On September 11, 2001, New York author and historian Susan Jacoby headed home, not unreasonably stopping at a bar first, where she overheard a conversation between two men in suits:

“It’s just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

“What’s Pearl Harbor?” the other one asked.

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbour, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

That was when Jacoby decided to write her stunningly sad new book, The Age of American Unreason, on the anti-intellectualism of her nation. It’s the type of worthy, timely book that consolidates information rather than uncovering it, and stunning only in the sense that it is asteroid-like when it hits the reader. Just when Americans, led by the young, were getting their courage back and demanding a return to sanity — with the rest of us cheering them on — Jacoby delivers a harsh verdict.

Here was I, expecting and rejoicing in great things from a stricken country — President Obama, money wasted on Iraq to be spent on education in slums and Arkansas, and maybe a new novel from Jonathan Franzen. The Age of American Unreason obliterates all hope and leaves a steaming black pit. It’s the most depressing book since Bambi, and I was six when I read that. Bambi’s mother isn’t coming back and neither is the American drive towards rationalism, self-improvement, respect for measurable scientific truth and ability to understand sentences with clauses.

Widespread uneducation

Anti-intellectualism has always existed but it didn’t always run the American show, Jacoby says. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter weren’t embarrassed to take speed-reading classes in the White House, part of the same grand tradition of self-taught intellect that fuelled the almost unschooled Abraham Lincoln into the building. But the era of the autodidact is dead. The accepted stance now is to assert that one cannot be improved upon.

Here’s the puzzle Jacoby presents: it isn’t that the poor are shut out of an education, it’s that everyone is. Learning is aggressively undervalued. Evolution is officially considered a theory, Bush aides refer sneeringly to the “reality-based community,” and, as Bill Moyers put it, “the delusional is no longer marginal.”

Adults are not expected to have a common literacy or prior body of knowledge, and this one has pained me personally for years. When I write a column, should I have to identify all the proper names of intellectuals I mention? Can I assume that readers are already familiar with John Kenneth Galbraith or Donald Rumsfeld? I say yes, Canadian newspaper editors gently say no, American editors angrily say no, and — here’s the glory of writing online âe” my CBC.ca editor says yes, and anyway, readers curious about Moyers will simply Google his name and return to this page.

Mainstream editors assume that readers don’t know who anyone is. And this is Jacoby’s point. It’s not that her fellow Americans know nothing — that would be fixable in a better world — but that they are expected to know nothing.

This extends into the Ivy League, media, academia and science.

Undisciplined analysis, in many disciplines

The New York Times recently ran an article on young immigrant students drawing classroom lessons from reading The Great Gatsby. They yearned for Gatsby’s wealth; they saw him as a glorious “striver.” But no one, not the sweet-natured teacher, the students or the reporter seemed to grasp that Gatsby’s green light was a delusion, that the novel ends in tragedy and that Gatsby was a bootlegger, a 1920s version of a drug dealer. The article was written with the literalism and gassy sentimental wonder that is the hallmark of a Times feature. I am always awed by journalists’ ability to see glamour where there is none. Wiser readers wrote to complain about the misreading, but they sounded âe¦ lonely.

Lawrence Summers of Harvard had no evidence for saying women were bad at science; he simply felt it to be true. News reports on NBC are short because viewers are assumed to have a child’s attention span. It is scientists hungry for research grants who are responsible for the laughable “health” stories that clog our landscape. Take, for example, “post-abortion syndrome,” or the recent study that claimed pot smokers were more likely than cigarette smokers to get lung cancer, based on chats with 10 smokers in Melbourne. It’s junk science, but people are innumerate, scientifically illiterate and credulous — three things educated people are not supposed to be.

As for last week’s headline, Female G-spot can be detected, all I can say is “Yes, if you work at it,” and if you’re an enthusiastic male Italian PhD with 20 women to be probed at leisure, you will find it, but it’s not science.

Decline of the middlebrow

Jacoby traces the historical paths of anti-intellectualism. She studies the devastation caused by the U.S. system of locally controlled education, which dooms the poor and rural; the way the South for centuries ran a blockade against good schoolteachers; the primacy of religion; and, most tragically, the decline of the middlebrow.

Middlebrow culture began with the early 19th century adult-education lyceums, and continued with the postwar GI Bill that gave Second World War soldiers a free education, as well as a 1950s attempt by the middle class to improve themselves with such things as the Book-of-the-Month Club. But TV destroyed middlebrow. And highbrow dumbed down, Jacoby says, thanks to timid academics who allowed the core curriculum to drift into trendiness, killing off the study of the Dead White Males and anything that could be called an agreed-on central culture that all Americans should share. Now Americans, including the president, live in a lowbrow world.

I cannot square this with evidence of America’s geniuses — there are plenty of them — but she would say that the exception proves the rule. And she’s no happier saying it than I am reading about it.

American unreason is why a white-collar New Yorker conflates the Vietnam War with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. What half-remembered whispers of fact rustled in this man’s mind? He regards history as a series of generic anti-American explosions, but then, he probably never took a high school history class. He is normal; Jacoby is the odd one out. In the U.S. today, literate thoughtful people are regarded as freaks.

De Toqueville described all this in 1835 in Democracy in America. But he was describing a nation in transition. Jacoby isn’t. “It is possible that nothing will help,” she concludes. “The nation’s memory and attention span may already have sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived by the best efforts of America’s best minds.”

This Week

Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste is Canadian journalist Carl Wilson’s Celine Dion contribution to Continuum’s inspired 33 1/3 series of short books in which music critics write about albums, often very badly indeed. It’s famously hard to write about music, like dancing about architecture, as Steve Martin sort of said.

But Wilson has written an elegant, informed, witty essay ostensibly about the awfulness of Dion but in fact about snobbery, inconspicuous consumption, subversion, schmaltz, the power ballad, coolness, the globalization of pop music and the skinny woman herself. He’s a great quoter, an unheralded art among critics, e.g. R.H. Blyth’s definition of sentimentality: “When we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.” And he has the honesty to describe how he really felt in huge tawdry gilt-encrusted Vegas, where Dion reigned for years. Small. And shy.

Music criticism is often just guy-world. Wilson’s the real thing. I can’t praise this small book enough. Smart, but humane.