Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with learning and those who pursue it. We are a nation that has made free public education a birthright, but we pay teachers the lowest salaries of any group of college-educated professionals.
In the last two presidential elections, we've chosen a man of less-than-mediocre intellect whose thinking is as garbled as his syntax, while the braininess of politicians such as Adlai Stevenson, Mario Cuomo and Bill Bradley has put them at a disadvantage in trying to reach the nation's highest office.
Our heroes are athletes and entertainers, while we fabricate un-endearing terms like "nerd" and "egghead" for successful students. Our national myth celebrates the self-made man who succeeds by native wit and guile; we've always been a little suspicious of the "pointy-headed" intellectual who succeeds by using his brain.
Until recently, African Americans' relationship to learning has been less conflicted. Through slavery and segregation, whites tried to keep it away from us, while we, recognizing it as the key to attaining whatever freedom was available, risked life and limb to get it. Only in the last 35 years, a period that produced the greatest expansion of opportunity for black Americans since the Emancipation Proclamation, have we adopted a kind of paradoxical schizophrenia about education that mimics the majority culture.
Thus America today is host to two kinds of anti-intellectualism —the mainstream culture's, and our own unique African-American brand. I've just finished reading two books -- one new, the other a few years older -- that take close and disturbing looks at each one. The new book, Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason, paints a compelling portrait of a nation sinking into a quagmire of ignorance that renders America increasingly ill-equipped to confront the massive challenges we face.
The older, John McWhorter's Losing the Race, portrays an African-American community turning its back on the most effective tool available to end centuries of under-privilege. As an American, I find the combined message of these books sobering. As an African-American, I find it downright scary.
With passion and considerable insight, Jacoby argues that the anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism stalking the nation today are fundamentally different from, and more dangerous than, the suspicion of learning that has been a persistent feature of the American landscape since the Second Great Awakening. "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," she writes. "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."
Jacoby, the respected author of previous books on Russia and freethinking, lays the blame for this depressing state of affairs at the feet of three interconnected phenomena:
o A digitally-enabled mass media that subordinates the written and spoken word to an all-but-inescapable 24/7 onslaught of sound and video images that endanger the survival of serious thinking;
o A resurgence of fundamentalist religion that celebrates "willed ignorance" and "places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy;"
o A malfunctioning public education system that has produced a level of ignorance in science (one in five American adults believes the sun revolves around the earth), as well as religion (a majority of American adults cannot name the four Gospels, or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible), and a lack of simple curiosity (fewer than half of Americans, according to a 2002 survey, had read any work of fiction or poetry in the preceding year) that puts the citizenry's ability to think critically about any serious issue at risk.
Jacoby's arguments are compelling and well-crafted. However, they are by nature polemics, provocative and stimulating but impervious to proof. Is time spent in childhood reading The Bobbsey Twins or the Hardy Boys really better used than time devoted to twitching one's thumbs in response to video game images on a digital screen? It's easy for those of us who, like Jacoby, reached adulthood prior to the advent of the digital age to assume so, but we'll have to wait until our children gain control of our culture and economy to know for sure.
Jacoby's view of religious fundamentalism also assumes more than she can know with certainty. America's blatant religiosity has not prevented us from becoming one of the world's leaders in science and technology. For more than 230 years, the mind of our nation has been flexible enough to encompass both the unreasoning belief in supernatural religious myths that Jacoby condemns, and a dedication to understanding the natural world that has made us a leader in agriculture, manufacturing and engineering.
Jacoby quotes public television's Bill Moyers to argue that the role of religion in public life really is different today:
"One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime 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."
