How down have we dumbed?

SUSAN JACOBY (Chris Ramirez)

Email|Print|Single Page| Text size – + By John Dicker

March 30, 2008

The Age of American Unreason
By Susan Jacoby
Pantheon, 356 pp., $26

Recently added to the list of impending dooms - global warming, a retro-1930s economy, seven more months of sleeping children in campaign ads - come stern warnings from The New Yorker and The New Republic on the death of the printed word. Be it newspapers, magazines, or an archaic instrument called the book, Americans in general, and young ones in particular, are bypassing them with alarming consistency. Novels and serious nonfiction rarely fly off the shelves at our waning independent bookstores. Newspaper circulation is declining; book review sections like the one you're reading are prompting some critics to consider more relevant lines of work like, say, barrel staving. Couple this with the ascendancy of the ever-streaming blogosphere, wireless devices that seem to do all but direct a funeral, and we've entered perilous times indeed.

The vulgarians may be at the gates, but they're "2 bize txtn" or playing water polo on their Wiis to prevent our intellectual culture from plunging further into the muck. That's sort of how Susan Jacoby sees it in her engaging and unrepentantly (and often unbearably) crotchety history of American anti-intellectualism, "The Age of American Unreason."

Part intellectual history, part polemic, "American Unreason" laments the demise of our intellectual life and catalogs the ways it has been assaulted from above and below. None of it, mind you, springs solely from the usual suspects like rock music, an unfortunate genre of television, or some inevitable moral free fall. Rather, its roots are embedded in our republic. This is the most substantive and interesting angle of this polemic. Consider as Jacoby does the failure of our Founding Fathers to set a national educational curriculum in the Constitution, allowing states to set standards that vary with the region's political tide. Couple this with the fact that in a republic of yeoman farmers where the myth and reality of the self-made man hold sway, those inclined toward ideas for their own sake are often viewed with suspicion at best.

The McCarthy era conflated intellectuals, especially those in the academy, with Marxism and communism. This charge has managed to stick well into the post-Cold War era even while competition for spots in elite colleges, those reviled institutions of leftist brainwashing, has never been fiercer. Such ironies are not lost on the author. What Jacoby does not fully explore are the ways in which many intellectuals seem content in their own irrelevance.

Jacoby is a delight to read when she's playing the part of intellectual historian turned polemicist. Take her evisceration of straw-dog arguments of the right, particularly the shared notion among conservative revisionists that the movements of the 1960s were a unified resistance. She's equally enjoyable taking down those on the left who would have future generations believe that Manhattan Stalinists of the '40s and '50s exerted the kind of cultural clout now enjoyed only by the likes of Time Warner.

It's not so much Jacoby's bipartisan approach that's troubling. Rather, it's her willingness to ignore distinctions among contemporary culture makers when it suits her purposes. Her lumping of the entire blogosphere as the enemies of intellectual life or mere peddlers of fluff reveals little more than her inability to sift through URLs. For every celebrity-gawking site, there's smart analysis from the likes of Talking Points Memo, the Daily Dish, or, in the case of the Huffington Post, both. It's certainly not on the scale of Lionel Trilling, but it's hard to dismiss as tripe.

On a similar note, when Jacoby veers from the road of taking down pundits, her anecdotes are wildly unconvincing. For instance, her claim that today's college students no longer stay up late discussing Tolstoy is based on a night spent at a Michigan university in which she encountered two students atomized in their iPods.

Ultimately Jacoby's sins of distinction blurring can be overlooked for the saliency of her larger point, which is that the American hostility toward ideas and those who posit them is a national vulnerability. Witness the nuance-free foreign policy of our current president. Jacoby yearns for the era of the great American middlebrow, The New Yorker magazine, and the Book-of-the-Month Club.

But has it really gone away? My subscription still arrives, and David Remnick's weekly rarely disappoints. Other examples that we're not falling off a cultural cliff? Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" was an Oprah's Book Club pick and a success with critics; many of 2008's Oscar-nominated films, if not blockbusters, enjoyed similar commercial and critical respect. While the fruits of wireless technology distract us and celebrotainment is nothing to celebrate, neither have we became the Homer Simpsons of Jacoby's imagination. The extent to which we will set limits on the communications grid remains to be seen. Tune in, turn on, and drop out is an anachronism that may require some modification, but it's likely to be revisited in the iPhone era. Whether that will raise our collective middlebrow remains to be seen.

John Dicker is the author of "The United States of Wal-Mart." He lives in Denver.