dynamics and dangers of American illiteracy, innumeracy, and "infotainment" indulgance. Ms. Jacoby weaves a historical narrative that helps us understand how we ended up with a President who for his life could not or would not properly pronounce the word "nuclear."
  
  Her history ranges from the 19th century self-educated through the creation of "middle-brow" living to the present where apparently 25% of Americans polled think Christianity is mentioned in the constitution as the "American religion." Yikes!
  
  As a college professor I appreciate Ms. Jacoby's arguments against the dumbing down of higher education, her erudition, and the fact that I learned several new words while reading her book (I looked them up in the unabridged dictionary that sits as a centerpiece in our living room).
  
  I recommend this book to anyone interested in our national zeitgeist regarding intellect and intellectuals. The book is well written, compelling and inspiring....more info
• just started, concerned this book is a waste of time.
  I am an intellectual and so far this looks more like a blog of rants than a well thought out and organized book. Please tighten this up in the second edition, make better use of the examples and if needed print it on more pages as the text is too tightly spaced!...more info
• CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORS BEWARE
  I read Richard Hofstadter's ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE when it came out so I looked forward to reading this book. I found it a pleasant read; a sort of 'short trot with a cultured mind'. But that all changed on page 224 with 3 paragraphs on child abuse. Like most non-survivors Ms Jacoby gets everything exactly backwards. She offers no discussion or analysis of the works she names only judgements which betray no acquaintance with either child abuse or the works mentioned. She seems not to know that the one work she praises was publicly discredited. These 3 paragraphs make everything else in the book suspect & to my mind omitting them from future editions would be an improvement. A disappointing book & as a child abuse survivor a disheartening one....more info
• Incisive jeremiad about America's intellectual decline
  This is a stimulating tour of the history of ideas that shaped the United States' intellectual heritage and the social forces that continue to influence it. Susan Jacoby's expansive, provocative book is both personal and exceptionally refreshing. She shows the links among several, major intangible drivers of human behavior - religion, politics, ideology and fundamentalism - and uses them to explain why U.S. society came to devalue reason itself. Her culprits include rising fundamentalism and antiscientific thinking, and an onslaught of superficial stimuli. She doesn't think much of some political leaders, either, for that matter. getAbstract recommends this book to those who care about the U.S.'s intellectual life and the ideas that will shape its future....more info
• How we got here...
  For anyone of intelligence, anyone who has ever had even a fleeting thought that ours might be an age of exceeding stupidity, this is a book that needs to be read.
  
  Jacoby is clear thinking and knowledgeable -- wise, really -- and she does a great job tracing the historical roads that have brought the United States to its current crisis. As an earlier book ("Freethinkers") shows, she's an expert on the clash between secular and religious interests, and her insights on the battle between faith and intellect alone make this book worth reading.
  
  Actually, any single one of a dozen other topics Jacoby discusses are equally valuable: the ever more ignorant tone and content of political discourse, pseudo-science and cultural wars, the Red Scare and the sell-out of intellectualism to institutionalism, the myth of "The Sixties," celebrity culture, junk thought, mass distraction, the disappearance of conversation, etc. All well thought-out, well-informed and well-supported.
  
  Jacoby's insights and the implications for American education are especially important, and anyone who is in school now, no matter what his or her career plans are, needs to read this book as soon as possible. So should anyone considering teaching as a profession at any level, university or otherwise. And so should any parent who needs a clear view of the current situation in order to better predict what the future holds for coming generations and how to make the best of that.
  
  Jacoby provides no quick fixes, however. How could she? So don't expect easy answers for huge, complex problems. Rather take the book as a lucid description of where we are and how we got here. In addition I would read Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Boorstin, Howard Zinn and Neil Postman, as well as Philip Marchand's biography of Marshall McLuhan. Jacoby goes well with all of them. Without first knowing how grim the situation is, no solutions are likely, and this book offers a big step towards knowing.
  ...more info
• Yes and no
  Though she makes excellent points, I believe her dislike for contemporary media is a very old and tired argument. That was precisely the argument made by Cervantes in Don Quixote (16th Century): He was complaining about the vulgarization and intellectual debasement brought about by the print media! The point of that novel was to illustrate an extreme case of stupidity caused by the then ultra-popular knight novels.
  
  Western Europeans are exposed to as much media garbage as we are and yet, their societies value reason and intellectualism, and accept Evolution as an established scientific principle, despite the fact that they originated something as stupid and intellectually debasing as "reality" TV.
  
  Jacoby's points about American "know-nothingism" are excellent, especially how right-wing fringe politicians embrace and exploit this tendency.
  
  The book is written in an excellent, readable style that goes right to the point. Excellent writer. She does encourage you as reader to use your own reason and critical thinking to come to your own conclusions....more info
• A Great but Flawed Look at the America Today
  Susan Jacoby's book has two basic parts. First Ms. Jacoby examines the historical roots of America's penchant for resisting intellectuals and intellectualism. Second, Ms. Jacoby fumes about the changes in our culture since the '60s.
  
  The first portion of the book is without a doubt an excellent investigation and discussion of 75% of 'how we got to where we are now.' The second part of Ms. Jacoby's book is essentially 'The '60s and the o...more Susan Jacoby's book has two basic parts. First Ms. Jacoby examines the historical roots of America's penchant for resisting intellectuals and intellectualism. Second, Ms. Jacoby fumes about the changes in our culture since the '60s.
  
  The first portion of the book is without a doubt an excellent investigation and discussion of 75% of 'how we got to where we are now.' The second part of Ms. Jacoby's book is essentially 'The '60s and the other 25% of how we got to where we are now' and is a bit more problematic for me.
  
  Her basic premise for 'The '60s' is that the youth of the era, the baby boomers, divided themselves into two opposing camps. One was either a member of the counter-culture (a hippie) or of the counter-counter-culture (an anti-hippie) and the two sides haven't agreed on anything since then. To me, this seemed pretty logical. How many Republicans still see every liberal as a 'D.F.H.'
  
  Her examination of how the Culture Wars, efforts to combat the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the Evangelical Movement promote unreason all rang true for me but, like most of the people reading The Age of American Unreason, Ms. Jacoby was preaching to the choir.
  
  Where things bogged down for me was when Ms. Jacoby sounded a bit too much like every other geezer out there ranting about 'kids these days.' I'm less than half of Ms. Jacoby's age and at times she seemed too willing to condemn our culture simply because it is now very different from what it was when she was growing up.
  
  Youth culture, technology and the studying of pop culture in college classes is not the end of the world Ms. Jacoby thinks it is. Yes, email has destroyed the letter. Yes, the vast majority of us are dependent on spell check. College classes studying 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' don't carry the gravitas of classes on Shakespeare or Chaucer or even Bram Stoker. I would argue that if a student can approach 'Buffy' with the same close reading and analysis she or he would have approached 'Cantubury Tales' that student has both learned to think about all the media they consume and has gained the skills to apply that mindset to 'the classics.' I digress...
  
  Changes in how we transmit our thoughts and who sets our tastes in clothes do not, however, do anything to decrease our trust in experts or explain why Americans are peculiar in our celebration of being 'just folks' and our pride in our ignorance. This isn't to say that Ms. Jacoby doesn't address those things, but 'you kids stay off of my lawn!' attitude weakens her arguments.
  
  In the end, The Age of American Unreason is a valuable and timely look at who we are as Americans. Sadly, it's scholarly style and mildly combative stance (and the fact that it's a book and not a TV show) ensures that those who need to hear Ms. Jacoby's message most will be completely unaware that it exists....more info