May 14, 2008
A dissent from Susan Jacoby
As Mike O'Connor notes in his post at the blog U.S. Intellectual History, many have praised Susan Jacoby for speaking hard truths in her new book, The Age of American Unreason, including his USIH blog colleagues. Yet he has his reservations:
I have two particular concerns with this book. The first is that Jacoby's ire is disproportionately aimed at conservative examples of "unreason." The first chapter, for example, is on the debasement of language in U.S. culture. Focusing particularly on the increased use of the term "folks," she notes that "there is no escaping the political meaning of this term when it is reverently invoked by public officials in twenty-first-century America." (3) The implication suggested by this way of speaking is, of course, that there are some of us who are "folks," and others--presumably intellectual and cultural elites--who are not. Yet the populist worldview articulated by this rhetorical trope is much more strongly representative of a conservative cultural orientation than a broader American one. By criticizing it, Jacoby comes across as taking sides in an argument rather than, as she intends, offering a criticism of the debate itself. Another example concerns what appears to be Jacoby's bête noire (it comes up repeatedly throughout the book): the fact that the settled scientific consensus over evolution can actually generate a controversy. This issue, she writes, "owes its existence not only to a renewed religious fundamentalism but to the widespread failing of American public education and the scientific illiteracy of much of the media." (22) Again, the challenge to evolution comes exclusively from the right. Criticizing it, therefore, clearly constitutes an argument against a specifically conservative form of anti-rationalism.
[...]
My second beef with the book is that many of Jacoby's own observations--often in the form of asides--are every bit as unreasoned as those found on a political blog or cable talk show. At one point she declares that "anyone who says that he or she was unmoved by Armstong's walk on the moon is either lying or was stoned at the time." (218)
This is of particular interest to me because I am fifty-odd pages in to Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, Jacoby's last book, and am enjoying it but discovering similar limitations to her pugnaciousness. To read the rest of O'Connor's post, which discusses The Age of American Unreason at some length and links to other commentary on the book, click here.