The Age of American Unreason

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.

My copy arrived with a sticker "Updated Post-Election Edition." I do not believe it was truly post-election, and "Trump" is not in the index. That comment withstanding, however, Jacoby's argument is to extend Hofstadter's argument from 1963 Anti-intellectualism in American Life into the 21st century. Well she might, given this last pathetic election and the ascension of Trumpism. I found this book to be a good intellectual history. As Jacoby notes, it is harder to trace anti-intellectualism than it is to track the development of ideas, since the development of ideas involves advocacy and publication, whereas anti-intellectualism is a "stance." Jacoby is persuasive. There is a lot of evidence that anti-intellectualism is distributed throughout our history but coalesces periodically into political movements such as Know-Nothingism, Red-baiting, McCarthyism, the Tea Party, and now Trumpism, in which the anti-intellectual glue is meant to hold the self together. A lot of us are poorly educated and have no further interest in school. A lot of us are stupid. But it takes a special venom to become anti-intellectual, a cultural cast fed by ignorance, fear, distrust, and anomie--which glues one's self to the "flag" of the group.

Susan Jacoby, "The Age of American Unreason". This book sounds a clarion warning about the dumbing-down of American society. Jacoby has done well to write over 300 pages on this topic and her journalist's eyes have enabled her to add historical and everyday support to her thesis. The problem that Jacoby saw was that Americans have a love-hate relationship with intellectuals. In the days of Camelot, the Kennedys encouraged the intellectuals to support America's new directions. Intellectuals with foreign names suddenly became accepted household names across the world. Times have changed however. Jacoby claimed (2008, p. 23) that the key issues for schools, and the future of rationalist society, are the poor quality of science education, and the resultant poor levels of understandings of scientific principles: "This level of scientific ignorance cannot be blamed solely on religious fundamentalism, because the proportion of Americans who reject evolution in any form is higher- by 15 percentage points- than the proportion who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Something else must be at work, and that something else is the low level of science education in American elementary and secondary schools, as well as in many community colleges". This is a major concern to all educators, and it was quite interesting that Jacoby's theses are as applicable in Australia as they are in America. For all of us brought up on Time and Life magazines, "The Age of American Unreason" was a trip down memory lane. Jacoby, the journalist, intertwines the historical events that affected our lives in the manner of a master story teller with a beautiful use of language, and while the story can become repetitive on occasions, it provoked passionate discussion in our reading group. Regardless of where you stand on the changes that the Baby-Boomers have experienced in their lifetimes, the book is worth reading and, more importantly, discussing. Be warned however: Do not attempt to read this book without access to a dictionary.

You are an intelligent being. I know I may be speaking to anyone, yet I make that claim without hesitation. You are unconditionally capable. You may be male or female... conservative or liberal... religious or secularist... young or old. Regardless, I am quite certain of your thinking abilities. You don't need to change who you are. Anyone can free a precious mind to grow in positive ways. Susan Jacoby also thinks that there is a brilliant person inside you, and waiting to be set free. So why not? Why not choose to seek the better life of a person who actually knows instead of passively walking through life hoping for an answer in the next television commercial? Understanding the works of classical music and literature of high-brow culture does not make up the entire treasure. Nor does it require reading Time magazine and growing gladiolas to understand middle-brow culture. These are bits. Pursue your valuable passions. Value your best thoughts and share them. Listen to the best thoughts of your friends. An elitists attitude may be a problem for your friends if you do not reflect back their intelligent moments as well as your own. Perhaps it takes more than just realizing your personal need. Perhaps wisdom can be shared among people... any two people. Likewise elitists charges make it impossible share and find intelligence. Stupidity abounds in times and places where wisdom and reason shall be hidden in shame. One cannot attempt to fix a situation hidden from reality. Perhaps we can stop dumbing down for others. Perhaps we can encourage others... and not love others only when they dumb down. Wisdom and reason must be shared in order for it to be partaken. Ultimately, God loves wisdom. He loves it when you choose wisdom. God loves reason, rationalism, logic, science and those kind of things. You won't find God by living in stupid obedience. You won't find God by hiding from truth. Free yourself from those negative influences. Choose to intellectualism. I know you can.

In Daniel Webster’s 1826 eulogy for John Adams, he declared the young American republic was distinguished by “an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge…such has been before altogether unknown and unheard of.” By 2005, Bill Moyers noted, “One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal.” How, asks author Susan Jacoby, did America become possessed by anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, and aggressive ignorance? Her first cause: religious fundamentalism at odds with the nation’s heritage of Enlightenment reason as the “most enduring and powerful strand of American anti-intellectualism,” writes Jacoby. And part of the American experience since Puritans first disembarked from their Atlantic voyage, while another branch of Christianity balanced belief with higher learning. For fundamentalists, then as now, “the very irrationality of their faith was seen as proof of emotional and spiritual superiority.” To be clear, “Supernaturalist fundamentalism is by definition anti-rational because it cannot be challenged by any countervailing evidence in the natural world.” (For apolitical believers, perhaps “non-rational” would be more accurate than “anti-rational.”) Once checked by Enlightenment thinking, fundamentalism accelerated with the Second Great Awakening after the Revolution early in the 1800s as a response to Enlightenment restraint, “freethought,” and social change. “It is the greatest irony,” says Jacoby, “that the American experiment in complete religious liberty led large numbers of Americans to embrace anti-rational, anti-intellectual forms of faith. [While] in Europe prevailing unions between church and state made some form of rationalism… the most common response for those who lost faith in religion or government.” In America, a kind of “mindless religious tolerance” is misunderstood to mean respect not only for one’s personal beliefs but a respect for the beliefs themselves, placing “observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy…” Today, any belief, no matter how wild, is garnered “free choice.” These intellectual fissures lay latent but then expanded in the first half of the 1800s, acquiring a new dimension in the latter half. The power of science produced a desire to meld a science-sounding cachet to emotionally satisfying dogmas. Social Darwinism was the first—the birth of pseudoscience, today called junk science, now appropriated by the Right-wing as a dismissive label for real science. Social Darwinism, which sounded like science, mixed with the very non-scientific social “sciences” to produce justification for mass inequality of the Gilded Age. (That social studies in the humanities are still called social “sciences” causes many to think they really are science.) This combination of scientific notions with social studies spun off eugenics, Nazism, Creationism, Intelligent Design, anti-vaxers, and QAnon, to name a very few among our now burgeoning conspiracy theory industry. When scrutinized by science, pseudoscience collapses. Ironically this leads Americans to dismiss real science because they can’t tell one from the other. As when “facilitated communication” with autistic children or “recovered memories” of sex abuse “victims” were found to be academic graft; when nutrition fads changed claims about vitamin C as a cure for cancer; or when demographers forewarned the end of the world in Paul Ehrlich’s 1971 <i>The Population Bomb</i>. None of these are physical sciences like the physics, chemistry, and biology comprising climate science. But the American response is, “See? The experts don’t know anything.” It’s not the experts. Jacoby explores “junk thought” since the sixties with “acceptance of theories in which undue weight is ascribed to the passionate, emotional conviction of believers.” She even gets a dig in on my (not) favorite feminist theorist, UCLA’s Sandra Harding, for whom Newton’s <i>Principia</i> is a “rape manual.” When debunked by the hard sciences, says Jacoby, pseudoscience promoters are forced to fall back on cranks who “claim that dissent is being suppressed by a conspiracy of elites controlling the universities. [While] in the social sciences [where Harding resides], there is no shortage of credentialed ‘experts’ to endorse any position, however, untethered from common sense and scholarly evidence.” While Jacoby’s sixties liberalism occasionally comes through as smugness, this is a fine, occasionally slow, survey of American irrationalism. This and Kurt Anderson’s book, “Fantasyland,” go far in unraveling what went wrong in America and how it did.

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, by Susan Jacoby - Book Review by Helen Bennett Susan Jacoby's newest book, The Age of American Unreason, is a worthy successor to her last blockbuster, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, which came out in 2004. "In the best of all possible Americas every college freshman would be required to take a course called `The History of American Secularism.' The text would be Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers" (Philip Roth). I agree with this assessment, and believe that her new book also should be read and pondered by all intelligent adults. Jacoby's thesis is that since the decline of the "middlebrow culture" of the `40s and `50s, our nation has become so saturated with "infotainment" of the digital sort, and so right-wing in fundamentalist/evangelical religion, that the average adult's intellectual attainments have been "dumbed down" to an unacceptable level. After a brief rundown of our early intellectual history, both religious and secular, she examines the Communist scares of the `30s and `50s, and the loss of integrity of intellectuals who capitulated to HUAC and Senator McCarthy. Her assessment of the turbulent `60s as an era of both left-and right-wing influence, was intriguing to me. In recent decades, intellectuals have served as powerful government advisors, and so have lost their objectivity in their quest for power. She calls on intellectuals, who have been scorned as "eggheads," to recapture their personal courage and integrity and help lead us to a sounder, more rational form of education. Jacoby deplores the pseudoscience, the "junk thought," and the timidity of political candidates in calling to the attention of the American public their educational deficiencies. A shockingly small percentage of adults know anything about our Constitution and its Bill of Rights, and the majority are not convinced of the truth of evolution. Their historical and geographical knowledge is so miniscule, and their unconcern about learning a foreign language is so apparent, that we are lagging behind most other developed nations in the areas of scientific, cultural, and historic knowledge. Also under fire are the media represented by TV and the Internet, hand-held digital devices, and the omnipresent earphones that keep Americans separated from one another. The decline of newspapers (and their cultural, in-depth content), middlebrow and highbrow magazines, and the dearth of book reading of the general public are also signs of our mental decline. Conversation is no longer courteous and prevalent; friendships are fewer, and we are seldom face-to-face. We cannot make good judgments about our political future without the cultural literacy that earlier generations strove for. Our colleges waste their time offering academic "ghetto" courses on pop culture and ethnic and women's studies. Great literature is lost to common knowledge, and the public goes on believing in New Age junk thought, including superstition, communing with the dead, astrology, and other anti-rational garbage. I found this book impossible to put down, and cannot recommend it highly enough. Like Jacoby, I have lamented the absolute disappearance of old-fashioned letter-writing in favor of short, impersonal, ungrammatical e-mail notes. Future historians and biographers will have little to work with in the absence of such informative letters that many of us fondly remember, and that formed the basis of Jacoby's own--and my own--courtship. The main remedy Jacoby offers, other than complete educational reform involving national standards, is to turn off the TV as background noise, limit children's time with the computer and video games, and get back to the reading of substantial books for pleasure and enlightenment. Parents can only accomplish this about-face by their own example. Helen Bennett March 4, 2008

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.

This was, by far, one of the best works of non-fiction I have read in my lifetime. I have a hard time even beginning to describe all of the reasons I found this book so appealing. On the most basic level, it was very well written and researched. Simple things, such as the eloquent language of the author added to the work... and dare I say, for a person who feels well versed, I had to look up several words in the book. A fact which I loved because I was truly learning something from the author, a point I am sure she would appreciate. And the learning did not stop with the vocabulary. The history lessons she taught, many garnered from first hand accounts, went deep into a world hidden from normal minds. The term `intellectual' has received such disdain from the masses over the last century, that I have heard nothing about the true origins besides the negatives. On the other side, I also picked up insight on how many people found themselves believing much of the information spread. This book really allowed me to look at both sides from each point of view. As I followed the history, I slowly grasped the flow of society which led us to our current predicaments. As a person of only 31, I have been living through the gradual `dumbing down' of America since my birth. I lived with the hostility of having common sense at a young age. I have worked in offices that were no better then a sports bar when it came to conversation. I have seen the open hostility on the internet as `flame wars' erupt from both sides of an issue and I have wondered how my fellow humans could be making so many poor choices. In a sense, I have been isolated by the world. While this book allowed me to understand the how's and why's of a world going wrong, it did more then merely point out these flaws. It made me aware that these attacks against those seeking truth have been going on for as long as our country has been a nation (and probably since the dawn of mankind). I'm comforted in the knowledge that I am not alone in this mess. And, most importantly, this book impressed upon me that it is vital for all free thinkers and intellectuals to do even more to bring rational thought back to the table.

Book is not in good condition.

I simply loved this book. An impassioned defense and celebration of liberalism, secularism and the joy of books, this is a thought provoking, entertaining and sometimes challenging read. Always fair, always balanced, and always full of clarity, the author makes clear in this very readable book, her disdain of junk, unprovable thought and of policy and advocacy based on emotion, religous dogmatism and partisan politics rather than reason. Although primarily concerned with the United States,this book has strong resonance in the UK and is well worth reading for those who care about education and the development of reasoned thought wherever they may live. Although I do not share all of the author's concerns about the impacts of the internet, of social media, or of popular culture, her concerns about the celebration of ignorance, and the belittling of intellectualism are relevant and highly persuasive throughout, particularly in the last few chapters which made me want to applaud and cheer out loud. An excellent book, and one of the best I have read for many a year. UPDATE JANUARY 2025 This book is even better than I thought when I read it in 2013. The author was absolutely right about the dangers of the internet and social media, as is frighteningly and abundantly clear today. Sadly, I was being much too optimistic, and the age of unreason fuelled by social media in the USA is unfolding before our horrified eyes.

Warum viele Amerikaner so wenig über die Welt wissen wird hier ausführlich Thematisiert. Der Einfluss von Vorurteilen und Aberglaube in eins der reichsten Länder der Erde sollte ein lösbares Problem sein. Sehr zu empfehlen.

Beautifully written: almost proof that intelligent thought, and the ability to communicate it in elegant prose, still DO exist in the United States (not 'America', thank you). Anyone interested in the history of the United States, and its cultural and social history in particular, should buy at least two copies of this book: one for herself, and one for an acquaintance who may still be 'salvageable'. One would then hope that both of these individuals would communicate the many merits of the book to at least one or two more individuals not yet hopelessly lost. I have read and enjoyed quite a few relatively recent books - in a wide range of subject areas - in the past year, but none has given me more pleasure than has Ms Jacoby's. I was particularly favorably impressed by her perceptive words on the subject of education, and, although I am a Canadian - I should rather say a Québécois - virtually everything she has to say about education (and many other things) is just as relevant here as it is in the United States. Would that there were more Susan Jacobys in this world - and many more readers of her (starting with our own 'baby' George W. Bush, another fundamentalist, by the name of Stephen Harper). Finally, Ms Jacoby, thank you for recognizing the value of the study of - even an awareness of - classical music! I look forward to your next book.

Dieses Buch erklärt die Ursprünge vieler amerikanischer Denkweisen, was ich durchaus interessant fand. Die Autorin geht dabei bin in die Zeit des Unabhängigkeitskrieges (also um 1776) zurück und erklärt aus einem historischen Kontext heraus das Misstrauen mancher Amerikaner gegenüber rein intellektuellen Denkweisen und die Ablehnung darwinistischer Ideen. Sie stellt auch die Mechanismen von politischer Manipulation und Populismus dar. Obwohl schon einige Jahre alt, ist das Buch hochaktuell. Leider ist ihr Schreibstil sehr trocken, teilweise langatmig und schwer verdaulich. Das macht die Lektüre mühsam. Trotzdem habe ich viel Neues gelernt und Altes wurde mir wieder mehr bewusst. Was mich etwas gestört hat, war allerdings eine gewisse Arroganz seitens der Autorin gegenüber "schlichter " Popmusik, z.B. die Beatles, die sie im Vergleich zur "wertvollen" Klassik doch sehr abwertet. Die selbe Arroganz zeigt sie gegenüber der Populärwissenschaft und anderen, der Mittelklasse leicht zugänglichen Kunstformen. Obwohl ich der Autorin nicht in allen Punkten zustimmen kann, ist ihr Buch trotzdem ein notwendiges und informatives Werk.