HOW THE ANTICHRIST TOOK THE MINDS AND HEARTS OF AMERICANS
Re: America closes the book on intelligence by Laura Miller
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/02/15/susan_jacoby/index.html
http://www.salvationscience.com

"Our country is barely smarter than a fifth grader -- no wonder it's
drowning in religious fundamentalism and political ideologues on
both sides", argues Susan Jacoby.

A Review of Susan Jacoby's writings by Laura Miller

Feb. 15, 2008 | For an author of serious nonfiction, success can
lead to some surprisingly disheartening encounters with the reading
public. Susan Jacoby's 2004 history of American
secularism, "Freethinkers," was among the first in the recent wave
of welcome books protesting the growing influence of religion in
civic life, and universities and other institutions soon began
asking her to deliver lectures. Jacoby jumped at the chance, only to
find that wherever she spoke, "my audiences were composed almost
entirely of people who already agreed with me." Instead of
participating in the great public debate that she envisions as
central to American culture, she was preaching to the choir. What's
more, she learned, "serious conservatives report exactly the same
experience on the lecture circuit."

A couple of years later, put up in a student dormitory after giving
another talk, she found her environs "eerily quiet." Gone were
the "high level of noise and laughter," the "late-night and all-
night" conversations she remembered from her own undergraduate
years. Instead, everybody was "on line or in an iPod cocoon." To top
it all off, when she was invited back to her alma mater, Michigan
State University, to receive an honorary award, she struck up a
conversation with an honors student in the College of Communications
Arts, only to find that the young woman had never even heard of
Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats. Apparently, even when
students felt like talking they didn't know enough about their own
disciplines to be worth talking to.

Such are the little disillusionments that vex a public
intellectual's soul. Furthermore, as Jacoby sees it, they are
telling the same story as those shocking polls that show most
Americans can't list the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment or
find Iraq on a map. All of it confirms her suspicion that "the
scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant
and varied intellectual life so essential to a functioning
democracy."

Richard Hofstadter's 1963 classic, "Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life" (a clear inspiration for this book), described anti-
intellectualism as "older than our national identity" and deeply
rooted in our history. Jacoby thinks the old American distrust of
those who devote themselves to "ideas, reason, logic, evidence, and
precise language" has been worsened by the conditions of
contemporary life. There is, she writes, "a new species of semi-
conscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant
popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no
room for contemplation or logic." People never read books, they
can't concentrate on anything significant for more than a minute or
two, and as a result they don't really think anymore. Lulled by
the "pacifier" of "infotainment," their civic and political
decisions emerge from a confused welter of laziness, reckless
emotion and prejudice.

The chief manifestations of this newly virulent irrationality are
the rise of fundamentalist religion and the flourishing of junk
science and other forms of what Jacoby calls "junk thought." The
mentally enfeebled American public can now be easily manipulated by
flimsy symbolism, whether it's George W. Bush's bumbling, accented
speaking style (labeling him as a "regular guy" despite his highly
privileged background) or the successful campaign by right-wing
ideologues to smear liberals as snooty "elites." Unable to grasp
even the basic principles of statistics or the scientific method,
Americans gullibly buy into a cornucopia of bogus notions, from
recovered memory syndrome to intelligent design to the anti-
vaccination movement.

"The Age of American Unreason" veers unevenly between well-argued
debunkings of assorted crackpot claims and litanies of gripes that
come dangerously close to diatribes. A former reporter for the
Washington Post and program director of the Center for Inquiry-New
York City, a rationalist think tank, Jacoby can certainly formulate
concise ripostes to the likes of former Harvard president Lawrence
H. Summers, who suggested that the underrepresentation of women
among the top ranks of the hard sciences must be due to innate
gender traits. "What places Summers' speculative statements within
the realm of junk thought," she writes, "is not the idea that there
might be some differences in aptitude between men and women but his
unsupported conclusion that such disparities if they exist, are more
important than the very different cultural messages girls and boys
receive about whether they can expect to succeed in science."

Jacoby takes care to point out that the political right and left
have both indulged in anti-rationalism, and this is one of her
book's strengths. Intellectuals themselves often come in for a
drubbing at her hands. She reproaches those deluded American
leftists who defended Soviet communism in the 1930s and '40s, long
after it had become obvious that Stalin and his successors presided
over a brutally oppressive regime. (She also points out that the
influence of such figures on American culture at large has been
vastly overstated by both their friends and their enemies.) She
quotes goofy feminist theorists from the 1980s, academics who
likened Isaac Newton's laws of mechanics to a "rape manual" and
called Beethoven's Ninth Symphony "horrifyingly violent."

Although Jacoby scolds culture warriors like Allan Bloom, author
of "The Closing of the American Mind," for both misunderstanding and
misrepresenting the upheavals on American campuses during the 1960s
and '70s, she also deplores many of the leftist remedies for those
conflicts. Women's and African-American studies departments, she
argues, only "ghettoize" the subject matter they champion, and
further Balkanize and provinicalize university students. Not
coincidentally, the creation of those departments generated more
faculty jobs without pressuring traditional professors to reassess
their curricula: "Too many white professors today could not care
less whether most white students are exposed to black American
writers, and some of the multicultural empire builders are equally
willing to sign off on a curriculum for African-American studies
majors that does not expose them to Henry James and Edith Wharton."

Jacoby, who covered education for the Post during the '60s, sees
herself as a "a cultural conservationist, committed, in the strict
dictionary sense, to the preservation of culture." She believes in
the classics (whether of literature, music or the visual arts), and
at the same time sees no reason why they can't be expanded to
include great works by people (women and racial minorities)
previously excluded from the canon. It's not a zero-sum game. Hers
is a moderate, sensible, well-founded position, shared by many
Americans, yet it somehow rarely got voiced amid the raging
hyperbole of the culture wars.

Next page: Most Americans don't even understand the religion they
defend

Fundamentalism, however, is the real red-hot center of American
irrationality, and Jacoby calls religious assaults on the theory of
evolution "a microcosm of all the cultural forces responsible for
the prevalence of unreason in American society today." She notes
that in the summer of 2005 nearly two-thirds of Americans told
pollsters that they believed creationism should be taught in schools
alongside Darwinian evolution. The poll revealed what Jacoby
characterizes as "an intellectual disaster as grave as the human and
natural disaster unfolding in New Orleans" at the same time.

It's hard to quarrel with her on that one, and compounding the mess
is the fact that most Americans don't even understand the religion
they want to see defended: "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." For me, this startling information immediately brought to
mind Stephen Colbert's interview with Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland
on "The Colbert Report." Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would
require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of
Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn't actually
list the commandments he's fighting to enshrine. (Of course, the
bill, a flagrant violation of the separation of church and state,
was proposed only so that it could be shot down, thereby fueling the
Christian right's preposterous claims of persecution.)

Jacoby would no doubt find it depressing that I should be reminded
of a TV show at this juncture. She sees the triumph of video-based
culture as the primary source of America's mental decay. Yes, she
admits that "screen media" has "many intellectually useful
components," but believes that "it is on balance an unfriendly
habitat not only for serious high-level intellectual endeavor but
also for the more ordinary exchanges of ideas that enliven and
elevate culture at every level." The more people watch -- or IM, or
e-mail, or play video games -- the less they read and converse.

This argument, which soon bogs down in too-sweeping indictments of
TV and the Internet, is the weakest portion of "The Age of American
Unreason," and Jacoby (to her credit) knows it. She laments the fact
that "aggrieved eulogies for print culture" have become so
commonplace that no one pays them any mind. Still, a writer who has
just come from ridiculing Diana Trilling and David Brooks for
ludicrously exaggerating the influence of old left intellectuals
ought to know better than to write a sentence like: "It has now
become more insulting to call someone a Luddite than to call her a
cheat, a drug addict, or a slut."

I don't entirely disagree with Jacoby on many of these points. As a
literary critic, I too worry about the dwindling numbers of
Americans who read for pleasure. Furthermore, like Jacoby (and Caleb
Crain, in a recent New Yorker article about the prospect of a "post-
literate" America), I believe that reading fosters a particular
mental stamina, discipline, creativity and flexibility that can't be
acquired from other media. In a future dominated by complex social
systems, technology and science, only people who can think in this
fashion will have enough understanding of how the world works to
actually run it. And to remain truly democratic, America should be
made up of citizens who are able to think that way.

Nevertheless, Jacoby has a hard time separating her legitimate
worries about America's eroding attention span from simple
disagreements of taste and generational preferences. She dismisses
certain forms of popular art out of hand, automatically presuming
that her readers will agree. But I, for one, see no reason why
newspaper articles on "the newest trends in hip-hop" should be
written off as no more than craven pandering to distractible young
readers; the subject is interesting, and worthy, in its own right. I
might not equate Bob Dylan with Milton, as some overzealous rock
critics have apparently done, but I'm also aware that the pop fluff
of one era (the operas of Puccini, for example) often becomes the
classical repertoire of the next. When Jacoby hauls out that old,
shopworn story about crowds gathering at the docks to grab the
latest installment of a Dickens novel, she's not accounting for the
fact that Dickens had about the same artistic status in his day as
the creators of "The Sopranos" have in ours -- and I'm not sure that
the Dickens novel in question ("The Old Curiosity Shop") emerges as
the better work in the comparison.

Next page: Is "30 Rock" automatically a lesser creation than an old
play written by a man who wore a wig?

Recognizing the merits of James Baldwin need not detract from the
admiration due to Shakespeare, a sentiment Jacoby herself would
probably second. Just so, valuing the wit of "The Colbert Report" or
the intricacies of "The Wire" doesn't automatically imply a
depreciation of "War and Peace." Each form has its own artistry and
makes its own demands on creator and audience, and new forms (such
as the novel in the 18th century) arise to speak to new audiences in
a new way. Jacoby rightly considers Al Gore to be an example of the
sort of serious, studious public figure who gets unfairly written
off as "arrogant and patronizing" in the dumbed-down politics of
today. But she carefully avoids acknowledging that Gore managed to
break through the public's indifference to the issue of global
warming by figuring out how to present his ideas visually, first in
a PowerPoint presentation, and later in a movie, demonstrating that
it's possible to do justice to complex issues in those forms.

Likewise, Colbert's deft dispatch of Westmoreland (getting the man
to betray himself, no less) conveys the sleaziness of this type
of "values" crusader more persuasively and conclusively than any
number of written jeremiads by left-wing commentators. Is a top-
drawer television series like "30 Rock" automatically a lesser
creation than, say, the live performance of a play by Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, simply because the first is TV and the second is
theater, the first filmed and broadcast, and the second written by a
man who wore a powdered wig? You can waste hours parsing the
relative greatness of various artworks in different media, and that
would be time much better spent watching "Project Runway."

The real problem with TV, and to a lesser extent the Internet, is
that while some of it is excellent, much of it is not -- and all of
it has become ubiquitous. As Jacoby astutely points out, reading
does not "constitute a continuous invasion of individual thought and
consciousness ... 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." Unless
you make a point of turning off the TV and putting the computer to
sleep, they can easily fill up your day and mind, gradually
atrophying the mental muscles uniquely exercised by reading.
Abstaining, for many people, turns out to be as easy as bypassing a
cupboard stocked with chips and cookies and snacking on carrot
sticks instead. To hope that the American public will pick the
nutritious but difficult over the easy and tasty is to bet on a
losing horse.

No wonder that the concluding chapter of Jacoby's book is so gloomy.
All we have to count on, she writes, is the fortitude of "parents
and citizens determined to preserve a saving remnant of those who
prize memory and true learning above all else. Adult self control,
not digital parental controls, is the chief requirement for the
transmission of individual and historical memory" to the next
generation.

But wait -- is it really that bad? The current crop of leading
presidential candidates not only aren't dumb, they aren't even
trying to appear dumb, apart from occasionally droppin' their Gs.
The only candidate who professes not to believe in evolution, Mike
Huckabee, has fallen behind a front-runner, John McCain, who is
widely disliked by fundamentalists.

If TV and the Internet (more prevalent now than ever) are supposedly
rotting our brains, turning them into mulch for the poisonous growth
that is fundamentalism, what seems to have reversed that trend, even
if only temporarily? Perhaps we're better able to assess
the "reality-based" consequences of putting a fundamentalist in the
White House than we once appeared to be. The problem is, when push
comes to shove, we don't always feel like facing reality.

The missing factor in Jacoby's formula is just that: In addition to
being capable of rationality, we also have to want to be rational.
Intellect, copious reading and education by themselves are no
guarantee of reasonable or even sensible behavior, as the neo-
conservative true believers responsible for the Iraq war have amply
demonstrated. Yet this is one aspect of American religiosity that
doesn't seem to interest Jacoby much. In considering the Second
Great Awakening, the outburst of religious revivalism that swept
through the nation in the early 19th century, she kicks around some
possible causes (the "unsettled" social conditions following the
Revolution, the difficulties of life on the frontiers, etc.) in a
desultory fashion. Then she writes, "in any event, the reasons why
fundamentalism triumphed over 'rational' religion in the American
spiritual bazaar are less important than the fact that
fundamentalism did succeed in capturing the hearts of large numbers
of Americans."

It's hard to imagine what could be more central to Jacoby's subject
than the motivations of those Americans who chose what she describes
as "willed ignorance" over reason. Isn't it likely that the recent
resurgence of that ignorance arises from similar needs and desires?
If there were some other way to address those needs (or fears),
perhaps fundamentalism would be less appealing, and perhaps reason
could be made more so. However, that would require admitting that
people who are capable of reason will nevertheless sometimes pick an
irrational course of action or belief. Rational people do this all
the time, of course -- even intellectuals. But rationality has its
own ideology, and one of its tenets is the conviction that, if given
a fair chance, reason must always carry the day.

If you believe that, then you can only arrive at one conclusion,
Jacoby's: It's not that Americans won't be rational, but that we
can't. There's enough evidence of our poor schooling, susceptibility
to pseudoscientific hucksterism and general cluelessness to justify
that opinion, to be sure. But if that's really the case, then it
really is down to a few brave souls, committing to a doomed battle
to preserve that "saving remnant" and fighting the dying of the
light.

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2008/02/15/susan_jacoby/index.html
http://www.salvationscience.com