I don't think there's any doubt that Jacoby's general thesis--that American culture is steadily moving away from Enlightenment ideals of rational judgment and embracing with a Toquevillian vengeance religious fundamentalism, "junk science," infotainment, anti-"elitist" politicians, and shoddy public educational standards--is more true than not. To her great credit, she goes to great pains, especially in the final five chapters, to document cultural and intellectual decline. (Besides, any number of books recently have made similar cases and cited similar data; see, for example, Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation or Rick Shenkman's How Stupid Are We?). Moreover, Jacoby offers some insightful comments along the way about the crisis of memory our society is undergoing, and the risk we face of dropping off into another dark age. Along with books such as Morris Berman's Dark Age America and Jane Jacobs Dark Age Ahead, Jacoby's really deserves to be read and taken seriously.

But at the end of the day, Jacoby's book is flawed. In the first place, it really seems to be two books in one. The first six chapters, a quick intellectual history of anti-intellectualism, is book #1. The final five chapters, a partial analysis-partial polemic concerning the present state of affairs, is book #2. The two don't hold all that well together in a single volume.

Second, as other reviewers have noted, either of the two books could've been better edited. Jacoby is windy, and tends at times to get on a roll that she just can't seem to cut short. Her disdain of the Baby Einstein merchandising, for example, is one of these tangents that deserves much less space than she devotes to it.

Ultimately, Jacoby's book doesn't need to be read straight-through. Discerning readers can pick and choose chapters, and then be inspired (hopefully) to pick up Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Many of Hofstadter's examples are dated, of course. But his brilliant analysis of the history, causes, and character of anti-intellectualism is still spot-on. Jacoby's book is a nice appendix to it.

Three and a half stars.

What is intelligence?

This is a question that stumped Richard Hofstadter in his 1963 Pulitzer Prize winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And I think it stumps Jacoby as well.

There are, most likely, many different kinds of intelligence. And even though Hofstadter never really arrives at a convincing definition in his book nor Jacoby in hers, they know that a higher value has been placed on earning than on learning in American life.

Education as an end in itself has never really been legitimized in this country. To many (perhaps most), learning is a means to an end and the end is a career, preferably a high paying one. As a result the education that most Americans want and the kind that they get is the kind that provides them with the skills that they need to succeed in the workplace. Therefore the education that most Americans receive is practical and vocational. Most of us are taught from an early age that American values like freedom, equality, and fairness are what makes America a great country but we are not taught that America does not always live up to its own promise because critique (which requires reasoning skills) of American practices past and present is considered unpatriotic. So even if we have plenty of intelligent people in this country, that native intelligence is fostered with specific goals in mind. We are not taught to be broadminded nor are we taught to be critical (let alone self-critical) thinkers.

We do have excellent universities in this country, but most students want to study subjects that will earn them big paychecks and status (those unspoken and so uncriticized American values). Knowledges that do not produce monetary dividends are not valued as much as those that do.

Is it any wonder that we are economically rich but intellectually poor?

It's impossible to say whether intelligence is something we inherit like our hair color or whether it can be learned; either way most Americans (regardless of intelligence level) choose a career path and learn a very specific trade or profession and do not have the time or take the time to become learned. To study things in depth and engage with issues the way academics do takes time, a lot of time, and it takes a familiarity with both the topic at hand and with thought in general and it certainly aids the thinking and reasoning process to have a well of knowledge acquired from a lifetime of reading and many many hours contemplating history, philosophy, social and political theory, literature...

Who has the time, and how many of us spend our leisurely hours in these pursuits? No wonder we make bad choices at the polls.

Except for those academics who get paid to think, no one really has the time to formulate views about our past and present and future based upon their own research. And so we reluctantly hand over power to those that we think we can trust. But who can we trust?

Our founding fathers were very learned men, but even in the eighteenth-century learning was a suspect thing in the minds of many Americans. For one thing, America was supposed to be founded on egalitarianism and so many were not comfortable being ruled by an intellectual class of men. Plus "learning" had a stuffy and conceited and elitist old world connotation that didn't attract new worlders who valued plain speech, populist wisdom, and leaders who looked and acted just like them.

Jefferson was perhaps our most intellectual leader, but many thought that he would have made a greater leader had he been less educated.

Most people, then and now, do not trust an educated leader if that educated leader does not have some practical experience that connects them to the common man and common concerns. Nice speeches are fine but most vote according to necessity (the dictates of their pocketbook)and they want a leader who will make the nation prosper, economically. The kind of intelligence that matters (to most) is the kind that can get things done. Those educated to the life of the mind are not necessarily the kind of men that get things done.

Finally, education provides comfort to those who like to think and find satisfaction in knowing the truth whatever the truth may be. But most do not find thought (the pleasures of the mind, of exercising reason) to offer them any comfort or certainty and so they seek comfort and certainty in some kind of ideology that makes what they value seem like an unchanging principle of God or nature.

Hence our country is ruled by political and media ideologues who make their appeal and build a constituency based on shared ethos rather than on clearly stated objectives.

If Americans cannot reason for themselves, then freedom is clearly in peril.

One of my favorite thinkers, George Santayana, left his position at Harvard because he thought that in America academic freedom was not possible. He felt American ideology influenced everything that his fellow Harvard philosophers (William James included) did. He despised the American boosterism in James writings. Born in Spain Santayana never sought American citizenship and left Harvard and America as soon as he had the means to earn a living through his books which built upon and extended many of Alexander de Tocqueville's ideas.

I think we have plenty of talent in this country, but we cannot wait for great leaders to mobilize our minds. For democracy to work we have to take responsibility for our own destinies and be our own guiding intelligence and voice of reason. Reason, not special interest or private passion, as Jacoby (and Hofstadter before her) so well argues, has to be the standard by which we measure ourselves and our country, as well as the star by which we steer.

With apologies to other reviewers, a 5-star or 4-star review of Jacoby's `Unreason' would require a winking unreason, although she has some very strong moments (chapters 9, 10, and 11 contain some rather interesting essays with which I generally agree). Apart from the stark inconsistencies, departures from reason, certain Hollywood-driven fictionalizations of historical events, sporadic bursts of emotionalism, and us-versus-them dogmatism (I'll touch on some of these below), I was most immediately struck by her self-certainty. She tells the reader of the voluminous great literary works that she had already devoured before entering high school. The reader should make no mistake--the author is a formidable "intellectual" and champion/guardian to lofty realms of "genuine intellectual" authority. Be awed folks (inside joke), we're here treading the paths of the author's "genuine intellectual elite." Funny things is, in reading some rather intelligent people, like Plato, Descartes, Kant, Leibniz (the smartest guy most smart people never actually read), Dostoevsky, Einstein, Gamow, Feynman, and so forth, I don't recall being forced to choke on their tantrums or visions of personal "intellectualism" (although we may say there is some of the latter in Plato). One can only smile thinking what Richard Feynman's reaction would be to Jacoby's nakedly impassioned authority-seeking! Despite her occasionally declared disdain for certain self-congratulating intellection-police, there can be little avoiding the fact that she seeks and assumes such rolls. As a related side bar, throughout most of the discourses it appears that her knowledge of science, and the issues that historically surround it, might have been gleaned from five minutes of watching a dramatically simplified presentation of the Discovery channel (although she does better in chapter 9). Of course none of this is to say that she is consistently wrong on all issues considered, I wholly concur on some points and go at least part way down many other of her paths.

Scholarly dispassion surfaces somewhat intermittently through at least 2/3 of this volume. In the mean time, Jacoby is ticked that folks are so given to calling people `folks'. She's disappointed that television doesn't provide better programming, but she's also aghast that people would watch much television--whatever, in abstract, the programming might potentially be. She's ticked that "lowbrow" types don't support their views with evidence and documentation--but it is quickly evident that she often doesn't mind proceeding without these tools of reason herself. She's disturbed that Americans are so greatly entertained by vulgar language, and likens this to `12 year olds laughing at farts' (I agree, by the way), but she's also miffed by the _lack_ of vulgarity in the language of `young Republicans.' She's annoyed with people esteeming Bob Dylan. While she decries the influence that entertainment products have on too many people's thinking, it is delusional to presume she is exempt on this count. Her multiple and extra-historical revisitations of the famed "Scopes monkey trial" trace more to the 1960 movie fictionalization, and to other popular literary and film alterations, than to the far more nuanced historical realities, a very good factual and non-triumphalist account of which is given by the late Harvard paleontologist SJ Gould (see Rocks of Ages, 1999). Jacoby's version amounts to the conveniently simplistic and non-questioning triumphalism that she rightly despises when it come from other quarters. William Jennings Bryan was _not_ the backward fundamentalist due to Stanley Kramer's film and Susan Jacoby's sermons, and while Jacoby rightly assails Social Darwinism as being a specie of anti-intellectualism, it was precisely the claims of Social Darwinism's academic authorities that alarmed the progressive Bryan (Harvard offered a major in eugenics--the consummate practical `scientific' application of Social Darwinism--until 1945!). Jacoby has no use for mere facts if they don't fit with her dispositions.

The swagger here is, sooner or later (in my case, sooner), hard to take, but I readily admit that I agree with many of her views. For example: (a) I too disdain TV and rarely watch it--but find no use in ranting against the fact that others embrace the intellectual numbness of it all it. People that must watch American Idol do not care what I (or Susan Jacoby) think about Idol or Entertainment Tonight or the entire vast breadth of the entertainment-gaga American wasteland. (b) I agree that "middlebrow"** popular American authors of earlier generations (think Michener [Tales of the South Pacific, Alaska, etc], who's works involved much hard-headed historical and scientific research) constructed `historical fiction' far truer to history than the sensationalized "historical fiction" of the present day (think Dan Brown's popular but stupefying perversions of "history" [The Da Vinci Code]). (c) I agree that the tsunami-like advance of instant gratification technologies, especially video gaming (discussed in chapter 10), is poison to intellect-engaging activities like reading and examining the past for insight into what is now happening in our larger world.
** Jacoby is hopelessly smitten with social and intellectual castes, labelings, and an expansive battery of "-ism"s; chapter 8 is a conflated War of Isms.

Well, an earlier draft of this review was lengthier, but I don't think that is necessary, so I'll end it here. If one wallows too much in this sort of "genuine intellectual" analysis, one risks soundings as cocksure as Jacoby does. But I'll finish on an `up note': skip the first eight chapters and you've got a shorter and more interesting book that flirts with a 4 star rating instead of an almost insufferably protracted 2 star book.

Title The Age of American Unreason
Author: Susan Jacoby
Rating ****1/2
Tags intellectuals, anti-intellectualism, education, critical thinking

I had watched Susan Jacoby on a couple of shows promoting this book and have been anxious to read it since, though it wasn't what I was expecting - it was something better. I had expected to be a collection of stories about the decline of knowledge in the country and a plea for change, and it is. By saying that it is something even better, I mean that she gives the reader the context of the current poor state of civic understanding and discourse. Part of the book is an intellectual history of anti-intellectualism in America (neat trick, that) as well as the history of intellectualism, and even of the place the two met for a while, the middlebrow culture of the Book of the Month Club and the Great Books of the Western World series.

Not surprisingly, Jacoby sees the key points in the decline of knowledge and understanding to be the decline in reading and in conversation, mostly attributable to the culture of infotainment which began with TV.

She explains herself much better than I can, so here is a pretty extensive quote from p. 297:

"Liberals have tended to blame the Bush administration as the problem and the source of all that has gone wrong during the past eight years and to see an outraged citizenry, ready to throw the bums out, as the solution. While an angry public may be the short-term solution, an ignorant public is the long-term problem in American public life. Like many Democratic politicians, left-of-center intellectuals have focused on the right-wing deceptions employed to sell the war in Iraq rather than on the ignorance and erosion of historical memory that make serious deceptions possible and plausible - not only about Iraq but about a vast array of domestic and international issues.

The general decline in American civic, cultural, and scientific literacy has encouraged political polarization because the field of debate is left to those who care most intensely - with an out-of-the-mainstream passion - about a specific political and cultural agenda. Every shortcoming of American governance, in foreign relations and domestic affairs, is related in some fashion to the knowledge deficit of the American public..."

I've believed critical thinking was the answer, but she points out that thinking critically requires some knowledge as well as the habits of rational thought.

She does stimulate some curiosity when she talks about that other industrialized cultures don't seem to suffer quite as badly. One assumes it is the educational system that works better, but it would be nice to know if, for example, other countries have lower statistics on amount of television watched. Dare I say it? She needs a blog to answer such questions, a suggestion she would not thank me for.

Please read it. Think about it. Discuss it with others. For these things Jacoby would thank you.

Publication Pantheon (2008), Hardcover, 384 pages
Publication date 2008
ISBN 0375423745 / 9780375423741

The book is provocative and well-written. However, its premise is thin on two counts.

First, no group of any size is "reasoned." Societies and nations, as well as churches, corporations, and armies, among others, run on emotional fuel, devoted to one cause or another. That these institutions establish laws, usually for the good, does not mean that the constituents, individually or in groups, use sound, logical thinking, especially in social areas such as mating, child-rearing, vocational choice, personal habits, and beliefs. Has there ever been a nation of intellectuals?

Second, and more interesting to me is this. The author strongly implies that the United States (1) has become more ignorant (the common sense meaning of which is clear enough as not to merit more detail), and (2) that this is a recent phenomenon. Neither assertion can be adequately proven by logic or experiment; nor can mine, which is that both of the author's assertions are false.

Setting aside the unlikelihood that any society is marked by intellect, the US is and has been particularly aloof from the world of logic and science, and this has been so since before 1776.

The country was "established" largely by English people whose life-meaning was puritan, that is, obsessed with the discovery and exorcism of sin. They were expelled from Europe, unwanted religious fanatics, whose chief characteristic was greed. From the country's inception, even as colonies, violence and money predominated, not reason. (The brilliant political minds of a handful of men cannot be dismissed, obviously, but they were far from typical of the population. Further, their lives were mostly consumed, not by reason, but by war.)

The problem of slavery is central! How could any reasoning human being kidnap tribal peoples from Africa (and other lands), beat them, torture them, destroy their families and their identities - all for profit? What should anyone expect when, at long last, these people were freed from their shackles and given no real opportunity to assimilate, were unleashed on the population, barely over one hundred years ago, as the industrial wheel was gaining momentum? And what should anyone expect when, after centuries of dehumanizing treatment, that, in the mid-Twentieth Century, the Mississippi would finally burst and overflow, casting its music and recalcitrance and beast-like behavior into the cities, stirring the young of all races, such as to strike fear and hatred into even the mildest-mannered buyer of Oldsmobiles and Frigidaires? And, what then, when the self-proclaimed greatest country [ever] on Earth, stimulated by its young, adopted as its culture the culture of the very people it had enslaved? What then?

It was then that William F. Buckley, Ayn Rand economists, and conservative politicians, all backed by Mellon and Coors money, "stood athwart history." No more! We must pick up where Cotton Mather left off. The anti-Christs! The erstwhile slaves having exploded, provoked braless women to politicize their desire to abort, and homosexuals to politicize their plight, and then agnostics and atheists, anti-war-ists, and just about anybody who wished to rattle a cage to the music of Jimmy Hendrix. These must be rescinded! Declare war on drugs. Build more prisons. Restore the death penalty. At the least, arm yourselves!

Put simply, we have George Bush because we have OJ. But this is not because of new-found dumbness. The American people have not changed at all. Their true nature has just been cast into a brighter and sharper light.

Some have commented that the author offers no solution. Hers is not a user's guide, complete with a help desk number. Why must every author who wishes to highlight and explore a subject give a solution? Nevertheless, I will fill in the gap. For those who wish for a solution, there is none! Demographic projections suggest that the white European power base in the US will slowly evaporate, as the water in a simmering pan. In order to hold onto power, its has stooped so low as to break every law in the Torah, not to mention the Constitution. (Where does raising the "terror alert" to orange just before the last presidential election fit into this? That was Goebbels at his best!) Like the Afrikaaners, the good-old Americans sense that their day is done. They are digging in their fingernails. The Republican Party, having adopted them, is now the party of hate (the sin) and anyone who objects to their views is anti-American. (Hitlerian indeed!) So, if you have hopes for a renaissance, try to forget them. There will be no Mozart, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goya, no Dickens, no Newton, no Kant, just the murmurings of a few hymns off in the distance. There will be no awakening, except, perhaps in the mega-churches. The experiment will be over soon enough.

The book is provocative and well-written. However, its very premise is thin on two counts.

First, no group of any size is "reasoned." Societies and nations, as well as churches, corporations, and armies, for example, run on emotional fuel, devoted to one cause or another - the stuff of the lower brain, not logic and science. That these institutions establish laws, usually for the good of our kind, does not mean that the constituents, individually or in groups, use sound, logical thinking, especially in social areas such as mating, child-rearing, vocational choice, personal habits, and beliefs. Has there ever been a nation of intellectuals?

Second, and more interesting to me is this. The author strongly implies that the United States (1) has become more ignoranct (the common sense meaning of which is clear enough as not to merit more detail), and (2) that this is a recent phenomena. Neither assertion can be adequately proven by logic or experiment. Neither is my assertion, which is (also by fiat) that both of the author's assertions are incorrect, i.e, false.

Setting aside the unlikelihood that any society is or has been marked by intellect, the US is and has been particularly aloof from the world of logic and science, and it has been since before 1776. Why? The country was "established" largely by English people whose life-meaning was puritan, that is, obsessed with the discovery and exorcision of sin. Most were expelled from Europe as unwanted religious fanatics. Most were adverturers, whose chief characteristic was greed. Freud could have done no better in explainng the [id] drives - lust, fear, rage, greed, jealousy, et. al. - and the archaic superego and its [id-like] judgmentalism than to use as an example the American forefathers.

From the country's inception, even as colonies, violence and money predominated, not reason. (The brilliant political minds of a handful of men cannot be dismissed, obviously, but they were far from typical of the population. Further, their lives were mostly consumed, not by reason, but by war and furthering their own assets.)

The problem of slavery is central! How could any reasoning human being kidnap tribal peoples from Africa (and other lands), beat them, torture them, destroy their families and their identities - all for profit? What should anyone expect when, at long last, these people were freed from their shackles and given no real opportunity to assimilate, were unleashed on the population, barely over one hundred years ago, as the industrial wheel was gaining momentum? And what should anyone expect when, after centuries of dehumaninzing treatment, that, in the mid-Twentieth Century, the Mississippi would finally burst and overflow, casting its music and recalcitrance and beast-like behavior into the cities, stirring the young of all races, such as to strike fear and hatred into even the mildest-mannered buyer of Oldsmobilies and Frigidaires? And, what then, when the self-proclaimed greatest country [ever] on Earth, stimulated by its young, adopted as its culture the culture of the very people it had enslaved? What then?

It was then that William F. Buckley and the Mellons and Coors families and the richest of the rich and the disciples of Ayn Rand "stood athwart history." No more! We must pick up where Cotton Mather left off. The anti-Christs: the Negroes, the gays, the braless women with their want of abortion - these must be somehow rescinded - the godless (as were those Commies - a page from Hitler) are finally here, visibly, markedly. Everone who calls himself an American, arm yourself!

Alas, the New York Jews (Howe et. al.) played no part in this. Television and mass electronics, some. Put simply, we have George Bush because we have OJ.

America did not become dumb after World War II. If dumb, or ignorant, or unreasoned, or stupid is what the author wishes to call it, the American people have not changed at all. Their true nature has just been cast into a brighter and sharper light.

Some have commented that the author offers no solution. Hers is not a user's guide, complete with a help desk number. Why must every author who wishes to highlight and explore a subject give a solution? Nevertheless, I will fill in the gap. For those who wish for a solution, there is none! Demographic projections suggest that the white European power base in the US will slowly evaporate, as the water in a simmering pan. Why are stooping so low as to break every law in the Torah, in order to hold onto power? Like the Afrikaaners, they know their day is done. So, if you have hopes for a renaissance, try to forget them. There will be no Mozart, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goya, no Dickens, no Newton, no Kant, just the murmurrings of a few hymns off in the distance. There will be no awakening, except, perhaps in the mega-chruches. The experiment will be over.

The book is provocative and well-written. However, its very premise is thin on two counts.

First, no group of any size is "reasoned." Societies and nations, as well as churches, corporations, and armies, for example, run on emotional fuel, devoted to one cause or another - the stuff of the lower brain, not logic and science. That these institutions establish laws, usually for the good of our kind, does not mean that the constituents, individually or in groups, use sound, logical thinking, especially in social areas such as mating, child-rearing, vocational choice, personal habits, and beliefs. Has there ever been a nation of intellectuals?

Second, and more interesting to me is this. The author strongly implies that the United States (1) has become more ignoranct (the common sense meaning of which is clear enough as not to merit more detail), and (2) that this is a recent phenomena. Neither assertion can be adequately proven by logic or experiment. Neither is my assertion, which is (also by fiat) that both of the author's assertions are incorrect, i.e, false.

Setting aside the unlikelihood that any society is or has been marked by intellect, the US is and has been particularly aloof from the world of logic and science, yes, reason, and it has been since before 1776. Why? The country was "established" largely by English people whose meaning in life was puritan, that is, obsessed with the discovery and exorcision of sin. Most were expelled from Europe as unwanted religious fanatics. Most were adverturers, whose chief characteristic was greed. Freud could have done no better in explainng the [id] drives - lust, fear, rage, greed, jealousy, et. al. - and the archaic superego and its [id-like] judgmentalism than to use as an example the American forefathers.

From the country's inception, even as colonies, violence and money predominated, not reason. (The brilliant political minds of a handful of men cannot be dismissed, obviously, but they were far from typical of the population. Further, their lives were mostly consumed, not by reason, but by war and furthering their own assets.)

The problem of slavery is central! How could any reasoning human being kidnap tribal peoples from Africa (and other lands), beat them, torture them, destroy their families and their identities - all for profit? Is that not, once removed and more subtle, the United States today? What should anyone expect when, at long last, these people were freed from their shackles and given no real opportunity to assimilate, were unleashed on the population, barely over one hundred years ago, as the industrial wheel was gaining momentum? And what should anyone expect when, after centuries of dehumaninzing treatment, that, in the mid-Twentieth Century, the Mississippi would finally burst and overflow, casting its music and recalcitrance and beast-like behavior into the cities, stirring the balls and breasts of the young of all races, such as to strike fear and hatred into even the mildest-mannered buyer of Oldsmobilies and Frigidaires? And, what then, when the self-proclaimed greatest country [ever] on Earth, stimulated by its young, adopted as its culture the culture of the ver people it had enslaved? What then?

It was then that William F. Buckley and the Mellons and Coors families and the richest of the rich and the disciples of Ayn Rand "stood athwart history." No more! We must pick up where Cotton [hmmm] Mather left off. The anti-Christs: the Negroes, the gays, the braless and sometimes titless women with their want of abortion - these must be somehow rescinded - the godless (as were those Commies - a page from Hitler) are finally here, visibly, markedly. Everone who calls himself an American (like John Smith and unlike Pocahontas), arm yourself!

Alas, the New York Jews (Howe et. al.) played no part in this. Television and mass electronics, some. Put simply, we have George Bush because we have OJ.

America did not become dumb after World War II. If dumb, or ignorant, or unreasoned, or stupid is what the author wishes to call it, the American people have not changed at all. Their true nature has just been cast into a brighter and sharper light.

Some have commented that the author offers no solution. Hers is not a user's guide, complete with a help desk number. Why must every author who wishes to highlight and explore a subject give a solution? Those who want one are examples of the studpid people she writes about. Nevertheless, I will fill in the gap. For those who wish for a solution, there is none! Demographic projections suggest that the white European power bsae in the US will slowly evaporate, as the water in a simmering pan. Why do you think they are stooping so low as to break every law in the Torah, in order to hold onto power. Like the Afrikaaners, they know their day is done. So, if you have hopes for a renaissance, try to forget them. There will be no Mozart, no Dante, no Shakespeare, no Goya, no Dickens, no Newton, no Kant, just the murmurrings of a few hymns off in the distance. There will be no awakening, except, perhaps in the mega-chruches. The experiment will be over.

Jacoby explains our cultural decline as thinking citizens. She is a left winger and spends a lot of time critiquing right wingers, although she criticizes the politically correct national history standards of 1994 and our unwillingness to have national teaching standards that all schools would have to fulfill.

Americans are particularly weak at understanding science and the scientific method, which is why evolution is questioned so much, she claims. The scientific method involves attempting to falsify a theory, if it withstands these attempts, the greater the probability that the theory is true. Because evolution has withstood these attempts, then it must be true. Theories must be able to be tested to be verified as true, otherwise they are nonsense, false knowledge or pseudo-science. Various forms of this "junk thought" are even pervasive in centers of cultural authority such as schools and universities and are spread by both left and right wingers. She does not think that the media and schools should give equal emphasis to both valid and crackpot theories.

America can be defined as having a small highbrow culture, with a somewhat larger middlebrow culture, and then a much larger lowbrow culture. Over the past 50 years, we have been gravitating toward lowbrow culture and moving away from high and middlebrow. Middlebrow culture has supported high brows somewhat, although high brows have a disdain for the uninformed and naïve tastes of middlebrows such as buying prints of classic paintings or a Great Books series. A highbrow would always go to a museum to see the real thing and knows that all the great books are in the library. He also knows which great books have up to date knowledge and which ones have merely historical importance. Hence, the high brow likes to make fun of a middlebrow's noble, but bumbling attempt to improve his mind. But even middlebrow culture is diminishing because people do not read as many good books as they used to and do not have as many intellectually stimulating conversations because they are too busy attending to their gadgets such as TV, video games, and infotainment that distract from real learning and quality conversation. Even writing suffers, because people no longer write long letters, but send out quick emails instead. Great letters between intellectuals may no longer be available for researchers because of deletable emails.

Who is to blame for cultural decline? There are many bandits of anti-intellectualism to blame. Jacoby blames fundamentalist Christians for their anti-intellectual and anti-secular attitudes which have been spread out through the culture. They believe in the literal truth of the Bible and are supposedly pushing society towards a theocracy in which the bible is all you need to know. Celebrity culture is also to blame because people follow the vapid lives and ideas of famous bozos and bimbos. People also distrust intellectuals because they think that are Marxist, more often than not. Left-wingers of the sixties helped get rid of the traditional core of learning that everyone should know coming out of college. Jacoby wants some compromise between traditionalists and multiculturalists, but I do not want anyone in the canon just because they are not white male. It should be a merit-based list only. Colleges also have fluffy, pop culture courses now in which students study lowbrow literature like Stephen King horror books, when they should be reading challenging highbrow literature like Wuthering Heights, whether they have developed a taste for it or not. Finally Americans have always been somewhat anti-intellectual, wanting mostly to learn what is practical, profitable, and wanting only to learn to a certain extent, otherwise you will end up like a one of those dreaded smarty- pants, wine drinking, jazz listening intellectuals who looks down on the dummies.

This is a fantastic book explaining the history and present state of Americans' fear of intelligence - both of acquiring it themselves or of those who cultivate it.
I cannot recommend this book enough.
Anyone who is closed minded about nearly any controversial subject in this country will surely be offended - but open your mind and you will see the truth - don't fear knowledge!

This book is especially interesting in this time of election activity!
Enjoy!

Considering that the basic premise of the book is that a large portion of the USA is actively anti-intellectual, I'm unsure whether it's an intentional irony or a subconscious hypocrisy that makes this the most anti-rational, anti-scientific piece of what I hesitate to call literature that I've ever had the displeasure of picking up. The only thing that kept me reading to the end was that it was _so_ poorly researched and documented that I was sure it was a joke of some kind, and that at some point there would be a chapter saying "surprise! I've just tricked you into exactly the same rejection of logic and empiricism that I've been ostensibly complaining about!"

More specifically, the book makes numerous claims which are simply not true at all, often about things for which a large body of research exists which the author could have easily accessed via any number of commonly-available resources. As early as the second chapter, for instance, she's making multitudinous attacks on visual media in general via bare assertion, and makes no reference to any actual scientific studies, probably because most of the thousands upon thousands of experiments done regarding the effect of television and games on the mind prove precisely the opposite of the claim she's pushing.

This is the hallmark of the book: assertion, assertion, assertion with nothing to back any of it up. In the cases where my personal knowledge actually covered the subject and I could judge the veracity of said assertions, they almost invariably demonstrated an amazingly complete disconnect from reality and the scientific and rational communities. It's telling that no scientific studies are among the rather sparse footnotes and references, which are reserved for other op-ed pieces, usually quoted out of context.

This book is useless to anyone trained in the principles of research and logical argument, and actively dangerous to the mind of anyone untrained enough to take it as a serious piece of research. Intellectually dishonest and a picture-perfect representative of the actual forces involved in the phenomena the author is attempting to describe. Don't bother with this claptrap, if you want a clever and well-thought out critique of anti-intellectualism, go read The Wizard of Oz. It's better referenced and more relevant to modern society.

I enjoyed this book tremendously. I liked best Jacoby's critique of today's newspapers for reporting at face value patently false statements by politicians, as if actual facts made no difference at all.

I did disagree with a few of Jacoby's points. She is too cavalier about dismissing the idea that the U.S. is overpopulated. To provide some balance to this, I would encourage reading Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.

Overall, though, the book is great. Don't miss it.

The basic premise is correct, that we need to study more, read more, think more clearly. When hasn't that been true? I agree with her that people spend too much time on TV, video games and other liesurely activities that don't stimulate the intellect. Many seem to be addicted or perhaps too tired/lazy to do something that takes effort. I liked the book from that standpoint.

But, she seemed stuck in the past, constantly telling the reader how wonderful it was when.... I kept getting the nagging feeling I was listening to a church sermon in which the pastor kept praising the "family values" of the past....Yah, like racism, sexism, discrimination against people because they held different religious beliefs? Sure, the glorious past when people were all so smart and pleasant. The past of fiction.

Then, despite some effort to point the finger equally at conservatives and liberals, she fell into what seemed her natural tendancy to associate smart with liberal and dumb with conservative. That was frequent in the book, particularly toward the end.

She talked about poor academics in the South, but didn't analyze the school systems to see what was driving some of the poorly performing schools. I've lived in the South for several years and found some sectors of Southern society to be very well educated, while others were sorely neglected. Saying that Southern public schools are funded less than other states misses a key issue, namely strong tendancy of whites in the South to send their kids to private schools. The blacks are left in the underfunded, voluntarily segregated public schools. Not such a problem in towns where many whites stayed in the public schools, but the county schools were all black and had very poor performances. I don't pretend to understand or like the social/political dynamics of schools down there (my kids hated Southern schools because of the reverse discrimination and jumped for joy when we moved out), but I do know that white parents didn't want to send their kids to these underperforming county schools where their kids were treated to reverse discrimination.

My point is that a lot of the educational dollars are avoiding the public school system as whites avoid the underperforming schools. This caused a spiral effect where parents, both black and white, sent their kids elsewhere to avoid schools with poor academics. I believe the author could have addressed this issue better and might have found more intelligence in the South than she gave it credit for.

(As an aside, I worked with an African American woman who sent her kids to a county school where the percentage of blacks was about 98%. The daughter requested this because she wanted to "get back to her roots" after attending predominantly white schools elsewhere in the states. After one year, the daughter wanted out because in her words, "These blacks aren't my people. I don't think like they do. They don't care about education. All they care about is acting tough and insulting people who want to study.")

Back on topic, Jacoby couldn't get past her love of Al Gore either. Lord have mercy. She claims to be an intellectual, but can't see past her blind liberalism to see just how many non-partisan climatologists say Al Gore has been promoting the biggest scam in history by blaming humans for what is actually nothing more than natural, long-term climate cycles!! Susan, if you read more, you'd see that there is no consensus!! Perhaps the Internet could help you find some of that information. :-)

And the Internet is such a terrible thing! Yah sure. Except that thanks to the Internet I can instantaneously get various intellectual viewpoints and studies on both sides of most issues, whereas before the nasty technology came along....I had to spend hours searching for books in the library and they probably didn't have anything relevant to my topic of interest.

Then, how about book reviews she went on and on about? I can now read solid book reviews on the Internet by many, many smart readers, whereas under her preferred method I would have been stuck reading the one lame book review in the New York Times or whatever biased newspaper I was limited to in my hometown.

Susan, I'm with you on the need for more of us to study, but please change your condescending attitude against conservatives. In case you didn't notice, there are about as many smart/ignorant Democrats as there are smart/ignorant Republicans.

She also seemed confused about whether she liked communism or not. She'd praised a number of intellectuals of the hippie era who were involved in the Communist party and I never understood whethere she thought that was a good or bad thing.

And Bush is just a moron to her. Granted, he isn't my favorite guy and he has a very country style, but that doesn't make him stupid. To equate dumb with country as she seemed to be doing is just evidence of elitism. But on Bush, yep Suan, he's so stupid he just stumbled into the White House. And during the debate with those intellectual giants, Al Gore and Mr Swift Boat Kerry, he won only because they were, what, smarter than he? Uh, right. Her theme of conservatives being morons was just so intellectually vacuous that I just started laughing.

Bottom line: Good premise that people should read more. She should do just that without the prejudice against conservatives. She's stuck in the past, unable to see the good in many modern things. Blinded by her liberal bias. OK book overall. Made me want to read more, but that idea without the bias would have been a pamphlet.

The basic premise is correct, that we need to study more, read more, think more clearly. When hasn't that been true? She seemed stuck in the past, constantly telling the reader how wonderful it was when.... I kept getting the nagging feeling I was listening to a church sermon in which the pastor kept praising the "family values" of the past....Yah, like racism, sexism, discrimination against people because they held different religious beliefs? Sure, the glorious past when people were all so smart and pleasant. Then, she couldn't get past her love of Al Gore. Lord have mercy. She claims to be an intellectual, but can't see past her blind liberalism to see just how many non-partisan climatologists say Al Gore has been promoting the biggest scam in history!! Yo, Susan, there is no consensus. Wake up. And the Internet is such a terrible thing! Yah sure. Except that thanks to the Internet I can instantaneously get various intellectual viewpoints and studies on both sides of most issues, whereas before the nasty technology came along....I had to spend hours searching for books in the library and they probably didn't have anything relevant to my topic of interest. Then, how about book reviews? I can now read solid book reviews by many, many smart readers, whereas under her preferred method we were stuck reading the one lame book review in the New York Times or whatever biased newspaper we were limited to in our hometown. Susan, I'm with you on the need for more of us to study, but drop the condescending, rude attitude against conservatives. In case you didn't notice, there are about as many smart/ignorant Democrats as there are smart/ignorant Republicans. She also seemed confused about whether she liked communism or not. She'd praised a number of intellectuals of the hippie era, without mentioning that some of them were actually convicted of spying for the USSR. And Bush is just a moron to her. Yep, he's so stupid he just stumbled into the White House. And during the debate with those intellectual giants, Al Gore and Mr Swift Boat, he won only because they were, what, smarter than he? Uh, right. Her premise of conservatives being morons, just bored me to laughing. Bottom line: Good premise, though old and worn. She's stuck in the past. Unwilling to see the good in many modern things. Blinded by her liberal bias. But yes, people should study more.

Jacoby uses her deep and nuanced knowledge of American history to lay out where we are falling well short of America's most cherished goals. Some reviews have complained the book is too long. But Jacoby's survey is so broad, and to do it justice strikes me as worth this level of detail. There's a lot of real gold in this book, and I did not find my mind wandering. One of my takeaways: it confirms for us that the vast sums of money we've chosen to pay for the education for our children (private school, I'm afraid) seems well spent. This book is an inexpensive and very modest substitute for the mediocre education most people received in the last 20-30 years, the author of this review included.

Her introduction and chapter one simultaneously attempt to tie her book to historian Richard Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) while making a case for the United States' supposedly "new anti-intellectualism." To her, anti-intellectualism is not new, but it has taken new forms. Her approach is a combination of history; commentary on popular culture; specifics of religion, education, politics, and the mass media; and critiques of social science. Thus, the book's topics mostly overlap with Hofstadter's book, which was strictly a history, divided into four sections on anti-intellectualism in U.S. religion, U.S. education, U.S. business, and U.S. politics, respectively. And if Jacoby never directly addresses anti-intellectualism among business executives or corporations, she offers enough about commercial influences on U.S. culture to say business and economics were included. The title of Jacoby's first chapter, "The Way We Live Now: Just Us Folks," even reminds one of Hofststadter's first chapter, "Anti-intellectualism in Our Time."
But the similarities to Hofstadter's book are not extensive, and should not be overstated. Hofstadter's book was and is a masterful history (even if it has been significantly criticized), while much of Rigney's book is on more or less current events, or at least past recent enough to not yet be "history" with a capital H. Hofstadter's first chapter, and his other discussions of then-current events (such as paragraphs on President Kennedy late in Chapter 8) seems insincere, even forced, as if his publisher or his conscience or someone else told him that his book couldn't start with his largely theoretical second chapter and had to hold out some hope. One must give Jacoby credit for displaying no false optimism, as the facts and arguments in both her book and Hofstader's don't warrant any, false or otherwise, even if one finds her one-sidedly negative.
Knowledge sociologist Daniel Rigney (1991), among others, have pointed out that the major U.S. "institution" ripe for studying anti-intellectualism in, in both impacting and reflecting U.S. culture, and not addressed by Hofstadter, was the mass media, and Jacoby doesn't make this omission. Sooner or later, her book gets around to newspapers, magazines, television, radio, movies, the Internet, music, and videogames.
But Jacoby's book pales by comparison to Hofstadter's book. Her chapter on "junk thought," which she defines as "anti-rationalism and contempt for countervailing facts and expert opinion," is (as she almost dismissively says about scientific and social scientific studies showing differences between males and females) mostly just that. That's not to say she doesn't make some good points, only that she often doesn't do it very well. While another reviewer suggested that New Yorker Jacoby needs to exit her apartment and interact with bright students at an excellent university, she apparently also needs to get out of the city. Like The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (1987), by Russell Jacoby (no relation that I'm aware of), her book sometimes implies that what happens among New York City intelligentsia affects, or is at least known by, the rest of America. While New York City boasts a disproportionate amount of intellectuals, and intellectual products and services, clearly both Jacobys equally need to learn that, unless an intellectual has a ready audience of thousands or more, often what happens in New York City stays in New York City.
Granted, her book includes several solid chapters by fact, argument, and writing, the best of which probably are chapters four, five, and eight. And, overall, it is well written as books go these days, although one could pick a few nits with an author who professes to be a stickler about English, including obsessing about the word, "folks."
However, as much as it tries, Jacoby does not grab the reader the way that Hofstadter did and still can. He was the education historian who wrote that John Dewey "has been praised, paraphrased, repeated, discussed, apotheosized, even on occasions read" (p. 361). And "American education can be praised, not to say defended, on many counts; but I believe ours is the only educational system in the world vital segments of which have fallen into the hands of people who joyfully and militantly proclaim their hostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise" (p. 52). And "the schools of the country seem to be dominated by athletics, commercialism, and the standards of the mass media, and these extend upwards to a system of higher education whose worst failings were underlined by the bold president of the University of Oklahoma who hoped to develop a university of which the football team could be proud" (p. 301). Jacoby never equals Hofstadter's combination of knowledge and writing skill, let alone his wit, nor is she more than rarely original, in terms of subjects, sources, or analysis.
If there is a major "institution" that Jacoby failed to address, like Hofstadter and mass media, it is sports, what Hofstadter 45 years ago(!) referred to on college campuses as "the cult of athleticism." Today, every U.S. mass medium is clogged with sports, including the average daily newspaper devoting nearly a quarter of its news space to sports (double or more than of any other content area), while advertisers avoid it like the plague and the Newspaper Management Center finds sports only the ninth most popular newspaper part among subscribers. Yet Jacoby, who manages a swipe at every other nonintellectual and anti-intellectual aspect of American life, totally missed it.
Finally, her literature review was surprisingly limited and sometimes a bit odd. Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) gets a passing comment and is not listed in bibliography. Major authors on intellectual history or education and culture, such as Jacques Barzun, Oscar Cargill, Henry Steele Commager, the other Jacoby, and Neil Postman are overlooked, not to mention a long list of lesser ones (such as mine, for full disclosure).

As others, I picked up this book with great anticipation, hoping to find an objective text on the slow descent of intellectualism in America. Unfortunately, I was left disappointed by Ms. Jacoby's disdain for everyone other than herself and her near-clones. Anti-everything is not intellectualism.

I'm so thoroughly nauseated by the quantity of anti-Christianity being pumped into modern literature these days. At least I can count on books like "The God Delusion" and "God is Not Great" to disclose their intentions outright, before I waste my time. This book masquerades as a piece of researched modern philosophy, and quickly spirals downward into a remarkably under-researched, ostensibly biased rant against 'anti-rational religion.'

"What is most disturbing, apart from the fact that millions of Americans already believe in the imminent end of days, is that the mainstream media confer respectability on such bizarre fantasies by taking them seriously... [a Time magazine article] gave no space to those who dismiss the end-times scenario as a collective delusion based on pure superstition...ideas that ought to be dismissed as the province of a lunatic fringe."

Ms. Jacoby gives this rhetoric the heading of "Modern American fundamentalism," all the while denigrating what is actually age-old, global, mainstream Christianity. Not the same thing, and how ignorant on her part to make no distinction between the two.

She goes on to say that anti-evolutionism is anti-intellectualism, and that "this level of scientific ignorance cannot be blamed solely on religious fundamentalism," but must also be blamed on the "poor quality of public science education." Clearly no one with a proper science education could believe in intelligent design.

If you believe in anything at all that defies logic or has yet to be proven by a self-declared intellectual such as Ms. Jacoby, don't waste your time on this poor application of fantastically correct grammar.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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 [...]

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.

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.

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 snapshot 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. This snapshot is presented within the context of our past where Jacoby treats us to a journey from the past to the present in each chapter which covers different topics all related to non-rational thinking and its impact on society.

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 used for many years to come).

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 of our founding framers and other great leaders of the past as a benchmark to current day approaches. For example, she compares current political speech to FDR's fireside chats broadcasted across America on the radio. FDR treated Americans with 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.

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 he 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 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 analysis beyond her occasional books. A few of the topics covered 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 matters Jacoby finds trivial to forming and bettering western thought (like 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 mis-used 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 non-techie.

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.

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 ow