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| The Age of American Unreason | 
 enlarge | Author: Susan Jacoby
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  98 reviews
Sales Rank: 6674
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.6
ISBN: 0375423745
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.91
EAN: 9780375423741
ASIN: 0375423745
Publication Date: February 12, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 A silly book February 18, 2008
41 out of 107 found this review helpful
Cries of anti-intellectualism are usually exercises in self-validation, for the speaker and the audience, and this book is no different. And while most of Jacoby's readers will revel in their sense of intellectual worthiness, genuinely thoughtful people will see right away the problems inherent in making broad claims about what intelligence is and how it manifests itself in a dynamic complex world. But of course, even if we grant the premise--that average Americans are, on the whole, objectively dumb--Jacoby is still at a loss to explain how exactly this stupidity overwhelmingly determines the course of national policy--policy formulated and executed by quite un-average people. There seems to be a basic, liberal assumption at work here, that society is generically democratic and that the people's views are represented directly and unfiltered in the halls of government. If the policy is dumb then so must be the people. Unfortunately, in the real world the political power of individual citizens (and thus of their opinions) is badly circumscribed by any number of structural factors, such as the interests of business and other bodies, the inertia of governmental institutions and the oligarchical nature of the party system (to name just a few). As a result, and as polls suggest, the actual policies of the government have little in common with the views of average people (to the extent that such views get articulated).
I think one example will suffice: the war in Iraq. According to Jacoby (and some of the commenters around here) a smarter population would have forseen the difficulties and refused to invade. Suppose that's true (even though the invasion wasn't up for vote). And suppose the corollary, that it's a part of intelligence to oppose the war (as most Americans do) and want the troops home as soon as possible. Naturally then, the smarter among us will be voting in the '08 election for candidates who have pledged to, in fact, end the war. Except, they won't, as there are no mainstream candidates running (federally at least) who have so pledged. Some have proposed partial withdrawals but none propose ending the war in toto, deconstructing our bases and paying reparations. So vote away enlightened ones. Just know you'll be voting for war. As to whether that's proof of your stupidity or of the structural defects present within the system is a question I can't answer. But apparently Jacoby can.
 Not for libertarians -- this book is an assault on reason and truth! May 6, 2008
28 out of 53 found this review helpful
This book would be quite funny if it weren't so frustrating. Author Susan Jacoby accurately depicts the sorry state of intellectualism in America and properly castigates the "videoization" of the culture. Baby Einstein videos are one particular, and particularly deserving, target of her wrath. But time and time again, Ms. Jacoby is guilty of the intellectual sloth she accuses "conservatives" of.
She (correctly) condemns conservatives for being close minded, but then shamelessly insists that the views of conservatives (i.e. Creationism) should be dismissed out of hand and given no hearing. She criticizes conservatives for name-calling and mischaracterization of their opponents, but she routinely does the same to religious conservatives and others with whom she disagrees.
But what ultimately annoyed and infuriated me to the extent that I had to give up on the book was Ms. Jacoby's bloodthirsty anti-intellectual statism and historical revisionism. She spends pages correctly evaluating the public schools as a mess, but then blames their sorry state on a lack of federal control. You see, the simple "folks" (a word she quite wittily assails) in the South and Midwest cannot be trusted to fund and operate their own centers of learning -- they need an Imperial government in Washington, D.C. to do it for them! And of course, a president like George W. Bush could never be elected again in this fantasy, I would suppose.
Tellingly, Ms. Jacoby evidences a horrible misunderstanding of American history, particularly the views of the Founders, which can only be achieved by a statist public education. You see, in Ms. Jacoby's perverse world of anti-truth, federally-funded public education was always part of the Founders' plans -- or at least the "good" ones. Sadly, those dastardly "conservatives" foiled the centralist plot. She laments that the uneducated and illiberal George Washington's attempt to posthumously establish a national(ist) university was foiled -- not by laissez-faire classical liberals in her contention, but by religionists who were wary of government supplanting their role in education. You see, to Ms. Jacoby, the Founders were all secularists with a 1965 view of the First Amendment -- despite the inconvenient truth that several states had official state religions at the time of the Constitution's ratification. She also firmly believes that the Founders were for "democracy," when in truth, the word was an epithet in the Founding Era. This shoddy scholarship abounds and firmly establishes Ms. Jacoby as an anti-intellectual herself.
The only thing this book succeeded in doing for me was demonstrating, once and for all, that the Secular Left is as statist and anti-intellectual as the Religious Right. Susan Jacoby's religious faith in the federal government and centralized political dictatorship is just as idiotic as fundamentalist Christianity. Maybe even more so.
Absolutely nothing new, for Left or Right. March 31, 2008
24 out of 39 found this review helpful
American "dumbing down" studies are back in vogue, and really have been for the last decade or so. Before you rush out and buy this book, let me give you some insights into it that might make you reconsider.
This book is divisive. Decline studies, and this one in particular, tend to confirm the opinions of people who agree, and consolidate the defenses of people who do not agree. Either way, both sides just dig in. The author brings no additional insight to the issue that motivates either side to think critically about it. There's a skill to encouraging a healthy reconsideration of important cultural anomalies that this author fails to exercise in the book. It's just a one-sided rant.
These studies are numerous, and they all say basically the same thing: Economic prosperity, and the desire to achieve it, is a philistine social disease. American culture is dominated by lazy, instant-gratification consumerism and superstitious evangelicalism that erode our quality of life and international prestige. This thesis has been written so many times, by so many alienated intellectuals, you have to ask yourself why another restatement is worth reading. Thorstein Veblen got the whole thing going over 100 years ago with THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS in which he introduced the concept of "conspicuous consumption." The story is really, really old. The opening chapters of the book do a nice job of framing the problem in a new historical context, but the rest of it reads just like Morris Berman.
The argument, as with all others of this stripe, hints at a time long passed in which Americans were all rational, civil, refined critical thinkers, in the images of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Here's a hint: There is no such period in American history. The United States is, and has always been, a society fed and dominated by interest in property and wealth, with a small (but critically important) segment of intellectuals holding up the mirror to remind us how crude we are. We have never been Plato's Republic, and tastelessness did not begin with reality TV.
There's an underlying flavor of atheism in this book. While I don't have a problem with that per se, any intellectual who is willing to dismiss popular religion as irrelevant is living in a Marxist bubble. Here's another hint: People may be mostly rational, but nobody is perfectly rational. To deny emotion is to engage in absurd narcissism. One need not be religious to qualify for the title of "superstitious." The great Czeslaw Milosz taught us that in his great work, THE CAPTIVE MIND. Mindless groupthink attacks those of all political and religious persuasions, not just evangelical Christians.
As with other books in the genre, there's a healthy dose of Bush bashing as well. A President does NOT need to be a poet or professor. Think about this: Would you rather have your best and brightest signing legislation and traveling the world to sign (or not sign) treaties, or would you rather have that person in a hospital or university working on the cure for AIDS or global warming?
I'm not criticizing the author for a poorly written book, but for her lack of original thinking on the topic. There's really nothing here to get your attention beyond the "Eureka" effect you're likely to feel if this is your first encounter with American cultural polemic.
Bottom line: Read Veblen and Hofstadter, but don't waste your time with this latest salvo in a long line of increasingly hysterical American decline studies.
 Profoundly disturbing...but so true. February 27, 2008
22 out of 27 found this review helpful
What is so disturbing about Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason is that it is true. I disagree with some other reviewers who see The Age of American Unreason as a left/right, conservative/liberal discussion. Ms Jacoby's points of view fairly dig out issues that either side could be upset with. There are places I think she is unfair to the Christians in the country and I think it is "unreasonable" to see all conservatives as dim and all liberals as gifted and polite.
Generally speaking, Jacoby hits the nail on the head when she points out that we are in a country that places little value on intellect and reason. Most of us are at least mildly aware that society rewards even intellectually average people who are pretty and can recite a few lines in front of a camera, or who can catch a ball before 100,000 fans, but pays our teachers, police officers, and other vital public servants salaries that could be considered insulting. Society is reflecting the culture's value system and it "ain't" reassuring.
Ms Jacoby doesn't do a good job looking at the role of MTV and the hip-hop culture in placing rude and ignorant behavior at the forefront of what is acceptable. Ignorant behavior, by the way, isn't in the sole control of conservatives, but equally distributed throughout the population. I also believe that she pays little attention to what has become the "dumming down" of society via public education. Truly educating children isn't the mission of the educational community anymore. Passing standardized tests is what education is all about in the modern world. Citizens who aren't taught to think critically can be recruited by any political or social movement to the detriment of us all.
I must also disagree with other reviewers who see her work as undocumented. She offers enough proof for me.
I highly recommend The Age of American Unreason. It will disturb you regardless of your political affiliation, but then isn't that what books of this nature should do?
 Out of Touch Like Hall & Oates March 17, 2008
22 out of 30 found this review helpful
Whether he would admit it or not, most anyone who would even consider reading Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason" probably already agrees with her essential premise -- that the USA, never a bastion of high culture to begin with, has not only failed to rise from the western social sewer but nowadays is quickly sinking deeper in.
It doesn't take one of Jacoby's intellectuals to figure that much out; the real point of discussion is how the country came to be this way and the reasons why. Here is where Jacoby falls short. Relying far too heavily on derelict statistics, anecdotal evidence (much of them the "when I was a child" variety), and untethered citations to that august old authority called "common sense," Jacoby offers the essential argument that the US was well on the road to intellectual promise with the advent of encyclopedia publication and mass-printing of the great books in the 1930s and 40's -- but then, Jacoby says, along came rock music and the new math, and television finished us off by the end of the sixties (which, as Jacoby points out, actually lasted until 1975).
It's not that Jacoby is unconvincing. At times she is, but other portions of Unreason are extremely persuasive. Rather, Jacoby's nemesis her aloof elitism and an astonishingly narrow concept of (what passes for) "culture." She alienates readers like goose-steps in Haifa.
As Jacoby tells it, literally nothing in popular culture is worth a darn. Modern fiction is nothing. Modern music is mush. Anything on a video screen is the abysmal -- and not only video games (the consummate devils in Jacoby's non-sectarian world), but even film, which Jacoby can't even bring herself to acknowledge as a bearing any legitimate artistic potential. Even essentially textual media are irretrievably sullied by digitization. Reading an article on a newspaper's website, Jacoby explains, is an intrinsically different (i.e., inferior) experience from reading the same article on paper & ink. So much virtue in wood pulp.
Had Jacoby kept to fair targets like Britney Spears and Sony video games, her snobbery might have never have bubbled to the surface. But when she dismisses Bob Dylan as "no poet," blames the G.I. Bill for lowering the quality of U.S. colleges, and declares our last public intellectual (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) is already dead, it's pretty difficult to get past.
Jacoby is probably right that, by now, Americans -- most of whom can't even find Iraq on the map or admit that evolution is the real -- are a truly hopeless lot of dimwits and irrational bible-thumpers. But her book is ultimately mis-titled, for it is not the absence of Americans' reason that troubles Jacoby, but our lack of aristocratic refinement. And that part's not so bothersome.
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