The Age of American Unreason: Review Part 2

[Ed. Note: Yesterday, our one regular reader asked if we could refocus the blog into a site that "was stupid and made him laugh." We do not know how to take this request from 100% of our audience.]

In "The Way We Lived Then: Intellect and Ignorance in a Young Nation," the second chapter of Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason, Jacoby establishes the seeds of the intellectual and anti-intellectual movements in America, suggesting that this problem is not local but systemic.

Predictably, Jacoby lionizes Emerson, the patron saint of American intellect. Again, Jacoby does not interrogate Emerson's message, but establishes his claims as inherently correct. Jacoby focuses on "The American Scholar," and she discusses Emerson's truly democratic concept of "Man Thinking." Emerson is worth quoting at length:

The fable [of there being One Man] implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

In this passage, Emerson argues against the compartmentalization of one's subjectivity into a single area defined by labor (what Emerson calls "a form"), and if we extend his thinking, we see that an individual is capable of being an intellectual, a laborer, an artisan simultaneously—Man Thinking anticipates Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual, and the concept does not close off laborers from participating in intellectualism, nor does it argue for the reification of an elite class of intellectuals. While Emerson does not investigate any labor-based reason for one's estrangement from his or her own labor, on the majority we can say of the Man Thinking: So far, so good.

One need not look too hard at "Self Reliance," though, to see some roots of American isolationism, as well attitudes and beliefs that have worked to marginalize oppressed groups.¹ Thus, by not problematizing her major argument, again Jacoby stacks the deck in her own favor, undermining her own case by either intentionally omitting what is problematic in the sources she champions or by not seeing the problems themselves. She does, however, focus on those who disagree with Emersonian self-reliance and intellectualism, painting them as antagonists to what she develops more and more as an American narrative.²

Throughout this chapter, however, Jacoby is relatively even-handed in her analysis of the parallel development of secular and non-secular school systems in the early years of the Republic, and she does an excellent job of framing the intentional omission of religion from the nation's founding documents.

And for our one reader who wants "funny":

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¹In Extraordinary Bodies, Rosemarie Garland Thomson posits that "Self Reliance" and its related themes directly contribute to a culture that devalues bodies with difference and ultimately ignores the reality that humans are, in fact, interdependant, not autonomous.

²In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault credibly argues why one must resist the impulse to narrativize when researching history. As a New Historian, Foucault would reject Jacoby's method of chronological, causal narrative outright.

The Age of American Unreason: Review Part 1

[Ed. Note: As I might have known, I could not stop reading after a single chapter, so the review and reflection on the first six chapters will each be written after having read them as a block.]

In the opening chapter of The Age of American Unreason, Jacoby establishes what she contends are the two main causes of the metastatic unreason she finds in America. Titled "The Way We Live Now: Just Us Folks," the opening chapter paints with broad brushstrokes, covering [in some cases quite clumsily] linguistics, the mass media (she attacks television with particular gusto), and fundamentalist religion. In short, the pillars (or post-hole diggers) of American anti-intellectualism are defined precisely where one would expect them to be.

Problematically, Jacoby spends little time promoting intellectualism (granted, this is not the mission of the book); however, Jacoby's argument for rationalism and scientific method are seriously undermined by treating "intellectualism" and "rationality" as things which are inherently good, as though they themselves are devoid of rhetoric, non-ideological, and natural.¹

Jacoby, however, would disagree. At every turn Jacoby posits that intellectuals are the accurate interpreters of "culture"—using it not in Raymond Williams' tripartite sense, which includes the whole way of life for a people, but in Matthew Arnold's sense of culture as,

the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.... (Culture and Anarchy)

By subscribing to such an ideology, Jacoby feels no need to justify the denigration of television because she contends it disrupts reading, a highly-valued cultural practice.

Jacoby opens with an analysis of the rhetorical usage of "folks," particularly how President George W. Bush has consistently used the term in his political addresses. While Jacoby's analysis of the rhetorical effect of that term is accurate—by being repeatedly called one of the folks, one subjectifies (not her term) him- or herself as one of the good ol' boys or girls who has no need for intellectualism—she reveals herself to be a linguistic prescriptivist, arguing for an inflexible language and lamenting the supposed "debased speech" as a sign of cultural degeneracy.

Paradoxically, Jacoby argues that language and meaning does change when she  defines debased speech not as, "the prevalence of obscene language, so widespread as to be deprived of force and meaning at those rare times when only an epithet will do" (7). By arguing that language can lose its efficacy, Jacoby is arguing for a descriptivist approach to language, one that is based upon actual usage, nor prescribed "correct" usage. Moreover, she argues that there are times (admittedly "rare") when an epithet is appropriate. By suggesting that obscene language is overused, she simultaneously argues that the majority of English speakers is unable to discern what those appropriate times are.  Well, hot damn, I suppose the intellectuals could tell us.

While Jacoby consistently lauds scholars and intellectuals, she has no hesitation dismissing scholars with whom she disagrees, and her argument about television illustrates this. She writes,

Predictably, the video culture has spawned an electronic cottage industry of scholars and writers taking up the cudgels in defense of a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate and pooh-poohing old-fashioned intellectuals (a.k.a. curmudgeons) for their reservations about sucking at the video tit from cradle to grave. (15)

Interestingly, Jacoby seems to sense no irony in her proclamations, given that she stumps for print (itself a technological innovation in 1485 when William Caxton printed Sir Thomas Mallory's Morte Darthur) and chose to publish this book not with an academic, scholarly press, but with Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, the world's largest trade book publisher and a subsidiary of the transnational media corporation Bertelsmann AG, which posted a 28.5 billion dollar revenue for 2007.  "Sucking at the ... tit," indeed.

When Jacoby challenges fundamentalist religion, she would be better served by establishing the assumptions she relies on to posit (out-of-hand) that science trumps religion. By neglecting to investigate how scientific method is itself a cultural construction, how it has deployed and still deploys rhetoric to establish itself as natural and inherent, Jacoby participates in furthering the hegemony of the scientific (Jacoby's thesis would argue against such a hegemony, but if one takes her claim that all good intellectuals believe in the scientific method, one might illuminate that hegemony more clearly).

In this chapter Jacoby makes many interesting and profound claims, but by relying upon the old historical conventions of narrativizing—even though she claims, in a watered-down Foulcauldian way, that "Anti-intellectualism in any era can best be understood as a complex of symptoms of symptoms with multiple causes"—and failing to declare and illustrate the many assumptions upon which her the-best-that-has-been-thought-and-said-in-the-world argument is based, she does not present in this first chapter a convincing opening argument, but a series of opinions and standpoints (10).

 

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¹ One only need read Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (written between 1929 and 1935) to encounter a much more democratic concept of intellectualism. Gramsci does not restrict intellectualism to an elite class (although, according to Gramsci, such a class can and does exists), but each bloc (or class of people) produces its own intellectuals. The role of the intellectual, Gramsci argues, is not only to be eloquent, but to be active.

Review: The Age of American Unreason, Introduction

In Susan Jacoby's eighth book, The Age of American Unreason (2008), she explores what Richard Hofstadter had earlier described in his seminal Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) as the cyclical nature of America's passionate anti-intellectualism, positing that this current nadir may be the end of the cycle and the beginning of a cultural infection that will kill finally intellectualism.

Jacoby, a well-credentialed author who has received many prestigious awards for her work, has garnered praise for this new work from Douglas Brinkley to Stephen Colbert (he accepts your apology).

While the book has received glowing reviews, Not Invisible plans to develop an extended analysis of it, moving chapter by chapter with a method somewhat reminiscent of Barthes' S/Z. Somewhat. The actual method will be antidisciplinary, blending reader-response theory, structuralism, deconstruction, ideology theory and cultural criticism as Jacoby's arguments warrant their applications.

Each section of criticism will be written after reading a chapter, so the analysis will work by accumulation—expect misadventure—and will not endeavor to be comprehensive, but it will attempt to be fair. As Jacoby writes in her introduction:

The unwillingness to give a hearing to contradictory viewpoints, or to imagine that one might learn anything from an ideological or cultural opponent, represents a departure from the best side of American popular and elite intellectual traditions. ...In today's America, intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike, whether on the far left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo. This obduracy is both a manifestation of mental laziness and the essence of anti-intellectualism. (xix-xx)

Jacoby is unafraid to diagnose; one wonders if her book will pass her own examination.

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Jacoby, Susan. The Age of American Unreason. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.