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The Age of American Unreason
Susan Jacoby
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science.
Pantheon
February 2008
On Sale: February 12, 2008
384 pages
ISBN: 0375423745
EAN: 9780375423741
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation,
Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural
phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of
Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and
science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist
landscape extending from pop culture to a
pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for
logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by
the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism,
mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public
intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a
lazy and credulous public. Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American
addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and
cites this toxic dependency as the major element
distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier
outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and
anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific
and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly
ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven
language and received opinion. At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more
important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory
and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded
book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth
about what the flights from reason has cost us as
individuals and as a nation.
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