The Age of American Unreason
by Susan Jacoby
Pantheon, 384 pp., $26
American anti-intellectualism is a venerable and much lamented phenomenon, as well as a paradox, considering the American respect for education and the resources devoted to it. Anti-intellectualism also seems incongruous with American accomplishments in science and technology.
However, one may separate the veneration of education from the popular suspicion of intellectuals. These suspicions have coexisted for a long time with the respect for education and the determination to make its blessings widely available. This is the key question raised in this timely volume discussing
why the United States has proved more susceptible than other economically advanced nations to the toxic combination of forces that are the enemies of intellect, learning and reason. . . . What accounts for the powerful American attraction to values that seem so at odds not only with intellectual modernism and science but with the old Enlightenment rationalism that made such a vital contribution to the founding of our nation?
Susan Jacoby seeks the answer by placing these cultural-intellectual trends in a historical context, with special reference to the part played by religion, the ideas of the Enlightenment and social Darwinism, but not the
ideals of equality.
The suspicion of intellectuals is inseparable from American egalitarianism. They have been widely perceived as a group that looks down on ordinary mortals who don't have their educational credentials and vocabulary. Intellectuals have also been criticized for being removed from the rest of society by their arrogance and elitism, preoccupied with abstruse ideas couched in impenetrable jargon and of little use to regular people. Lack of common sense, impracticality, and a foolish idealism complete these negative stereotypes.
It has often been suggested that anti-intellectual sentiments follow from the nature of a commercial society that does not appreciate reflection, or the pursuit of higher ideals which don't yield tangible benefit or profit. In more recent times, Jacoby suggests, anti-intellectualism also fed on the conflation of intellectuals with the radical left, and she finds it difficult to understand why this identification persists well after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But pro-Soviet or pro-communist leanings do not exhaust the range of attitudes intellectuals display as tokens of alienation which invite popular misgivings.
Jacoby argues that anti-intellectualism--including anti-rationalism, disdain for science, and popular ignorance--has catastrophically increased during recent decades. This trend finds prominent expression in the decline of educational standards, the increasing dominance of popular culture (especially "the shift from print to video culture"), and even in political discourse. Her indictment of what has come to pass for higher education is clear and unequivocal:
Anyone who takes more than a cursory look at the vast array of college curriculum offerings on popular culture, from "fat studies" to in-depth examination of television sitcoms, knows how far standards have been lowered. . . . How can it be that American culture has so debased itself that institutions calling themselves universities, and academic bodies calling themselves English departments actually give course credits for writing "fear journals"? . . . It is now possible at many institutions of so-called higher learning for a student to receive a degree in psychology without having taken a mid-level biology course; for an African-American studies major to graduate without reading the basic texts of the "white" Enlightenment; for a business major to graduate without having studied any literature after her freshman year. . . .
All of these college graduates, should they choose to become teachers at any level . . . will pass on their narrowness and ignorance to the next generation.
Jacoby admits to a "somewhat jaundiced view of the sixties youth culture" and recognizes that the rejection of "the idea of aesthetic hierarchy is unquestionably one of the most powerful cultural legacies of the sixties." Yet she resists a full recognition of the political roots of these attitudes in radical leftist egalitarianism, and the fashionable irrationality of the period.
