It is hard not to be sympathetic to the thesis of Susan Jacoby's latest book: if you pick up a magazine, if you surf the internet, if you turn on the television, you will feel inevitably that American ambition seems limited to acquisition and consumption. If the United States is not a dumber place, it is not as intellectually ambitious as, intuitively, it should be. While this blog seeks to problematize the word "conservative," of course, Jacoby abandons it entirely, preferring to call herself a "cultural conservationist." But in, for example, the unease she feels towards the trendy disciplines at universities, I feel a strong kinship with her and sympathy towards her analysis.
What is surprising is that Jacoby does not read these foreboding signs, wholly, as a recent phenomenon. She sees "social darwinism" as an early example of junk thought, a hyper-individualism that betrays the ideal of self-reliance and leads to civic indifference. Ultimately, American leaders do not inspire citizens' better natures, preferring to play to the lowest common denominator amongst the "folks." In this regard, The Age of American Unreason serves as a timely excoriation of the administration of George W. Bush, demonstrating how a historical value placed upon self-improvement, the desire to teach and better ourselves, has become a skepticism towards formal education that is most felt today as a turning away from science. What is less evident is the influence of the 1960s. Jacoby is an apologist for the various movements that defined the decade, but it is hard to believe that none of our current problems are rooted in the disoriented jumble of ideologies rooted in that time.
Jacoby's final chapter does not offer the sorts of solutions we are used to reading in similar social indictments. If there is a practical way forward, even a modest one, it might be simply to watch less television. Having earlier debunked the claim that television can be educational, Jacoby concludes that a limited amount of visual entertainment - say, perhaps, half of what we are currently ingesting - might be healthier for us. But the reader cannot help but conclude that Susan Jacoby believes many Americans are simply beyond help.