Jacoby writes from a deep foundation of knowledge and insight. I am glad I read this book on the cultural milieu of US of A in the mid-aughts. Lots of it relates to our current anti-science, know-nothing culture. ( )

Good book. Could have been a great book. Unfortunately Jacoby, like most extreme fundamentalists, (religious or atheist- it really doesn't matter) has an ax to grind that gets in the way of her writing. Pity. ( )

On 9/11, Susan Jacoby ...

"Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14dumb.html

Preaching to the choir. I only got as far as the first half of the second chapter, but I didn't feel as if I'd be learning anything new.

Great insight into what has happen to our country. I believe, as the author, this country has basically gotten 'dumber' over the past 20 years. A lot has to do with the religious right and the Republican policies over these years. We do need to emphasize education and I think Obama is working on this. ( )

An excellent and timely book on the decline of intellectualism in the USA, which is also relevant to the rest of the developed world. While I personally believe that Jacoby overplays her hand in the latter chapters on the malign influence of screen culture (the ubiquity of TV and now computers), the thrust of her argument is well written and undeniable. If we do not respect intellectualism and aspire to it for ourselves and our children, if we do not educate ourselves by reading broadly rather than accepting TV soundbites and unfounded weblog and editorial opinions and if we do not insist that our schools, colleges and universities teach rigorous thinking which we back up ourselves with the examples we give our children, we risk being manipulated by advertising, pseudo-science and self-serving politicians and, in the very worst case, risk the very values and achievements of our society. ( )

I don't disagree with the author on most issues but she wrote this in a such a tedious way that I often lost track of the point she was trying to make. ( )

I loved this book: it has earned a bookplate and a permanent spot on my overly crowded shelves. That said, Jacoby writes much more persuasively when she's discussing ignorance in politics and faith than when she approaches modern culture. She has made the error of viewing her youth nostalgically; she may not have been searching for ignorance in American culture in that era, but that doesn't remove its presence. Likewise, she views Gen Y and Gen X with such withering disdain that she begins fronting anecdote as broad-sweeping fact, at one point stating that receiving a restful night's sleep as a campus speaker staying in an undergraduate dorm is a clear sign that today's college students no longer speak to each other and spend all their time with their earbuds in. That and other examples seemed so precariously slapped together that it became difficult to appreciate the deeper inquiries in her chapters: is a classical education still relevant? What place will technology play in education and intellectual discourse? Why aren't more adults reading fiction? ( )

Susan Jacoby's book is at its best when she's weaving together her philosophical take on intellectualism and elitism with failings in modern education, American citizens, and public debate. Unfortunately, she sometimes falls into a sense of "days gone by," reminiscing about individual moments in history, e.g. Robert Kennedy announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, without convincingly connecting that moment to her thesis.

That Robert Kennedy uses a few lines of poetry in an extemporaneous speech hardly qualifies as proof of his intellectualism, any more than I using poetry from the likes of Robert Frost or Stephen Crane as a teacher proves my elitism. Still the book offers an interesting take on how relativism in education has helped usher in the age of pseudo-science, which in turn begets a dumbed-down public debate in America.

There's little chance that anyone reading the book will come away with an opinion, as Jacoby's take on religion, television, media, education, and politics are the foundation of the work. While some essays left me wanting the author to prove her point (she often argues with anecdote), each section forced me to consider where I stood on the issue of intellectualism in America. ( )

Ah, a left-wing version of Alan Bloom's 'Closing of the American Mind.' Just what we need.
There are good things about this book, specifically, the history of the early and mid-twentieth century. The opening chapters and the closing chapters, however, are mind-boggling. If one takes it upon oneself to defend 'reason', it is best to be rational in the task. Jacoby can't do it. I'm glad she pointed out that the worst instance of irrationality is our general inability to distinguish between causation and correlation. Just because x and y go together doesn't mean one caused the other, and it certainly doesn't mean you can decide which is the cause and which the effect. But instead of taking her own advice, Jacoby argues that stupidity is caused by 'screen media.'
Of course there can be no evidence for this causation, only a correlation. I'm not surprised that people who watch more television do worse on tests of intelligence. I am surprised that one would conclude from this that television causes low intelligence. Had Jacoby thought a little more before launching onto her Jeremiad, she might have considered the following:

* that the Emersonian individualism she preaches is itself a cause for irrationalism. It implies that each person should find their own way. The problem is that nobody can ever 'find their own way.' At best, they can get thrown onto a path, and much later learn to view it dispassionately. But if you assume that everyone can, by virtue of being a 'unit, one character,' a picker of peculiar fruit, you block off this possibility. And you assume that the path you're on was freely chosen, unlike 'the gross, the hundred or the thousand.' Unlike everyone else.

* that this individualism fits nicely with the doctrines of 'responsible journalism,' which mandate that both sides of a story be told even when there is only one side. 'Responsible journalism' has left American blissfully free of truth in reporting. Jacoby and her ilk believe that long form reporting is what we're missing. Not so. What's missing is a belief that journalism involves more than facts; it involves opinions.

* Jacoby argues against all social theory, most of the social sciences, philosophy, theology... in short, anything which isn't based on physical scientific facts. This fits in nicely with the about 'responsible journalism.' The question arises, then, what Jacoby's own work is? It's certainly social science in some guise or another, with a hefty dose of philosophy (Enlightenment humanism, more or less). So the book is self-refuting. More importantly, if all knowledge is scientific fact, then the 'rational' among us have nothing to say to those we think of as 'irrational'. Facts are neither reasonable nor unreasonable. Only their interpretations are reasonable or unreasonable. And unfortunately, Jacoby's interpretation is unreasonable: there is a correlation between screen media use and intellectual ability, not a direct causal relationship.

* Her belief that this is a causal relationship means Jacoby doesn't look a little deeper to find the reason so many people spend all their time watching TV, despite knowing that a game/a concert/a dinner with friends is more fulfilling: most of us are simply too frigging tired to make the effort. And we're too tired because our work-hours have increased, the intellectual requirements of our work have increased, and our holiday time has decreased. Had Jacoby done a bit more reading of the classics, and a bit less time reading I. F. Stone's idiotic conversations about those classics, she would know that 'negotiation' means, more or less, 'not leisure.' And that it was precisely leisure that made all the deep thinking of the classic authors possible - the free time that was more available in the 'fifties and 'sixties, and which has now disappeared.

You can't just tell people to read more if they're too tired to read. Better to spend your time fighting for reasonable labor laws. But I think we know how unlikely that is. It wouldn't sell at all. ( )

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. ( )

She makes a lot of excellent points, but that almost doesn't overcome the dryness of the writing. ( )

A scathing and all too accurate look at the culture of anti-intellectualism that abounds in contemporary America. ( )

A friend recommended this book, and I both enjoyed it and also got upset by it. Comforting to know that anti-intellectualism is not a new trend, but something that has been going on in this country since the beginning. I just wish there were ideas for how we combat the problem, especially as related to politics and picking politicians we would "like to have a beer with" over people with great minds and ideas. How many people who talk about what the Constitution says or what the Bible says really know those documents? We seem to be a soundbite nation, in which uninformed opinions are ok, especially if based on some kernel of truth. A good read, and I learned some things I definitely missed in my hears of history classes. ( )

I have read three of Susan Jacoby's other books and enjoyed them thoroughly. Parts of this book are excellent although there was little factual material that I didn't know already. I do not, however, fault a competent bringing together of scattered information or insightful commentary, even if there is nothing new, but there seem to be a number of other books dealing with Jacoby's subjects. I agree with a number of her concerns, but in the final analysis, I found it to be too idiosyncratic and narrowly aimed, and often lacking in rigor, especially for a book questioning other people's intellect. It seems to be for liberal, high-brow intellectuals with no supernatural beliefs, a commitment to rationalism and science (no postmodernists), who read only nonfiction and "serious" adult fiction, don't play solitaire, don't like Hit Parade music, and don't spend too much time on the computer. Moreover, I think that Jacoby is discusses a number of different topics that don's necessarily go together. Not believing in evolution and not reading "great books" are not necessarily linked, although many people of a scientific pride themselves that they generally know more about the humanities than humanities specialists know about science. Jacoby discusses the failure of Adlai Stevenson to appeal to the typical American voter, and the failure of the intellectuals to understand that failure and why that was. I would suggest that there is a similar misfiring here. I have analyzed some specific examples that are typical of her reasoning.

I would certainly like the general population to be more educated, and yes, I can find Iran and Iraq on a map; I have a Master's degree; I read as several times as many books in a month as the average American does in a year, and half of them are nonfiction; I am even an atheist and a firm believer in science as the best source of objective truths; and neither of my televisions work. Still, I would not begin to measure up to Jacoby's standards: I recently read (and thoroughly enjoyed) the Abhorsen Chronicles by Garth Nix, and reread the Harry Potter books, which the library classifies as (horrors!) "young adult", and I both read and write amateur book reviews, and I play solitaire, so I must take my place in Jacoby's estimate with the intellectually and morally degenerate masses dragging down our country.

If one would think that Jacoby would rejoice in citizens who are well informed, educated, productive, and socially-involved, it seems apparent by the end of the book that if they are "middle-brow," they are also part of the problem, especially if they are not suitably deferential to intellectuals and experts, as well as being ashamed of their low tastes. I'm not sure that I know anyone that Jacoby would approve of. Actually, to be an intellectual is not necessarily to possess manners, morals, commonsense, or useful life skills, and there have been some over the years whom I wouldn't want to have too much influence on the workings of society. The Blithesdale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne's take on a group of Transcendentalists trying to establish a utopian commune illustrates some of the problems, even from the point of view of another intellectual. Like other people, they are as they do. Moreover, intellectuals do not necessarily understand or appreciate science. Personally, I think the most glaring example of unreason is that many, maybe most, Americans rely on sophisticated technology while insisting that the science that undergirds it is bunk. Likewise, I do not worship with the "cult of the expert." Expertise is often open to interpretation: consider the financial experts who got us into our current economic mess. These sections are among the weakest parts of the book: a cri de coeur to those who already agree with her than a reasoned argument to persuade others.

I think that it is worth examining Jacoby's claim that historical fiction has deteriorated, as evidenced by a comparison of James Michener novels to Dan Brown The DaVinci Code. In the first place, The DaVinci Code isn't historical fiction, it's a contemporary thriller. The fact that Jacoby doesn't understand this, and some of her other comments on reading cause me to think that she is outside of her areas of competence in commenting on popular fiction. Be that as it may, it is also an example of a technique that Jacoby uses much too often: cherry-picking. Even if The DaVinci Code was a historical novel, it is a single example; neither it nor Michener's work is a survey of an entire genre at a particular time, and therefore this is not a legitimate comparison. I also dismiss Jacoby's repetition of the scorn of intellectuals for Great Book lists, it remains that she clearly considers only a very limited selection of works to be worthwhile, so effectively she (and quite a few other people) obviously have a Great Books list of their own that they assume to be broadly applicable. If it is not possible to create a definitive list, it is at least possible to compile a meaningful one: one could look to the syllabi of those colleges whose curriculum consists of "great books.". The only saving grace is that Jacoby does at least give the middlebrow and their mentors credit for trying. Of course to many intellectuals and docents, a cultured public is necessarily a contradiction in terms: witness the use of "popular" and "amateur" (meaning to do something for the love of it) as insults. So often I have seen something which started out quietly to good reviews being sneered at if it becomes popular, as witness Jacoby's take on the case of 'If I Had a Hammer" (below.) One wonders why Jacoby admires the Founding Fathers so much considering that although themselves elite, they had the bad taste to found a government that was shockingly democratic.

In addition to legitimate concerns about knowledge, Jacoby drags in a lot of personal idiosyncrasies that she wishes to enshrine. I despise George W. Bush, and think that if he wasn't stupid, he did an excellent imitation of it. Nonetheless, I find it tediously trivial for her to rant and rave for several pages about his use of the words "folks" and "troops" when she would prefer "people" and "soldiers." She also disapproves of playing solitaire, amateur book reviews, and most things having to do with computers. I share some of her concerns, but I often think that she sounds like a crank. I wonder if she is one of those people who just like to see themselves as an embattled elite fighting off the barbarians at the gate: there's been a lot of that down the centuries. As an example of what I find truly peculiar, consider this excerpt:

"'If I Had a Hammer", performed at Communist rallies in 1949 by Seeger and his group, the Weavers, was recorded in 1962 by Peter, Paul, and Mary, and led the Hit Parade. A year later, 'If I Had a Hammer' was mainstream enough for the group to sing it from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before Martin Luther King delivered his oration. By then, no one cared that the song had been written by a man cited ten times for contempt of Congress after testifying before the House Committee on Un-American activities in 1955."

Really, Jacoby thinks that the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a vulgar, crassly commercial event? Does Jacoby mean that instead of wasting his time talking to ten of thousands of attendees, and millions of people on television, none of them vetted for their educational level, King should have spoken to a select group of a hundred intellectuals (51 from New York City, of course!)? No one cared about Seeger's history because everyone who previously did was so shocked at the song appearing on the Hit Parade that they either died or suffered amnesia? No-one in 1962 understood what Seeger was saying in the song, or was moved to learn more about him? I believe that a sensible person would have thought that it was promising that it became a hit. I would have thought that Peter, Paul and Mary were among the people who knew and cared about Seeger's history: like Seeger, they won the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award. But of course, they were popular, and therefore automatically crass and trivial, since the general public is always and necessarily wrong. Actually, I would have thought that Seeger would have been pleased to have his song sung in such a venue.

Jacoby, shades of Glenn Beck, spends a lot of time complaining about how society has degenerated since her youth. As an example of a lack on intellectual rigor, let us consider Jacoby's assessment of society's deterioration since the golden years of her youth, which she occasionally documents, but mostly asserts based on her own remembrances. In the first place, Jacoby lived in a particular place, was part of a particular class, and had other situations peculiar to herself and similar people, and should not attempt to extrapolate from those bases to the lives of other people living at the same time in different places. Nor should one cherry-pick the best of another time and place to be contrasted to the worst of the here and now, or vice-versa in the case of xenophobes. It is one thing to argue that too many people today are unfamiliar with world geography; if she wishes to argue that things have deteriorated, she needs the facts and statistics to compare and contrast similar cases in the past and present. I am not a historian, but I feel safe in saying that there was never a time, at least for those of us who don't believe in the Garden of Eden, when everyone was kind, honest, and virtuous. Yet if one believed my father and uncle, that is how it was in the 1930s, and it is how Glenn Beck remembers his own youth. Now that I am growing older, I am amazed at how some of my peers have suffered selective amnesia regarding our own past.

In sum, I strongly recommend her books Wild Justice and Freethinkers, as well as Never Say Die for those who can bear its sad warnings, but I think less of Jacoby and this book every time that I think about it. ( )

I found her examination of anti-intellectualism in America informative and persuasive, but she is preaching to the choir. Her overuse of the term "middlebrow" comes off as snobbish, and her indictment of electronic media is light on fact and heavy on personal grievance. These chapters are heavy slogging. The explosion of e-book reading shortly after publication dents her thesis.

Another contrary data point: I am told that one of my first spoken words was "Mo", referring to then-ubiquitous TV personality Garry Moore. So you know that I watched beaucoup TV during my childhood. Today, I do a website about local TV. Yet, I have read a huge number of books in my lifetime, including this one. ( )

This book is a very good entry into the critical thinking genre, looking specifically at America and the current anti-intellectual currents that reject logic and reason in favor of emotionally charged, fuzzy, feel good argumentation. This book should be in every library around the country. ( )

This is possibly the best book I've read this year. If you're at all shocked at the pride people seem to take in their ignorance, you must read this book. Jacoby has put together a chronicle of American history both showing past desires of the public to be educated, while another portion was content to take part in whatever current trend in anti-intellectualism was in vogue. Where once the public was impressed with a president who put overtly intelligent men in places of influence, now the public seems enamored of candidates who could not even tell you what was in the first amendment of the constitution or locate countries on the map where we are fighting wars. ( )

This books is a survey of anti-intellectualism in America. Jacoby traces the roots of this aspect of American culture and illustrates how it continues. It is especially frightening that ignorance, illogic and emotionalism have managed to be elevated to virtues in popular culture. Effective self-governance in a democracy depends on an educated population capable of making logical decisions based on dispassionate evaluations of evidence, so the anti-rational trends Jacoby describes threaten the basic foundations of a participatory democracy. ( )

In this book, Susan Jacoby presents an overview of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism in American society. She has some very harsh things to say about modern American politics, and a few harsher things to say about pseudoscience, both of which I believe are fully justified. She also traces the political and religious roots of anti-intellectualism in the past, with a special emphasis on the sixties, and those chapters for the most part strike me as interesting, thoughtful, and fair. Unfortunately, I can't say as much for her discussions of modern media and pop culture, as she all too often wavers from what should be a reasonable examination of the mixed blessings of the Information Age into an only slightly more sophisticated version of, "Stupid rotten-brained kids today with the video games and the YouTube and the inexcusable lack of interest in classical music or listening to me talk about Russian poetry!" I have very little patience with that kind of attitude, and I'm afraid that my annoyance with it colors the entire book in an unfortunate negative light. After all, sometimes "anti-elitism" is a foolish and dangerous belief that just because other people might know more about something than you do, that doesn't make what they have to say about the subject any more valid than your own ignorant opinion. And sometimes, it's a perfectly justifiable dislike of people like Jacoby telling you that if you don't read the same books they do, it means you're stupid. Those two things desperately need to be separated, not conflated more than they already are, and Jacoby is really not helping on that score.

Despite my mixed feelings, I do think this is worth reading. But I recommend doing so with a bit of a critical eye. ( )

My brother doesn't believe the what, ( 98% of all Scientists?) who've made these studies their life work, about global warming. But he DOES believe what George Carlin, a comedian, says about it. ....... so yes, I think she has something here. The anti-intellectualism mindset in this country is nuts. In this area where I now live, the vast majority of the people are PROUD to be ignorant. ( )

I'm trying to figure out how anyone who didn't already agree with Jacoby's central premise - that the level of discourse in this country has degenerated to anti-elitism, ad hominem attacks and name calling - would have any inclination to pick up this book whatsoever. She lays out a good argument, but it's presented with such a coating of smug self-righteousness, that you realize that this anti-elitism might be completely justified. ( )

Trash, it seems like. ( )

This was a book I basically enjoyed. While I agree with her premise, I found at times that I wanted more citations in support of some of her assertions. Without them, her arguments were less convincing. ( )

Susan Jacoby goes through all the problems of American educational culture: the over-reliance on media (especially TV, but also internet), religious fundamentalism, pop culture, the problems of our public education system and the decline of the 'middle-brow' culture. Not too many surprises for people who have paid attention and have despaired of the mindlessness of public discourse, but it does make for a good overview of what our current problems are. ( )