false 4 15 false false Thu Dec 18 16:54:53 -0800 2008 Thu Jan 01 02:47:53 -0800 2009
Then one day one of these sisters got lost in the woods, lost in the dark and impenetrable woods of ignorance and stupidity and aggressive ignorance. And hope called for her sister, but called in vain.

Perhaps I’m pitching this review at too low a level for my audience? Hard to say after reading this one. Christ, how depressing this book is. It is full of those sorts of statistics that it is best not to remember, you know, one in five biology teachers in the US believe people and dinosaurs co-habited the earth. Surely not! In my lighter moods I just assume all of these statistics are made up with the sole intent to frighten me. And so I would like to make up a statistic now that might even be true – 84% of Americans believe Charles Darwin was a Communist. Now, I’ve told you I’ve just made that up, but God, if it isn’t true, it really ought to be.

There were parts of this book that I didn’t agree with. Frankly, I’m very fond of email, it is one of my chief pleasures in the world, and so I won’t hear of anyone criticising it. Yes, it is different to letters, but that doesn’t make it worse than letters. A well composed email and a well composed letter have two words in common, and much else, and depend on the quantity and quality of thought that went into them. Bill Gates has enough to answer for, email is not one of those things.

As to the rest of the book, oh dear God. It makes me too depressed. Her fundamental premise is that there was a time in American history when there were effectively three cultures, high brow, low brow and middle brow. The middle brow was associated with the middle class, that great amorphous mass of humanity, and they would dutifully read their book of the month and buy reproductions of famous paintings and this was what sustained American intellectual life. But come the era of television with its inevitable obsession with the image and sound bite over analysis, the middle has been squeezed to the point where it now hardly exists.

I have weaned myself off most television, about the only things I watch now are Chaser’s War on Everything and Quite Interesting with my mate Stephen Fry. Chaser are handy to mention here as they do Vox Pops on the streets of America like these: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ3RrqBqk1...

And this is one of the things Jacoby gets most upset about – rather than be humiliated by this, she claims most Americans are actually proud. In this, the last few chapters of her book are the most disturbing. A long time ago I watched a television show called Judge Judy, and then I saw she wrote a book called something like, Beauty fades, dumb is forever, and this from a woman who makes a living from the dumbest medium in history. I guess that is one of my main problems with this stuff, the wanton lack of shame these idiots possess.

A large part of this book talks about biology and god – two of my favourite topics. Naturally, these are related in the USA, although, the USA is about the only place in the world where these subjects are related. There is a price to pay for deciding to be thick when it comes to theories of biology. Lysenko proved that in the Soviet Union when he plunged Soviet science into a dark age for decades with his version of ideologically palatable genetics. Having recently read books like The Botany of Desire the US probably can’t afford to be too smug about these Soviet failings.

This is not a great book, but it is a good book and a necessary book. It offers little hope and even less reason to believe things will not get worse (and they can get much, much worse) – but perhaps pointing out repeatedly that the vast majority of Americans have no idea about such basic notions about how they are governed as the separation of powers or how many Senators there are or that the language is Spanish (Mr Bush) not Mexican (a language he even speaks, for Christ sake) someone, just maybe, will be shamed into finding out that your founding fathers actually made a conscious effort not to include references to God in any of your core documents for a very good reason.

Now, before I get flamed – here in Australia we also use, as a key idea of our mode of government, the separation of powers. We had a politician here when I was growing up who effectively gave himself a knighthood, back in the days when knighthoods were still available to Australians. He decided to give himself one for his contributions to the Westminster system of Government – so a journalist asked him to explain the separation of powers. It was one of the truly great moments in the history of television, if not in the history of our young nation. That there are three powers, the administrative, the legislative and the legal, in government and that these are held separate as a bulwark against corruption and the abuse of power is such a central feature of our parliamentary system that even a Premier (even one from Queensland) should be able to give a definition off the cuff - that he proved completely incapable of answering at all made remarkable television.

It is a fact that one could all too easily replicate the Chaser videos above on the streets of Melbourne. We need to be afraid of that fact. We can’t be content with a world increasingly populated and run by people who are pig ignorant.

p.s.

Sorry, I forgot to mention - one of the really interesting things about this book, and one of the main reasons I would recommend it, is what it says about slavery. Part of her contention is that the South is still paying the price for slavery. The idea, and I will need to think about this some more, is that any system that is not based on merit tends to reinforce itself by appeals to systems of ideas other than 'reason' - as reason would tend to reject such foolishness as racism, white superiority, sexism, genderism, ageism and other such nonsense for what it is. Marx says somewhere that the white man will never be free until he frees his black cousin, and of course Marx was wrong. It is actually much worse than this. It is not just freedom that is denied, but even the rationalism that would enable us to conceive a better life that is denied all of us.

Reason, intelligence, equality - they actually are that important. ]]>