November Read (I): Unreason

Ohio: WPA Art Program
Library of Congress

The Age of American Unreason
Susan Jacoby, 2009

This title and Charles Pierce's Idiot America (post to follow) are fitting reads, post-election. Both were published last year, but need no election tie-in—not when there's always ample evidence of the 'Murkan public's cluelessness. It just happens that we now are experiencing the full effects of the Right's mid-term election tactics. Having engineered the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and made sure the media played up Koch-sucking tea partiers, the Right just keeps improving upon its ways of making the electorate stupider and more delusional than before.

Taking Richard Hofstadter's 1963 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life as a point of departure, Susan Jacoby offers a guide to the history of that anti-intellectualism, along with its forms and uses today.

From the country's start there were tensions between desire for learning and disdain for it, stemming from common disapproval of book learning or knowledge without obvious practical gain.

Also early was the divide between Jefferson and others who wanted to build public education, versus those unwilling to pay taxes to finance it. Southern plantation owners were the major opponents, and the strongest educational institutions would develop first in New England. By the end of the nineteenth century the mid-Atlantic, mid-West, and Pacific had caught up; the South would stay close to its origins in "a slavery-based class system... indifferent to the education of all but the rich."

Adult education would also take root in New England, with the start of the lyceum movement in the 1820s. The public popularity of lectures on serious topics grew in the 1840s and 50s, as a national literature was also emerging, with the first publications of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman.

Even so, "America stood with its intellectual house already divided." By 1800, what we now call Christian fundamentalism had developed in response to the social upheaval of the Revolutionary War and the freethinking of the Founding Fathers.

The period after the Civil War saw the rise of an "ideologically driven pseudoscience intended to rationalize the Gilded Age's excesses of wealth and poverty." Though the term was not yet in use, Darwin's work was distorted to become what we know as "social Darwinism." Business tycoons and important intellectuals would embrace what Jacoby deems America's "first mass-marketed wave of pseudoscience."

During the period

...there were really two culture wars over evolution—the first centering on the challenge to traditional religion posed by Darwin's real science and the second rooted in a pseudoscientific social theory that attempted to transpose Darwin's observations about man in a state of nature into a prescription for the way human beings ought to treat one another in a state of civilization. In the first culture war, nearly all intellectuals were on the side of science; in the second, many (though not all) succumbed to the pseudoscience... The attraction of upper-class intellectuals to a theory maintaining that "tooth and claw" laws of survival in nature were appropriate and inevitable in society did much to exacerbate a religiously based anti-intellectualism already aroused by evolution's challenge to biblical literalism.

Herbert Spencer's books won adherents to "the gospel of laissez-faire economics as the only way to ensure that the fittest would triumph in society through a process of 'social selection.'" Promotion of eugenics would become the next stage in upper-class intellectuals' embrace of these ideas.

Both poles of this "culture war"

...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.

Of the biblical literalist camp of the time, Jacoby writes that the influential William Jennings Bryan had a narrow education and no understanding of scientific method. Yet—

Bryan would no doubt have been astonished had anyone told him in 1896, when he made his "Cross of Gold" speech, that by the end of the twentieth century, many Americans who shared his religious beliefs would ally themselves with the political party favoring the interests of the rich—and that the Social Gospel, enjoining Christians to help their fellow man, would be replaced by the conviction that the Lord helps those who help themselves (and that the Bible tells us so).

Jacoby has an enlightening take on the "middlebrow" culture of the 1950s and early 60s, which she sees as a largely unrecognized secularizing trend, developing from changes in the publishing industry that began around the 1920s.

Those innovations began with Emmanuel Haldeman-Julius, son of an immigrant Russian book-binder, and

... a publishing genius who combined the pamphleteering of the Enlightenment, the ideas of cooperative economic effort that characterized the Progressive Era, and the new mass-marketing techniques of the 1920s.

His publications,

with a ... strong debt to... nineteenth-century freethought as well as twentieth-century psychology, philosophy, and sociology, represented the traditional American ideal of self-education...

Calling his project a "university in print," Haldeman-Julius published pamphlet-sized, 15,000 word books and sold them for $.25 each. These passed from hand to hand in the Depression, thus reaching a vast audience. 300 million Blue Books were published from 1919 to 1949; soon after that, large publishers would seriously enter the paperback market.

Jacoby sees a parallel between the aspirations of education-hungry readers who bought Blue Books and readers like her own parents, who later became Book of the Month Club subscribers. "Middlebrow" culture may have been derided by intellectuals, but along with forgettable novels, the BOMC published 1984 and Catch-22; Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and titles by James Baldwin. Non-fiction included The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Silent Spring.

"Middlebrow," notes Jacoby,"was a reading culture"; readers were willing to buy thick books, and it wasn't unusual for popular novelists to incorporate solid information into their tales. Irving Stone's 1961 The Agony and the Ecstasy was a "703-page novel... faithful to what is known about Michelangelo and ... suffused with real art history." In contrast, Dan Brown's 2003 The Da Vinci Code, "distorts art history in the service of a supernatural thriller that has nothing to do with the real Leonardo..."

Jacoby cites figures on the post-war boom in symphony orchestras and local art museums [to at least some degree, I believe this may have grown from seeds sown during local WPA arts projects]. Jacoby also notes the growth of "art film" houses by the early 60s.

Jacoby finds the high point of American magazines lasted into the 70s and late 80s, years when she "made a good living writing serious articles for women's magazines—most between 3,000 and 5,000 words." She notes her 1988 assignment for Glamour, to write about the status of Soviet women under Perestroika. Jacoby also worked for Cosmopolitan; she cites a thank-you note she was sent by Helen Gurley Brown, in appreciation of a a long article and Jacoby's use of a quote from Paradise Lost.

A glance at either magazine today shows what a very different world we live in.

Chapters on recent years cover right-wing spin; the attack on science; the political rise of the religious right; Bush's wars; and the mass media's overall contribution to stupefying the public mind.

Which brings us back to elections. Jacoby tells how her relatives and most of their circle voted for FDR and Truman, but believed Adlai Stevenson—the prototype of an "elitist" Democrat, decades before the right's branders hit upon that term—"was too much of an egghead to have any understanding of ordinary people and their problems."

My grandmother, who before her death at age ninety-nine boasted that she had never voted for a Republican, was able to overcome her distaste for Stevenson's syntax and elevated vocabulary only by recalling the Depression and her beloved FDR. "Adlai talked down to people," she recalled, "and he didn't have the common touch. Ike had the common touch and I loved him, but in the end, remembering which party gave us Social Security and which party couldn't care less about starving old people, I just couldn't bring myself to vote Republican."

Stevenson lost, but Eisenhower was probably to the left of Obama in most things. Certainly, he never would have considered messing with Social Security, just to please "a few... Texas oil millionaires."

But Ike faced an electorate that knew very well what the New Deal had done for them.

The decades of dumbing down have paid off; the more we descend into feudalism, the larger the segment of the peon class willing to vote for having their lives made even worse.