Age of Unreason

[salvorhardin]

Anyone here reading Susan Jacoby's newest book The Age of American Unreason? I'm part way through and having some serious misgivings about it. I hate to say it, but Jacoby comes off as a snob, and at times supremely silly in her concerns. For instance, her multi-page diatribe against the word "folks". I think she's missing some very important socioeconomic and sociocultural reasons for the decline of intellectualism and the rise of anti-rationality in the U.S. Indeed, this book should be a sociological study and what we get is polemics against everything from mass culture, TV and video, the internet and fundamentalist religion (not that I disagree with her on that one, but she fails to explore why fundamentalism has grown).

Actually, I'd go further and say she's grossly oversimplifying. And at least once so far she's dabbled in pseudoscience. In her attempts to disparage what she calls the "video culture" she asserts that studies show video viewing, in any form, on any type of display device (including projected film one supposes), regardless of content is detrimental to developing minds. If it's the study I'm thinking of, it's complete bollocks.

Anyway, I'm just wondering what everyone else thought.

On edit: I really, really want to like this book. I understand Jacoby's concerns, moreso I deeply empathize with them. It just seems to me that Age of American Unreason is nothing more than finger-pointing polemic.

[TZ]

1. I haven't read the book

but "her multipage diatribe agaisnt the word "folks" "leads me to ask..Has she been reading GD here?
:rofl:
Seriously it does sound like alot of the crap I see here from time to time...Did you see the flamewar a while back about the word "village" being offensive and racist?
BTW, you might be interested to go check out a couple of R_A's threads in R/T he is asking some REALLY interesting questions about religion and fanaticism....

[salvorhardin]

2. I do remember that thread

I think I may even have contributed to it because, at least in New England, Village and Town are political/municipal entities. Another of Jacoby's silly diatribes is on the use of the word "troops" instead of "soldiers" by the media claiming that the former is dehumanizing. What she fails to understand is that that the media is using the word correctly. Only the Army refers to its members as soldiers and the other branches actually take offense if their members are referred to in that way, nor is it no tall feat to find military books and documents dating back at least a century to find the use of the word "troops" in the manner that the media uses it.

BTW: I suspect, but don't know because it's not in her endnotes, that when Jacoby decries video as detrimental to child development that she's referring to studies like this one by two Cornell economists and trashy science writing by the likes of Gregg Easterbrook.
http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/faculty/profiles/waldman/autpaper.html
http://www.slate.com/id/2151538

[TZ]

4. WTF?

ECONOMISTS studying autism and TV, why the hell would they have any credibility on this except for the fact that its"Cornell"?
And this woman is talking about irrationality in America? She's obviously fucking nuts. A woo in skeptics clothing.

[salvorhardin]

5. I want to be clear...

Jacoby does not specifically reference the Cornell study. I'm only inferring from her uncritical warnings against video viewing in early childhood that this is the sort of study she has in mind, if not the exact one.

I don't think Jacoby is either nuts or a woo. Freethinkers, her previous volume, is an excellent history. She's associated with the Center For Inquiry NYC (forget her exact role -- I believe it's Director of Programming or some such) and she speaks eloquently for rationalism and freethought. I just think in Age of American Unreason she was hoping to produce the modern day Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, but she's no Richard Hofstadter.

[onager]

3. You're certainly not making me want to read it.

Multi-page diatribes on words like "folks" and "troops?"

I can't imagine "troops" being demeaning. The word, applied to military formations, dates back to at least 1545, according to the online dictionaries.

The most demeaning thing I could find is that the original French word troupe could also mean "herd." But back when I was a Drill Instructor, I referred to my recruit platoons with exactly that word. Often.

And we Marines certainly found it offensive to be called "soldiers." We had many philosophical discussions about that, especially in academic fora equipped with pool tables and poles for the dancers.

However, I will be Politically Correct. From now on, whenever I talk about a certain Sixties TV sitcom, I promise to call it "F Demeaning Word."

[salvorhardin]

6. It's not all bad

In so far as she decries the demise of the middlebrow intellectual culture (the best chapter so far IMHO) and sticks to history it's an interesting book and does build on Hofstadter. If she had confined herself to that it would have been as good as Freethinkers but I think she allowed herself to become too personally involved and instead comes off as scolding and snobbish.

The book is due back at the library in a few days so I'm not sure if I'm going to take the effort to finish it, although I may skim through the rest. If I do I'll collect my thoughts at my blog.