Dumbing down America

The culprits Jacoby fingers, as suggested above, are eclectic but to a great extent include the usual suspects too. Her documentation varies from the fairly thorough (on junk science) to the somewhat thin (in lambasting the media). She applauds postwar "middlebrow" culture for its ethos of self-betterment, its secularizing influence and its aspirations to the high arts, but her effort to track the erosion of print culture is like trying to take on the fall of the Roman Empire. In a book that seeks to trace the convergence of several cultural trends, such an attempt is bound to be spotty. (On that topic, incidentally, Jacoby discusses a 2002 study on reading conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts. Readers should be aware that last November, the NEA released a new study, available online, even more dire in its findings than the one Jacoby cites. The 2007 study, which NEA Chairman Dana Gioia termed "alarming," found "reading proficiency rates are stagnant or declining in adults of both genders and all education levels," and that, as of 2005, scarcely more than a third of high school seniors read at or above the proficient level.)

Jacoby manages to step on toes across political and cultural spectrums in "The Age of American Unreason," and whether by accident or design it is hard to determine. She questions the residual damage done by McCarthyism, for example, which is bound to raise hackles on the left; her main point is that the rapid acceleration of new protest movements (such as the civil-rights campaign) argues "against overstating the overall cultural impact of the postwar hunt for Communists." She accuses right-wing attacks on the 1960s of being "essentially a political indictment masquerading as a defense of Western culture." Yet, she has her own cavils about the period, maintaining that "the fusion of video, the culture of celebrity, and the marketing of youth is the real anti-intellectual legacy of the sixties" and that everyone took rock 'n' roll "too seriously."