Life In America’s Dumber Ages

Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

Does it seem like America has gotten coarser lately? Not only the usual suspects, like political vitriol or “lowest common denominator” media content. Rather, we’ve become impatient with nuance, intolerant of expertise, and fearful of innovation or challenge to our existing beliefs. Nor is this a partisan issue, though it’s easier to see in the “other side.” Americans of most stripes seemingly want to snuggle into politics, media, religion, and art that makes us comfy.

I really wanted to like American journalist Susan Jacoby’s 2008 bestseller. Written as the American electorate grew dissatisfied with George W. Bush’s “plain folks” style, and tried to transition to Obama’s starchier, more academic approach to social order, I and others saw much in her willingness to call out Americans’ fondness for bonhomie and informality over knowledge and competence. That is, we saw much in her early chapters. But then her arguments started mounting up.

Jacoby starts well. She doesn’t romanticize the powdered-wig past, and rightly correlates America’s early high culture with its slaveholding and its peonage of the industrial working classes. Far from wishing to return to an idealized aristocratic age, she seems more enamored of “middlebrow,” a culture that arose between the World Wars. She speaks warmly of ordinary Americans’ aspirations to better understand science, history, and politics. Mass media, publishing, and culture encouraged proletarian learning and self-improvement.

In this, Jacoby positions herself in a robust intellectual lineage. She doesn’t even hide the debt her analysis owes to Douglas Hofstadter and Neil Postman, two prior culture critics who derided America’s slippery cultural slope. Like Hofstadter and Postman, Jacoby pooh-poohs television, overextended public schools, and Americans’ desire to see our prejudices verified. Far from revolutionary, these complaints are so well established and widely shared, at least in certain circles, that they too are comfy.

Problems become visible as Jacoby’s peroration continues. Her chapter on religion laments Christianity’s descent into nationalism. Post-WWII public Christians, progressive innovators like Dr. King and Reinhold Niebuhr, gave way to conservative heel-draggers like Falwell and LaHaye. Okay, true enough. But I’ve read James Cone and Gustavo Guittierez, and I spot something Jacoby overlooks: Whiteness. Where Black and other “racialized” Christians still seek justice, White Christians frequently want their prejudices sanctified. Jacoby sees only the latter.

Susan Jacoby

Proximity to power, not religious devotion, often defines how nuanced one’s Christianity is. Scholars like Kevin M. Kruse or Gorski & Perry address this in detail. These sources shipped after Jacoby’s book, but their premises and conclusions aren’t new. Rather than addressing such scholarship, Jacoby compares contemporary (2008) religious headlines with her childhood catechism lessons, and finds the present wanting. She probably hasn’t needed to consider non-White Christianity in her journalism, so she forgets it.

We could continue. Jacoby’s discussions of American anti-science spotlight Intelligent Design, and President Bush’s opposition to Darwinian evolution. This seems quaint after, y’know, global warming and The Pandemic. Likewise, she belittles universities teaching courses on Stephen King, which she sees as decline from the Bronte sisters. Except universities have historically used pop culture analysis to teach students the principles of literary criticism. To say nothing of the importance of analyzing today’s world through contemporary art.

As Jacoby’s claims accumulate, themes emerge. Though she’s largely progressive (though dismissive of Politically Correct excesses), she shows an essentially past-oriented bias, believing things used to be good, and now they’re not. She yearns for moral clarity she believes America had at its middlebrow peak, encouraged by post-WWII economic largesse and the GI Bill. But she isn’t comparing apples to apples. Jacoby’s present consists primarily of headlines; her past mainly comprises memories and cultural touchstones.

The past doesn’t just objectively exist. It took me years to realize how thoroughly curated the past is, even within my own lifetime. Headlines create a perception of urgency, and in today’s saturated media landscape, crisis and catastrophe sell ad space. Breaking news isn’t your friend, and is frequently deceptive. Meanwhile, the past gets trimmed of ambiguity, contingency, or doubt, making positive outcomes seem falsely inevitable. That’s why people yearn to bring greatness back “again.”

Don’t misunderstand me. Historians and anthropologists have long documented America’s widespread opposition to learning, nuance, and deliberation. The years since this book dropped make Jacoby’s 2008 milieu look parochial and sweet; we’ve busted multiple nadirs since, and find new ways to crash ever lower. But blanket statements about a bucolic past and an apocalyptic present are neither useful nor accurate. Good and bad have always existed—and Americans have always chosen poorly between the two.