Our Know-Nothing Nation

...One is widespread religious “fundamentalism,” defined as accepting the Bible as the literal word of God...

...Though Jacoby can sound at times like H.L...

...Half believe in ghosts, a third in astrology, and three fourths in angels...

...Yet such is the sea of woeful ignorance in which American democracy now flounders and may soon drown, Susan Jacoby contends...

...All were unabashed “elitists” who believed every citizen is entitled and obliged to a firstrate education in the knowledge and skills necessary to protect their interests and advance the commonweal...

...Her second particular assault is on the mass media and the video culture of infotainment it has spawned...

...Nearly two thirds of us want both creationism and evolution to be taught in public schools...

...She proposes no formal requirements for civic and cultural literacy of the sort Mencken might well have liked to impose on boobs determined to vote...

...And they were unafraid to venture a view of what such an education entailed—for everyone...

...My conviction is that the crisis of American democracy runs deeper even than Jacoby imagines and requires more than forthright politicians to resolve it...

...Less than half accept any form of evolution, and only 26 per cent accept the Darwinian theory of natural selection that most scientists subscribe to...

...If Kennedy really preferred Ian Fleming to Stendhal, he thought it essential to imply otherwise...

...The more time people spend before the computer screen or any screen,” she cautions, “the less time and desire they have for two human activities critical to a fruitful and demanding intellectual life: reading and conversation...

...Yet critics like Jacoby who charge others with ignorance should take greater care than she has to cleanse their own books of errors...

...For not only does our democracy suffer from ignorance, but ignorance has been fostered by the extraordinary thinness of our democracy...

...But in putative democracies such as ours each of us relies at least every few years on the competent judgment of our fellow citizens in the electorate, as they rely on ours...

...William James was hardly alone in opposing conservative social Darwinism, nor was that opposition absent among pioneering social scientists like Lester Frank Ward...

...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...

...Above all, she wishes for a Presidential candidate who would have the guts to say to disenchanted voters that “The problem isn’t just that you were lied to...

...Although these are motes, not beams, one may nonetheless ask why the ignorance or the reading habits of American citizens should matter—to those who are ignorant and to those who are not...

...Scientific ignorance is most visible, of course, in debates over evolution (debates that wound up in most of the modern world over a century ago...

...One culprit, local control of schools, is charged with inhibiting the formulation of national educational standards...

...No American democrat worth her or his salt, from Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Walt Whitman to Jane Addams to John Dewey to C. Wright Mills to Martin Luther King Jr., ever thought that democracy in the hands of a dimwitted public was a form of government worth defending...

...As she says, “the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to functional democracy,” and this should be of concern not only to those with pointy heads...

...Two thirds of Americans cannot name the three branches of government or come up with the name of a single Supreme Court justice...

...Over 40 per cent believe it declares English as the nation’s first language, and a quarter believe it makes Christianity the nation’s established religion...

...A citizenry of dolts is a recipe not for freedom but for soft tyranny and plebiscitarian despotism...

...Moreover, where Hofstadter (writing during the Kennedy Administration) viewed American anti-intellectualism as episodic, Jacoby fears its predominance may be permanent...

...Mencken, I think she belongs in this company of democrats...

...Well into the war in Iraq, two thirds of Americans in their late teens and early 20s could not locate that country on a map...

...Casting her book as something of an updating of Richard Hofstadter’s AntiIntellectualism in American Life (1963), Jacoby argues that in addition to being dumber than they were during the early ’60s, Americans are prouder to say so...

...Is Jacoby’s book something more than a passionate atheist’s complaint about an increasingly unwelcome cultural surround...

...In some regimes, public ignorance would not matter...

...From Princeton’s Charles Hodge forward, many Biblical literalists have been quite learned (after all, much rests here on how one translates the Greek Bible...

...To cite but some of it: Two thirds of Americans do not know what DNA is, and 20 per cent believe the Sun revolves around the Earth...

...Isn’t all this merely a matter of taste...

...The portrait of the “intellectual as pinko” has survived the end of the Cold War...

...It is not only this ignorance that troubles Jacoby, but also the anti-intellectualism that serves to occasion and belittle it...

...John F. Kennedy made the most of his thin veneer of advanced culture, while George W. Bush wears his contempt for the life of the mind as a badge of honor...

...Building on the hegemony television established in the ’60s, she argues, the mass media—including the Internet—have subordinated both speech and writing to visual images...

...Instead, like every faithful democrat, she offers wistful hopes for the transformation of boobs into thoughtful citizens and struggles vainly to imagine how this might be done...

...We may look with trepidation, she adds, to the day sometime soon when “the political and cultural leadership of the nation will inevitably pass to the first generation raised on television from Day 1.” The Age of American Unreason is a largely persuasive polemic...

...Such believers, she says, are convinced that secular learning and secular intellectuals are “implacable enemies of the faith...

...More of us might care to know where Iraq is if we thought that whether or not Americans die on the streets of Baghdad is in fact up to us...

...A quarter of all those who teach biology in our public schools think dinosaurs and human beings roamed the Earth simultaneously...

...Our own ignorance is our worst enemy...

...Nearly half of those young Americans who cannot find their way around a world map do not think it is worth knowing where international hot spots may lie...

...Most Americans have never had much use for fruitless knowledge...

...Jacoby properly criticizes proponents of “junk science” who try to pass off correlations as causal relationships, but she herself does precisely that in asserting (“without question” or persuasive evidence) that the coincidence in the South of poor schooling and Biblical literalism is a causal nexus...

...Eighty per cent of us with at least a high school education have no idea of the location of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel...

...indeed, it might be a source of stability...

...If it is the case, as John Updike recently said, that “Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village,” why should the hermits worry over the limited mental horizons of the villagers as long as the villagers do not begrudge them their cave...

...The evidence she amasses is appalling...

...In the process, they have supplanted an adult “culture of effort” with an effortless culture “driven almost entirely by the preferences of the young...

...Jacoby admits she uses “fundamentalism” anachronistically to characterize 19th-century evangelical Protestantism and loosely to label its 20th-century successor, but it serves her purpose...

...It embraces components dating back to the early days of the republic, she notes, and it helps explain why Americans have proven especially susceptible to “a toxic combination of forces” that is mindnumbing, and why so little has been done or even proposed to rectify our extraordinaryignorance...

...JACOBY puts particular emphasis, though, on two other sources of ignorance and anti-intellectualism...

...Pointed up, too, is the success that conservatives (including, ironically, conservative intellectuals) have had in convincing many Americans that “there is something sinister, even un-American, about intense devotion to ideas, reason, logic, evidence, and precise language...

...Print calls for “willed attention . . . the antithesis of the reflexive distraction encouraged by the 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...

...Science is not the only subject we flunk...

...She has little patience with those who see the Internet as “the Messiah come to save print culture” simply because it has a textual aspect...

...It is...

...The persistence and strength of this sort of fundamentalism, we are told, is what most distinguishes the United States from other modern nation-states in which politicians and intellectuals do not feel the need to play dumb to please the “folks...

...Bush, on the other hand, “is unashamed of—and even seems quite proud of his own parochialism and intellectual limitations...

...Fortytwo per cent believe all living beings have assumed their present form since the beginning of time...

...A third dismiss knowledge of a foreign language as “not at all important...

...A misplaced populism— “Better stupidity than elitism”—has been a central part of the culture...

...Jacoby rightly prefaces her book with Thomas Jefferson’s remark that “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be...

...Historians such as Eugene D. Genovese and Michael O’Brien have provided abundant evidence that “rigid intellectual torpor” is not the best way to describe the culture of the Old South...

...Then there is the collapse of core curriculums in American colleges, leaving even our better-schooled young people largely uneducated...

...Most cannot name the rights guaranteed to them by the First Amendment, while at the same time many add intriguing elements to the Constitution...

...She places that “foremost among the vectors of antiintellectualism...

...Some of the sources of American antiintellectualism cited by Jacoby are old, others are of more recent vintage...

...author, “Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth” ONE POSSIBILITY Abraham Lincoln failed to consider is that you can fool most of the people most of the time...

...Similarly, it is by no means any longer the case that “nearly all evaluations of the legacies of the ’60s” ignore the origins of the eventually ascendant Right in that decade...

...The greatest long-term significance of the ’60s was not its radical politics or its counterculture, Jacoby suggests, it was “the eclipse of the print culture by the culture of video...