I bought Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason as something of an impulse buy--it was prettily displayed in the store--but I had enjoyed Freethinkers, and am concerned about the sorry state of intellectual life in America (won't say "dumbing down," because I'm not sure it's really gotten worse).
Having read it, the nicest thing I can think to say about it is that I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if Jacoby hadn't gotten off to such a bad start. And even there, I suspect the answer is "no," since there are enough things to dislike about the book throughout.
First the bad start: Jacoby spends five pages complaining that some people have begun using the word "folks" where they might have used "people." This is bizarre. Words go in and out of fashion all the time without consequence. What's her position: that there is a transcendental rule that only "people" can be used to convey that particular idea? Is she shocked by the idea of people in the Spanish speaking world conveying that idea with "la gente"? There are many troubling features of our intellectual climate, but a single point of word choice that doesn't create the smallest confusion in thinking isn't one of them.
As I read on, I could kind of convince myself this was a minor lapse. After the first chapter she launches into history reminiscent of Freethinkers. I had a lingering worry about history being used for propaganda purposes, but tried to suppress it. I ultimately failed at that. I gave out during the chapter on the 60's, which was dedicated to arguing that the American Left is not responsible for our current state of affairs. To this end, she trivializes major events from that period:
The problem with that argument is that radical New Left activists never came close to attaining a majority among students, much less faculty, on most campuses--including the elite institutions that were centers of student protest and garnered the most extensive national publicity. At Columbia University, where the administration closed the school in response to a student strike in April 1968, only about 1,000 of the 4,400 undergraduates were actually on strike, and many fewer took part in the occupation of buildings. (p. 141)Are we seriously expected to believe that students shutting down a university would not have had broader aftershocks, just because the students involved were a "mere" large minority? The anti-war activists on my campus today can only dream of having over 20% of the student population backing their protests. This doesn't mean Leftist students are to blame for our problems: my response to hearing that story is curiosity rather than fury, but Jacoby can't find it in her to be even historically, curious, because that would undermine her rhetorical aims.
Once she leaves the history behind, the book becomes pure trash. The central motif that emerges from the book is snobbery. Reading Jacoby, I've come to see that snobbery is best understood as valuing the outward trappings of intellectual and cultural achievement, and feeling superior about it, while having no sense of what's really valuable in those areas. Such is the attitude required for mistaking a minor point of word choice for a sign of the End.
A major strand of Jacoby's snobbery is ungrounded rants against new media. I was initially puzzled by Jacoby's assertion that the internet would take time away from reading--made as if she is unaware that text comprises as solid majority of the internet's content. Then, on p. 262, she comes back from a section break by noticing this problem and giving signs she will issue a rebuttal. She even has the decency to provide a substantial excerpt from an enthusiastically pro-internet Wired article. Then she declares the excerpt "ghastly," and doesn't really bother to answer it. The final sentence before the next section break reads "I say readers get what they pay for--in time as well as money." Jacoby is too busy being impressed by her use of a cliche to see how stupid she's being. Literally, this statement is trivially true as long as one isn't defrauded or accidentally handed the wrong product. What she means to imply, though, is something along the lines of "new technology will never give us equal- or better-quality products more efficiently and at a lower price." Counter-examples to this claim are embarrassingly abundant, and include near everything that makes civilization possible.
On television, let me say this: yes, it's a tragedy that many people watch trashy TV shows when they could be watching great novels. But it's also a tragedy that Firefly got canceled, and just think: it probably would have survived if every hour spent reading trashy novels that year had been invested watching the show instead.
Not only is Jacoby snobbish, much of the book can only be described as anti-intellectual. Oftentimes, people with more academic qualifications than she disagree with her, and rather than providing serious intellectual engagement, simply acts shocked that an intellectual would disagree with her. This reaches its most absurd point when she mentions academic discussion of popular culture:
Courses in popular culture are extremely popular with students, and the faculty members who teach them argue that such classes enable students to "deconstruct" and think critically about mass entertainment. They are wrong. (pp. 314-315)Though Jacoby continues to heap scorn on popular culture for a few more sentences, those last five words are the entirety of her response to her academic opponents. Here, as in many other places, it's clear Jacoby hasn't bothered learning enough about her targets to effectively critique them. Learn enough about popular culture, and it becomes pretty clear that it really is possible to deconstruct popular culture in a way that prevents anyone from viewing it the same way ever again.
If we want to improve the state of American culture, we need to be able to make a convincing case that life is too short to spend watching "whatever's on."* We need to be able to show people the world of first rate literature, philosophy, science, and history. But to that, we need to be able to explain what's valuable in it, and to do that, we need to understand ourselves what's valuable, moving beyond a mere snobbish exaltation of the superficially sophisticated.
*Perhaps the closest thing this book has to a redeeming feature is Jacoby's discovery of a statistic that something like 43% of Americans are willing to watch "whatever's on," a finding unfortunately not given the attention it deserves.
5 comments:
Words go in and out of fashion all the time but there are instances where this is of consequence. E.g., the word "nigger" has fallen out of fashion and, I would argue, this has had consequences. I would also argue that the use of the word "bitch" has become fashionable (at least in certain circles of pop culture) in referring to women generally and that this has consequences. Not having read the book, I must ask, does Jacoby merely complain or does she posit any perceived consequences?
Do you see anything incongruous about labeling Jacoby a snob and then calling it "a tragedy that many people watch trashy TV shows when they could be watching great novels" and that "we need to be able to show people the world of first rate literature, philosophy, science, and history". You act as an arbiter of good vs. bad (high vs. low?) culture in the same way she does. Also, you think her criticisms are facile yet you yourself don't tell us what is important about the areas to which you give personal preference.
Your post reads as if you and Jacoby agree on what's important but neither of you are willing to say why. The difference between you two seems to be that she prefers print while you embrace New Media. A difference in quantity, perhaps, but no quality.
I read a short excerpt from the book a week or so before it was published and came away thinking the exact same thing you did, so I guess that excerpt summed up the rest of the work pretty well. "New Media is worse than old media! Children are lazy! The past is preferable to the present!"
I'm part way through the book right now. Just finished the chapter on middlebrow culture. Like Jacoby I think the decline of the middlebrow culture is sad, but unlike Jacoby I don't think it's because of the advent of video and other new media, new liberals or anything particularly new. Oh sure, the media has its' share of blame in the decline of rational culture but I think Jacoby is missing something rather important, or perhaps ignoring it because it doesn't fit her thesis.
Actually, come to think of it, I think Jacoby is missing at least three important things: 1) The creation, rise and fall of the middle class, 2) the transition from a hegemonic to a heterodox culture, and 3) the exponential rise in the sheer complexity of knowledge.
The first is important because, in order to be well-read and/or well-cultured, one has to have both the money and time to invest in such things. If you're worried about putting food on the table, or , in a traditional nuclear family, if both partners have to work long hours in order to make ends meet, then you simply don't have the time, money or energy.
The second is what Chris and others are touching on when they say that Jacoby comes off as a snob (that she does). While the great Western tradition is important, the fact of that matter is that no culture stands still and in a nation as diverse as the United States it is inevitable that both intellectual and popular culture will reflect that diversity. Additionally, I just don't think Jacoby's assertions about new media hold any water. In particular, she engages in pseudoscience when she says that no amount of video viewing, in any form, regardless of content, is harmful to children. I haven't checked her endnotes to see where she's pulling that assertion from, but I'm pretty sure I know what study she has in mind and it's total codswallop (as Jacoby would put it).
Finally, Jacoby totally misses the fact that knowledge hasn't stayed still since 1950. Maybe I'm making my own bit of uninformed judgment here, but I think it's nay well impossible for any one person to be knowledgeable in all sciences and schools of thought, even at the lay level.
That all being said though, Jacoby is on the money when she says the anti-intellectualism and anti-rationality are rampant. But like Chris, I'm not sure it has gotten any worse. Surely fundamentalist religion is more prevalent today than in the 1950s and in that I do think things are worse, but I also think that's a transitory thing and even among some fundamentalists we're seeing a push toward moderation.
Anyway, I'll probably write this up at my blog and see if I can't make my argument hang together better after I've finished the book. An act I'm sure Jacoby would despise.
I'm not sure how much the alleged "collapse of the middle class" has to do with it. The average American finds something like four hours a day to watch TV, I don't think that's all trust fund babies who don't have to work at all. Between libraries and the more intellectual internet sites, knowledge is pretty cheap these days. To a significant extent, I think that people of all classes just don't care.
One comment on the supposed decline of middlebrow culture: I have great difficulty identifying with the "middlebrow" that Jacoby describes. She seems to have in mind slavish imitation by poor people of upper-class culture. I'm more inclined to think of people who do new and original things with mass culture media, or who do new and original things to make high culture media accessible to the general public.
Incidentally, the first thing I did before logging on to the computer right now is open up a package containing one of Alan Moore's latest works. It's the comic book medium of course, where Moore is considered the leading innovator, and to boot Moore really likes working in a lot of history (literary and otherwise) into his works, giving an incentive to bone up on that stuff. That's the kind of middlebrow I go in for.
I wonder though whether those four hours are spent merely with the TV on, playing in the background, and people doing other things while half paying attention or if they are solely devoting their attention to the television?
I guess my overarching point is that Jacoby could have examined why contemporary culture is so anti-intellectual and anti-rational, yet it's all finger-wagging polemic.
And yes, I think Jacoby also takes a rather condescending view of middlebrow culture. However, it seems to me, that middlebrow culture was alive and well at least through the 1980s. I'm not sure it is today, but you make a good point similar to mine that culture doesn't stand still. Maybe people don't read literature for enjoyment as much as they did in the 50s, but I've read a little of Moore's stuff and it's at least as good as Hemingway. Or what of serious science fiction? I wonder how Jacoby would classify that?
To be honest, the book disturbs me because I empathize with Jacoby on many levels and I want to like it. And I do like Jacoby's style. But this is not history, this is not sociology, this is not even cultural analysis. It is however bad. The best I could say about it so far is that perhaps it'll engender a conversation about anti-intellectualism and anti-rationality. I doubt it will though.
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