Customer Reviews:
 Good start, but doesn't go far enough into the reasons for our malaise August 21, 2008
2 out of 2 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
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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
5 out of 7 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).
 The Age of American Faithlessness July 18, 2008
6 out of 33 found this review helpful
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.
 Tracing the Decline of American Culture and the American Intellect July 18, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
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.
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