Half a century ago, the political historian Richard Hofstadter wrote: "The widespread distrust of intellectuals in America reflects a tendency to depreciate their playfulness and distrust their piety. Ours is a society in which every form of play seems to be accepted by the majority except the play of the mind."
Hofstadter expanded that theme in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1963 book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," which ranged across education, politics and religion. In documenting a majoritarian and nativist bias, it became what Hofstadter biographer David S. Brown termed "one of the most troubling criticisms of American democracy ever written."
What we have in Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason" is an attempt to update Hofstadter. He had concluded that intellectuals "have tried to be good and believing citizens of a democratic society and at the same time to resist the vulgarization of culture which that society constantly produces," and in many ways Jacoby's book concentrates on that vulgarization. She decries junk thought and junk science, youth culture, celebrity culture, degradation of the language, television, screen technologies for infants, innumeracy and other forms of cultural illiteracy. A particular concern -- not as vulgarization but as an overweening, deleterious influence on public policy -- is religious fundamentalism.
"During the past four decades," Jacoby writes, "America's endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic."
The confluence of disparate forces, she argues, is "at odds not only with the nation's heritage of eighteenth-century Enlightenment reason but with modern scientific knowledge," propelling "a surge of anti-intellectualism capable of inflicting vastly greater damage than its historical predecessors inflicted on American culture and politics." Aware that much of what she has to say could leave her labeled a cultural conservative, a term "hijacked by the religious right and propagated by the media," Jacoby identifies herself as a "cultural conservationist" instead.
