Becalmed Among The Great Unwashed

You know, I don’t think I’m going to finish reading Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. I imagine Jacoby feels better for having written it, vented her bile, and talked to the press about it. But I don’t feel better for having read the first eighty pages, so I’m gonna vent my bile right here.

As I expected, The Age of American Unreason is an extended and not very skillful game of “Ain’t It Awful.” In a way, it’s frustrating to read, because I do dislike most of the things she dislikes, but then I don’t need her to tell me about them. On the other hand, I don’t share her fury over the use of “folks”:

a plague spread by the President of the United States, television anchors, radio talk show hosts, preachers in megachurches, self-help gurus, and anyone else attempting to demonstrate his or her identification with ordinary, presumably wholesome American values. Only a few decades ago, Americans were addressed as people or, in the more distant past, ladies and gentlemen. Now we are all folks.

A plague? Darling, get a grip. Reading this, one wants to deliver a Hollywood-style hysterics-stopping slap upside Jacoby’s head, and wipe the flecks of foam from her quivering lips. Someone who gets as worked up over “folks” as about creationism, infotainment, and Larry Summers’s slighting remarks about lady academics – and, as far as I can tell, more upset than she gets about the US war in Iraq – needs to work on her priorities. (Two hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift threw a similar hissyfit over the word “mob”, which would never take the place of “rabble” in his heart. I agree with the writer Jay Quinn that it's a shame Swift didn’t win that battle, so we could talk today about rock stars being “rabbled” by their fans.) If she opposes the war in Iraq, it seems to be because of Bush’s belief that he is Yahweh’s instrument, not because innocent people are getting, like, hurt and killed there. There’s an odd lack of ordinary humanity in Jacoby’s jeremiad. (How can you worry about dying children when Americans are misusing apostrophes?)

Nor has she convinced me that things are that much different from the way they used to be, especially since her own evidence has a way of refuting her. She thinks that reactionary Christian religion is more influential in American life than it was in the 1800s, though she documents plenty of anti-intellectualism and Christian square-headedness from that era, which managed to flourish without the aid of today’s mass media. She brushes aside the Second Great Awakening with a sniff, to focus on an oration by Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harvard College’s Class of 1837. Emerson told his audience that “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself” – making basically the same complaint then that Jacoby’s making now, only without videogames and Oprah. Ironically, the burden of Emerson’s oration was that it was time for American culture to stand on its own two feet, rather than leaning on Europe; Jacoby regards Europe today as a comparatively enlightened place where Christians don’t keep Darwin out of the schools. She also admits that “American freethought” was “never a majority movement,” which is probably putting it mildly, but it still undermines her thesis that things used to be better.

Oh yeah – I asked a dozen or so undergraduates around the dorm where I work if they knew what Pearl Harbor was, since Jacoby told the New York Times that her book was inspired by overhearing two yuppies in a bar on the night of September 11, 2001, who seemed to have no idea about it. Everyone I asked knew that the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese led to the US entry to World War II. Jacoby will be relieved to know that the coming generation of college students know their history pretty well, even if that fact takes some wind out of her book’s sails.

History's A Punk

Something else I wanted to say about the Times article on Susan Jacoby. She told the reporter that she first decided to write The Age of American Unreason on September 11, 2001, in a New York City bar:

As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

If true, this story is depressing, all right; but then I have to balance these men’s historical ignorance with Jacoby’s, since she believes that people are more ignorant now than they were – I don’t know, fifty years ago? a hundred? Even if American schools aren’t teaching World War II in history classes, which is possible for reasons I’ll go into in a moment, that war is ubiquitous in commercial media. The Hollywood blockbuster Pearl Harbor was released with plenty of fanfare in the summer of 2001, and it enraged a number of American critics and audiences who thought it was too historically accurate, that is, not hostile enough to the Japanese. And then we have Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book on the Greatest Generation, the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers about American fighter pilots, Schindler’s List, the History Channel, and much much more. Despite all this, I suppose it’s possible that basic information about World War II has not sunk in to most younger Americans’ psyches, compared to really important knowledge like the records of professional and Division I college athletes.

It’s hard for me to believe that the men Jacoby overheard hadn’t picked up on Pearl Harbor by osmosis, as I did, long before it could have been covered by my American history class; but I’m 57, just five years younger than Jacoby, and I was born ten years after Pearl Harbor. My father and uncles served in the military during the war, though none of them ever talked to me about their experiences, and the war was common coin in all sorts of media, from TV to comic books to the newspapers. On the other hand, though I was born during the Korean War, I never heard anything about it as I was growing up; it wasn’t a Great War, and its American veterans weren’t lionized as a Great Generation.

When I had American history in my junior year of high school (1967-1968), I don’t recall that we got very far into the twentieth century. The history textbooks were massive even then; and they’ve become enormous since. My teacher made a valiant effort, but it was impossible to slog through the entire text in a school year. I know we got as far as Woodrow Wilson’s administration, because I remember the book’s mentioning US warships shelling some Mexican city in 1912 or so, because the local officials had disrespected the American flag. I was appalled, but then I was already coming under the baleful influence of the Dirty Fucking Hippies and the Blame America First Crowd. I don’t remember that anyone else was bothered by the incident, and when I mentioned it to my mother, she also thought it was fair and just.

So I think it’s quite possible that American history classes today don’t get as far as World War II either. If they do, it could only be at a dead run, with facts to be memorized no longer than the weekly quiz and the final exam. That has always been the standard approach to teaching history in American schools, and it has never worked very well. (See the indignant quotation from the New York Times in 1943, in my previous post, for an example of what I mean.) I doubt that high school students in past generations were any better informed or educated about wars that occurred 30 to 40 years before they were born, and that wasn’t because of post-modernist relativism that held all truths are created equal. This is not a new problem, nor can it be simply explained with sloganeering about “junk thought.” Indeed, Jacoby’s book appears to be one more example of junk thought.

Something else occurred to me when I read about Jacoby’s business-suited ignoramuses. Consider the Vietnam War. When I was growing up during that conflict, the standard line all over the media was that the Communists had attacked our ally in South Vietnam, and we were only there because our ally had asked for our help in defending itself against Communist aggression. This account was a complete fiction, as I learned from better sources around the time I graduated from high school. Now that the war is officially history, I wonder how the textbooks explain it. I run into few people of any age, even now, who know anything like the historical truth. That’s a subject for further research, I guess. (I’m thinking of asking students in the dormitory where I work what they know about Pearl Harbor and Vietnam. They’re not a representative sample – it’s an academic dorm – but it will be interesting to ask them anyway. I’ll report back in a week or two.) The origins of the American Civil War (or as I prefer to call it, the Confederate Rebellion) are still controversial, with revisionists trying to whitewash the South to this day; I doubt that the accounts taught to high school students today are any more adequate than the one I was taught.

Imagine, too, how our present adventure in Iraq will be described in the history textbooks thirty or forty years from now. Half-a-dozen different, and often conflicting, justifications for the US/UK invasion of Iraq were floated in the months just before we attacked. Now, even elite media can’t quite make up their minds how we got there, or why we have to stay, and it’s well-established by now that they were eager to be misled by the Bush gang. American history texts prefer to avoid controversy in favor of neat, preferably glorious soundbytes, partly because they must please adopting committees that prefer propaganda to sound history, so I wouldn’t expect much from their coverage of Iraq in years to come. I won’t blame the students if they don’t learn much from it, either.

But again: none of this is in any way new. All the copies of The Age of American Unreason at the local Border’s had been sold today, so I couldn’t browse through it any more. But now I see, from reviews on Amazon.com, that Jacoby was consciously extending Richard Hofstadter’s thesis in Anti-Americanism in American Life, which was originally published in 1963. Why, then, did she tell the Times that she was dealing with a new problem? Because newness is more marketable? If so, she’s lying; if not, she’s ignorant. I agree we have a problem, which has always been with us; I don’t see that dishonesty or sloppiness are going to help any.

P.S. Now there's this review at Salon, which doesn't make Jacoby or her book look any better. But I will read it, when the library gets it. And then there's an interview with this guy, who brings to mind Molly Ivins's remark anent some Texas pol that, if his IQ gets any lower, we'll have to water him. I don't deny that we have a lot of stupid people in this country, but it seems they're all writing books about how dumb everybody else is. But that just reminded me of this exchange from The Importance of Being Earnest:

Jack. I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.
Algernon. We have.
Jack. I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?
Algernon. The fools? Oh! about the clever people, of course.
Jack. What fools!

A Mad As Hell Tea Party

What, another book on the dumbing down of America? Why does no editor ever seem to dismiss a hopeful author of one of these with “It’s been done”? Because, you know, it has been done, and done, and done to death, in an endless session of “Ain’t It Awful?”

Even more symptomatic, the author of this admits that it’s been done, but that didn’t stop her from doing it again, because things are like really different this time, okay? Susan Jacoby, “one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture”, said:

But now, … something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

One commenter on the Times article wrote:

College professors are routinely confronted with students (not all, thankfully) in need of remedial assistance, let alone individuals possessing critical knowledge of global matters. And yes! College! A college professor (often an overworked adjunct) has all of three months to teach a subject to adults who have spent their formative years learning how to be demanding, adroit pleaders who know the system and their rights and understand that they need a diploma as fast as possible to force a future employer into a slightly higher salary category. Few are interested in learning for themselves, let alone in acquiring the mental self-discipline that analysis and critical thinking foster.

Yes, indeedy, things used to be different. The Greatest Generation, for example.

A large majority of the students showed that they had virtually no knowledge of elementary aspects of American history. They could not identify such names as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, or Theodore Roosevelt. ... Most of our students do not have the faintest notion of what this country looks like. St. Louis was placed on the Pacific Ocean, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, the Atlantic Ocean, Ohio River, St. Lawrence River, and almost every place else.

This, however, was on the front page of the New York Times on April 4, 1943. Gerald Bracey, from whose Setting the Record Straight (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1997, page 68) I swiped this quotation, adds:

What particularly galled the Times was that these ignoramuses were not high school students, they were college freshmen. The Times did not take note of the fact, but we can, that in 1943, the high school graduation rate was about 45 percent. Of these, about 15 percent went on to college. So these ignoramuses were an elite group of ignoramuses - the upper 7 percent of the student body. It is worth noting that the Times did not blame the public schools for the students’ poor performance; such laying of blame would begin shortly after World War II. Rather, the Times seems to have assumed that the students forgot information that they once had known.

And before that? “Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing, ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation, and almost entire want of familiarity with English literature, are far from rare among young men of eighteen otherwise well prepared for college.” So said Harvard President Charles William Eliot, complaining in 1871, when elite colleges like Harvard were mainly finishing schools for the sons of the rich. . . just the sons, of course, since conservatives knew that higher education rendered women sterile or insane. Only the occasional very talented and very docile male of African descent attended Harvard or Yale. Jews and the Irish had not yet become Honorary White People. (If I recall correctly, in his Opening of the American Mind Lawrence W. Levine showed that in the Good Old Days, students at the best universities who were actually interested in study and learning were ostracized by the rich men's sons who were there to kill time, drinking and earning their Gentlemen's C's, until they were ready to take over the control levers of the Nation. So no, American apathy -- or antipathy -- to knowledge is not a new development.)

Jacoby’s book just came out in the past week, so it’s not in the local libraries yet, and I’m sure not going to shell out money for it. But I did poke through it standing up in Border’s today, and it surprised me a bit. She spent several pages on Larry Summers, the President of Harvard who took heat for claiming that “innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Summers also questioned how much of a role discrimination plays in the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities.” Instead of attacking the PC feminists who want to destroy our great Male Chauvinist traditions, she lit into Summers himself, calling his scientifically-based beliefs “junk thought.” While I agree that Summers’s claims are bogus, they are not evidence of a new ignorance “about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge.” If anything they count against Jacoby’s thesis that people are dumber than they used to be, since even fifty years ago Summers could have said the same things without raising an uproar.

Nor do I agree with the other positions attributed to Jacoby in the Times article. As it happens, I’m now reading the revised edition of James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me (Simon & Schuster, 2007), and Loewen reports (page xviii) that the original edition was useful to many students who wanted their history courses to be accurate, as well as to teachers and general readers. Loewen holds that the reason history is such an unpopular school subject is that it’s taught badly and inaccurately, which also is not a new development in American or other cultures. The point is, kids want to learn, even in the face of an educational system that has always been set up to make learning more difficult -- maybe not all kids, but enough to make hash of Jacoby's claims.

Jacoby’s gripe about the academic “decision to consign African-American and women’s studies to an ‘academic ghetto’ instead of integrating them into the core curriculum” seems off too. Couldn’t that situation have something to do with the intense and ongoing resistance to such integration by the white males who still mainly run American universities, and the whole society for that matter? As for her claim that “students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests,” that’s simply false. It’s a big topic, but for a start, look here and here and here.

I suppose I’ll have to read her book, or at least skim bigger chunks of it, to see if she can actually back up her bogus claims. But so far it looks like she’s her own best evidence.

Oh, wait, I can’t resist quoting this comment on the article on Jacoby:

Because we have so many foreigners in this country in our Universities, especially from Europe, teaching in our Universities who really have a grudge against America and are finding subtle ways to work their wiles. By being extreme on the “Divirsity” issue, pushing “Gay Rights”, and anything else that causes division, the “extremist” are helping America slide down the same path as Rome did.

And this one:

I share your lament. I sometimes ask people new into the workforce, “When was the Magna Carta signed?” After a blank stare, this will always lead to a conversation about King John, Runnymede, and the march toward democracy. Sometimes combating illiteracy is hand to hand combat.

If I started a new job, and someone asked me out of nowhere when the Magna Carta was signed (1215, for what it’s worth, though it has nothing to do with "illiteracy"), I’d start edging away and looking for a desk to hide behind.

Earlier I mentioned “Ain’t It Awful?”, one of the Games People Play identified by the psychiatrist Eric Berne. In “Ain’t It Awful?” two people complain about the sorry state of the world / humanity; the payoff of the game consists in the shared “good feeling that comes from blaming and finding fault...” as Berne described it. Ain’t it awful that there are all those people playing “Ain’t It Awful?” Seriously, I recognize the pleasure that comes from complaining that the world's going to Hell in a Handbasket, but I'm also well-informed enough to know that our problems are not new and weren't caused by videogames or postmodernism. If Susan Jacoby (and Master of Sockpuppets Lee Siegel, and Eric G. Wilson, along with all the other tillers in this field) want to vent, fine, but why commit their whining to print? Jacoby told the Times, “I expect to get bashed,” as well she should be, for wasting trees on one more useless book.