Name: The age of American unreason
ISBN: 9780375423741

The age of American unreason

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.From the Hardcover edition.

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gPphXJan 2016

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thread

dwcApr 2011

Two books I've recently read are The Age of American Unreason by Jacoby [1] and Unscientific America by Mooney & Kirschenbaum [2]. Both are worth reading, but Jacoby gives a deeper and more thoughtful analysis and spends considerable time on historical roots and trends.

This topic is tied heavily to politics, and I hesitate to get into that here. I will say this: science is about exploring, like math is about exploring. Viewing science and math as pragmatic skills reduces them to engineering and accounting. Now there's nothing wrong with engineers and accountants and we desperately need and value their skills. But we also need scientists and research mathematicians who explore mysteries for the sake of discovery. There are a lot of subtle implications of that which are completely lost on people who think of science and math as purely functional, vocational pursuits. The benefits of science and math that have been capitalized on by engineers are spin-offs of people with curiosity exploring for exploration's sake. When exploration for its own sake is devalued, the engineers of the world find once fertile ground growing barren.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Age-American-Unreason-Susan-Jacoby/dp/...

2. http://www.amazon.com/Unscientific-America-Scientific-Illite...

thread

nescioquidJun 2021

Susan Jacoby[1] made the case that the lack of a federal/national education system (the constitution makes it a state responsibility) historically results from Americans' fears of indoctrination by such an education system -- specifically that their children would not be properly indoctrinated into their religion, or worse, be indoctrinated into someone else's religion.

[1] Age of American Unreason

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