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| Author: Susan Jacoby
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  99 reviews
Sales Rank: 3658
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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| Customer Reviews:
 I thought the idea was to apply reason July 18, 2008
20 out of 21 found this review helpful
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.
 A Blow to the Use of Reason July 15, 2008
6 out of 12 found this review helpful
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.
 CHILD ABUSE SURVIVORS BEWARE July 10, 2008
4 out of 11 found this review helpful
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.
 History of the United States, Volume II July 7, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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 Contemporary Decline of American Culture As Noted by Susan Jacoby July 3, 2008
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
"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.
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