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 — 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 … 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 19^th 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.

Letters

At least 60% of the people around you would be walking barefoot if someone smarter hadn't invented shoes. The advances of a handful of geniuses have made possible a vast sea of half-wits, all driving around in circles in little chimp-wagons.

Many people today are so damn dumb that you can blow a building up in front of them and they won't even notice, let alone ask questions. Mr. Moyers would no doubt file me among the 'delusional', not that he's done the reading himself, of course.

I too am depressed. It's rather like being stuck on the Planet of the Apes with no bus ticket home. Or perhaps the only grown-up in a world of five-year-olds, all screaming 'because BECAUSE !!!".

– trout | Victoria

Thanks, Heather, for discussing this frightening trend in anti-intellectualism (or, perhaps more accurately, anti-literacy). I spent three years in the US South, and was rather shocked to find, not that there were necessarily a greater proportion of stupid people than in Canada, but that there seemed to be so many people who were PROUD to be stupid.

Never before have I encountered people who bragged about how few books they had read, or how little they knew about world affairs.

Unfortunately, these people would rather their country be governed by someone just as stupid as they are than by an intelligent leader who threatens their preconceived notions...hence the current US administration.

– Christopher Moorehead | Toronto

Thank you Heather for your humour, though it be lost on many. Your mocking may show disrespect for the Knights, but they do not represent the Catholic Church.

Having 16 years education in the Catholic system in Saskatchewan, I can say that I never heard a peep about the K of C. I thought it was a chicken franchise...

– Dean Sinnett | Vancouver

I do agree with Heather's assessment of the state of knowledge (and I refuse to rule out our own country) I think there is another culprit we seem to take for granted.

"Knowledge is Power" Remember that little gem? The original speaker, Sir Francis Bacon, he had no concept of the direction or implication that statement would take.

To the educators of today it is power because as long as it is contained on a hard drive, they dont have to teach. Today knowledge exists as bits and bytes, not memory and science, mathematics, literacy or history.

Dont know it? Google it. Historical revisionism is rampant due to political influence and the fourth estate's reluctance to challenge it for that matter they are promoting it through their own use of this medium Mathematics is contained on a calculator; assuming the 10 year old student doesn’t have a Blackberry. Sciences are challenged as irrelevant due to religion and politics.

An undergraduate degree can be easily obtained without putting in a whole lot of effort. Critical thinking is frowned upon and definitely not taught as Heather pointed out. Corporate America is filled with people who lack this ability. I can sum up the proof of that in one word; Enron.

This is the real crux of the problem. We can use technology but we should be depending upon our abilities of reason, judgment and critical thinking to carry us forward, not depending upon someone "wiser" because of social position, influence, or worse a computer and search engines with online “encyclopedia”. “Wiser” certainly doesn’t exist in too many of our political leaders in the world. We accept sport figures who barely finished college and whose literacy is questionable as heroes and role models. We ignore history an make the same mistakes over and over again; often within a single generation.

Society begins with education and that means good teachers, real teachers who care that students actually learn to depend upon themselves first. Literacy should begin with a book, not a computer screen, Mathematics with flash cards not a calculator, Science with a leaf collection not software, and honesty and character through acceptance of ones own mistakes and failure.

Until we get those concept through the heads of our politicians, it will only get worse.

The good teachers know all of this and practice it. The trouble is they are either in a minority or near minority situation and fighting administrations who embrace the status quo. And the kids? Just look at how many parents give them cell phones, computers and other electronics to make life "easier". Look at how they battle a teacher who says their child is not meeting standards.

Knowledge may be power but it has to be used wisely; something we have failed to do.

Thank you Heather for the excellent article.

– Harold Hotham | London, ON

Sad but true Heather. I've just returned from working in the southern US for nearly five years. While I met more insightful people than I had anticipated, I also looked on in shock as the equivalent to the education minister, actually spoke of removing the evolutionary theory from science class.

A woman who had never even read a line of any Harry Potter book, tried to have them banned from the school libraries. Best of all, I dealt with a customer who looked as if he was about to faint, only to discover that he had just finished a conversation with a 25 year old woman who honestly had no idea who Adolph Hitler was.

It is out there, it is frightening and the educated among them look on with dumbfounded shock wondering how it could be. It's good to be home.

– J. Ross | Winnipeg

Thank You Heather! I very much agree with your comments, and English is not even my first, or second, language. My best wishes.

– Pentti Hietalahti | Pitt Meadows, BC

Heather Mallick's hopes were dashed to pieces when she read a book about anti-intellectualism in America. There was she expecting only great things apparently on the condition that Barack Obama be elected president.

Apparently things are in dire straits when someone places all her hopes on a candidate who has never accomplished anything and never done any governing. Recently I have heard his supporters left speechless whenever they are asked what it is that Mr. Obama has ever accomplished and what he will do if elected and how how he will do it.

Only if Mr. Obama is elected president will America spend any money educating children in slums and Arkansas (why Arkansas?). But with all her glorious intellectualism. Ms. Mallick is truly ignorant of the problems with public education in the United States.

It is not now and has never been for want of spending that the public schools are inferior in many cases, and not just in slums and Arkansas. And I daresay that in all probablity many Arkansans are well-educated. Neither is the problem that Americans are anti-intellictual. After all, what problems has intellectualism ever solved?

The problem with American public schools is the lack of standards. George Bush, and this is the truth like it or not, tried to address the problem with his No Child Left Behind initiative. George Bush actually dared to require performance standards for students. Was No Child Left Behind a success? No. It was just more billions of dollars wasted. Wasted because the teachers unions do not want their members to be accountable for the results of their efforts. And there's nothing the president can do about it.

I do hope Ms. Mallick recovers from her terrible depression. Maybe some good reading would help her. Probably something very intellectual like 'Das Kapital' or 'Summa Theologica'. It is so awfully depressing when our intellectual castles in the sky are overtaken by reality.

– Robert Gilman | Escondido, CA

I agree with Heather Mallick ("The most depressing book since Bambi"), that education is undervalued in the United States. However, she gives away her own credulity and lack of scientific understanding when she writes, "Evolution is officially considered a theory [in the United States government]".

Well, I'm sure that Charles Darwin considered evolution to be a theory. The strength of Western science is that it doesn't rest on faith; science is built instead on theory -- rigorous, falsifiable theory. If you can disprove somebody's theory, then science marches forward. As an oversimplified example, that's how we got from the Newton's physics to Einstein's.

The same goes for evolution; it's a theory, not the absolute truth. Because science can never find the absolute truth; it can only improve upon or falsify existing scientific theories.

– Bob Young | Guelph, Ontario