Original Link:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_mallick/20080225.html
HEATHER MALLICK
The most depressing book since Bambi
America's sad state of
knowledge
February 25, 2008
On Sept. 11, 2001, New York author and historian Susan Jacoby headed
home, not unreasonably stopping at a bar first, where she overheard a
conversation between two men in suits:
"It's just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.
"What's Pearl
Harbor?" the other one asked.
"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in
a harbour, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man replied.
That was when Jacoby decided to write her stunningly sad new book, The
Age of American Unreason, on the anti-intellectualism of her nation. It's the
type of worthy, timely book that consolidates information rather than uncovering
it, and stunning only in the sense that it is asteroid-like when it hits the
reader. Just when Americans, led by the young, were getting their courage back
and demanding a return to sanity — with the rest of us cheering them on — Jacoby
delivers a harsh verdict.
Here was I, expecting and rejoicing in great things from a stricken
country — President Obama, money wasted on Iraq to be spent on education in
slums and Arkansas, and maybe a new novel from Jonathan Franzen. The Age of
American Unreason obliterates all hope and leaves a steaming black pit. It's the
most depressing book since Bambi, and I was six when I read that. Bambi's mother
isn't coming back and neither is the American drive towards rationalism,
self-improvement, respect for measurable scientific truth and ability to
understand sentences with clauses.
Widespread uneducation
Anti-intellectualism has always existed but it didn't always run the
American show, Jacoby says. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter weren't embarrassed to
take speed-reading classes in the White House, part of the same grand tradition
of self-taught intellect that fuelled the almost unschooled Abraham Lincoln into
the building. But the era of the autodidact is dead. The accepted stance now is
to assert that one cannot be improved upon.
Here's the puzzle Jacoby presents: it isn't that the poor are shut out
of an education, it's that everyone is. Learning is aggressively undervalued.
Evolution is officially considered a theory, Bush aides refer sneeringly to the
"reality-based community," and, as Bill Moyers put it, "the delusional is no
longer marginal."
Adults are not expected to have a common literacy or prior body of
knowledge, and this one has pained me personally for years. When I write a
column, should I have to identify all the proper names of intellectuals I
mention? Can I assume that readers are already familiar with John Kenneth
Galbraith or Donald Rumsfeld? I say yes, Canadian newspaper editors gently say
no, American editors angrily say no, and — here's the glory of writing online —
my CBC.ca editor says yes, and anyway, readers curious about Moyers will simply Google his name and return to
this page.
Mainstream editors assume that readers don't know who anyone is. And
this is Jacoby's point. It's not that her fellow Americans know nothing — that
would be fixable in a better world — but that they are expected to know nothing.
This extends into the Ivy League, media, academia and science.
Undisciplined analysis, in many disciplines
The New York Times recently ran an article on young immigrant students drawing classroom lessons
from reading The Great Gatsby. They yearned for Gatsby's wealth; they saw him as
a glorious "striver." But no one, not the sweet-natured teacher, the students or
the reporter seemed to grasp that Gatsby's green light was a delusion, that the
novel ends in tragedy and that Gatsby was a bootlegger, a 1920s version of a
drug dealer. The article was written with the literalism and gassy sentimental
wonder that is the hallmark of a Times feature. I am always awed by journalists'
ability to see glamour where there is none. Wiser readers wrote to complain
about the misreading, but they sounded … lonely.
Lawrence Summers of Harvard had no evidence for saying women were bad
at science; he simply felt it to be true. News reports on NBC are short because
viewers are assumed to have a child's attention span. It is scientists hungry
for research grants who are responsible for the laughable "health" stories that
clog our landscape. Take, for example, "post-abortion syndrome," or the recent
study that claimed pot smokers were more likely than cigarette smokers to get
lung cancer, based on chats with 10 smokers in Melbourne. It's junk science, but
people are innumerate, scientifically illiterate and credulous — three things
educated people are not supposed to be.
As for last week's headline, Female G-spot
can be detected, all I can say is "Yes, if you work at it," and if you're an
enthusiastic male Italian PhD with 20 women to be probed at leisure, you will
find it, but it's not science.
Decline of the middlebrow
Jacoby traces the historical paths of anti-intellectualism. She studies
the devastation caused by the U.S. system of locally controlled education, which
dooms the poor and rural; the way the South for centuries ran a blockade against
good schoolteachers; the primacy of religion; and, most tragically, the decline
of the middlebrow.
Middlebrow culture began with the early 19th century adult-education
lyceums, and continued with the postwar GI Bill that gave Second World War
soldiers a free education, as well as a 1950s attempt by the middle class to
improve themselves with such things as the Book-of-the-Month Club. But TV
destroyed middlebrow. And highbrow dumbed down, Jacoby says, thanks to timid
academics who allowed the core curriculum to drift into trendiness, killing off
the study of the Dead White Males and anything that could be called an agreed-on
central culture that all Americans should share. Now Americans, including the
president, live in a lowbrow world.
I cannot square this with evidence of America's geniuses — there are
plenty of them — but she would say that the exception proves the rule. And she's
no happier saying it than I am reading about it.
American unreason is why a white-collar New Yorker conflates the
Vietnam War with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. What
half-remembered whispers of fact rustled in this man's mind? He regards history
as a series of generic anti-American explosions, but then, he probably never
took a high school history class. He is normal; Jacoby is the odd one out. In
the U.S. today, literate thoughtful people are regarded as freaks.
De Toqueville described all this in 1835 in Democracy in America. But
he was describing a nation in transition. Jacoby isn't. "It is possible that
nothing will help," she concludes. "The nation's memory and attention span may
already have sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived by the best
efforts of America's best minds."
=//Turnquest
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