THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
New In An Updated, Post-Election Paperback Edition From Vintage Books
This impassioned, tough-minded work of contemporary history—a New York Times bestseller in 2008—paints a disturbing portrait of a mutant strain of public ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism that has developed over the past four decades and now threatens the future of American democracy. In an updated 2009 paperback edition, the author examines the challenges posed by the current anti-rational landscape for the new administration of Barack Obama, who pledged during his campaign to restore reason and science in public policy-making. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a culture at odds with America’s heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. With mordant wit, the author offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society—on the political right and the left. America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.
The book surveys an anti-rational landscape extending from reality TV and “infantainment” videos for babies to a pseudo-intellectual universe of “junk thought.” This vast kingdom of junk thought reaches from semiliterate blogs of all political persuasions to institutions of so-called higher education that offer courses in “fat studies” and horror films but do not require students to obtain a thorough grounding in American and world history, science, and literature. Throughout our culture, disdain for logic and evidence is fostered by the infotainment media from television to the Web; aggressive anti-rational religious fundamentalism; poor public education; the intense politicization of intellectuals themselves.
Finally, the author argues that anti-rational government is not the product of a Machiavellian plot by “Washington” but is the inevitable result of “an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge” that has left many ordinary citizens and their elected representatives without the intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making. The real question is not why politicians have lied to the public but why the public was so receptive and so passive when it heard the lies. At this crucial political juncture, The Age of American Unreason challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what our descent into intellectual laziness and our flight from reason have cost us as individuals and as a nation.
ALGER HISS AND THE BATTLE FOR HISTORY
Coming in April from Yale University Press, Icons of America Series
From the author of The Age of American Unreason comes a toughminded, evenhanded investigation of changing public perceptions of the Alger Hiss case and the reasons why the case has served as a litmus test of American political and cultural loyalties for the past sixty years.
Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars and writers—many with a political ax to grind on either the right or the left—have visited and revisited Chambers's shocking accusation in 1948 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities—that Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage. In Susan Jacoby's highly original work—sure to annoy Hiss's die-hard defenders on the left as well as those who have made a right-wing cottage industry out of portraying the Hiss case as a symbolic failure of American liberalism—treats the decades-long controversy as a mirror of shifting American political passions. The book examines conflicting responses to the case, from scholars and media of every political persuasion, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present post-Cold War era.
Jacoby positions the case within the politics of the post-World War II upsurge of anti-Communism and explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Hiss to their own ideological use. “What remains important about the Hiss case today,” the author concludes, “is its ability to strike chords located along ideological fault lines that, in spite of many cultural shifts, extend from the 1930s to the present. Where does dissent cross the line into disloyalty? When does an American government's determination to guard against treachery become a form of treachery to the Constitution, and to the very liberties the government is sworn to uphold? Should we trust what any government says, especially in the murky realm of espionage—a profession based by definition on trickery and filled with both accomplished an inept liars? And finally, what is the proper relationship of the United States to the international community? The contradictory scripts about the Hiss case reveal much more about what conflicting visions of what America ought to be than about what American Communism actually was—or about who Alger Hiss was.”
Susan Jacoby is the author of nine books, a frequent contributor to national magazines and newspapers, and the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2001 appointment as a fellow of the New York Public Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers. She is a panelist for On Faith, a blog published by The Washington Post and Newsweek. Jacoby is also program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, a rationalist think tank with offices in Lower Manhattan.
