Abstraction

Concern over the stupidity of the average American has been a theme of intellectual pundits throughout my life, finding an initial voice in the early 60s with Richard Hofstadter’s “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” Since then media attention to the subject has ebbed and flowed over the years. During the early 80’s, when I was in high school, I heard constantly about the fantastic levels of moronism achieved by my peers, many of whom, it was said, struggled to find the United States on an unmarked map. Japan was opening mocking our engineering ability, and America’s competitive position seemed to sink along with our math and science scores.

For my part, I had never (to my knowledge) met someone that couldn’t identify major countries on a map; I thought it would be interesting, in a slowing-down-to-look-at-a-car-wreck kind of way, to speak with someone so fantastically stupid. In some way, I expected such a person to consider their ignorance an aspect of their personality: “I’m Sam, and I play the guitar, and I can’t find the United Kingdom on a map or describe the importance of the first amendment.”

Sadly, stupid people don’t often self-identify with their stupidity, and I never got the chance to meet my representative moron. Turns out I didn’t need to, as the election of George W. Bush and the political rise of evangelical Christianity has put a good number of them on the world stage, free to be gawked at. The election also ushered in a new cycle of intellectual hand-wringing, which has risen in pitch as the gang of Idiots seek to ensure the country is well and truly ruined before they leave office and go back to their homes and their churches.

The latest furlow: last week Susan Jacoby’s “Age of American Unreason” was released. If the review at Salon is any indication (I’ve yet to read it myself), I will probably think it’s a great book, because I’ll strongly agree with it:

The chief manifestations of this newly virulent irrationality are the rise of fundamentalist religion and the flourishing of junk science and other forms of what Jacoby calls “junk thought.” The mentally enfeebled American public can now be easily manipulated by flimsy symbolism, whether it’s George W. Bush’s bumbling, accented speaking style (labeling him as a “regular guy” despite his highly privileged background) or the successful campaign by right-wing ideologues to smear liberals as snooty “elites.”

Unable to grasp even the basic principles of statistics or the scientific method, Americans gullibly buy into a cornucopia of bogus notions, from recovered memory syndrome to intelligent design to the anti-vaccination movement.

Ms. Jacoby also has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post:

It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an “elitist,” one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just “folks,” a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980.

Truth be told, I’ve myself accepted “elitist” as a pejorative, one that I use almost unconsciously in a self-deprecating way. The main culprit, according to Jacoby, is the rise of video culture and correlated decline of reading

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Not that Jacoby’s effort matters. As Laura Miller describes in her Salon review, she is only preaching to the choir. I’ll buy her book (I’ll even read it), but it’s really an exercise in narcissism in the sense that I know the book will just reinforce my own opionions. Just think: I’ll be even more elitist.