The Age of American Unreason

December 17, 2007
Inspired by Richard Hofstadter's trenchant 1963 cultural analysis Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
, Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
) has produced an engaging, updated and meticulously thought-out continuation of her academic idol's research. Dismayed by the average U.S. citizen's political and social apathy and the overall “crisis of memory and knowledge involving everything about the way we learn and think,” Jacoby passionately argues that the nation's current cult of unreason has deadly and destructive consequences (the war in Iraq, for one) and traces the seeds of current anti-intellectualism (and its partner in crime, antirationalism) back to post-WWII society. Unafraid of pointing fingers, she singles out mass media and the resurgence of fundamentalist religion as the primary “vectors” of anti-intellectualism, while also having harsh words for pseudoscientists. Through historical research, Jacoby breaks down popular beliefs that the 1950s were a cultural wasteland and the 1960s were solely a breeding ground for liberals. Though sometimes partial to inflated prose (“America's endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism”), Jacoby has assembled an erudite mix of personal anecdotes, cultural history and social commentary to decry America's retreat into “junk thought.”

Starred review from February 1, 2008
Many writers have parsed the dumbing down of American culture, but none bring quite the deep historical perspective, razor-sharp analysis, well-calibrated moral compass, and stinging wit to the subject that Jacoby does. Building on her last book, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004), Jacoby presents a take-no-prisoners inquiry into the history and consequences of American anti-intellectualism. Alarmed by the decline in reading (a practice indispensable to intellectual life), the debasement of the nations speech, and the education systems failure to teach essential facts and critical thinking, Jacoby looks back to the postwar middlebrow culture of aspiration and redraws the map of the epoch-launching 1960s: while the counterculture attracted the limelight, religious fundamentalists constructed the foundation for todays Christian Right, television began to spread its gospel of passivity and consumerism, and the commodification of youth culture was launched. Jacoby is at once reasoned and scathing in her assessment of the damage done by the fundamentalist war against evolution, her protest against the malignant fog of infotainment, and her condemnation of the plague of ignorance. Electric with fearless interpretation and fueled by passionate concern, Jacobys goading portrait of a society squandering its powers is brilliant, incendiary, and, one hopes, corrective.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)