The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
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Book Summary Author: Susan Jacoby Edition: Hardcover Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published) Published: 2008-02-12 ISBN: 0375423745 Number of pages: 384 Publisher: Pantheon |
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Book Reviews of the The Age of American Unreason
Customer Review: A painful, unflattering look in the mirror
Summary: 4 Stars
Jacoby is at her best when she reasons close to the facts, documents her claims, and builds logical sequences from those facts. She is at her worst when she engages in speculative, broad brush generalizations that seem to be presonalized impressions.
Her book has the texture of being written from two mindsets, one more objective and untimately far more informative, and the other, more subjective and tendentious without the assurance that those impressions are carefully grounded in evidence.
Because of this dual natured, dual flavored style some reviewers have accurately sensed the weak side of Jacoby's thought processes and taken umbrage. Which isn't entirely unfair, only incomplete and one sided criticism.
Where Jacoby shines, and when she shines she shines brightly, is the spot on deconstruction of the "belief path" that America has taken over the last three decades from the Reagan Revolution, some would say the seeds were planted in the Nixon administration (this with Nixon's calculation that the religion card could be played for maximum political advantage) until the NeoConservative debacle of the present.
Jacoby makes a strong case that Americans are not inherently stupid, anti-rational, or ahistorical clamoring rubes (although a superficial reading of her book could leave one with that emotive sense of her thrust), rather that the American media, American educational structure, and the introduction of disruptive technologies have colluded to produce an atmosphere so sterile and lacking of nutrition that Americans are growing up as stunted, incomplete, intellectually damaged citizens dangerously unprepared for the global tasks we will soon face.
This is a most terrible actuality to see as it truly is. The average, average mind you means that a good percentage are above this number, watch seven hours of television in a 24 hour period, what's worse is that the average American now watches indiscriminately, using television as an escapist drug, not as a source of information. Her evidence (which I badly wish she had closely documented and footnoted) is that today the viewer will watch 7 hours of television regardless of what is being broadcast. In other words, the viewer doens't care what is on, only that there is something marginally viewable. One must wonder, when does vegatation become outright addiction of the same power as opiate addictions ?
This stuporous, bovine, cud chewing, glazed over, hypnotic fog appears to be matched with a near contempt for science, rigorous logic, reasoned philosophy, or even the conversational reference to any of the above. When a high percentage of science teachers are unaware that large reptiles ceased to inhabit the Earth and mammals began their ascent at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, thus humans and dinosaurs could not possibly have lived at the same time, if you can imagine, and assuming her statistic is accurate, that 25% of high school biology teachers actually believe in Human-Dinosaur cohabitation.... the only thing one can conclude is that our educational system is so broken it would take another massive meteor impact to change anything, as the phase goes, "Houston, we have a problem"...
Yes, we do... a serious dysfunction that goes all the way to the core of our society...
Regardless of its imperfections, Jacoby has written an essential book for taking stock of this social-political-educational moment in American history, and we would be fools not to begin asking hard questions as to who and what we have allowed ourselves to become as a people.