The Dumbing Of
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
By Susan Jacoby
"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon
itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his
words echo with painful prescience in today's very different
This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and
winding road to the White
House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public
ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an
"elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied
to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure
Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you
will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just
imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in
vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall
not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among
the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.
The classic work on this subject by Columbia
University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in
American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist
crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s.
Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon
that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic
impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism
is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at
age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found
that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic
predictions about the future of American culture.
Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been
steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore
irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print
culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older
electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal
education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and
the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is
video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old
story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to
accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.
Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of
print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book
"Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually
Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we
have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and
active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like
characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of
focus." Balderdash. The real question is what
toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on,
while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.
Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as
young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a
screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last
August, University
of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months
recognized an average of
I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was
doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft
Xbox or obsessing about Facebook
profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as
distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me
intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news
events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the
presidential candidates about the Iraq
war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones,
simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq.
Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most
important news.
No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to
keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of
information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New
Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is
cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the
viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started
watching."
As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of
acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves
under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and
quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard
University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average
sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the
candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000,
according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just
7.8 seconds.
The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the
second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of
general knowledge.
People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy
choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible
to imagine the pains that Franklin
D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl
Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after
another in the Pacific. In February 1942,
This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also
of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to
satellite-enhanced Google
maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public.
According to a 2006 survey by National
Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not
think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important
news is being made. More than a third consider it
"not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14
percent consider it "very important."
That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American
dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of
knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one
in five American adults who, according to the National
Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the
alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to
know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome
that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not
knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a
manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure
anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts
discussions of
There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and
anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by
stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests
will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually
oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought
and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national
discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and
rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the
low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects
ought to be the first item on the change agenda.
Susan Jacoby's latest book is "The Age of American Unreason."