The Age of American Unreason Quotes

“This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“The specific use of folks as an exclusionary and inclusionary signal, designed to make the speaker sound like one of the boys or girls, is symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards. Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls (unless the victims are, in fact, little girls and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in the history of the United States before 1980, and you will find not one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: 'We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain; and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Printed works do not take up mental space simply by virtue of being there; attention must be paid or their content, whether simple or complex, can never be truly assimilated. The willed attention demanded by print is the antithesis of the reflexive distraction encouraged by infotainment media, whether one is talking about the tunes on an iPod, a picture flashing briefly on a home page, a text message, a video game, or the latest offering of "reality" TV. That all of these sources of information and entertainment are capable of simultaneously engendering distraction and absorption accounts for much of their snakelike charm.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Throughout the nation, the American tendency to value education only in terms of its practical results—a phenomenon as old as the republic—reasserted itself strongly in the “no frills” decisions of many local and state school boards. That the eliminated frills had once provided children with some exposure to a higher culture than pop was a matter of little concern to the public.           A”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter writes. “Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: ‘Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!’”5”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“How pathetic it is that such products now appeal to a huge market of people who do not understand that the way to introduce children to music is by playing good music, uninterrupted by video clowns, at home; the way to introduce poetry is by reciting or reading it at bedtime; and the way to instill an appreciation of beauty is not to bombard a toddler with screen images of Monet’s Giverny but to introduce her to the real sights and scents of a garden. 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.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“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.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“On a deeper level, though, the article exemplifies the journalistic conviction that anything “controversial” is worth covering and that both sides of an issue must always be given equal space—even if one side belongs in an abnormal psychology textbook. If enough money is involved, and enough people believe that two plus two equals five, the media will report the story with a straight face, always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that “mathematicians, however, say that two plus two still equals four.” With a perverted objectivity that gives credence to nonsense, mainstream news outlets have done more to undermine logic and reason than raptureready.com could ever do.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“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.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“To add to the muddle, it seems that Americans are as ignorant and poorly educated about the particulars of religion as they are about science. A majority of adults, in what is supposedly the most religious nation in the developed world, cannot name the four Gospels or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible.19 How can citizens understand what creationism means, or make an informed decision about whether it belongs in classrooms, if they cannot even locate the source of the creation story? And how can they be expected to understand any definition of evolution if they were once among millions of children attending classes in which the word “evolution” was taboo and in which teachers suggested that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together?”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Public ignorance and anti-intellectualism are not identical, of course, but they are certainly kissing cousins. Both foster the rise of candidates who regard a broad knowledge of history, science, and culture, and a decent command of their native language as political liabilities rather than assets - and who frequently try to downplay these qualities, even if they possess them, in order to pander to a public that considers conspicuous displays of learning a form of snobbery.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“THE MIND OF THIS COUNTRY, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” In 1837, Emerson struck that note mainly as a rhetorical device, in a young nation obviously engaged in building up its intellectual capital.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“The inseparability of junk science from junk thought is evinced by the telltale marks of endemic illogic coupled, in many instances, with deliberate manipulativeness. The first and most fundamental warning sign is an inability to distinguish between coincidence and causation--a basic requirement for scientific literacy.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Public ignorance and anti-intellectualism are not identical, of course, but they are certainly kissing cousins. Both foster the rise of candidates who regard a broad knowledge of history, science, and culture, and a decent command of their native language as political liabilities rather than assets—and who frequently try to downplay these qualities, even if they possess them, in order to pander to a public that considers conspicuous displays of learning a form of snobbery.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Discussing Armageddon as if it were as real as the earth itself, the Time story was, on one level, an effort to capitalize on public fear and sell magazines. On a deeper level, though, the article exemplifies the journalistic conviction that anything “controversial” is worth covering and that both sides of an issue must always be given equal space—even if one side belongs in an abnormal psychology textbook. If enough money is involved, and enough people believe that two plus two equals five, the media will report the story with a straight face, always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that “mathematicians, however, say that two plus two still equals four.” With a perverted objectivity that gives credence to nonsense, mainstream news outlets have done more to undermine logic and reason than raptureready.com could ever do.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“The only thing that might have saved the South from falling further and further behind the rest of the nation in education in the late nineteenth century was massive federal aid—which the South would surely have suspected as a plot against its way of life even if the federal government had been willing to break with precedent and provide aid for the schooling of destitute former slaves and white sharecroppers. In the 1870s and 1880s, various legislators from New England introduced bills to provide federal aid to education for the poorest states and to hold them to some minimum, nationally determined standards. The proposals got no further in Congress than George Washington’s effort to establish a national university had in the 1790s.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“It is beyond the scope of this book to explore the full history of the discrepancy between public education in the South and the rest of the country; suffice to say that in a society based for so long on the supremacy of a planter aristocracy and belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, there was little reason to provide decent public education for poor whites, much less blacks. Why bother, when just being white—even an illiterate white—made an inhabitant of the South superior to any black? As for blacks, the public school systems of the South rarely provided any education beyond eighth grade until well into the twentieth century.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“If you want to call the designer God, that’s entirely up to you” is the intelligent design pitch—along with “teach the controversy.” The lethal inefficiencies of penguins marching across a frozen wasteland in order to reproduce, or of blood requiring the presence of numerous proteins in order to clot and prevent humans from bleeding to death, are viewed not as accidents of nature but as marvels of intention. 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.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“That their views are almost universally rejected by respected mainstream scientists is seen by the intelligent design crowd as evidence of a liberal establishment conspiracy to protect its Darwinist turf. Institute spokesmen constantly compare their contrarian faith-based researchers with once scorned geniuses like Copernicus and Galileo—a contention conveniently ignoring the fact that the Catholic Church, not other seekers of scientific truth, was the source of opposition to the heliocentric theory of the solar system.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“The film [March of the Penguins] has been endorsed by religious conservatives not only as a demonstration of God’s presence in nature but as an affirmation of “traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice, and child-rearing.” These penguin family values, however, mandate monogamy for only one reproductive cycle: mama and papa penguin, once their chick is old enough to survive on its own, flop back into the ocean and never see each other or their offspring again. In the next mating cycle, they choose new partners. But why quibble? Serial monogamy, if ordained by a supreme being, is apparently good enough.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“What is most disturbing, apart from the fact that millions of Americans already believe in the imminent end of days, is that the mainstream media confer respectability on such bizarre fantasies by taking them seriously.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Americans’ enthusiasm for apocalyptic fantasy probably owes more to movies like The Exorcist and The Omen than to the Bible itself.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“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.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“However, there are ways of trying to strangle ideas that do not involve straightforward 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.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“It is surely true that few people like to consider themselves enemies of thought and culture. Bush, after all, called himself the “education president” with a straight face while simultaneously declaring, without a trace of self-consciousness or self-criticism, that he rarely read newspapers because that would expose him to “opinions.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“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.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“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.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“The denigration of fairness has infected both political and intellectual life and has now produced a culture in which disproportionate influence is exercised by the loud and relentless voices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Is it possible that American voters have learned something about the consequences of choosing an intellectually challenged chief executive on the basis of a beer test?”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Because irreligion has been associated with foreign influences and too much learning from the earliest years of the republic, the popular American image of intellectuals as irreverent atheists has proved even more enduring then the image of intellectuals as pinkos. And although American intellectuals, like other Americans, are more likely to believe in some form of God than their European counterparts, it is perfectly true that intellectuals as a group tend to be secularists—especially when it comes to the conduct of government.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason