The Age of American Unreason

"One of the most remarkable characteristics of America’s revolutionary generation was the presence and influence of so many genuine intellectuals (although the term had not been coined in the eighteenth century). Men of extraordinary learning and intellect were disproportionately represented among the politicians who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and led the republic during its formative decades."

"The denigration of fairness has affected both political and intellectual life and has now produced a culture in which a disproportionate influence is exercised by the loud and relentless voices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another."

"Americans are alone in the developed world in their view of evolution by means of natural selection as “controversial” rather than as settled mainstream science."

"This level of scientific illiteracy provides fertile soil for political appeals based on sheer ignorance."

"The current American relationship to reading and writing by contrast, is best described not as illiterate but as a-literate.…In this increasingly a-literate America, not only the enjoyment of reading but critical thinking itself is at risk."

"The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between."

"One important element of the resurgent anti-intellectualism in American life is the popular equation of intellectualism with a liberalism supposedly at odds with traditional American values. The entire concept is summed up by the right-wing rubric “the elites.”"

"The unwillingness to give a hearing to contradictory viewpoints, or to imagine that one might learn anything from an ideological or cultural opponent, represents a departure from the best side of American popular and elite intellectual traditions."

"In today’s America, intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, whether on the left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo. This obduracy is both a manifestation of mental laziness and the essence of anti-intellectualism."

"However, there are ways of trying to strangle ideas they do not involve straight forward attempts at censorship or intimidation. 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."

"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."

"First and foremost among the vectors of anti-intellectualism are the mass media."

"It is not that television, or any of its successors in the world of video, was designed as an enemy of active intellectual endeavor but that the media, while they may not actually be the message, inevitably reshape content to fit a form that subordinates both the spoken and the written word to visual image. In doing so, the media restrict their audience’s intellectual parameters not only by providing information in a highly condensed form but by filling time—a huge amount of time—that used to be occupied by engagement with the written word."

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

"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."

"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."

"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, or ideally suited to assist in the propagation of a form of faith that stands opposed to most of the great rationalist insights they have transformed Western civilization since the beginning of the Enlightenment."

"The American marketing of the Apocalypse is a multi-media production, capitalizing on fundamentalism and paranoid superstition."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A scientist looks at emperor penguins and sees a classic example of random mutation, natural selection, and adaptation 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 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."

"“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.”"

"Whatever the denomination or religion, fundamentalism has always been defined by its refusal to adapt to any secular knowledge that conflicts with its version of revealed religious truth; that refusal, in science and the humanities, has been the most enduring and powerful strand in American anti-intellectualism."

"The American religious landscape at the conclusion of the Revolution was pluralistic and somewhat chaotic: it bore little resemblance to the portrait of a devout, churchgoing America that the religious right loves to paint today."

"Translated into politics, freethought demanded a government based on the rights of man and human reason rather than divine authority—in other words, a secular government. The Constitution, with its pointed and conscious omission of any mention of God, as well as its prohibition of all religious tests for public office, formalized and legalized the freethought ideal of a government free of religious interference."

"Supernaturalist fundamentalism is by definition anti-rational, because it cannot be challenged by any countervailing evidence in the natural world."

"This debate between religious conservatives and religious liberals over the relative gravity of sins was no abstract matter; it was being played out at exactly the same time between orthodox ministers and radical abolitionists over the evil of slavery. In 1836, the Reverend Lyman Beecher made a major speech in which he described the Sabbath as the “sun of the moral world” and lax Sabbath observance as the major moral issue in American society. The abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, in the July 1836 and August 1836 editions of The Liberator, mocked Beecher for dwelling on Sabbath observance while at the same time “giving his protecting influence to a system of slavery, which, at a single blow, annihilates not only the fourth commandment but The Whole DECALOGUE! and which effectively excludes from the benefits of the Sabbath, two millions and a half of his fellow countrymen!!”"

"For generations, the science and history taught in small towns in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana was vetted by adults who believed in the innate inferiority of blacks and who also subscribed to fundamentalist creeds at odds with the growing body of secular scientific knowledge. The best educated regions of the country became better educated, and the most intellectually backward regions became more backward."

"Finally, the Enlightenment culture that had produced Jefferson, Madison, and Washington no longer existed in the South: men of learning and science like Thomas Cooper were being exiled instead of recruited to build regional educational institutions. All of this converged in a culture in which the richest and most influential members, the planters, were noted for and proud of their lack of interest in intellectual pursuits."

"In the South, what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in an effort to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."

"The ideological fixations of otherwise intelligent men in America’s Gilded Age offer a recognizable precursor of the imperviousness to evidence that permeates many ideologies in our current age of unreason."

"Then as now, the public was overwhelmed by information and misinformation filtered through new technologies."

"One of the great ironies of this phase of American intellectual history is that the intellectual social Darwinists and their fundamentalist opponents shared an inability to distinguish between science and social pseudoscience, and they passed on their confusion to a public that worshipped the fruits of science but was fundamentally ignorant of the scientific method."

"In 1878, there were fewer than eight hundred public high schools in the United States; by the eve of the First World War, the number had increased to more than eleven thousand."

"The Gilded Age was also the golden age of the lecture as a source of both entertainment and instruction."

"After Darwin, the gap between contemporary scientific knowledge and southern religion grew much wider."

"Perhaps only someone trained as both a natural scientist and a philosopher could have spotted, at such an early stage in the culture wars over evolution, the bloviating arrogance of metaphysical theories that ignore inconvenient facts, as distinct from scientific theories subject to modification by the discovery of new facts."

"Regardless of political reversal of position, two critical ingredients of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism have remained largely unchanged since the 1890s. The first is the belief of a significant minority of Americans that intellectualism and secular higher learning are implacable enemies of their faith. The second is the toxin of pseudoscience, which Americans on both the left and the right continue to imbibe as a means of rendering their social theories impervious to evidence-based challenges."

"Just as the pseudoscience of social Darwinism captivated many nineteenth-century American intellectuals, the social pseudoscience of communism exerted a powerful pull on twentieth-century American intellectuals between the world wars."

"Three enduring elements of twentieth-century American anti-intellectualism may be inferred from Bryan’s rhetorical melding of fundamentalist faith with opposition to the world’s first Communist state and its official atheism. First and foremost is the portrayal of experts—not just a “soviet” but a “scientific soviet”—as an alien organism within the American body politic. Bryan then expresses resentment toward an educated minority seen as a separate class, determined to impose its views on the majority. Finally, this separate class is identified as an enemy of religion. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has always been seen by its opponents as ideological and metaphysical rather than scientific, tapped into the vague resentment most people feel toward experts on whom they depend but whose work they do not understand."

"Another powerful element in the suspicion of intellectuals fostered by the McCarthy era was an emotional melding of religion with anti-Communist patriotism, prefigured by but even more strenuously promoted than the same linkage had been during the Red Scare after the First World War."

"The distinctive feature of American middlebrow culture was its embodiment of the old civic credo that anyone willing to invest time and energy in self-education might better himself."

"What has been lost is an alternative to mass popular culture, imbibed unconsciously and effortlessly through the audio and video portals that surround us all. What has been lost is the culture of effort."

"As long as a book had something to do with ancient Rome, I did not care whether it was written from the perspective of a Christian, an atheist, or a lion."

"The Little Blue Books, with their strong debt to and component of nineteenth-century freethought as well as twentieth-century psychology, philosophy, and sociology, represented the traditional American ideal of self-education, as distinct from the dawning era of self-help, which would place far more emphasis on improving personality and public image than on improving one’s mind."

"I am sure that I would have gotten around to doubt and atheism eventually, but reading a handy chunk of the Summa hastened the day."

"If these hefty novels often lack literary grace, their length also attests to the diminution of literate America’s attention span during the past forty years."

"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. 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. Indeed, popular anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism are now synonymous."