Greetings,
This is Off Topic, but timely.
February 14, 2008
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
By PATRICIA COHEN
A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from
“American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”
during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000
question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”
Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought
Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by
one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief.
“That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”
Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author
of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers
with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.
Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose “Against Happiness”
warns that the “American obsession with happiness” could “well lead to a sudden extinction
of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those
foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation.”
Then there is Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic
Mob,” which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and
arrant commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New
Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog (“you
couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces”) and to praise himself (“brave, brilliant”).
Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or
emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well
aware that some may tag her a crank. “I expect to get bashed,” said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either
as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a
secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.
Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or
ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads,
highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And
liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly
analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.
T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said,
“The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that
in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn
toward cultural issues.”
But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the
attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the
idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a
particularly insidious way.
Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge,
she said, but they also don’t think it matters.
She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to
24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news
are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with
some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.
Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting,
appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux
Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the
library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she
stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly
dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s
horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,”
the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”
Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause
millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer. But she
would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly
vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of
infotainment doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other
countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on
comparative tests.
In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to
school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said.
Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves
over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught
along with evolution.
Ms. Jacoby doesn’t leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left’s attacks
on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women’s studies
to an “academic ghetto” instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous
musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that
trivialize college-level learning.
Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to
call herself a “cultural conservationist.”
For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it
is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the
annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. “I was stunned at how difficult it
was for me,” she said.
The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just
how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is — even
curmudgeons.
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* Dr. James Ellingson, jellings(a)me.umn.edu *
* University of Minnesota, mobile : 651/645-0753 *
* Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 *