The Age of American Unreason

The Age of American Unreason is a 2008 book about American anti-intellectualism, written by Susan Jacoby.

All page numbers are from the hardcover first edition published by Pantheon, ISBN 978-0-375-42374-1, 6th printing

Italics as in the book. Bold face added for emphasis.

Introduction

• It is difficult to suppress the fear that the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to functional democracy. During the past four decades, America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic. This new form of anti-rationalism, at odds not only with the nation’s heritage of eighteenth-century Enlightenment reason but with modern scientific knowledge, has propelled a surge of anti-intellectualism capable of inflicting vastly greater damage than its historical predecessors inflicted on American culture and politics. Indeed, popular anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism are now synonymous.
  • pp. xi-xii

• One of the most remarkable characteristics of America’s revolutionary generation was the presence and influence of so many genuine intellectuals (although the term had not been coined in the eighteenth century). Men of extraordinary learning and intellect were disproportionately represented among the politicians who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and led the republic during its formative decades.
  • pp. xiii-xiv

• The denigration of fairness has affected both political and intellectual life and has now produced a culture in which a disproportionate influence is exercised by the loud and relentless voices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another.
  • p. xvi

• Americans are alone in the developed world in their view of evolution by means of natural selection as “controversial” rather than as settled mainstream science.
  • p. xvii

• This level of scientific illiteracy provides fertile soil for political appeals based on sheer ignorance.
  • p. xviii

• The current American relationship to reading and writing by contrast, is best described not as illiterate but as a-literate.…In this increasingly a-literate America, not only the enjoyment of reading but critical thinking itself is at risk.
  • p. xviii; ellipsis represents the elision of examples

• The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between.
  • p. xviii

• One important element of the resurgent anti-intellectualism in American life is the popular equation of intellectualism with a liberalism supposedly at odds with traditional American values. The entire concept is summed up by the right-wing rubric “the elites.”
  • p. xviii

• 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.
  • p. xix

• In today’s America, intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, whether on the 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.
  • p. xx

Chapter 1: The Way We Live Now: Just Us Folks

• However, there are ways of trying to strangle ideas they do not involve straight forward attempts at censorship or intimidation. The suggestion that there is something sinister, even un-American, about intense devotion to ideas, reason, logic, evidence, and precise language is one of them.
  • p. 10

• The explicit distinction between those who are fit only to study and those who are history’s actors not only expresses contempt for intellectuals but also denigrates anyone who requires evidence, rather than power and emotion, as justification for public policy.
  • p. 10

• First and foremost among the vectors of anti-intellectualism are the mass media.
  • p. 10

• It is not that television, or any of its successors in the world of video, was designed as an enemy of active intellectual endeavor but that the media, while they may not actually be the message, inevitably reshape content to fit a form that subordinates both the spoken and the written word to visual image. In doing so, the media restrict their audience’s intellectual parameters not only by providing information in a highly condensed form but by filling time—a huge amount of time—that used to be occupied by engagement with the written word.
  • p. 11

• Well-off professionals, including a fair number of intellectuals, have proved especially vulnerable to the bromide that there is no harm, and may be a great benefit, from video consumption as a way of life—as long as the videos are “educational.” But medical research does not support the comforting notion that a regular diet of videos, educational or otherwise, is good for the developing brains of infants and toddlers. A growing body of pediatric research does indicate that frequent exposure to any form of video in the early years of life produces older children with shortened attention spans. It does not matter whether the images are produced by a television network, a film studio, or a computer software company: what matters is the amount of time children spend staring at a monitor. The American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that there is no safe level of viewing for children under age two, but whatever the Academy may recommend, the battle against videos for infants is already lost.
  • p. 14

• It is a fine thing for tired parents to gain a quiet hour for themselves by mesmerizing small children with videos—who would be stuffy enough to suggest that the occasional hour in front of animals dancing to Tchaikovsky can do a baby any real harm?—But let us not delude ourselves that education is what is going on. Or rather, education is going on—but it is the kind of education that wires young brains to focus attention on prepackaged visual stimuli, accompanied by a considerable amount of noise.
  • p. 15

• Memory, which depends on the capacity to absorb ideas and information through exposition and to connect new information to an established edifice of knowledge, is one of the first victims of video culture. Without memory, judgments are made on the unsound basis of the most recent bit of half-digested information.
  • p. 17

• The second major spur to anti-intellectualism during the past forty years has been the resurgence of fundamentalist religion. Modern media, with their overt and covert appeal to emotion rather than reason, or ideally suited to assist in the propagation of a form of faith that stands opposed to most of the great rationalist insights they have transformed Western civilization since the beginning of the Enlightenment.
  • pp. 17-18

• The American marketing of the Apocalypse is a multi-media production, capitalizing on fundamentalism and paranoid superstition.
  • pp. 18-19

• Misguided objectivity, particularly with regard to religion, ignores the willed ignorance that is one of the defining characteristics of fundamentalism. One of the most powerful taboos in American life concerns speaking ill of anyone else’s faith—an injunction rooted in confusion over the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions.
  • pp. 20-21

• This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.
  • p. 21

• The perfect storm over evolution is a perfect example of the new anti-intellectualism in action, because it owes its existence not only to a renewed religious fundamentalism but to the widespread failings of American public education and the scientific illiteracy of much of the media.
  • p. 22

• A scientist looks at emperor penguins and sees a classic example of random mutation, natural selection, and adaptation to the harshest climate on earth. A believer in creationism or intelligent design, however, looks at the same facts and sees not the inefficiency but the “miracle” of the survival of the species. Exactly why an “intelligent designer” would place the breeding grounds seventy miles from the feeding grounds or, for that matter, would install any species in such an inhospitable climate, are questions never addressed by those who see God’s hand at the helm.
  • p. 26

• The obvious question of why a guiding intelligence would want to make things so difficult for his or her creations is never asked because it cannot be answered.
  • p. 27

• “One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime,” Moyers said, “is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seats of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.”
  • p. 29

Chapter 2: The Way We Lived Then: Intellect and Ignorance in a Young Nation

• Whatever the denomination or religion, fundamentalism has always been defined by its refusal to adapt to any secular knowledge that conflicts with its version of revealed religious truth; that refusal, in science and the humanities, has been the most enduring and powerful strand in American anti-intellectualism.
  • p. 38

• The American religious landscape at the conclusion of the Revolution was pluralistic and somewhat chaotic: it bore little resemblance to the portrait of a devout, churchgoing America that the religious right loves to paint today.
  • p. 39

• Translated into politics, freethought demanded a government based on the rights of man and human reason rather than divine authority—in other words, a secular government. The Constitution, with its pointed and conscious omission of any mention of God, as well as its prohibition of all religious tests for public office, formalized and legalized the freethought ideal of a government free of religious interference.
  • p. 41

• Supernaturalist fundamentalism is by definition anti-rational, because it cannot be challenged by any countervailing evidence in the natural world.
  • p. 44

• This debate between religious conservatives and religious liberals over the relative gravity of sins was no abstract matter; it was being played out at exactly the same time between orthodox ministers and radical abolitionists over the evil of slavery. In 1836, the Reverend Lyman Beecher made a major speech in which he described the Sabbath as the “sun of the moral world” and lax Sabbath observance as the major moral issue in American society. The abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, in the July 1836 and August 1836 editions of The Liberator, mocked Beecher for dwelling on Sabbath observance while at the same time “giving his protecting influence to a system of slavery, which, at a single blow, annihilates not only the fourth commandment but The Whole DECALOGUE! and which effectively excludes from the benefits of the Sabbath, two millions and a half of his fellow countrymen!!”
  • p. 51

• For generations, the science and history taught in small towns in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana was vetted by adults who believed in the innate inferiority of blacks and who also subscribed to fundamentalist creeds at odds with the growing body of secular scientific knowledge. The best educated regions of the country became better educated, and the most intellectually backward regions became more backward.
  • p. 54

• Finally, the Enlightenment culture that had produced Jefferson, Madison, and Washington no longer existed in the South: men of learning and science like Thomas Cooper were being exiled instead of recruited to build regional educational institutions. All of this converged in a culture in which the richest and most influential members, the planters, were noted for and proud of their lack of interest in intellectual pursuits.
  • p. 57

• In the South, what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in an effort to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order.
  • p. 57

Chapter 3: Social Pseudoscience in the Morning of America's Culture Wars

• The ideological fixations of otherwise intelligent men in America’s Gilded Age offer a recognizable precursor of the imperviousness to evidence that permeates many ideologies in our current age of unreason.
  • p. 61

• Then as now, the public was overwhelmed by information and misinformation filtered through new technologies.
  • p. 62

• One of the great ironies of this phase of American intellectual history is that the intellectual social Darwinists and their fundamentalist opponents shared an inability to distinguish between science and social pseudoscience, and they passed on their confusion to a public that worshipped the fruits of science but was fundamentally ignorant of the scientific method.
  • p. 63

• In 1878, there were fewer than eight hundred public high schools in the United States; by the eve of the First World War, the number had increased to more than eleven thousand.
  • p. 64

• The Gilded Age was also the golden age of the lecture as a source of both entertainment and instruction.
  • p. 65

• After Darwin, the gap between contemporary scientific knowledge and southern religion grew much wider.
  • p. 67

• Perhaps only someone trained as both a natural scientist and a philosopher could have spotted, at such an early stage in the culture wars over evolution, the bloviating arrogance of metaphysical theories that ignore inconvenient facts, as distinct from scientific theories subject to modification by the discovery of new facts.
  • p. 76

• Regardless of political reversal of position, two critical ingredients of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism have remained largely unchanged since the 1890s. The first is the belief of a significant minority of Americans that intellectualism and secular higher learning are implacable enemies of their faith. The second is the toxin of pseudoscience, which Americans on both the left and the right continue to imbibe as a means of rendering their social theories impervious to evidence-based challenges.
  • p. 81

Chapter 4: Reds, Pinkos, Fellow Travelers

• Just as the pseudoscience of social Darwinism captivated many nineteenth-century American intellectuals, the social pseudoscience of communism exerted a powerful pull on twentieth-century American intellectuals between the world wars.
  • p. 82

• Three enduring elements of twentieth-century American anti-intellectualism may be inferred from Bryan’s rhetorical melding of fundamentalist faith with opposition to the world’s first Communist state and its official atheism. First and foremost is the portrayal of experts—not just a “soviet” but a “scientific soviet”—as an alien organism within the American body politic. Bryan then expresses resentment toward an educated minority seen as a separate class, determined to impose its views on the majority. Finally, this separate class is identified as an enemy of religion. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has always been seen by its opponents as ideological and metaphysical rather than scientific, tapped into the vague resentment most people feel toward experts on whom they depend but whose work they do not understand.
  • p. 86

• Another powerful element in the suspicion of intellectuals fostered by the McCarthy era was an emotional melding of religion with anti-Communist patriotism, prefigured by but even more strenuously promoted than the same linkage had been during the Red Scare after the First World War.
  • p. 96

Chapter 5: Middlebrow Culture from Noon to Twilight

• The distinctive feature of American middlebrow culture was its embodiment of the old civic credo that anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself.
  • p. 104

• What has been lost is an alternative to mass popular culture, imbibed unconsciously and effortlessly through the audio and video portals that surround us all. What has been lost is the culture of effort.
  • p. 104

• As long as a book had something to do with ancient Rome, I did not care whether it was written from the perspective of a Christian, an atheist, or a lion.
  • p. 105

• The Little Blue Books, with their strong debt to and component of nineteenth-century freethought as well as twentieth-century psychology, philosophy, and sociology, represented the traditional American ideal of self-education, as distinct from the dawning era of self-help, which would place far more emphasis on improving personality and public image than on improving one’s mind.
  • p. 114

• I am sure that I would have gotten around to doubt and atheism eventually, but reading a handy chunk of the Summa hastened the day.
  • p. 117

• If these hefty novels often lack literary grace, their length also attests to the diminution of literate America’s attention span during the past forty years.
  • p. 121; the reference is to novels by such authors as Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Irving Stone

• Yet even as middle-brow culture, bolstered by highbrow contributions, seemed at its most robust, it was entering a period of gradual enfeeblement fostered by social forces that first manifested themselves in the mid-fifties and became more dominant in the sixties. The most important of these was of course television, a luxury that, in the course of just one decade, came to be considered a necessity. The new medium could not corrupt highbrow culture, because there basically was no highbrow culture on the air, but it could indeed help to corrupt middlebrow culture.
  • p. 124

Chapter 6: Blaming it on the Sixties

• Even the trauma of Kennedy’s assassination did not truly shake the sense of optimism that permeated those years before America’s involvement in Vietnam changed everything.
  • p. 133

• Many Americans who lived through the sixties have forgotten that the nation’s education in the irrational, which often included attacks on rationality itself, was being conducted from both the right and the left.
  • p. 134

• More often than not, those who tried to mediate were attacked from all sides.
  • p. 144

• What is clear, however, is that liberals and conservatives were no more interested in talking to one another on campuses during the sixties than they are today.
  • p. 146

• Even more important for the future of what would come to be known as the Christian right, Dallas’s First Baptist Church organized an entire system of private schools, originally designed to avoid desegregation but ultimately serving the much larger purpose of educating Christian children without secular influences like the teaching of evolution.
  • p. 154

• The resurgent fundamentalists were saying no to more than the counterculture of the sixties; like William Jennings Bryan and his followers in the first three decades of the century, the new fundamentalist generation was also saying no to intellectualism and modernism.
  • p. 155

• Although many grassroots Catholic social conservatives were as anti-intellectual as southern fundamentalist Protestants, their anti-intellectualism was rooted not in biblical literalism but in a longing for the pre-Vatican II church of their youth. These disillusioned right-wing Catholics would, in the years after the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, form a previously unimaginable alliance with fundamentalist Protestants.
  • p. 159

• By 1968, Richard Nixon already understood that conservative religious believers, including fundamentalist Protestants and right-wing Catholics, could form a new base for the Republican party.
  • p. 160

Chapter 7: Legacies: Youth Culture and Celebrity Culture

• Of course, every generation has its beloved music, rituals, drugs, and sentimental history.
  • p. 165

• In the long run, nothing dumbs down culture more effectively than the ripping of popular art—good, bad, or indifferent in quality—from its specific cultural antecedents.
  • p. 172

• The culture of celebrity, defined by the media’s circular capacity to create stars who shine not because of specific deeds but mainly because they are the objects of media attention, was a true child of the sixties.
  • p. 173

• The image became the message.
  • p. 180

• The real importance of the sixties in American intellectual history is that they marked the beginning of the eclipse of the print culture by the culture of video.
  • pp. 181-182

• The only kind of politics that does not lend itself to video images is any political appeal to thoughtfulness, reason, and logic.
  • p. 182

Chapter 8: The New Old-Time Religion

• It seems that the American tendency to choose from a cafeteria-style theological menu is not limited to Catholics.
  • p. 188

• Regardless of how fundamentalists fine-tune their beliefs, there is unquestionably a powerful correlation between religious fundamentalism and lack of education.
  • p. 188

• In politics, the nexus between fundamentalism and lack of education has enabled right-wing Christian candidates to tap into suspicion of educated “elites.”
  • p. 189

• Modern fundamentalists have forgotten, if they ever knew, that they owe their liberty of conscience to the demonized enlightenment rationalism that gave birth to the secular Constitution.
  • p. 190

• At the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists like my great-uncle made the entirely reasonable assumption that the expansion of knowledge about every aspect of the natural world would produce a less credulous American public. They assumed that the growing availability of scientific, historical, and anthropological evidence would deter the spread of both religious and nonreligious beliefs that not only lacked a basis in reality but frequently contradicted reality. That assumption, reasonable as it seemed at the time, was wrong.
  • p. 209

Chapter 9: Junk Thought

• Although cloaked in scientific language…the leaden heart of pseudoscience is its imperviousness to evidentiary challenge.
  • p. 210; ellipsis represents elision of an example

• But junk science also has a politicized meaning, diametrically opposed to what genuine scientists mean by the phrase. It has been appropriated by right-wing politicians and journalists to describe any scientific consensus that contradicts their political, economic, or cultural agenda.
  • p. 210

• The right-wing distortion and politicization of junk science is nothing more than a branch of a more pervasive phenomenon best described as junk thought. The defining characteristics of junk thought, which manifests itself in the humanities and social sciences as well as the physical sciences, are anti-rationalism and contempt for countervailing facts and expert opinion.
  • p. 211

• It cannot be stressed enough that junk thought emanates from both the left and the right, even though each group—in academia, politics, and cultural institutions—thrives on accusing the other of being the sole source of irrationality.
  • p. 211

• For ordinary Americans, including those not naturally disposed toward the irrational, the national menu of junk thought is as broad and accessible as its offerings of junk food. Junk thought is a state of mind that is hard to avoid. Press the remote, point and click the mouse, open the newspaper, and worlds of anti-rationalism open up.
  • p. 212

• What can be said with a fair degree of certainty is that anti-rational junk thought has gained social respectability in the United States during the past half century, that it interacts toxically with the most credulous elements in both secular and religious ideologies, and that it has proved resistant to the vast expansion of scientific knowledge that has taken place during the same period.
  • p. 216

• Finally, the virulent outbreak of anti-rationalism in late twentieth-century America is also rooted in a much older, nonpolitical tendency in American thought—a chronic suspicion of experts that dovetails with the folk belief in the superior wisdom of ordinary people.
  • p. 217

• Had anyone told me, in 1969, that an anti-vaccination movement—embodying both junk science and junk thought—would emerge in the 1990s and be treated by the news media with respectful attention, I would have considered the prediction sheer lunacy.
  • p. 219

• The inseparability of junk science from junk thought is evinced by the telltale marks of endemic illogic coupled, in many instances, with deliberate manipulativeness. The first and most fundamental warning sign is an inability to distinguish between coincidence and causation—a basic requirement for scientific literacy.
  • p. 219

• A second telltale sign of junk thought is the appropriation of scientific-sounding language without underlying scientific evidence or logic.
  • p. 221

• A third important element in much of junk thought is innumeracy—a lack of understanding of basic mathematical and statistical concepts.
  • p. 222

• Definitions so broad as to be meaningless are yet another telltale sign of junk thought.
  • pp. 224-225

• Expert bashing—a favorite tool of both the right and the left—is another distinguishing mark of junk thought, and the effectiveness of the technique depends on the public’s inability to distinguish among good science, bad science, and pseudoscience. Scientific evidence, however overwhelming, is dismissed by the expert-bashers as politically biased.
  • p. 225

• The scientific consensus on global warming is a favorite target of right-wing purveyors of junk thought.
  • p. 227

• All real scientific research must be and is subjected to rigorous scrutiny by peers. That is what separates science from pseudoscience and junk thought.
  • p. 230

• Intellectual quackery extends throughout the landscape of academia; tenured professors in the humanities and social sciences, on the right and the left, are constantly purveying theories that are the philosophical, literary, and artistic equivalents of junk science. That many of the researchers consider themselves intellectuals is sad but unremarkable in the annals of quackery within academia: junk thought with an intellectual patina fosters anti-intellectualism as effectively as junk science with a scientific patina fosters public misunderstanding and suspicion of real science.
  • p. 230

• No one can legitimately claim to be both a serious scientist and a serious opponents of evolutionism. In the social sciences, by contrast, there is no shortage of credentialed experts to endorse any position, however untethered from both common sense and scholarly evidence.
  • p. 240

• Finally, the simplistic slogans of junk thought are perfectly suited to modern mass media, which must fixate on novelty in order to catch the eyes and ears of a public with an increasingly short attention span.
  • p. 241

Chapter 10: The Culture of Distraction

• The decline in newspaper reading after the early seventies was a miner’s canary for an accelerating and relentless abbreviation of the public’s attention span, now fragmented into millions of bits and bytes by the unlimited electronically and digitally generated distractions that make up our way of life.
  • pp. 242-243

• Printed works do not take up mental space simply by virtue of being there; attention must be paid or their content, whether simple or complex, can never be truly assimilated. The willed attention demanded by print is the antithesis of the reflexive distraction encouraged by infotainment media, whether one is talking about the tunes on an iPod, a picture flashing briefly on a home page, a text message, a video game, or the latest offering of “reality” TV. That all of these sources of information and entertainment are capable of simultaneously engendering distraction and absorption accounts for much of their snakelike charm.
  • p. 243

• The media really do constitute a self-renewing, unified organism that cannot be contained or modified in any fundamental sense by lopping off some of the more malignant clusters of cells.
  • p. 245

• The first serious study on the subject, released in 2007 by researchers at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital, suggested that videos like Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby may actually impede language development in children between the ages of eight and sixteen months.
  • p. 250

• The more sophisticated video games require intense concentration, but in the end, the cognitive reward for the master of the game amounts to little more than an improved ability to navigate other, more complex video games. Reading good books, by contrast, does little to improve reading skills—certainly not after the age of seven or eight—but it does expand the depth and range of the reader’s knowledge and imagination in just about every area of conceivable interest to human beings.
  • pp. 251-252

• The problem is that the more obsessed people are with infotainment, the less likely they are to read anything.
  • p. 262

• If the books are the first mighty and indispensable pillar of intellectual life, conversation is the second.
  • p. 268

Chapter 11: Public Life: Defining Dumbness Downward

• Politicians, like members of the media, are both the creators and the creatures of a public distrustful of complexity, nuance, and sophisticated knowledge.
  • pp. 280-281

• Public ignorance and anti-intellectualism are not identical, of course, but they are certainly kissing cousins.
  • p. 282

• A president may be described as stubborn, or as impatient, or as a sexual libertine—even, on rare occasions, as a liar—but it would be unthinkable for “objective” reporters, in print or on television, to bluntly raise the question, “Is this man smart enough to be in charge of the country?” It is a question that ought to be asked openly about every man and woman who seeks high office.
  • p. 283

• Intelligence itself has not yet become a disqualifier for the modern American presidency, but the electability of an intelligent candidate often seems to depend on his ability to soften and downplay his “egghead” side.
  • p. 286

• Out-of-power (in Washington) liberal intellectuals also have a good deal to answer for, and one of their most serious failures of vision has been a reluctance to acknowledge the political significance of public ignorance.
  • p. 297

• While an angry public may be the short-term solution, an ignorant public is the long-term problem in American public life.
  • p. 297

• The general decline in American civic, cultural, and scientific literacy has encouraged political polarization because the field of debate is often left to those who care most intensely—with an out-of-the-mainstream passion—about a specific political and cultural agenda.
  • p. 297

• As both dumbness and smartness are defined downward—among intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike—it becomes much easier to convince people of the validity of extreme positions. Not only basic knowledge but the ability to think critically are required to understand the factual errors (as distinct from differences of opinion) but generally provide the foundation for policies at the far end of the political spectrum.
  • p. 298

• Right-wing intellectuals, particularly those involved in government, constantly bleat about the lamentable state of cultural literacy in America, but what they mean is their version of cultural literacy and American history.
  • p. 301

• In the early 1990s, a brouhaha over an attempt to develop national standards for the teaching of history offered an exemplary and depressing demonstration of the politically motivated pigheadedness shared by many hardline conservative and left-wing multicultural list intellectuals.
  • p. 301

• Citizens of the “new digital democracy” do not have to vote, or read books, or spend any waking part of their days without the combination of hypnotic comfort and artificial stimulation offered on screen media by the infotainment industry.…Like most politicians, most media opinion makers choose to pretend that dumbness is not being defined downward and to flatter Americans by telling them that they and their children are really the smartest, best educated generations ever to inhabit this nation.
  • p. 306; ellipsis represents a brief elision for the sake of continuity

Conclusion

• “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” In 1837, Emerson struck that note mainly as a rhetorical device, in a young nation obviously engaged in building up its intellectual capital. But Emerson’s straw man has come to life in America’s new age of unreason, and the inescapable theme of our time is the erosion of memory and knowledge. Memory loss has made us bad stewards of our intellectual inheritance, and the dissipation of our cultural storehouse gives rise in turn to new cycles of forgetting. Anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism flourish in a mix that includes addiction to infotainment, every form of superstition and credulity, and an educational system that does a poor job of teaching not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.
  • p. 307

• Science—how deep a faith it inspired in the Enlightenment rationalists of America’s founding generation and their freethinking late nineteenth century heirs!—can by itself provide no remedy for those who, out of ignorance or in servitude to an anti-rational form of faith, know little and care less about the basic principles that constitute the scientific method.
  • p. 308

• It would take awesome courage for a candidate to say to voters: “The problem isn’t just that you were lied to. The real problem is that we, as a people, have become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions. The problem is the two-thirds of us can’t find Iraq on a map, and many members of Congress don’t know a Shiite from a Sunni. The problem is that the public doesn’t know enough or care enough about culture to be outraged when a United States secretary of defense, informed that some of the oldest artifacts of Western civilization are being looted from a Baghdad Museum on our watch, says dismissively, ‘Stuff happens.’ The problem is that most of us don’t bother to read newspapers or even watch the news on television. Our own ignorance is our worst enemy.” It is so much easier, so much safer politically, to simply say, “You were victims of a lie,” than to suggested that both voters and their elected representatives, in both parties, must shoulder much of the blame for their willingness to be deceived.
  • pp. 310-311

• There is no such thing as right-wing or left-wing science—although there are certainly left-wing and right-wing scientists—but respected researchers generally agree on what separates real science, dedicated to the search for truth in the natural world, from pseudosciences designed to serve political, religious, or social ends.
  • p. 312

• One problem that cries out for collaboration between liberal and conservative intellectuals is the pandering of higher education institutions to students who apparently want to major in infotainment.
  • pp. 313-314

• How can it be that American culture has so debased itself that institutions calling themselves universities, and academic bodies calling themselves English departments, actually give course credit for writing “fear journals”? The job of higher education is not to instruct students in popular culture but to expose them to something better.
  • p. 314

• It is possible that nothing will help. The nation’s memory and attention span may already have sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived by the best efforts of America’s best minds. I too am nibbling at the edges by talking about the need for political leaders who address Americans as thinking adults; for intellectuals willing to step up and bring their knowledge, instead of a lust for power, to the public square; for educators devoted to teaching and learning rather than to the latest fads in pop psychology. None of the suggestions addresses the core problem created by the media—the pacifiers of the mind that permeate our homes, schools, and politics. There is a little evidence to indicate that Americans have either the desire or the will to lessen their dependency on the easy satisfactions held out by the video and digital world; on the contrary, the successful marketing of infant videos suggests that many parents are eager to draw their children into the infotainment snare before they have any chance to explore the world on their own.
  • pp. 315-316

• If there is to be an alternative to the culture of distraction, it can only be created one family at a time, by parents and citizens determined to preserve a saving remnant of those who prize memory and true learning above all else. Adult self-control, not digital parental controls, is the chief requirement for the transmission of individual and historical memory.
  • p. 316

• Anyone who values self-reliance will be changed for the better by limiting screen time, and for parents—who literally hold the future in their hands—there is no way, apart from the force of example, to raise children whose minds are not absolutely in thrall to commercially generated images.
  • p. 317

• Like all conservationists, a cultural conservationist in today’s America can only act in hope while living with amply justified fear.
  • p. 317