Dumbing down America

Darwinism (read: validated science) and its religious opposition occupy much of Jacoby's discussion and form the perfect paradigm underpinning her book. Approximately 45% of those with no education beyond high school believe in the literal truth of the Bible, she reports, and in a 2006 survey by the Pew Foundation, 60% of white evangelical Christians contended that the Bible, not popular representation, should shape U.S. law. Citing educational deficits in the South (another set of toes!), Jacoby notes that Southerners are more likely than other Americans to have a fundamentalist faith, a general point she belabors more than once. "Of all the cultural phenomena slighted by the contemporary media and academic community, the rejuvenation of fundamentalist religion was unquestionably the most important," Jacoby insists, noting its adherents' belief "that it is both a right and a religious duty to institutionalize their moral values."

Jacoby posits a hatred of secularism at work: That's probably an overstatement as a general proposition, but it seems pointedly true when applied to educational and scientific arenas. The great social thinker Jane Jacobs wrote a book not long before her death titled "Dark Age Ahead," voicing an equally diffuse set of cultural complaints, but in which the abandonment of science figured as a major concern. Science "isn't a thing but a state of mind," Jacobs wrote. Noting that science is mistrusted by those who "don't like its discoveries for religious, political, ethical, or even esthetic reasons," she spoke of a rot of bad science and asked, "Try to imagine how demoralizing that deterioration will be." Jacoby offers no specific alternative to the path she says we're on. Contending that "every shortcoming of American governance, in foreign relations and domestic affairs, is related in some fashion to the knowledge deficit of the America public," her book suggests that this demoralizing state is already here. But don't tell that to Beavis and Butt-head.