"“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” In 1837, Emerson struck that note mainly as a rhetorical device, in a young nation obviously engaged in building up its intellectual capital. But Emerson’s straw man has come to life in America’s new age of unreason, and the inescapable theme of our time is the erosion of memory and knowledge. Memory loss has made us bad stewards of our intellectual inheritance, and the dissipation of our cultural storehouse gives rise in turn to new cycles of forgetting. Anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism flourish in a mix that includes addiction to infotainment, every form of superstition and credulity, and an educational system that does a poor job of teaching not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills."
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The Age of American Unreason
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