The Age of American Unreason in Atheists and Skeptics

Apr 04, 2011 Erin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: free-thought-skepticism

I really enjoyed this book, though I feel that it was a bit preaching to the choir. And not a happy read. I think that perhaps the level of American intelligence may not ever again even reach where it was in the 1950s.

Jacoby deftly decries the tumbling downward spiral of American education and entertainment that meet to create a perfect storm of anti-intellectualism and lack of ability for critical thinking.

Though it makes me feel helpless for our society, I think that her main remedy may be as ...more

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Jul 02, 2010 John rated it really liked it

Although I'd vaguely heard her name, I hadn't come across Jacoby's work before; now that I have, my Powells wish list has taken a walloping . . .

With a wonderfully fresh, witty prose, a lot of humour and just the right touch of fogeyishness, in The Age of American Unreason she tackles the very evident modern social problem of rapidly spreading irrationality among Americans -- and not just among what I nervously call the underclasses -- that has occurred partially but not entirely in consequence Although I'd vaguely heard her name, I hadn't come across Jacoby's work before; now that I have, my Powells wish list has taken a walloping . . .

With a wonderfully fresh, witty prose, a lot of humour and just the right touch of fogeyishness, in The Age of American Unreason she tackles the very evident modern social problem of rapidly spreading irrationality among Americans -- and not just among what I nervously call the underclasses -- that has occurred partially but not entirely in consequence of a catastrophic dumbing-down of our culture. After an introductory chapter on contemporary "just us folks" culture -- try plugging "folks" into all the relevant places in the Gettysburg Address to get a measure of the paucity of modern politicians' thought processes alongside Lincoln's -- she takes up the story at the dawn of the new nation, skipping rapidly from there to the 19th/20th centuries cusp and the impact of the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism. Here she follows the line of Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944/59), that it's meaningful to describe Social Darwinism as having been a "movement" (or an approximation thereof), rather than the more common recent assessment that Social Darwinism was a later invention applied in retrospect to a rather disparate group of philosophers. Further chapters deal with the McCarthy witch hunts, the importance of the 1950s' middlebrow culture, the gains and excesses of the 1960s (her brief drubbing of Timothy Leary on pp174-5 is alone practically worth the entrance fee), etc., before she reaches the present (and recent past), where a series of chapters examines such topics as junk thought, that "New Old-Time Religion" and the collapse of attention spans in a "Culture of Distraction". Her final two chapters are entitled "Public Life: Defining Dumbness Downward" and "Cultural Conservation".

As many will perceive, this book could have been designed specifically with moi in mind; I was joyously punching the air so often it was begging me for mercy. All of my disgustingly snobby elitisms and intellectual pretensions -- such as my boring-old-fartish preference for cultural artefacts that are worth more than the 30 seconds it takes to watch a YouTube clip -- were amply catered to (lemme tell you about the lambasting of chicklit; or just see Timothy Leary, op. cit.). But don't get the idea that I was enjoying the book just as a sort of echo chamber: I learnt a very great deal from it, in particular from its chapters on the middlebrow culture of the 1950s and on Social Darwinism (I learnt more, I think, from Jacoby's breezy roundup than I did, later, from Hofstadter's book). And her hilarious skewing of various cultural icons is just an aspect of something more important, which is her constant pattern of offering accurate insights into ideas and social pillars that we all too often regard as givens but which are revealed, under Jacoby's spotlight, to be follies.

One of many conclusions I came away with was that the oft-bemoaned political polarization in this country today is likely connected in some way (it's not a one-to-one relationship) with a polarization between those who read widely and voraciously, spending considerable portions of their time in this activity, and those who don't. Another was that the sole major trouble with this book is that the very people who might gain the most from reading it probably never will. ...more

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May 29, 2012 Mark Gowan rated it really liked it

The topic, the inability to critically think in America, has been addressed in previous books but here Jacoby presents a well-rounded evaluation of the reasons behind the ubiquitous phenomenon. Susan Jacoby was a journalist and her style of writing shows her past. The book does well in that it does not pin the lack or rational thought on any one segment of society, and for the most part is fair and balanced.

I think that Jacoby spends an inordinate amount of time on the sixties, and her jabs at ...more

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Jul 18, 2011 Charles rated it really liked it

A sober look at the decline of intellectualism in America. It doesn't offer much hope for the future. ...more

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May 06, 2008 Erin rated it liked it

Shelves: atheism-religion-reason

This is actually a great book, but it gets only 3 stars from me due to mediocre originality. Similar to other books I have read centering around the same topics, and not introducing any particularly new ideas (or any ideas that I don't already agree with). ...more

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