THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
Laments about the Decline of American Civilization are nearly as old as
America itself, suggesting that things have pretty much always been going
downhill. But even leaving aside the current president's well-attested lack of
"intellectual curiosity" there has been some recent evidence beyond
the merely anecdotal that things are
getting worse. Findings include the fact that fewer than half of all Americans
believe in evolution, while one out of four public school biology teachers
believes that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously. A 2005
assessment ranked American fifteen-year-olds twenty-fourth out of twenty nine
countries in mathematical literacy. "Literary" reading, a category
that includes Harry Potter and Harlequin, has dropped almost thirty percent in
the last ten years among those under twenty-five. Three years into the
occupation of Iraq, two-thirds of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-four
couldn't find that country on a map.
That young people feature so prominently in these statistics strengthens the
narrative of decline. It doesn't seem as though things will be getting better
anytime soon. This is a conclusion that fits with Susan Jacoby's breakdown of the two main causes
for America's entering into an age of unreason. The first of these is
technology, and in particular electronic media like television and the Internet
that have collapsed attention spans and drowned our ability to think in a flood
of images and distracting infotainment. The screen has become the natural
habitat of the human organism, the very fabric of our lives, its reach
descending to infants who are hooked before they can even walk or talk by
"educational" DVDs. Print and social interaction become the
opportunity cost, leading to a corresponding decline in our ability to think for
ourselves.
Jacoby's other villain is less obvious. It's easy to see why technology,
being market-driven, is so addictive and makes its greatest appeal to the lowest
common denominator. The resurgence of fundamentalism, defined as faith based on a
literal interpretation of the Bible, is harder to understand because it involves
such a regression. There were opiates of the people before television, but back
at the turn of the last century who would have thought Biblical inerrancy was going to
be making a
comeback? Jacoby references her great-uncle, an astronomy professor who
died in 1932, as unlikely to have "anticipated that American religious
denominations in the twenty-first century would continue to concern themselves
with the very questions he thought had been settled by the end of the nineteenth
century." But they did. Why? And specifically why in the United States,
alone among fully modernized countries? The early history of American religion
that Jacoby goes into doesn't explain such a development, but rather makes it
seem all the more perverse. It is the "greatest irony" indeed that the
separation of church and state and progressive religious liberties of the
eighteenth century resulted two centuries later in the rise of an intolerant,
anti-rational and anti-intellectual faith-based politics typical of the world's
most backward and impoverished nations. "Based on the prevalence of
anti-rational religion, a visitor from another planet would have to conclude
that the United States must be a nation of poor, hungry, and warring people who
can only look to the supernatural for a way out of their miserable earthly
existence." There may be something to that.
Of course there is nothing terribly new in any of this. Jacoby's project is to bring
books like Richard Hofstadter's classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death up to date with the latest
news from the front. But her analysis is wandering, and on many points she seems
overly grumpy and ill-informed. Most of the early historical background is
unnecessary, and she might have been better off writing a shorter book starting
with the much-lamented demise of America's "middlebrow" culture, which
is one of her most persuasive and engaging lines of attack.
We are left, finally, with the question of what is to be done. Trying to find
a silver lining, Jacoby suggests the possibility of an intellectual backlash,
led by the "revenge of the reality-based world." She thinks we might
have arrived at a "'teachable moment' - a point at which citizens are
attuned, as a result of events that cannot be ignored, to the perils of making
decisions based on faith and emotion rather than facts and logic." This
will lead to a call for better education, less dependence on technology and
religion, and more responsible government held to account by the active,
informed and knowledgeable members of a properly functioning democracy.
Which is one way things could go. Unfortunately such a path is all uphill
from here, and the perils we face may not be motivation enough. One thinks of
all the current interest in crusades to get us eating better
food. Yet even the least rational and intelligent among us know that fast food
is expensive as well as unhealthy, and that broccoli and whole wheat bread are
good for you. Just as most people now accept that human activity is having an
effect on global climate change. These are important matters bearing directly on
our own health as well as that of the planet. But ignorance and
"unreason" are not what's standing in the way of solutions, and more knowledge is not going to
change anything. We are as stupid, or as unreasonable, as we choose to be.
Notes:
Review first published March 22, 2008.
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