The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies

by Susan Jacoby

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The prescient and now-classic analysis of the forces of anti-intellectualism in contemporary American life—updated for the era of Trump, Twitter, Breitbart and fake news controversies.

The searing cultural history of the last half-century, The Age of American Unreason In A Culture of Lies focuses on the convergence of social forces—usually treated as separate entities—that has created a perfect storm of anti-rationalism. These include the upsurge of religious fundamentalism, with more political power today than ever before; the failure of public education to create an informed citizenry; the triumph of internet over print culture; and America's toxic addition to infotainment. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation and sparing neither the right nor the left, Susan Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced "junk thought" that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.

At today's critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the crisis 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525436522
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/16/2018
Edition description:	New
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	375,784
Product dimensions:	5.17(w) x 7.98(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

SUSAN JACOBY is the author of twelve previous books, most recently Strange Gods, Never Say Die, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, The Age of American Unreason, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, and Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past. Her articles have appeared frequently in the op-ed pages of The New York Times and in forums that include The American Prospect, Dissent, and The Daily Beast.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Anti-Intellectualism on Steroids xi

1 The Way We Live Now: Just Us Folks 3

2 The Way We Lived Then: Intellect and Ignorance in a Young Nation 33

3 Social Pseudoscience in the Morning of America's Culture Wars 63

4 Reds, Pinkos, Fellow Travelers 84

5 Middlebrow Culture from Noon to Twilight 105

6 Blaming It on the Sixties 133

7 Legacies: Youth Culture and Celebrity Culture 165

8 The New Old-Time Religion 185

9 Junk Thought 212

10 The Culture of Distraction 244

11 Public Life: Defining Dumbness Downward 285

Conclusion: Cultural Conservation 307

Notes 327

Selected Bibliography 337

Acknowledgments 341

Index 343

Editorial Reviews

There are few subjects more timely than the one tackled by Jacoby. . . . Her book is smart [and] well-researched.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
 
“Forceful. . . . Cogently argued. . . . An intellectual journey of the first order.”
—Chicago Tribune
 
“One hopes Jacoby's incisive book will find an audience among the unconverted who will take her warnings seriously.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Provocative, well-written and often witty.”
—USA Today
 
“Jacoby’s is a moderate, sensible, well-founded position, shared by many Americans, yet it somehow rarely got voiced amid the raging hyperbole of the culture wars. “
—Salon
 
“Jacoby deploys sharp insight on our present straits”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“Trenchant …One hopes her incisive book, just in time for the 2008 elections, will find an audience among the unconverted who will take her warnings seriously.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A surprising and uncommonly sophisticated treatment of a familiar topic.”
—New York Observer
 
"The Age of American Unreason picks up where Richard Hofstadter left off. With analytic verve and deep historical knowledge, Susan Jacoby documents the dumbing down of our culture like a maestro. make no mistake about it, this is an important book."
—Douglas Brinkley, residential historian and author of The Great Deluge
 
"This is one of the most eye-opening books I've read in a long time. Jacoby charts the intellectual and cultural currents that have characterized the United States since its founding and explains just how and why Americans have recently become so, well, dumb. Anyone who cares about the future of our country will want to read it."
—Marcia Angell, editor in chief emerita, New England Journal of Medicine
 
"Jacoby has written a brilliant, sad story of the anti-intellectualism and lack of reasonable thought that has put this country in one of the sorriest states in its history."
—Helen Thomas, author of Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public
 
"Jacoby's fearless jeremiad, at once passionate, witty, and solidly grounded in facts, aries at a propitious moment, when many Americans are perceiving that ignorance conjoined to arrogance can be deadly. This book deserves to be widely read, and especially by concerned parents. As Jacoby insists, it is only within families that some immunity to mind-numbing 'infotainment' can now be acquired. First, however, there must be a will to resist—and if this stirring book can't rally it, nothing can."
—Frederick Crews, author of Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays
 
"To a country of underachievers and proud of it, this book delivers a magnificent, occasionally hilarious kick in the pants. Snap out of it, Jacoby says: Getting it right matters. Tough talk and wicked wit in the tradition of Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death."
—Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

From the Publisher