The Age of American Unreason | 
| Author: Susan Jacoby
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  65 reviews
Sales Rank: 486
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.6
ISBN: 0375423745
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.91
EAN: 9780375423741
ASIN: 0375423745
Publication Date: February 12, 2008
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 60 more reviews...
 Jacoby reveals herself May 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The Age of American Unreason" tells us far more about its author, Susan Jacoby, than it says about our recent US history, which she describes in her own selected terms. Her put-down characterizations of our society are as largely being middlebrow, anti-intellectual, and fundamentalist. These are her own designations of the primary themes of our US society. Our society has succeeded in many, many ways in spite of her observations. Still from her New York based pseudo-intellectual society, we are largely social and cultural failures. Bah-humbug, to use a literary phrase, the failure in analysis is hers, as is very well documented in her book.
The book is not recommended for anyone under 40, who has not directly experienced the recent historic successes of our society for the most of its citizens. People over 70 may enjoy critiquing her basically ultra-liberal commentary on our society. The book study group which I lead has very much enjoyed doing so.
 A worthwhile read May 9, 2008
Susan Jacoby takes us on an interesting and cutting rant on why we've become such a nation of imbeciles. Though not everyone might agree with everything she says I found most of it to be true. In an era in which we seem to be failing at everything or falling behind the rest of the world Jacoby offers a foundational reason for why we are so dumb and what it is costing us.
 Great idea, poor execution May 9, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
The premise of this book immediately grabbed my attention. The idea that the collective American public is not as educated or informed or able to adequately reason for themselves as they should be (and historically have been to some extent) could make an excellent book. Unfortunately, this isn't it.
The author makes some good points when talking about the "average" citizen's woeful lack of basic knowledge in fields such as mathematics, geography, culture, and history. Illustrating the poor way the media present news (in part due to reporters' inability to understand statistics or basic science), resulting in misleading - whether intentional or not - and plain wrong impressions being touted to the public was well-presented. And she verges on approaching the book's potential when exploring modern America's knowledge of and views on such topics as evolution and religion.
However, as the pages turn, it becomes increasingly obvious that the author's true complaint is NOT with modern America's unReason, but with its unLiberalness. She adopts the current Democrat philosophy that anyone who has voted Republican in the past forty years has done so strictly because they were too stupid to know any better. She bemoans the right-wing's attack on the "elite," then proceeds to demonstrate precisely what those conservatives resent about know-it-alls who have so much knowledge & breeding that their view (in their not-so-humble opinion) is the only conceivable correct one on every issue. Further, she ignores (when convenient)her own observation of the old saw that coincidence does not equal causality, even while criticizing those she disagrees with of doing the same thing.
One of the weakest sections is her attack on new media, rehashing the usual liberal philosophy that the plethora of choices before us these days cannot possibly be a good thing - we must be told (by her & her ilk) what is good for us and what is acceptable to read, view, listen to, or surf. Mostly read - she is completely intolerant of anyone who derives information or entertainment from any source other than books, And not just any books, but "the classics."
This book is very readable, and while many of her proposed solutions to real and imagined problems were quite unacceptable to a Libertarian like me, it was interesting to see just how the modern-day "liberal elite" truly feel about us commoners. Inasmuch as my breeding, education, and politics would leave much to be desired in the eyes of this author, it was nice to get a glimpse into that mindset which I call closed, and she would no doubt label "above my ability to comprehend."
 Food for thought, but not junk thought May 8, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
It's not often that a book delivers more than expected, but that's what this book did for me. For a long time, I've shared the author's concerns about the struggle between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism in the U.S., and her recent article in the Washington Post on the subject prompted me to pick up this book. I was surprised and pleased to find that the first half of the book traces the history of this intellectual struggle in America all the way back to revolutionary times. This provides an excellent background for the current events discussion that follows. As a result, I find myself in disagreement with reviewers who said the book was too long, and the history should have been left out. That outlook seems to demonstrate some of the very points the author is making.
It's no secret that conservatives and religious fundamentalists will not like the way they are portrayed in the book. But Jacoby can be equally scathing with liberals when she feels it's appropriate.
Not everyone will appreciate Jacoby's style, which mixes historical information, data from surveys and studies, and personal anecdotes - but I liked it. Sort of like a left-leaning version of George Will. The author is 10 years older than I am, so there's enough overlap in our growing-up experiences that I could relate to her stories about coming of age in the late 1950s through the early 1970s and her analyses of those times. (From her description of "middlebrow culture," I think I was probably lower-middlebrow.) On the other hand, Jacoby is uncomfortable with many aspects of the digital/video culture that are less bothersome, and in some cases eagerly embraced, among people my age and younger. Nevertheless, she makes important points about the proliferation of "junk thought" and the difficulty in balancing the benefits and hazards of "screen media," especially for young people who are still developing their powers of judgment and may inadvertently bypass other important avenues to American and world culture. Having taught university students for several years, I think she hits very close to the mark.
This is a good read on an important topic, valuable even if you don't agree with the author's position all the time. Jacoby doesn't offer a recipe to fix everything, but as she clearly points out at the end of the book, there are no simple remedies, and she does not presume to have all the answers.
Not for libertarians -- this book is an assault on reason and truth! May 6, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book would be quite funny if it weren't so frustrating. Author Susan Jacoby accurately depicts the sorry state of intellectualism in America and properly castigates the "videoization" of the culture. Baby Einstein videos are one particular, and particularly deserving, target of her wrath. But time and time again, Ms. Jacoby is guilty of the intellectual sloth she accuses "conservatives" of.
She (correctly) condemns conservatives for being close minded, but then shamelessly insists that the views of conservatives (i.e. Creationism) should be dismissed out of hand and given no hearing. She criticizes conservatives for name-calling and mischaracterization of their opponents, but she routinely does the same to religious conservatives and others with whom she disagrees.
But what ultimately annoyed and infuriated me to the extent that I had to give up on the book was Ms. Jacoby's bloodthirsty anti-intellectual statism and historical revisionism. She spends pages correctly evaluating the public schools as a mess, but then blames their sorry state on a lack of federal control. You see, the simple "folks" (a word she quite wittily assails) in the South and Midwest cannot be trusted to fund and operate their own centers of learning -- they need an Imperial government in Washington, D.C. to do it for them! And of course, a president like George W. Bush could never be elected again in this fantasy, I would suppose.
Tellingly, Ms. Jacoby evidences a horrible misunderstanding of American history, particularly the views of the Founders, which can only be achieved by a statist public education. You see, in Ms. Jacoby's perverse world of anti-truth, federally-funded public education was always part of the Founders' plans -- or at least the "good" ones. Sadly, those dastardly "conservatives" foiled the centralist plot. She laments that the uneducated and illiberal George Washington's attempt to posthumously establish a national(ist) university was foiled -- not by laissez-faire classical liberals in her contention, but by religionists who were wary of government supplanting their role in education. You see, to Ms. Jacoby, the Founders were all secularists with a 1965 view of the First Amendment -- despite the inconvenient truth that several states had official state religions at the time of the Constitution's ratification. She also firmly believes that the Founders were for "democracy," when in truth, the word was an epithet in the Founding Era. This shoddy scholarship abounds and firmly establishes Ms. Jacoby as an anti-intellectual herself.
The only thing this book succeeded in doing for me was demonstrating, once and for all, that the Secular Left is as statist and anti-intellectual as the Religious Right. Susan Jacoby's religious faith in the federal government and centralized political dictatorship is just as idiotic as fundamentalist Christianity. Maybe even more so.
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