The Age of American Unreason | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Pantheon
Category: EBooks
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $7.96 (44%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  91 reviews
Sales Rank: 727
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.91
ASIN: B0013SSPWS
Publication Date: February 12, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.
Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.
At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 86 more reviews...
 Maybe being a scientist and an intellectual is worthwhile after all August 23, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 Good basic premise, but stuck in past....too obviously biased August 22, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
Good start, but doesn't go far enough into the reasons for our malaise August 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a good start. But I was disappointed that Jacoby doesn't dig deeper. A lot of her "answers" just beg the question. I found she was good at diagnosing the problem--as are many pundits and observers these days--but short on understanding their true depth.
She gives us the laundry list of ills inflicting us right now--failed political systems, endemic rudeness, the death of civic responsibility, our vile popular culture--and does not see the thread that links it all. That thread is the complete dominance of unfettered capitalism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, our sole purpose in America has been to make money, at a faster and faster rate. "Values," such that they are, are only taught when they're seen to further expedite the chase of the buck.
No, there's nothing wrong with capitalism, but there is something wrong when capitalism is our only national goal, and it is now, no matter what some apologists may claim. People who think about nothing except how to acquire more material things are not going to be civil-minded, learned, courteous, moral or ethical. There's no reason to be. In fact, those things are just impediments to the pursuit of happine$$.
This is happening everywhere, of course, but nowhere as much as the U.S. Europe is struggling to keep a lid on rampant, unchecked capitalism--their blend of "soft socialism" with regulated capitalism seems to be working better than any other model, so far at least. Countries that most eagerly follow the U.S. down the road to free market mania--Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and now China and India--are starting to have the same social ills of the United States.
Rather than chapter after chapter reciting ills we already know about and citing his columnist peers and their skin-deep "analyses," I would have like to have been a deeper social-economic analysis, as well as discussions from historians and yes, philosophers. For a deeper look at our nation's ills I guess we have to turn to the likes of Thomas Frank, whose unblinking look at our national soul can be depressing, but accurate.
It's hard not to give five stars to a book when I am in such sympathy and empathy with the author. And Ms. Jacoby is a very engaging writer, and clearly intelligent and dedicated to the pursuit of intellectual activities. So why she couldn't have taken the next step and seen more into the reasons for the problems inherent in our system (hint: read de Tocqueville) surprises me. This book is worth your time, but with a little more depth it could have been so much more.
Brilliant; makes you wish you'd paid more attention in school August 21, 2008
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.
 Nothing original in it, yet nowhere near as good as Hofstadter's book, to which Jacoby obviously wants her book compared August 4, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
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).
|
|
|
