Throughout history, eras demanded their own unique labels, “Dark Ages;” ” Middle Ages-Renaissance;” “Age of Enlightenment and Reformation;” “Age of Romantisicm;” and more recently, “Industrial Age;” and “Technology Age,”  but it’s seventeenth century philosophy, or the  ”Age of Reason” which calls to me now as I ponder today’s Age and reflect on this previous age distinguished by, as Wikipedia’s site establishes, the belief that, in principle (though not in practice), all knowledge can be gained by the power of our reason alone [rationalists taking mathematics as their model] and those who rejected this theory, believing that all knowledge has to come through the senses, from experience [empiricists choosing the physical sciences for their model], standing in stark juxtaposition to our current age characterized by communication and absence of privacy, among many other things.

Many agree with me our current age might aptly be described as “The Age of Unreason.“  As Susan Jacoby, author of  “The Age of American Unreason,”  sees those shocking polls showing most Americans can’t list the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment or find Iraq on a map as confirming her suspicion  “the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to a functioning democracy.”

In her review of Jacoby’s book, Laura Miller cites Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 classic, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (a clear inspiration for this book), who described anti-intellectualism as “older than our national identity” and deeply rooted in our history.  She also cites Jacoby who 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, Jacoby 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.

 I concur with Jacoby’s belief :

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…[dot, dot, dot] 

I believe it’s fair to say, most of us don’t even begin to understand the religions or philosophies we defend.  Uncomfortable with this current American Society of Unreason, which has its treacherous aspects, I would like to issue this as your call to read, research, investigate, debunk your own ignorance and inform your community, encouraging them to debunk for themselves!  If we don’t, we’re destined to continue facing unreasonable beliefs which lead to dangerous villifications, which subsequently involve harm to ourselves and others.  I could substantiate this last statement with headline horror stories and other nightmares which never make it to even the back pages, like children performing mock decapitations of other children who voiced beliefs differing from their own; but those of you who have your own sagas don’t need more and you who have managed to avoid unreasonable de-humanizations may not believe these things could happen in America.  Instead, I leave you with this plea, as much as possible, live in this moment; more often than you have, challenge insanity and unreason; and seize daily opportunities to educate yourself and others.  One last thing, wherever you can, share yourself and your gifts with those differently abled than yourself, whether they’re terminally ill, marginalized by their different abilities, or just different from you–those who just wouldn’t normally appear on your radar screen. 

With conscious intention, we can transform our culture.

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OMG, I found this article in the Gaurdian and what it says about the state of US intelligence and education is shocking, appalling, and very, very sad. Having watched the Rachel Maddow clip in an earlier post, where McCain says “bla bla bla” in reference to the need for nuclear regulations, and the audience applauds wildly at the implication that such a need is foolish, well all I can say is if the US of this article is in the driver’s seat of this North American bus, God help us. Read on and weep.

“A fundamentalist is one who believes in a literal interpretation of sacred books, and a third of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. That’s about 10 times more than any other developed country in the world. It’s entirely possible to be a religious believer and to accept science, but not if you’re a literal religious believer. You can’t believe that the world was literally created in six days, and be open to modern knowledge.”

forrest/bush

Great quote, from an interview with Susan Jacoby over at AlterNet about her new book, The Age of American Unreason. Worth a read! Why do we want our president to be dumb? What’s wrong with being “elite”? If you had a brain tumor, wouldn’t you want your surgeon to be elite? Wouldn’t you want the best? Who wants morons in charge? Apparently, we do.

“No country in the West democratized education earlier, but no country has been more suspicious of too much education. We’ve always thought of education as good if it gets you a better job, but bad if it makes you think too much.”

Read it…

I recently read Susan Jacoby’s book, “The Age of American Unreason.”

The book is suffused with nostalgia for a time in America when the life of the mind was more valued than it seems to her to be today. Her evidence, however, is largely anecdotal. She refers, for example, to her experience, as a young woman in the 1960s, of writing long “snail mail” letters to a lover in South Africa, chronicling the zeitgeist of her place and time, and how he did the same. She praises this languid and sensuous form of communication, then contrasts it with the emotional flatness that she feels sending off electronic e-mails today, which she notes are rarely responded to with any degree of passion or detail.

Her thesis, in short, is that contemporary electronic communication, from TV and the Internet, to mass advertising, has drawn America away from nature, books, and the life of the mind. She perceives, correctly, that Steven Johnson’s book of just a few years back, “Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter,” threatens her thesis, and she attempts, in her first chapter, to dispatch it quickly. But rather than address the substantive claims and supports that book offers, she maligns it with little more than innuendo, contempt, and derision. But Johnson’s book is, whatever else you may think of it, suffused with a good deal of empirical data, and Jacoby chooses to simply ignore it and move on.

I share Jacoby’s sadness that the life of the mind is not broadly valued, but I don’t share her belief that it was ever valued all that much more than it is today. The nostalgic aspect of her book is thus the weakest part of it because she is doing something inherently unreasonable, accumulating anecdotes that do not add up (at least for me) to a compelling support for her claim. It was, afterall, William F. Buckley who said, long before the Internet and TV preachers presumably made us all stupid, that he preferred that the country be trusted to the first fifty names in the Boston phone book to the faculty of Harvard. Contempt and distrust of intellectuals and the elite, like the poor, have been with us always. Jacoby, who has written a book on Greek tragedy, surely knows Aristophanes’ “The Clouds,” a funny and disturbing send up of the atheist intellectuals of ancient Greece.

For all my complaints, however, the book is worth having and reading, if, for no other reason, to draw fresh intellectual air from someone who loves the life of the mind. But let’s not kid ourselves. The average person in 1950 probably could no more locate Iran on a world map than a person can today.

Here’s the link to the book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Age-American-Unreason-Susan-Jacoby/dp/0375423745/ref=cm_cr-mr-img

The wealth gap in America isn’t the only growing dichotomy in our melting pot of various demographic slices. An intellectual gap is asserting itself in dangerous levels as these demographic slices form battling coalitions over differing priorities. While the Internet is a fascinating equalizer, providing information and education to those who seek it, the increasing vilification of education and intellectualism is alarming. And the 2008 Election, with its record-breaking participation, has brought illustrations of the growing smart gap to the forefront of mainstream media – even if the media doesn’t understand or acknowledge exactly what they’ve got their hands on.

The most recent example of the degradation of education in America is the difference in voter groups in the Democratic Primary. We are continuously reminded that educated Americans lean more toward Obama and blue-collar (they hardly ever say “uneducated”) voters side with Clinton. In an effort to celebrate these blue-collar Americans, the media and the candidates repeatedly refer to them as “hardworking Americans” – which should seem offensive to white-collar workers who undoubtedly work just as hard whether it’s in the operating room or on the trading floor.

Obama’s opponents readily reach for the “elitist” attack, however, simply because educated voters choose him more than any other candidate. How ridiculous. How backwards. How indicative of the anti-intellectualism that seems pervasive even in our most top levels of government.

It is not far-fetched to assume that educated voters are more informed, know more about current events, and are more familiar with the global effects of our national decisions and, thus, can apply critical analysis – even in the voting booth – better than their uneducated counterparts. This is not to say that a college-educated voter will always make a better decision than an uneducated voter. Intellectualism has more to do with the seeking of knowledge than the attaining of a piece of paper in the form of a degree. Smarter, more educated decisions, however, lead to a better – even longer – life and benefit not just the educated, but society as a whole.

Hillary Clinton began to solidify a political base as she began to pander to the uneducated, as Republicans do in most of their campaigns. In a fantastic blog entitled “In Defense of Being Educated” on The Huffington Post, Robert J. Elisberg writes that Hillary Clinton thinks she should be president because her voters are less educated than those of her opponent. He’s simplifying for effect, but the message is clear. The uneducated, potentially poorer-decision making voters who have always been courted by Republicans, are being celebrated and lauded. Yes, this may just be a political tool to get ahead, but the message it sends to America is a very dangerous one indeed.

I’m reminded of the 60 Minutes Report “All Eyes On Ohio” during which Kenny Schoenholtz, a worker at the Glatfelter paper factory (which was shutting down) told Steve Kroft about Obama, “Well, I’m hearin’ he doesn’t even know the National Anthem, you know. He wouldn’t use the Holy Bible. He’s got his own beliefs, got the Muslim beliefs. Couple issues that bothers me at heart.” Now, I don’t know anyone who saw that report and were not – too put it lightly- gobsmacked by the stupidity of such a person.

Now, that may seem a harsh judgment, but it is difficult to watch as voters just like Schoenholtz are routinely courted as the Holy Grail among voting blocs. He is the perfect constituent for Republicans or Clintons, who salivate at the opportunity to use unreasoned and illogical attacks. He is the audience for Willey Horton ads and Swiftboat campaigns. He is the voter to whom it will matter that Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein. He is the voter who most likely voted for Bush a second time.

Why is he this type of voter? Because he is uneducated.

The pat-on-the-back for those who opted out of higher education or choose not to seek information and enlightenment will have grievous results beyond the quality of our elected leaders. With the diminishing appreciation of education – specifically science and math (largely due to religious fundamentalism) – the U.S. will continue to lose its stronghold as hegemonic power and falter economically, technologically and culturally. I recommend reading Susan Jacoby’s “The Dumbing of America” on The Washington Post for further statistics and examples of our rapid intellectual back-sliding. Jacoby has also recently written published “The Age of American Unreason“.

As the media and political parties request audience with uneducated voters using sugar-coated labels of importance, one must remember that lack of education and information encourage crime, teenage pregnancy, poverty, obesity, disease and more. Autocratic regimes and dictatorships prevent instruments of knowledge from reaching the masses as a tool with which to construct their oppressive governments.

I know many people who have not had access to a college education, yet are still very much intellectuals. The seeking of information, arming oneself with the ability to make enlightened decisions and the understanding of the importance of knowledge are all that is required to be intellectual.

As a nation, however, we glorify the rejecting of education to our own detriment.

There a fewer shames I can think of that the anti-intellectualism movement has produced than those presented by Nicholas D. Kristoff of The New York Times in his Op-Ed “With a Few More Brains…“:

“A 34-nation study found Americans less likely to believe in evolution than citizens of any of the countries polled except Turkey.

President Bush is also the only Western leader I know of who doesn’t believe in evolution, saying “the jury is still out.” No word on whether he believes in little green men.”

There are few subjects more timely than the one tackled by Susan Jacoby in her new book, “The Age of American Unreason,” in which she asserts that “America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism.”

For more than a decade there have been growing symptoms of this affliction, from fundamentalist assaults on the teaching of evolution to the Bush administration’s willful disavowal of expert opinion on global warming and strategies for prosecuting the war in Iraq. Conservatives have turned the term “intellectual,” like the term “ liberal,” into a dirty word in politics (even though neo-conservative intellectuals played a formative role in making the case for war against Iraq); policy positions tend to get less attention than personality and tactics in the current presidential campaign; and the democratizing influence of the Internet is working to banish expertise altogether, making everyone an authority on everything. Traditional policy channels involving careful analysis and debate have been circumvented by the Bush White House in favor of bold, gut-level calls, and reasoned public discussions have increasingly given way to noisy partisan warfare among politicians, commentators and bloggers alike…

As Ms. Jacoby sees it, there are several key reasons for “the resurgent American anti-intellectualism of the past 20 years.” To begin with, television, video games and the Internet have created a “culture of distraction” that has shortened attention spans and left people with “less time and desire” for “two human activities critical to a fruitful and demanding intellectual life: reading and conversation.”

The eclipse of print culture by video culture began in the 1960s, Ms. Jacoby argues, adding that the ascendance of youth culture in that decade also promoted an attitude denigrating the importance of tradition, history and knowledge.

By the ’80s, she goes on, self-education was giving way to self-improvement, core curriculums were giving way to classes intended to boost self-esteem, and old-fashioned striving after achievement was giving way to a rabid pursuit of celebrity and fame. The old middlebrow culture, which prized information and aspiration — and which manifested itself, during the post-World War II years, in a growing number of museums and symphony orchestras, and a Book-of-the-Month club avidity for reading — was replaced by a mass culture that revolved around television and blockbuster movies and rock music.

It was also in the ’60s, Ms. Jacoby writes, that a resurgent fundamentalism “received a jolt of adrenaline from both the civil rights laws” in the early years of that decade and the later “cultural rebellions.” She succinctly records the long history of fundamentalism in America, arguing that poorly educated settlers on the frontier were drawn to religious creeds that provided emotional comfort without intellectual demands, just as “the American experiment in complete religious liberty led large numbers of Americans to embrace anti-rational, anti-intellectual forms of faith.”

Michiko Kakutani
New York Times

MUDGE’s Musings

Susan Jacoby has just released a book, “The Age of American Unreason“, and contributed to the Opinion page of the Washington Post a couple of Sundays ago.

The Dumbing Of America

Call Me a Snob, but Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces

By Susan Jacoby | Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01

“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today’s very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

Jacoby sees three trends that have converged to create our current low state. The first of course is video, which is supplanting the written word at a furious pace.

And one of the unintended consequences of our video culture is a short attention span. Commercial interruptions every 10 minutes have conditioned us to the ultimate: the galvanizing, 2-minute YouTube extravaganza.

Read a book? I’m sure I don’t have the time (i.e., the ability to concentrate longer than 10 minutes). Of course, it would cut into my seven hours a night of television.

Read a book? Think about its contents? Reflect on its implications? Nope, don’t have time.

The screenwriters go on strike? No problem, we’ll just throw triple episodes of American Idol at them; they won’t miss the writers. [Welcome back, writers, I guess...]

Jacoby’s second ugly trend is the lack of general knowledge. She gives a wonderful example, one that this writer wishes he’d been around to hear, live, Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Roosevelt spoke to a different nation, one that wasn’t afraid to get out maps or a globe to better understand the magnitude of the war effort he led.

Today, we let the Decider think for us; why should we be surprised at the sad state of his war, his economy, his deficit?

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

The Dumbing Of America – washingtonpost.com

And, the final trend Jacoby is so fiercely agitated over  is how proud we are of our ignorance.

The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place.

Three current examples of our proud ignorance:

1. Creation science.
2. “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?”
3. The proliferation of state lotteries.

Yr (justifiably) humble svt is confounded when he tries to correlate the increasing number of college graduates in the U.S. with this proud anti-intellectualism, but perhaps the obvious impression one gets turns out to be true: most of our recent framed sheepskins represent majors in sex and beer.

Have no fear, faithful reader! This nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© will continue to try to hold the forces of ignorance at bay for another day, with your help.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Note!: the link to Amazon.com used above is for the convenience of faithful reader and represents no commercial relationship whatsoever. Left-Handed Complement should be so fortunate as to ever collect remuneration of any kind for this endeavor, and in any event it’s against WordPress.com’s rules. I can link, so I link. It’s technology. It’s cool. It’s an artifact of Sequitur Service©. Deal with it.

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Anlässlich des Erscheinens von Susan Jacobys Buch The Age of American Unreason, kontempliert die New York Times (“Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge“) ein wenig anektodalen Kulturpessimismus:

Man kann natürlich darüber lächeln, dass die NYT es für nötig erachtet, in der Einleitung des kleinen Dialogs noch mal darzustellen, was in Pearl Habor wirklich passiert ist, damit keiner ihrer Leser in die Peinlichkeit kommt, den Witz nicht zu verstehen oder, Gott behüte, irgendwo sich informieren zu müssen. Etwas nachzuschlagen ist schließlich nerdig. Vielleicht, könnte man mutmaßen, ist es ja auch die selbstgenügsame Häppchenberichterstattung in den Medien, die eben kaum noch Vorwissen für die Teilnahme am öffentlichen Diskurs voraussetzt, die das Begreifen von Hintergründen als lässlich und darum unlässig erscheinen lässt.

Es gibt natürlich auch andere kulturelle Strömungen, die für sich in Anspruch nehmen, Wissen nach Nützlichkeit und Zweck zu ordnen, und für die Aberglauben im Zweifel auf eine Stufe mit Wissenschaft zu stellen ist:

Aber, nein, Religion ist kein Problem. Es gibt hier nichts zu sehen. Bitte weitergehen.

(via 3QuarksDaily)