Susan Jacoby

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 in a Culture of Lies, 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. She lives in New York City.

BOOKS BY SUSAN JACOBY

Strange Gods

Never Say Die

The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies

The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

Alger Hiss and the Battle for History

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Half-Jew: A Daughter’s Search for Her Family’s Buried Past

Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge

The Possible She

Inside Soviet Schools

Moscow Conversations

The Way We Live Now

from The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies

Susan Jacoby

A Vintage Short

Vintage Books

A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

New York

Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2018 by Susan Jacoby

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form as part of The Age of American Unreason in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2008.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies is available from the Library of Congress.

Ebook ISBN 9780525566380

Cover design by Linda Huang

Cover illustration based on an illustration by Alexator/Shutterstock

www.vintagebooks.com

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Contents

Cover

About the Author

Also by Susan Jacoby

Title Page

Copyright

The Way We Live Now

Notes

THE WORD IS EVERYWHERE, a plague spread by presidents 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 most distant past, ladies and gentlemen. Now we are folks. Television commentators, apparently confusing themselves with the clergy, routinely declare that “our prayers go out to these folks”—whether the folks are victims of drought, flood, ordinary crime, or terrorist attacks. Irony is reserved for fiction. Philip Roth, in The Plot Against America—a dark historical reimagining of a nation in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election—confers the title “Just Folks” on a Lindbergh program designed to de-Judaize young urban Jews by sending them off to spend their summers in wholesome rural and Christian settings.

While the word “folks” was once a colloquialism with no political meaning, there is no escaping the political meaning of the term when it is reverently invoked by public officials in twenty-first-century America. After the terrorist bombings in London on July 7, 2005, President Bush assured Americans, “I’ve been in contact with our homeland security folks and I instructed them to be in touch with local and state officials about the facts of what took place here in and in London and to be extra vigilant as our folks start heading to work.” Bush went on to observe that “the contrast couldn’t be clearer, between the intentions of those of us who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who’ve got such evil in their heart that they will take the lives of innocent folks.” Those evil terrorists. Our innocent folks. Even homeland security officials, who—one lives in hope—are supposed to be highly trained experts, cannot escape the folkish designation. Presidential candidates constantly pepper their speeches with appeals to folks, but the awkwardness of the word coming out of their mouths often gives away an elite higher education, if not necessarily an upper-middle-class childhood. Every time Hillary Clinton, a Wellesley graduate brought up in a conservative Republican household in Chicago, uttered the word “folks” during the 2008 and 2016 campaigns, she sounded like a hovering parent trying to ingratiate herself with her children’s friends by using teenage slang. Barack Obama, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, a graduate of Honolulu’s exclusive Punahou School and Harvard Law School, couldn’t quite get his mouth around the cadence required to make folks sound authentically folksy when he began running for the presidency in 2008, but by the end of his first term, he had learned to pronounce the obligatory word without sounding patronizing or ridiculous. Obama, of course, is an outstanding orator—but even outstanding orators (unlike nineteenth-century presidents) feel obliged to dumb their words down a bit for the American public. President Donald Trump, however, is proud of his limited tweetish vocabulary. “I know words,” he declared at a campaign appearance in Hilton Head, South Carolina. “I have the best words. But there is no better word than stupid. Right?”

Let’s not be stupid about this type of speech. Casual language, in addition to reassuring people that their representatives are not snobs, also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated. Talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls (unless the victims, are, in fact, little girls and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in the history of the United States before 1980, and you will not find one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain…and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth. By the middle of the twentieth century, even though there were no orators of Lincoln’s eloquence on the political scene, voters still expected their leaders to employ dignified, if not necessarily erudite, speech. Adlai Stevenson may have sounded too much like an intellectual to suit the taste of average Americans, but proper grammar and respectful forms of address were mandatory for anyone seeking high office. Furthermore, one need not go back as far as Lincoln to find examples of the highest level of American public rhetoric. Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, for example, did not use the word “folks” at all. Such a locution would have detracted from the seriousness of the subject and the occasion; King would no more have called the citizens assembled before the Lincoln Memorial “folks” than he would have called them “guys and chicks.”

For adult Americans in the fifties and early sixties, the gold standard of presidential oratory was still the memory of Roosevelt (although John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address was another high-water mark of inspirational rhetoric). Roosevelt’s accomplishment was that his patrician accent in no way detracted from his extraordinary ability to make a direct connection with ordinary people. It is impossible to read the transcripts of FDR’s famous fireside chats and not mourn the passing of a civic culture that appealed to Americans to expand their knowledge and understanding instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator. Calling for sacrifice and altruism during perilous times, Roosevelt would no more have addressed his fellow citizens as folks than he would have uttered an obscenity over the radio. At the end of 1940, attempting to prepare his countrymen for the coming of war, the president spoke in characteristic terms to the public.

Tonight, in the presence of a world crisis, my mind goes back eight years to a night in the midst of a domestic crisis…I well remember that while I sat in my study in the White House, preparing to talk to the people of the United States, I had before my eyes the picture of all those Americans with whom I was talking. I saw the workmen in the mills, the mines, the factories, the girl behind the counter; the small shopkeeper, the farmer doing his spring plowing; the widows and the old men wondering about their life’s savings. I tried to convey to the great mass of the American people what the banking crisis meant to them in their daily lives.

Tonight I want to do the same thing, with the same people, in this new crisis which faces America….

We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war….

As president of the United States I call for that national effort. I call for it in the name of this nation which we love and honor and which we are privileged and proud to serve. I call upon our people with absolute confidence that our common cause will greatly succeed.[1]

Substitute folks for people, farmer, old men, and widows, and the relationship between the abandonment of dignified public speech and the degradation of the political process becomes clear. To call for resolution and a spirit of patriotism and sacrifice is to call upon people to rise above their everyday selves and to behave as true citizens. To keep telling Americans that they are just folks is to expect nothing special—a ratification and exaltation of the quotidian that is one of the distinguishing marks of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The debasement of the nation’s speech is evident is virtually everything broadcast and podcast on radio, television, and the Internet. In this true, all-encompassing public square, homogenized language and homogenized thought reinforce each other in circular fashion. As George Orwell noted in 1946, “A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fall all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”[2] In this continuous blurring of clarity and intellectual discrimination, political speech is always ahead of the curve—especially because today’s media possess the power to amplify and spread error with an efficiency that might have astonished even Orwell. Consider the near-universal substitution, by the media and politicians, of “troop” and “troops” for “soldier” and “soldiers.” As every dictionary makes plain, the word “troop” is always a collective noun; the “s” is added when referring to a particularly large military force. Yet correspondents routinely report that “X troops were killed” whenever Americans are involved in any military clash. This is more than a grammatical error; turning a soldier—an individual with whom one may identify—into an anonymous-sounding troop encourages the public to think about war and its casualties in a more abstract way. Who lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Troop? It is difficult to determine exactly how, why, or when this locution began to enter the common language. Soldiers were almost never described as troops during the Second World War, except when a large military operation (like the Allied landing at Normandy on D-Day) was being discussed. The term became more common during the Vietnam War, but it was not routinely substituted for “soldier.” My guess is that some dimwits in the military and the media (perhaps the military media) decided, at some point in the 1980s, that the word “soldier” implied the masculine gender and that all soldiers, out of respect for the growing presence of women in the military, must henceforth be called “troops.” Like unremitting appeals to folks, the victory of troops over soldiers offers an impressive illustration of the relationship between the debasement of everyday speech and fuzzy thinking.

By debased speech, I do not mean bad grammar, although there is plenty of that on every street corner and talk show, or the prevalence of obscene language, so widespread as to be deprived of force and meaning at those rare times when only an epithet will do. Nor am I talking about Spanglish and so-called Black English, those favorite targets of cultural conservatives—although I share the conservatives’ belief that public schools ought to concentrate on teaching standard English. But the standard of standard American English, and the ways in which private speech now mirrors the public speech emanating from electronic and digital media, is precisely the problem.

Debased speech in the public square—and the public square now includes every form of social media—functions as a kind of low-level toxin, imperceptibly coarsening our concept of what is and is not acceptable until someone says something so inappropriate that it breaks through our indifference to language ranging from the unimaginative to the offensive. Madonna’s memorable speech at the Women’s March in Washington on the day after President Trump’s inauguration was such a moment. She declared, “To the detractors that insist this march will never add up to anything: Fuck you. Fuck you! It is the beginning of much-needed change.” (Grammatical note to M.: “who,” not “that,” is the correct pronoun to use after the word “detractors.”) But I digress. You can’t expect a woman who says “fuck you” to people who don’t agree with her to be interested in the fine points of grammar. Madonna’s “fuck you” was offensive not because it is an obscenity but because it is an expression that cannot persuade opponents and can only please blind supporters. In either private or public, the only possible answer to “fuck you” is “fuck you too.” I happened to be watching MSNBC during Madonna’s speech and was amused when the cable network quickly cut off the sound feed to protect the audience from an expression that is, alas, familiar to most Americans over the age of, oh, five or six. This obscenity has no real force, despite MSNBC’s embarrassment, precisely because it is used so frequently. There is a time and a place for a deliberately meant obscenity, but that time and place is not a speech in which you are trying to show both enthusiasts and enemies that you are a serious person who means business. This is not a matter of left-wing vs. right-wing politics but of a general impoverishment of language. Madonna was displaying the same level of sophistication as Vice President Dick Cheney did in 2004 on the Senate floor when he told Vermont’s senator Patrick J. Leahy to perform the anatomically impossible act on himself.[3] (Cheney was angry at Leahy for questioning the practices of private military contractors in Iraq.) As the humorist Russell Baker observes, previous generations of politicians (even if they had felt free to issue the most familiar obscene Anglo-Saxon injunction in a public forum) would have been shamed by their lack of verbal inventiveness. In the 1890s, Speaker of the House Thomas Reed took care of one opponent by observing that “with a few more brains he could be a halfwit.” Of another politician, Reed remarked, “He never opens his mouth without subtracting from the sum of human intelligence.”[4] Americans once heard (or rather, read) such genuinely witty remarks and tried to emulate that wit. Today we parrot the witless and half-witted language used by politicians and radio shock jocks alike, men and women alike, and comedians of all races and ethnic origins.

The mirroring process extends far beyond political language, which has always existed at a certain remove from colloquial speech. The toxin of commercially standardized speech now stocks the private vault of words and images we draw on to think about and to describe everything from the ridiculous to the sublime. One of the most frequently butchered sentences on television programs, for instance, is the incomparable Liberace’s cynically funny “I cried all the way to the bank”—a line he trotted out whenever serious critics lambasted his candelabra-lit performances as kitsch.*1 The witty observation has been transformed into the senseless catchphrase, “I laughed all the way to the bank”—often used as a non sequitur after news stories about lottery winners. In their dual role as creators of public language and as microphones amplifying and disseminating the language many Americans already use in their daily lives, the media constitute a perpetuum mobile, the perfect example of a machine in which cause and effect can never be separated. A sports broadcaster, speaking of an athlete who just signed a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract, says, “He laughed all the way to the bank.” A child idly listening—perhaps playing a video game on a computer at the same time—absorbs the meaningless statement without thinking and repeats it, spreading it to others who might one day be interviewed on television and says, “I laughed all the way to the bank,” thereby transmitting the virus to new listeners. It is all reminiscent of the exchange among Alice, the March Hare, and the Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare tells Alice. “‘I do’ Alice hastily replied; ‘at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.’” The Hatter chimes in, “Not the same thing a bit! Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!” In an ignorant and anti-intellectual culture, people eat mainly what they see.

—

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to define anti-intellectualism as a historical force, or a continuing American reality, in a manner as precise or useful as the kind of definition that might be supplied for, say, abolitionism or feminism. In Hofstadter’s view, anti-intellectualism is not an independent historical or social phenomenon but the consequence of some other goal—such as the desire to extend educational opportunities to a broader population or to wrest control of religious life from ecclesiastical hierarchies. “Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter writes. “Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: ‘Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!’”[5] This seems to me an overly charitable portrait of anti-intellectualism—then and now, even though it is surely true that few people like to consider themselves enemies of thought and culture (or what they themselves define as thought and culture). But what people in public life do about and to culture is much more important than what they say in front of their mirrors. Even the Tweeter-in-Chief has never been known to proclaim proudly, “I hate culture” or “I hate books.” Instead, he says what is perfectly acceptable to Americans of many economic and social classes—that he doesn’t have time to read. But his plans, announced during his campaign, to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities reveal more about how he really regards both literary culture and the performing arts than any statement. (Even if the NEA and NEH remain technically alive, their ability to function will be severely hampered by deep budget cuts.)

There are so many ways of trying to strangle ideas that do not involve straightforward attempts at censorship or intimidation or even yanking away financial support. 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. Just before the 2004 presidential election, the journalist Ron Suskind reported a chilling conversation with a senior Bush aide, who told Suskind that members of the press were part of what the Bush administration considered “the reality-based community”—those who “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality.” But, the aide emphasized, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying the reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too….We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”[6] 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. The Bush aide’s insistence on anonymity in Suskind’s article provides an instructive contrast with Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s decidedly non-anonymous, unashamed defense of her boss’s “alternative facts.” Conway and the Bush aide were talking about the same thing—altering reality for public consumption. The difference is that twelve years ago, the reality-shifter in Bush’s White House was actually too ashamed to publicly identify himself (or herself) with what amounts to a policy of political lying. Shame is not necessarily a virtue, but the absence of shame—when shame is well-deserved—is always a vice.

—

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN ANY era can best be understood as a complex of symptoms with multiple causes, and the persistence of symptoms over time possesses the potential to turn a treatable, livable condition into a morbid disease affecting the entire body politic. It is certainly easy to point to a wide variety of causes—some old and some new—for the resurgent American anti-intellectualism that played such an important role in the Trump victory. In hindsight, it is tempting to view the saturation of our culture by infotainment and digital media (even social media) as an inevitable progression from the early days of television. Many would assert that television and social media are opposites, in that watching television is a purely passive activity while talking to others on social media is both active and interactive. I disagree. Television (and radio) were early forms of social media because people tended to watch and listen with family and friends and to talk about what they had seen and heard. The difference was, obviously, that they could not talk to as many people across great distances. I will never forget my grandmother’s laughter after she overheard two women having a bitter argument on the bus about another woman who had just left her husband. “They were so furious that I actually thought one of them was going to slap the other,” Gran said. “Then slowly, I realized that the names were familiar and they were talking about a divorce on a soap opera. I asked them how they could get that mad about TV characters, and one of the women said, ‘I know them a lot better than I know most of my own family.’” I have heard many people say the same thing about correspondents they have met only on Facebook.

—

IN THE FIFTIES—even though much of the public was interested only in soap operas and variety shows—intellectuals had great hopes for television as an educational medium and a general force for good. Television coverage had, after all, spelled the beginning of the end for Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the spring of 1954, when ABC devoted 188 hours of broadcast time to live coverage of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Seeing and hearing McCarthy, who came across as a petty thug, turned the tide of public opinion against abuses of power that had not seemed nearly as abusive when reported by the print media. The hearings pitted the bushy-browed McCarthy and his chief counsel, the vulpine Roy Cohn, against the U.S. Army and its special outside counsel, the well-mannered Joseph Welch. The most famous sound bite of the hearings came after McCarthy, reneging on an earlier agreement, accused a young lawyer at Welch’s firm of being a Communist sympathizer. Welch, turning in an instant from a kindly uncle into an avenging angel, thundered at McCarthy, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness….Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” By the time of the climactic confrontation between McCarthy and Welch, millions of Americans had gained context by watching at least some of the live committee sessions. Indeed, CBS and NBC, which had both opted not to cover the hearings live because there was so little drama at the beginning (and because daytime soap operas were huge moneymakers for networks at the time) had egg on their screens.

Optimism about the civic education value of television—at least among those who had favored the election of John Kennedy—was bolstered again by the broadcast of the first presidential debates in the fall of 1960. Yet Kennedy’s victory in the initial debate was based more on his appearance than on his words or policies; the pasty-faced Nixon, with his five o’clock shadow, projected an image not unlike that of McCarthy, while the tanned Kennedy, with his thick shock of hair, seemed the very essence of youth, energy, and virility. The potential danger of determining a presidential election on the basis of a telegenic appearance was largely ignored at the time. Later polls showed that those who had listened to the debate on radio thought Nixon had won, while those who saw the debate on television judged Kennedy the winner. This finding might have raised a red flag among more farsighted members of the intellectual community, but it was largely ignored—possibly because no politician before Trump was more despised by American intellectuals than Nixon. (Intellectuals did look down on George W. Bush, but they did not loathe him. His genial personality, denunciation of anti-Muslim bigotry after 9/11, and genuine concern for such causes as the battle against HIV infection in Africa made him a difficult man to hate. The sinister right-wing persona of Vice President Dick Cheney also deflected scorn that might otherwise have been directed toward Bush.)

In spite of the growing influence of television on public affairs, the overall power and presence of television were less pervasive throughout the fifties and the first half of the sixties than they would become by the beginning of the seventies—let alone with the rise of cable in the eighties. This was true even though the number of American households with television jumped from 9 percent in 1950 to nearly 90 percent in 1960. Although television had ceased to be a novelty by the mid-fifties, it still offered only a limited number of programs and did not broadcast around the clock. Moreover, the relatively small number of home television sets at the start of the decade meant that for older baby boomers, born before 1950, television was a treat rather than the metronome of everyday life—at least in the formative preschool years. Americans born in the late forties might well be viewed as a different cultural generation from the younger boomers, because a great many, if not most, members of the elder cohort learned to read before television entered their homes. The oldest baby boomers, now around age seventy, spent the first five to seven years of their lives in much the same fashion as their parents had—playing outdoors, listening to a favorite radio program, learning their ABCs from parents and books and not from Sesame Street. But adults now in their early fifties—the youngest boomers—were being schooled in front of the television set long before entering a real school. These boomers, like their own children today, were exposed to television from infancy—though few parents in the 1960s were foolish enough to put TV sets in front of their babies’ cribs.

It is sobering to reflect that during the next decade, as baby boomers born before 1955 (even politicians) enter retirement, that the political and cultural leadership of the nation will inevitably pass to the first generation raised on television from Day 1. They are already being joined by the first generation raised on computers from Day 1. This prospect is unsettling for those of us who doubt that any attempts to add more “quality” programming to either the old television or new digital menu can ever offset the negative intellectual impact of sheer quantity. This view was first expressed by Neil Postman in his prescient 1985 jeremiad, Amusing Ourselves to Death. “I raise no objection to television’s junk,” Postman declared unequivocally. “The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.”[7]

Postman was writing at the dawn of the era of personal computers and just before various taping devices, beginning with the VCR, became a fixture in homes and made it possible for entertainment consumers to acquire a virtually limitless stock of visual images for home viewing at their leisure. Everything he had to say about the implications of the shift from a print to a video culture is valid today—only more so. Postman’s argument that the quantity of viewing is more important than quality applies to millennials who, though they prefer mobile devices for many purposes, also watch plenty of television programs on various screens. I completely agree with Postman on this issue. When I was a child in the fifties, my mother and father had a rule that was somewhat unusual for that era of parental control. My brother and I could watch any program we wanted—but only one hour on weekdays (if our homework was finished) and two hours on weekends. An exception to this general policy was made after I became a passionate baseball fan, and I was allowed to watch the entire game. We also watched the evening news together as a family and discussed what had happened that day. When I became a teenager, all of the rules were banished—but by then I had formed the habit of watching television only when there was a program I really wanted to see.

Well-off professionals, including a fair number of intellectuals, have proved especially vulnerable to the bromide that there is no harm, and may be 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 screen. 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.

One of the most common statements made on blogs by anxious parents, fearful that too much viewing is bad for their children but eager for the convenience supplied by an electronic babysitter, is: “We never let our child watch TV, only videos.” A comical example of this widespread rationalization is the enthusiasm of ambitious, time-starved upper-middle-class parents for the Baby Einstein series, which force-feeds toddlers a series of educational films designed to introduce them to everything from Monet’s water lilies to the poetry of Wordsworth. Infants are next in line. Home Box Office’s Classical Baby, which premiered in the spring of 2005, is a perfect illustration of the genre. The half-hour film consisted of musical excerpts from Tchaikovsky, Bach, Duke Ellington, and Irving Berlin, all accompanied by animated images of clowns, fairies, and animals, and irritating, flashing glimpses of famous paintings by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh, and Claude Monet. When groups opposed to marketing television programs to infants objected, Dr. Eugene Beresin, a child psychiatrist on the staff of the Harvard Medical School and a consultant to HBO, declared that “to say that this kind of TV is bad is tantamount to saying art is bad.”[8] This statement should be considered prima facie evidence of video’s capacity to dull the wits of highly educated professionals as well as innocent babies. How pathetic it is that such products now appeal to a huge market of people who do not understand that the way to introduce children to music is by playing good music, uninterrupted by video clowns, at home; the way to introduce poetry is by reciting or reading it at bedtime; and the way to instill an appreciation of beauty is not to bombard a toddler with screen images of Monet’s Giverny but to introduce her to the real sights and scents of a garden. 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.

Only a Luddite would claim that the video culture, whether displayed on television or computer screens, has nothing to contribute to individual intellectual development or the intellectual life of society. Certainly the promotion of anti-intellectualism is not the intent of Baby Einstein, which, after all, is designed to cater to both the competitive anxieties and the intellectual pretentions of the upper middle class. Yet there is little question that the intrusion of video into the psyches of Americans at ever earlier ages is not only making it unnecessary for young children to entertain themselves but is also discouraging them from thinking and fantasizing outside the box, in the most literal as well as a figurative sense. Predictably, the video culture has spawned an electronic cottage industry of scholars and writers taking up the cudgels in defense of a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate and pooh-poohing old-fashioned intellectuals (a.k.a. curmudgeons) for their reservations about sucking at the video tit from cradle to grave. Only in today’s America could a book titled Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter have received respectful reviews. The author, Steven Johnson, acknowledges that he spends a fair amount of time playing video games. “Parents can sometimes be appalled at the hypnotic effect that television has on toddlers,” Johnson writes. “They see their otherwise vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouth agape at the screen, and they assume the worst: the television is turning their child into a zombie.” Not to worry, Johnson assures us. The glazed stares at the television—and later, at video games—“are not signs of mental atrophy. They’re signs of focus.”[9] If a grown man spends a great deal of time playing video games, it stands to reason that he would have to formulate a theory in which everything bad is really good.

The real point is not what children are focusing on but what they are screening out with their intense focus, most likely directed at a video already viewed scores of times. Johnson then goes on to declare that studies demonstrating the decline of reading and writing skills are deeply flawed because they “ignore the huge explosion of reading (not to mention writing) that has happened thanks to the rise of the Internet.” While conceding that e-mail exchanges or Web-based dissections of the television show The Apprentice are “not the same as literary novels,” Johnson notes approvingly that both are “equally text-driven.”[10] (Johnson wrote this before anyone imagined that the creator of The Apprentice would one day be in a position to say, “You’re fired” to high officials of the U.S. government.) Johnson’s self-referential codswallop is only to be expected from a self-referential digital and video culture; one might as well make the statement that kiddie porn and Titian nudes are “equally image-driven.” The appeal of such rationalizations in an acquisitive, technology-dependent society is obvious: parents can rest assured that their money is being well spent because electronic media toys all have educational value; that there is really nothing wrong with not having made time to read a book for the past six months; and that their children are actually getting smarter as they watch the action on their various screens.

What kind of reading has exploded on the Internet? Certainly not the reading of serious books, whether fiction or nonfiction. The failure of e-books to appeal to more than a niche market is one of the worst-kept secrets in publishing, in spite of the reluctance of publishers to issue specific sales figures. It was once thought that e-books would meet the needs of an ever-expanding market, but in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, e-sales are flat. At the turn of the century, there were already hints that e-books weren’t for everyone. Even a popular mass-market novelist like Stephen King has flopped on the Web. In 2001, King attempted to serialize one of his supernatural thrillers online, with the proviso that readers pay $1 for the first three installments and $2 for the subsequent portions. Those who downloaded the installments were to pay on an honor system, and King pledged to continue the serialization as long as 75 percent of readers paid for the downloads. By the fourth installment, the proportion of paid-up readers dropped to 46 percent, and King canceled the series at the end of the year. King’s idea of serialization had of course been tried before, and it was a huge success—in the nineteenth century. London readers used to get up early and wait in line for the newest installment of a novel by Charles Dickens; in New York, Dickens fans would meet the boats known to be carrying copies of the tantalizing chapters. The Web, however, is all about the quickest possible gratification; it may well be that people most disposed to read online are least disposed to wait any length of time for a new chapter of work by their favorite writer.

The tech stock analysts who predicted a limitless future for e-books have tried to explain their misjudgment in terms of the current state of technology: all that is lacking for their bright forecasts to be fulfilled is a better tool for downloading and reading. Something small, light, and easily perused while the reader is riding on a bus, eating a sandwich, or propped up against pillows. Something like…a paperback book? A much more likely explanation for the e-book fizzle is that reading for pleasure—as distinct from necessary, often work-related reading for information—is in certain respects antithetical to the whole experience of reading on computers and portable digital devices. The Internet is the perfect delivery medium for reference books and textbooks, which were never designed to be read from cover to cover. But a narrow, time-saving focus is inimical not only to reading for enjoyment but to reading that encourages the retention of knowledge. 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. All mass entertainment media, and the expanding body of educational media based on the entertainment model, emphasize “stand-alone” programming that does not require a prior body of knowledge. The media provide the yeast, which, when added to other American social forces and institutions, creates a fertile culture for the spread of invincible ignorance throughout the public square.

—

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, are ideally suited to assist in the propagation of a form of faith that stands opposed to most of the great rationalist insights that have transformed Western civilization since the beginning of the Enlightenment. Triumphalist Christian fundamentalism, mainly though not entirely Protestant, is based on the conviction that every word in the Bible is literally true and was handed down by God Himself. Public opinion polls conducted during the past four years have consistently found that more than one third of Americans believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, while nearly six in ten believe that the bloody predictions in the Book of Revelation—which involve the massacre of everyone who has not accepted Jesus as the Messiah—will come true.[11]

Beginning with the radio evangelist Billy Sunday in the twenties, American fundamentalists, with their black-and-white view of every issue, have made effective use of each new medium of mass communication. Liberal religion, with its many shades of gray and determination to make room for secular knowledge in the house of faith, does not lend itself as readily to media packaging and is at an even greater disadvantage in the visual media than it was on the radio. From the rantings of Pat Robertson on the 700 Club to Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ, religion comes across most powerfully on video when it is unmodified by secular thought and learning, makes an attempt to appeal to anything but emotion, and leaves no room for doubt. Gibson’s Passion, for instance, is rooted in a Roman Catholic brand of fundamentalism, long rejected by the Vatican itself, that takes the Gospel of Matthew literally and blames Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus. The core audience for the immensely popular movie in the United States was drawn not from mainstream Catholics, whose faith does not rest on biblical literalism, but from right-wing Protestants.

Even when the entertainment media are not promoting a particular version of religion, they do promote and capitalize on widespread American credulity regarding the supernatural. In recent years, television has commissioned an unceasing stream of programs designed to appeal to a vast market of viewers who believe in ghosts, angels, and demons. More than half of American adults believe in ghosts, one third believe in astrology, three quarters believe in angels, and four fifths believe in miracles.[12] The American marketing of the Apocalypse is a multimedia production, capitalizing on fundamentalism and paranoid superstition. Mainstream denominations have long downplayed the predictions in Revelation, which modern biblical scholars say was written at least sixty years after the death of the historical Jesus and has only the most tenuous relationship to the Gospels. One of the many rational developments rejected by fundamentalism, however, is biblical scholarship since the mid-nineteenth century. Who cares what some pointy-headed intellectual has to say about when various parts of the Bible were actually written and what, if any, relationship the text has to real history? Americans’ enthusiasm for apocalyptic fantasy probably owes more to the movies like The Exorcist and The Omen than to the Bible itself.

During the past twenty years, and especially since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon gave substance to every sort of paranoia, the driving force behind the “end times”—meaning the end of the world—scenario has been a series of books marketed through right-wing Christian bookstores and fundamentalist Web sites. Also known as the Left Behind series—meaning those left behind to be slaughtered for their unbelief after Jesus returns to earth for the Last Judgment—the religious horror stories for adults are accompanied by a series of children’s books (Left Behind: The Kids). The books are written by Jerry B. Jenkins, whose previous works consisted mainly of ghostwriting for sports celebrities, and are based on the scriptural interpretations of Tim LaHaye, a fundamentalist minister and founding member of the Moral Majority.*2 More than 100 million copies have been sold in the United States. The saga is also known to aficionados as the Rapture with a capital “R.”

Rapture is also a verb; “to rapture” means to frolic in heaven after God has dispatched every skeptic on earth, thereby fulfilling the biblical prophecy that “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of a man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). As for those who doubted Him, the sadistic Armageddon script spells out their unenviable fate: “And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads….And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them” (Revelation 9:3–4:6). Another popular fundamentalist Web site, run by an Air Force mechanic in Bellevue, Nebraska, publishes a daily “Rapture Index,” which its founder describes as a “Dow Jones Industrial Average of End Time Activity.” The index at raptureready.com hit a high on September 24, 2001, as Armageddon enthusiasts concluded that the terrorist attacks signified the imminent end of the world.

What is most disturbing, apart from the fact that millions of Americans already believe in the imminent end of days, is that the mainstream media confer respectability on such bizarre fantasies by taking them seriously. In a 2002 Time cover story on the Bible and the Apocalypse, the magazine soberly declared that “since September 11, people from the cooler corners of Christianity have begun asking questions about what the Bible has to say about how the world ends, and preachers have answered their questions with sermons they could not have imagined giving a year ago.”[13] Notably absent from the Time story was any secular or rationalist analysis. The authors gave no space to those who dismiss the end-times scenario as a collective delusion based on pure superstition and who understand the civic danger inherent in the normalization of ideas that ought to be dismissed as the province of a lunatic fringe. Discussing Armageddon as if it were as real as the earth itself, the Time story was, on one level, an effort to capitalize on public fear and sell magazines. On a deeper level, though, the article exemplifies the journalistic conviction that anything “controversial” is worth covering and that both sides of an issue must always be given equal space—even if one side belongs in an abnormal psychology textbook. If enough money is involved, and enough people believe that two plus two equals five, the media will report the story with a straight face, always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that “mathematicians, however, say that two plus two still equals four.” With a perverted objectivity that gives credence to nonsense, some mainstream news outlets have done more to undermine logic and reason than rapture ready.com could ever do.

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. Both the Constitution and the pragmatic realities of living in a pluralistic society enjoin us to respect our fellow citizens’ right to believe whatever they want—as long as their belief, in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But many Americans have misinterpreted this sensible laissez-faire principle to mean that respect must be accorded to the beliefs themselves. 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. Millions of Americans are perfectly free, under the Constitution, to believe that the Lord of Hosts is coming one day to murder millions of others who do not consider him the Messiah, but the rest of the public ought to exercise its freedom to identify such beliefs as dangerous fallacies that really do pick pockets and break legs.

Modern American fundamentalism (the term was not widely used until the twenties) emerged as an identifiable religious and cultural movement after the First World War, and its defining issue was opposition to the teaching in public schools of Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Intellectuals of that era, including nonfundamentalist religious believers as well as secularists, mistakenly concluded that the anti-evolutionists and fundamentalists had been dealt a decisive blow by the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee. Clarence Darrow, the nation’s leading trial lawyer and a crusading agnostic, took on the case of John T. Scopes, a high school teacher charged with violating Tennessee’s law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. His opponent was William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate and hero of fundamentalism, who famously declared that he was “more interested in the Rock of Ages than in the ages of rocks.” Bryan made the mistake of taking the stand as an expert witness on the Bible, and Darrow, whose skills at cross-examination were legendary, forced his onetime friend to admit that many biblical stories, such as the sun standing still for Joshua’s armies, could not be taken literally in light of contemporary scientific knowledge.

Although Scopes’s conviction by a fundamentalist jury was a foregone conclusion, northern journalists, scientists, and intellectuals believed that Bryan’s humiliation on the stand had discredited fundamentalism once and for all. In 1931, the cultural historian Frederick Lewis Allen observed that “legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the…trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”[14] Intellectuals like Allen, who came of age in the early decades of the twentieth century, would surely have been incredulous if anyone had predicted that evolution would be just as controversial a subject in America at the dawn of the twenty-first century as it had been at the end of the nineteenth.

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. Usually portrayed solely as a conflict between faith and science, the evolution battle is really a microcosm of all of the cultural forces responsible for the prevalence of unreason in American society today. The persistence of anti-evolutionism, and its revival as a movement during the past twenty years, sets the United States apart from every other developed country in the world. On August 30, 2005, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released the results of a public opinion poll that received almost no attention in the press because Hurricane Katrina had slammed into the Gulf Coast the day before. But the Pew findings, for those who bothered to read them, revealed an intellectual disaster as grave as the human and natural disaster unfolding in New Orleans. Nearly two thirds of Americans want both creationism, generally understood as the hard-core fundamentalist doctrine based on the story of Genesis, to be taught along with evolution in public schools. Fewer than half of Americans—48 percent—accept any form of evolution (even guided by God), and just 26 percent accept Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Fully 42 percent say that all living beings, including humans, have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.[15]

This level of scientific ignorance cannot be blamed solely on religious fundamentalism, because the proportion of Americans who reject evolution in any form is higher—by 15 percentage points—than the proportion who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Something else must be at work, and that something else is the low level of science education in American elementary and secondary schools, as well as in many community colleges. The poor quality of public science education at anything below the university level is easily inferred from the educational disparities in responses to the Pew poll on evolution. Only 27 percent of college graduates believe that living beings have always existed in their present form—although that in itself is an astonishingly high figure—but 42 percent of Americans with only a partial college education and half of high school graduates adhere to the creationist viewpoint that organic life has remained unchanged throughout the ages. A third of Americans mistakenly believe that there is substantial disagreement about evolution among scientists—a conviction reinforcing and reflecting the right-wing religious mantra that evolution is “just a theory,” with no more scientific validity than any other cockamamie idea. Since evolution is just a theory, the anti-evolutionists contend, it must not and should not be viewed as scientific truth.

There are of course many scientific disagreements about the particulars of evolution, but the general theory of evolution by means of natural selection is a settled issue for the mainstream scientific community. The popular “just a theory” argument rests not only on religious faith but on our national indifference to the specific meanings of words in specific contexts. Many Americans simply do not understand the distinction between the definitions of theory in everyday life and in science. For scientists, a theory is a set of principles designed to explain natural phenomena, supported by observation, and subject to proofs and peer review; scientific theory is not static but is modified as new tools of measurement and research findings become available. In its everyday meaning, however, a theory is nothing more than a guess based on limited information or misinformation—and that is exactly how many Americans view scientific theory. To those who equate theory with uninformed guessing, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Darwin’s theory of evolution have no more validity than the convictions of a Left Behind enthusiast who declares, “My theory is that the end of the world will come after one more terrorist attack.” Predictions about the end of the world are perfect examples of nonscientific theories: each time they fail to come true, the prognosticators simply set a new date for fulfillment of the prophecy. A specific set of calculations may be wrong, but the prophecy retains its status as an eternal and unverifiable supernatural truth. Who, after all, can prove that the end of the world is not just one more disaster away? In science, new information either unmasks a falsehood, as Copernicus’s and Galileo’s observations undermined the long-held belief that the sun revolves around the Earth, or supports an earlier theory based on less complete information.

One of the most important contributors to the evolution tempest is local control of elementary and secondary schooling, an American tradition responsible for vast and persistent regional disparities in the quality of education throughout the land. In Europe, national curriculum standards prevail: Sicilians may have different cultural values from Piedmontese, but a high school graduate in either Italian region will have been taught the same facts about science. In the United States, the geographical dimension of the culture wars, with the powerful fundamentalist presence in the South and parts of the Middle West, means that teachers in those areas, even if they believe in evolution themselves, are wary of incorporating the subject into their biology classes. A turn-of-the-millennium report by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, an education research institute, concluded that schools in no more than a third of American states, most in the South and Midwest, are failing to acquaint students not only with the basic facts of evolution but with the importance of Darwin’s theory to all modern scientific thinking.[16]

One of the most common strategies of schools kowtowing to anti-evolutionists is avoidance of the “E-word” and the substitution of bland, meaningless phrases like “change over time.” Biological evolution is frequently ignored in favor of the geological history of the solar system, a phenomenon less disturbing to fundamentalists than the descent of man. Ron Bier, a biology teacher in Oberlin, Ohio—one of the states receiving a poor grade in the Fordham report—summed up his teaching strategy for The New York Times. He believes in teaching evolution but tries to avoid challenges from fundamentalist parents by teaching the subject not as a “unit” but by putting out “my little bits and pieces wherever I can.” Bier added, “I don’t force things. I don’t argue with students about it.”[17] One might ask what the point of teaching is, if not to replace ignorance with knowledge—a process that generally does involve a fair amount of argument. But passivity and teacher avoidance of controversy are not the worst-case scenarios. Many teachers—products of the same inadequate public schools—do not understand evolution themselves. A 1998 survey by researchers from the University of Texas found that one out of four public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.[18] These misconceptions may not tell us anything definitive about the teachers’ religious beliefs, but they do reveal a great deal about how poorly educated a significant number of American teachers are. Any teacher who does not know that dinosaurs were extinct long before Homo sapiens put in an appearance is unfit to provide instruction in late nineteenth-century biology, much less modern biology. (There has been no comparable recent study, so there is no way to determine whether high school biology teachers today are more scientifically knowledgeable than teachers twenty years ago. However, pressure from administrators, fearful of objections from fundamentalist parents, leads many teachers to avoid the word “evolution” in class. This is a sore point with many high school teachers I have interviewed during the past decade.)

To add to the muddle, it seems that Americans are as ignorant and poorly educated about the particulars of religion as they are about science. A majority of adults, in what is supposedly the most religious nation in the developed world, cannot name the four Gospels or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible.[19] How can citizens understand what creationism means, or make an informed decision about whether it belongs in classrooms, if they cannot even locate the source of the creation story? And how can they be expected to understand any definition of evolution if they were once among millions of children attending classes in which the word “evolution” was taboo and in which teachers suggested that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together?

Infotainment culture reinforces public ignorance about both science and religion. The news media tend to cover evolution with the same bogus objectivity that they apply to other “controversies” like the Armageddon scenario. Even in nature documentaries, it is difficult to find any mention of evolution. The surprise hit movie of 2005, March of the Penguins, chronicled the bizarre reproductive cycle of the emperor penguin and managed, in a cinematic tour de force filmed in Antarctica, to avoid any mention of evolution. As it happened, the emperor penguin is literally a textbook example, cited in college-level biology courses, of evolution by means of natural selection and random mutation. The penguins march seventy miles from their usual ocean feeding grounds in order to mate in a spot that offers some shelter from the fierce Antarctic winter. By the time the birds pair off, the female is starving and must transfer her egg to be sheltered under the male’s fur. Then she waddles back to water to stoke up on fish so that she may return, making another seventy-mile trek, in time to feed her new offspring and trade places with the male, who by then is starving himself and must return to the sea.

A scientist looks at emperor penguins and sees a classic example of random mutation, natural selection, and adaption 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. The film has been endorsed by religious conservatives not only as a demonstration of God’s presence in nature but as an affirmation of “traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice, and child-rearing.”[20] These penguin family values, however, mandate monogamy for only one reproductive cycle: mama and papa penguin, once their chick is old enough to survive on its own, flop back into the ocean and never see each other or their offspring again. In the next mating cycle, they choose new partners. But why quibble? Serial monogamy, if ordained by a supreme being, is apparently good enough.

There is no need to speculate about what would have happened to box office receipts in the United States if the filmmaker (National Geographic) and the distributor (Warner Independent) had used the E-word. In 2001, the Public Broadcasting Service produced an eight-part documentary, accompanied by materials designed for use in schools, boldly titled Evolution. The Christian right went berserk, labeling the series anti-religious, unscientific propaganda and succeeded in keeping the supplementary educational materials out of most American schools. Furthermore, the evolution series prompted the Bush administration to begin monitoring all PBS productions for “liberal bias” and provided justification for further budget cuts in a government program already on the religious right’s hit list. PBS is, predictably, on Trump’s list of government-subsidized institutions targeted for deep budget cuts. If anything like the proposed cuts for arts funding make it through Congress, we may see only British imports on the remaining PBS stations throughout the nation. It is another testament to the persistence of American anti-intellectualism that the United States is the only developed country in which public funding for one television network with an educational purpose is still “controversial.”

In the evolution wars, the campaign on behalf of intelligent design deserves special mention because it achieved success in many communities by brilliantly employing an intellectual and scientific vocabulary to attack “elitist” scientists who reject religious attacks on Darwin’s theory. The intelligent design movement is spearheaded by the Discovery Institute, a think tank based in Seattle and bankrolled by far right conservatives. The slick, media-savvy right-wingers who run the Discovery Institute prefer to downplay religion and highlight the anti-Darwinist views of a handful of scientific contrarians, many with ties to the religious right. That their views are universally rejected by respected mainstream scientists is seen by the intelligent design crowd as evidence of a liberal establishment conspiracy to protect its Darwinist turf. Institute spokesmen constantly compare their contrarian faith-based researchers to once scorned geniuses like Copernicus and Galileo—a contention conveniently ignoring the fact that the Roman Catholic Church, not other seekers of scientific truth, was the source of opposition to the heliocentric theory of the solar system. Intelligent design does not insist on the seven days of creation but it does rest on the nonscientific hypothesis that the complexity of life proves the existence of a designer. “If you want to call the designer God, that’s entirely up to you” is the intelligent design pitch—along with “teach the controversy.” The lethal inefficiencies of penguins marching across a frozen wasteland in order to reproduce, or of blood requiring the presence of numerous proteins in order to clot and prevent humans from bleeding to death, are viewed not as accidents of nature but as marvels of intention. 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. Telling educators to “teach the controversy” about evolution is the scientific equivalent of telling historians to “teach the controversy” about the Holocaust.

The proponents of intelligent design were dealt a major blow at the end of 2005, when Federal District Court Judge John E. Jones III handed down a decision prohibiting the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in the public schools of Dover, Pennsylvania. Jones was forthright in his opinion, which states unequivocally that intelligent design is a religious, not a scientific, theory and that its teaching in schools therefore violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment. “To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect,” Jones concluded. “However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.”[21] Jones’s opinion, grounded in science, will not of course be the last political word on the subject.

When Bush endorsed the teaching of intelligent design, he was predictably cheered by the religious right and denounced by the secular and religious left, but no one pointed out how truly extraordinary it was that any American president would place himself in direct opposition to contemporary scientific thinking. Even when they have been unsympathetic to new currents in philosophical, historical, and political thought, American presidents have always wanted to be on the right side of science, and those who understood nothing about science were smart enough to keep their mouths shut. One cannot imagine Calvin Coolidge making pronouncements about the desirability of teaching alternatives to Einstein’s theory of relativity or about the theory of evolution—even though Coolidge was in the White House when the Scopes trial became the subject of major national publicity and controversy. Trump has yet to become embroiled in any controversies about the teaching of evolution in schools, but Vice President Pence, a profoundly conservative Protestant evangelical who converted from Roman Catholicism (which, like mainstream Protestantism, eventually forged an accommodation of faith with evolution), has denounced the idea of evolution as settled science on numerous occasions. Many political observers believe that Trump, who has never displayed any particular interest in religion but who was supported overwhelmingly by right-wing evangelicals, has “outsourced” religious issues to Pence. If so, evolution—and any scientific issues that conflict with a literal interpretation of the Bible—are likely to fare worse in public schools during the next few years. This is particularly true because Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, raised with strong Calvinist beliefs, is committed to using public money for religiously based charter schools.

Unlike its predecessor in the twenties, the current anti-rationalist movement has been politicized from the bottom up and the top down, from school boards in small towns to the corridors of power in Washington. The journalist and longtime political aide (beginning in Lyndon Johnson’s administration) Bill Moyers, who was long under attack from the religious and political right for the pro-science, pro-rationalist, and anti-fundamentalist content of his programs on public television, described the process in a scathing speech about the end-times scenario. “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. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologies hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The offspring of ideology and theology are not always bad but they are always blind. And that is the danger; voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.”[22] In the land of politicized anti-rationalism, facts are whatever folks choose to believe.

The question is why now. It is much easier to understand the resurgent religious fundamentalism of the twenties than it is to understand politicization of anti-rationalism over the past twenty-five years. Both the fundamentalism of the early twentieth century and the anti-rationalism of the late twentieth century tapped into a broader fear of modernism and hatred of secularism that extend beyond the religious right and have always been an important component of American anti-intellectualism. But the reactionary fundamentalism of the twenties was deeply rooted in nostalgia—of which traditional religion was only one component—for a simpler time. Bryan, the leading populist and fundamentalist politician of his era, was the product of prelapsarian, late nineteenth-century small-town America, which had considered itself singularly blessed by God and in need of no further enlightenment from outside experts. It is understandable that fundamentalism and anti-rationalism would have appealed to many who longed for a return to the less dangerous world before the Great War.

What Edenic past is calling out today to those who rail against experts, scientists, and intellectual “elites”? Most Americans would certainly like to return to the safety—or the perceived safety—of the world before September 11, 2001, but the rise of ideological anti-rationalism in American life antedates the terrorist attacks by several decades. Are we longing not for physical safety but for the world before the digital revolution, when the young were not separated from the middle-aged and the old by a technological barrier? With the rise of Trump, however, another form of nostalgia has entered the anti-rationalist mix—idealization of a country that was less urban, whiter, had fewer immigrants from vastly different cultures, and always paid lip service to a Christian (later Judeo-Christian) identity. Trump, of course, is not himself the product of the simpler, more rural society he extolls—a society in which America always won its wars and welcomed immigrants only when they had white skins. The president, as is well known, is a big-city boy. His paternal grandfather was an immigrant from Germany and his mother an immigrant from Scotland (although they did have the preferred white skins). Still, it is hard to imagine that his immigrant grandfather would have expected his grandson—whether he grew up to be president or not—to display open contempt for learning and expertise. Many of Trump’s anti-intellectual statements, expressing his enthusiasm for the poorly educated, would have seemed out of place coming from a builder in 1917, much less a century later. Once again, Trump’s personal history offers no real answer to the wave of anti-intellectual nostalgia that created the conditions for his election to the presidency.

What accounts for the powerful American attraction to values that seem so at odds not only with intellectual modernism and science but also with the old Enlightenment rationalism that made such a vital contribution to the founding of our nation? Any attempt to answer these questions must begin with the paradoxical cultural and political forces that shaped the idea of American exceptionalism even before there was an American nation and became an integral part of the American experiment during the formative decades of the young republic. Many of these forces combine a deep reverence for learning with a profound suspicion of too much learning, and they have persisted and mutated, through economic and population changes that the first generation of Americans could never have envisaged, into our current age of unreason.

*1Liberace first used this line in 1957, when he won a libel judgment against the British tabloid the Daily Mirror, which published a column calling the entertainer a “deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.”

*2LaHaye died in July 2016.

Notes

1.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside Chats (New York, 1995), pp. 48–49, 62–63.

2.  George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon 76 (London, 1946); www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit.

3.  Helen Dewar and Dana Milbank, “Cheney Dismisses Critic with Obscenity,” The Washington Post, June 25, 2004.

4.  Russell Baker, “Talking It Up,” New York Review of Books, May 11, 2006.

5.  Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1963), p. 22.

6.  Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.

7.  Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York, 1985), p. 16.

8.  In “HBO Criticized for Pushing TV to Infants,” Associated Press, May 12, 2005.

9.  Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You (New York, 2005), p. 181.

10.  Ibid., p. 183.

11.  See Nancy Gibbs, “Apocalypse Now,” Time, July 1, 2002.

12.  “The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans 2003,” Harris Interactive Poll, February 26, 2003.

13.  Gibbs, “Apocalypse Now.”

14.  Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York, 1931), p. 171.

15.  “Public Divided on Origins of Life,” August 30, 2005, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life; www.pewforum.org.

16.  “Good Science, Bad Science: Teaching Evolution in the States,” Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, September 1, 2000, figure I; www.edexcellence.net.

17.  Cornelia Dean, “Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes,” New York Times, February 1, 2005.

18.  George E. Webb, The Evolution Controversy in America (Lexington, K.Y., 1994), p. 254.

19.  George Gallup, The Role of the Bible in American Society (Princeton, N.J., 1990), p. 17, Genesis reference in Steven Prothero, Religious Literacy (San Francisco, 2007), p. 12.

20.  Michael Medved, “March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder,” New York Times, September 13, 2005.

21.  Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, case no. 04CV2688.

22.  Bill Moyers, “The Delusional Is No Longer Marginal,” New York Review of Books, March 24, 2005.

ALSO BY

SUSAN JACOBY

THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON IN A CULTURE OF LIES

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 have 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 addiction 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 have cost us as individuals and as a nation.

History

STRANGE GODS

A Secular History of Conversion

In a groundbreaking historical work that focuses on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with an uncompromising secular perspective, Susan Jacoby illuminates the social and economic forces that have shaped individual faith and the voluntary conversion impulse that has changed the course of Western history—for better and for worse. Covering the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s dour theocracy, American plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters’ religion—along with individual converts, including Augustine of Hippo, John Donne, Edith Stein, Muhammad Ali, George W. Bush, and Mike Pence—Strange Gods makes a powerful case that nothing has been more important in the struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one’s choice or to reject belief in God altogether.

History/Religion

HALF-JEW

eBook Only

Since childhood, New York Times bestselling author Susan Jacoby was sure that her father was keeping a secret. At age twenty, just before beginning her writing career as a reporter for the Washington Post, she learned the truth: Robert Jacoby, a Catholic convert with a Catholic wife, was also a Jew. In Half-Jew, Jacoby grapples with the hidden identity cloaked by the persona of a successful accountant and member of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in East Lansing, Michigan—and with the secrets and lies that had marked her family’s history for three generations on two continents. Beginning in 1849 when her great-grandfather arrived in America as a political refugee, Jacoby traces her lineage through the lives of her great-uncle Harold, the distinguished astronomer whose map of the constellations is etched on the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal; her uncle, the bridge champion Oswald Jacoby; her aunt Edith, also a Catholic convert and eventually a reformer within the church; and, of course, her father himself. At the core of the story is the psychic damage that accrues across generations when people conceal their true ethnic and religious origins. Featuring a new afterword, Half-Jew is a meticulously researched, emotionally poignant examination of the dark legacy of European and American anti-Semitism as well as a tenderhearted account of a daughter coming to understand her father, herself, and her family’s true legacy.

Autobiography

NEVER SAY DIE

The Myth of the New Old Age

In Never Say Die, Susan Jacoby delivers a brave, impassioned, and exceptionally important wake-up call to Americans who have long been deluded by the dangerous myth that a radically new old age awaits the huge baby boom generation. Combining historical, social, and economic analysis with personal experiences of love and loss, Jacoby unmasks the fallacies promoted by twenty-first-century hucksters of longevity and reveals the hazards of the magical thinking that prevents us from facing the genuine battles of growing old. Never Say Die speaks to Americans, whatever their age, who draw courage and hope from facing reality instead of embracing platitudes and delusions, and who want to grow old with dignity and purpose. It is a life-affirming and powerful message that has never been more relevant.

Current Affairs

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