The Age of American Unreason
I’ve finished listening to the audiobook version of Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. It chronicles the history of anti-intellectualism throughout American history. It’s a nice look at how irrationality reigned throughout history, and overall it doesn’t seem to be much better or worse today than it was in the past. What is worse today is that those in power and the public in general have a blatant hostility to intellectualism and rational thought. At least rationality was generally an admired trait in the past, even if not everyone practiced it.
The author has a dim view of today’s information age, which is a viewpoint I beg to differ with. While she is probably right about the shorter attention spans of today’s audience, I think she’s wrong in believing that the online world has made them much less intellectual. I think that a much larger proportion of the general public has much more contact with intellectual thought than in the past, it’s just that the proportion of the population who are intellectually deep is probably the same as in the past. And the networks today give many more opportunities for intellectual interaction.
