I admired Susan Jacoby's 2004 book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, which poked giant holes in the notion that the United States began as a "Christian nation". In her most recent effort - The Age of American Unreason - she traces the decline of Enlightenment reason in America and the disastrous consequence of this today in public education and political discourse. The book was meant to be a sequel to Richard Hofstadter's great 1963 study Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, but Jacoby has fallen far short of that goal.
Susan Jacoby does do a good job at compiling a great deal of depressing statistics. For example:
- Approximately 45% of those with no education beyond high school believe in the literal truth of the Bible.
- 60% of white evangelical Christians contended that the Bible, not popular representation, should shape U.S. law.
- In that context, 2/3 of all Americans were unable to name one Supreme Court Justice.
- 25% of all biology teachers in the US believe that humans and dinosaurs cohabited the earth.
- Despite their religiosity, the majority of American Christians were unable to name the Four Gospels of the New Testament.
- A majority of Christian's polled believed that Jesus said:"God helps those who help themselves." - a well-known quote from Benjamin Franklin.
- 2/3 of American high school graduates could not locate Iraq or Afghanistan on a map of the world.
The list goes on and on. Everywhere there is a decline in literacy and a hostility to intellectualism in America. Jacoby does a good job on diagnosing the problem today, but she runs into problems in identifying the root causes. Nor does she have any real solutions for how we can extricate ourselves from this growing swamp of ignorance.
I do share Jacoby's dismay at the decline of Middlebrow culture in the US. In her strongest chapter, she writes about the heyday of Middlebrow culture in the 1950s and 1960s, when middle-class American families would flock to museums, buy Britannica Encyclopedia for their children, subscribe to the Book-of-the-Month Club, etc. They were open to acquiring knowledge as a gateway to a better life and highbrow culture. But starting in the 1970s Middlebrow culture began to disappear with the rise of television culture and Christian fundamentalism. Today the average American watches 7 hours of television in a 24-hour period.
Jacoby outlines the convergence of Christian fundamentalism, conservative Catholicism and right-wing ideology, and how this has resulted in widespread hostility to science and academic inquiry. She has some sympathy for the mainline Protestant denominations and moderate Catholics, but centrist believers are no match for the True Believers who seek to impose their views on all Americans. The tendency of moderates and centrists to compromise with the True Believers has led to absurd situations, such as the teaching of both creationism and evolution in public schools. But one senses that Jacoby equates belief in God - whether moderate or fundamentalist - with "superstition", and that faith is antithetical to reason. I could recommend that she read Pope Bendict XVI's undelivered lecture to La Sapienza University in Rome, in which he examines how faith has informed scientific inquiry and the search for truth since the earliest days of the Church.
And Jacoby points to the American predisposition to hold all religion in high esteem as the principle difference between America and Europe, where the "dumbing down" of society has not progressed nearly as fast:
"Like America, Europe has experienced major social dislocations that began in the 1960s. Like Americans, Europeans have been affected by recent biomedical research that challenges, at a basic physiological and psychological level, our assumptions about what it means to be a human being and how much control humans can and should exert over their own destinies. But Europeans have responded by becoming more rather than less skeptical about traditional religious dogma: homosexuality, abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and the teaching of evolution are simply not divisive political issues in most of Europe today...For the most part, secular Europe is utterly baffled by the anti-rational sector of the American religious landscape. In 2003, a survey by The Economist concluded that "Europeans consider religion...the strangest and most disturbing feature of American exceptionalism. They worry that fundamentalists are hijacking the country. They find it extraordinary that three times as many Americans believe in the virgin birth as in evolution."
I believe Jacoby is overestimating the role of religion in America in the decline of Enlightenment rationalism. First, the number of true fundamentalists is probably not that significant: she conflates fundamentalism with evangelicalism, and American evangelicals are going through some fairly significant changes today. Second, a recent poll shows that Americans are becoming more European in their church-going habits.
Jacoby is on much firmer footing in her analysis of "The Culture of Distraction" - the all-consuming 24/7 "infotainment" industry. The printed word has been displaced by videos and tunes on the iPod. We're buying fewer CDs, going to the movies less often, we long ago stopped reading books. Our lives revolve around the Web, e-mail, games, DVDs, cable-on-demand, text chat. The result is mass mental atrophy. And while this unfortunate culture has infected America, Europe is hardly immune. Just as America brought chewing gum and McDonald's hamburgers to the world it is now exporting "infotainment" , junk science and "reality TV". Enlightenment reason is following the polar bears into extinction.
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