The Age of American Unreason
110 quotes
Biography
Susan Jacoby is an American author. Her 2008 book about American anti-intellectualism, The Age of American Unreason, was a New York Times best seller.
"It is difficult to suppress the fear that the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to functional democracy. During the past four decades, America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic. This new form of anti-rationalism, at odds not only with the nation’s heritage of eighteenth-century Enlightenment reason but with modern scientific knowledge, has propelled a surge of anti-intellectualism capable of inflicting vastly greater damage than its historical predecessors inflicted on American culture and politics. Indeed, popular anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism are now synonymous."
"One of the most remarkable characteristics of America’s revolutionary generation was the presence and influence of so many genuine intellectuals (although the term had not been coined in the eighteenth century). Men of extraordinary learning and intellect were disproportionately represented among the politicians who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and led the republic during its formative decades."
"The denigration of fairness has affected both political and intellectual life and has now produced a culture in which a disproportionate influence is exercised by the loud and relentless voices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another."
"Americans are alone in the developed world in their view of evolution by means of natural selection as “controversial” rather than as settled mainstream science."
"This level of scientific illiteracy provides fertile soil for political appeals based on sheer ignorance."
"The current American relationship to reading and writing by contrast, is best described not as illiterate but as a-literate.…In this increasingly a-literate America, not only the enjoyment of reading but critical thinking itself is at risk."
"The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between."
"One important element of the resurgent anti-intellectualism in American life is the popular equation of intellectualism with a liberalism supposedly at odds with traditional American values. The entire concept is summed up by the right-wing rubric “the elites.”"
"The unwillingness to give a hearing to contradictory viewpoints, or to imagine that one might learn anything from an ideological or cultural opponent, represents a departure from the best side of American popular and elite intellectual traditions."
"In today’s America, intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, whether on the left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo. This obduracy is both a manifestation of mental laziness and the essence of anti-intellectualism."
"However, there are ways of trying to strangle ideas they do not involve straight forward attempts at censorship or intimidation. The suggestion that there is something sinister, even un-American, about intense devotion to ideas, reason, logic, evidence, and precise language is one of them."
"The explicit distinction between those who are fit only to study and those who are history’s actors not only expresses contempt for intellectuals but also denigrates anyone who requires evidence, rather than power and emotion, as justification for public policy."
"It is not that television, or any of its successors in the world of video, was designed as an enemy of active intellectual endeavor but that the media, while they may not actually be the message, inevitably reshape content to fit a form that subordinates both the spoken and the written word to visual image. In doing so, the media restrict their audience’s intellectual parameters not only by providing information in a highly condensed form but by filling time—a huge amount of time—that used to be occupied by engagement with the written word."
"Well-off professionals, including a fair number of intellectuals, have proved especially vulnerable to the bromide that there is no harm, and may be a great benefit, from video consumption as a way of life—as long as the videos are “educational.” But medical research does not support the comforting notion that a regular diet of videos, educational or otherwise, is good for the developing brains of infants and toddlers. A growing body of pediatric research does indicate that frequent exposure to any form of video in the early years of life produces older children with shortened attention spans. It does not matter whether the images are produced by a television network, a film studio, or a computer software company: what matters is the amount of time children spend staring at a monitor. The American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that there is no safe level of viewing for children under age two, but whatever the Academy may recommend, the battle against videos for infants is already lost."
"It is a fine thing for tired parents to gain a quiet hour for themselves by mesmerizing small children with videos—who would be stuffy enough to suggest that the occasional hour in front of animals dancing to Tchaikovsky can do a baby any real harm?—But let us not delude ourselves that education is what is going on. Or rather, education is going on—but it is the kind of education that wires young brains to focus attention on prepackaged visual stimuli, accompanied by a considerable amount of noise."
"Memory, which depends on the capacity to absorb ideas and information through exposition and to connect new information to an established edifice of knowledge, is one of the first victims of video culture. Without memory, judgments are made on the unsound basis of the most recent bit of half-digested information."
"The second major spur to anti-intellectualism during the past forty years has been the resurgence of fundamentalist religion. Modern media, with their overt and covert appeal to emotion rather than reason, or ideally suited to assist in the propagation of a form of faith that stands opposed to most of the great rationalist insights they have transformed Western civilization since the beginning of the Enlightenment."
"The American marketing of the Apocalypse is a multi-media production, capitalizing on fundamentalism and paranoid superstition."
"Misguided objectivity, particularly with regard to religion, ignores the willed ignorance that is one of the defining characteristics of fundamentalism. One of the most powerful taboos in American life concerns speaking ill of anyone else’s faith—an injunction rooted in confusion over the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions."
"The perfect storm over evolution is a perfect example of the new anti-intellectualism in action, because it owes its existence not only to a renewed religious fundamentalism but to the widespread failings of American public education and the scientific illiteracy of much of the media."
"A scientist looks at emperor penguins and sees a classic example of random mutation, natural selection, and adaptation to the harshest climate on earth. A believer in creationism or intelligent design, however, looks at the same facts and sees not the inefficiency but the “miracle” of the survival of the species. Exactly why an “intelligent designer” would place the breeding grounds seventy miles from the feeding grounds or, for that matter, would install any species in such an inhospitable climate, are questions never addressed by those who see God’s hand at the helm."
"The obvious question of why a guiding intelligence would want to make things so difficult for his or her creations is never asked because it cannot be answered."
"“One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime,” Moyers said, “is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seats of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.”"
"Whatever the denomination or religion, fundamentalism has always been defined by its refusal to adapt to any secular knowledge that conflicts with its version of revealed religious truth; that refusal, in science and the humanities, has been the most enduring and powerful strand in American anti-intellectualism."
"The American religious landscape at the conclusion of the Revolution was pluralistic and somewhat chaotic: it bore little resemblance to the portrait of a devout, churchgoing America that the religious right loves to paint today."