soc.culture.china

/2008/02/14/books/

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Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: February 14, 2008


A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum
blonde from "American Idol," appearing on the Fox game show "Are You
Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" during celebrity week. Selected from a
third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked:
"Budapest is the capital of what European country?"

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard
perplexed. "I thought Europe was a country," she said. Playing it
safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth
graders: Hungary. "Hungry?" she said, eyes widening in disbelief.
"That's a country? I've heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I've never heard
of it."

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives
Susan Jacoby, author of "The Age of American Unreason," up a wall. Ms.
Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the
state of American culture.

Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose
"Against Happiness" warns that the "American obsession with happiness"
could "well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that
could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by
global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation."

Then there is Lee Siegel's "Against the Machine: Being Human in the
Age of the Electronic Mob," which inveighs against the Internet for
encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization.
Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for
using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog
("you couldn't tie Siegel's shoelaces") and to praise himself ("brave,
brilliant").

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn't zero in on a
particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a
generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may
tag her a crank. "I expect to get bashed," said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either
as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and
values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is
a way to disparage religion.

Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not
limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds,
bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have
been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and
conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have
regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.

T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly
review Raritan, said, "The tendency to this sort of lamentation is
perennial in American history," adding that in periods "when political
problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward
cultural issues."

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-
intellectualism (the attitude that "too much learning can be a
dangerous thing") and anti-rationalism ("the idea that there is no
such things as evidence or fact, just opinion") have fused in a
particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and
cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don't think it matters.

[...]

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Scientific, civic and cultural knowledge are relevant to the real
life.
But they are irrelevant to those who are seeking happiness and
excitment from video
games, movies or shows. In contrast, suspending one's disbelief is the
prerequisite to
enjoy the more real than real.