AIf a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be .@ (Thomas Jefferson, 1816)

Every now and then, just for comic relief, I like to read a book written by someone I know, prior to turning the first page, I am going to disagree with 90 per cent of the time. It keeps me on my toes. And the entertainment value is not to be understated: I can chuckle frequently, sneer often and smirk at regular intervals. On the serious side, I have the grand opportunity to spy into the enemy’s camp and see just what the Aother side@ might be thinking or planning. Obviously, my simple mind is easily entertained.

Such was the case with my recent perusal of Susan Jacoby=s The Age of American Unreason. The basic premise of this tome is, in a nutshell, it is America=s obsession with religion that has established a permanent current of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism among our people and, along with our growing infatuation with "infotainment", has lead to the lamentable demise of our once-hallowed tradition of superb public education. Along the primrose path to this conclusion (which, by the way, I don=t necessarily dismiss, out of hand), Ms. Jacoby takes shots at conservatives, Christians (with special scorn reserved for evangelicals), President Reagan and, particularly, our current President, the war in Iraq and the vast right-wing conspiracy that opposes gay marriage. Alright, alright. I was kidding about the gay marriage thing.

I have come to expect this sort of rhetoric in quasi-historical books from both the left and the right. Authors who write these sorts of books, understandably, cannot help themselves from mixing in their opinions with the facts. Conservative writers (Sowell, Coulter, Hannity, O=Reilly, et al) blame the current lamentable state of our nation on Aliberal, ivory-tower elitist, left-wing pseudointellectual socialist pinheads@. On the other hand, liberal scribes - such as our Ms. Jacoby - blame the "Fall of the American Empire" on their usual suspects - e.g. President George Bush, neo-cons, paleo-cons, the Hoover Institute, fundamentalists, evangelicals, global warming, the vast right-wing conspiracy, et al. About the only thing writers of either ilk can find as common ground is that we are down for the count. Which is to say we, as a nation, are in a heck of a fix with no easy or painless solutions in sight. Which is to say, America is in the crapper and we all need to start bailing, quick!

The rhetoric (not to say logic) of these writers never actually changes anyone=s mind and, as they well know themselves, is really read only by those who already think like they do. To recall an old-time-religious phrase, they are Apreachin’ to the choir.@ Nothing ever really is accomplished with their screeds but it goes on, book after book. With the deepening fracture of the American sociopolitical culture, half those who read books read one group of authors, the other half reads the other set. With all this gratuitous waste of papers and trees, signifying nothing, it=s enough to make any self-respecting tree-hugging, save-the-spotted-owl, sock-less, Birkenstock-wearing, unwashed, long-haired hippie weep. And, as I contemplate the situation, I feel a tear coming on myself. The only thing that we can take heart in is that no one reads books anymore.

But, I digress. As expected, I found myself chuckling and sneering (in almost equal measure) as Ms. Jacoby scurried through the "history" (such as it was handled) of our nation’s demise. Primarily, she seemed intent on making the point that the Christian religion in America=s history has been the source of much mischief. Specifically, the rigid Christian dogma and its persistent dismissal of scientific facts has perpetuated (even glorified) anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism in the South, specifically, and the nation, in general. That, in a nutshell, is her thesis. And, remaining Afair and balanced@ as always, Ms. Jacoby is up-front with her bias when, on page 117, she proffers that she "is sure that [she] would have gotten around to doubt and atheism eventually, but reading a handy chunk of [the writings of Thomas Aquinas] hastened that day@ around age eleven.

In proving her thesis, the author begins with an examination of the founding of the original 13 states. She posits that the celebrated Founding Fathers were more deists than of the Christian Faith and made sure, in the Constitution, that there was a clear exclusion of references to God, religious tests for office and, famously, a formal and perpetual separation of Church and State. I have absolutely no argument with these early chapters and her reading of the history of political thought in the late 18^th century.

It is the middle chapters, when Ms. Jacoby plunges into the 19^th century that she bogs down a bit. She spends a great deal of time discussing the controversy over Darwin=s Theory of Evolution and the fact that the South served as the breeding ground for theology-based anti-intellectualism for the whole of this century. The South, according to Ms. Jacoby was the most ignorant section of the nation where no one saw any value to having their children attend school and, with slavery in effect, everyone stayed home and hunted, rode horses and counted their cotton bales and their chattel instead of valuing education. Thus, while the North sent their children (even the immigrants) to fine schools, the Southern parent emphasized manly pursuits by the gentlemen, feminine pursuits for the ladies and, together, practiced foolish customs like chivalry and honor. Thus, when the Civil War was engaged, the South was doomed to defeat due to ignorance and bravado. Not to say that we were outnumbered 5 to 1 and were, nonetheless, consistently victorious in the first half of the War. But all that is neither here nor there.

Despite her fallacious arguments, Ms. Jacoby does make some reasonable points upon which she further buttresses her assertions. She points out that ANot until the 1830s did the principle of taxation for government-supported schools take root - and then largely north of the Mason-Dixon line.@ And, this: AOne of the most telling sets of statistics in the 1840 census is the comparative percentage of children in school in different parts of the country: in New England, the [proportion was] twice that of the middle-Atlantic States, and six-times greater than that in the South.@ But, then, as writers are prone to do, she inserts opinion instead of fact by saying: A...the sever disparity between the South and the rest of the nation persisted until after the Second World War - and the gap has not been fully closed even today.@ [Emphasis added]

Well.

I will leave that debate for another time. And, moving on, I will submit that, while the first two-thirds of Ms. Jacoby=s tome is rather (fairly or unfairly) negative toward my native region, she partially atones for any perceived slight as she rounded the turn number four and headed home. The final three chapters - Junk Thought, The Culture of Distraction, Public Life: Defining Dumbness Downward - are, for the most part, very illuminating. More to the point, they reflect pretty much what I have been ranting about in this web log for slightly over a year now.

Ms. Jacoby and I both feel we, as a nation, are on a very slippery slope and, I must admit, it is heartening that liberals appreciate this as I do. She, despite her liberal credentials and constant sniping at conservative ideology, seems to agree with me that the Adumbing down@ of American discourse is an ongoing and logical progression initiated (and perpetuated) by the public=s declining attention span. That is to say, we are - from sea to shining sea - an asylum for the teeming hoards afflicted with attention deficit disorder.

To wit:

- We no longer have conversations. In public, the conversations we are see and hear are nothing more than shouting matches between ideologues that are more interested in making their voices heard than actually exchanging and examining conflicting ideas. The halcyon age of Meet the Press has transmogrified into split-screen dueling sermonettes where the chief goal appears to be who can raise his voice to the highest decibel level. The winner is declared not by who presented the most logical support for his position but by who was best heard above the din, regardless of what was actually said. For a prime exhibition of this phenomenon, please (I beg you!) view the following YouTube exchange between Chris Mathews and California conservative (at least, I gather he is a conservative) Chris James here. It shouts (pun intened) volumes on the limited value of contemporary public debate.

- In our private lives, we have made the complete transition from conversation to communication. I asked a 20 year old recently for what purpose does she predominantly use her cell phone. The answer was not to talk with her friends; it was, by a wide margin, text messaging. These snippets of text flying back and forth through the atmosphere are not conversation and are not a high-tech substitute for it. Text messaging fits our attention deficit disorder and contributes to our growing sense of social isolation: one in four Americans say they have no one to talk with about important subjects (double the percentage in 1985). Even our reliance on friends has suffered: 43 percent of Americans talked about important matters with friends in 1985 and only 20 percent did so in 2004. Sociologist Claude Fischer labeled those who had only one or no discussion ties with whom to discuss personal matters as having Amarginal or inadequate@ counseling support. By this criteria, we have gone from "only" a quarter of the American population being isolated from counseling support to almost half the population falling into this category.

- In a related trend, candidates for public office have abandoned the soaring rhetoric of 20th century and now (clearly, a reflection of what plays in Peoria) have dumbed down their speeches and their personae to ape what Americans seem to value most: appearing to be one of the "common people". Which is to say, it ain’t hip to be intelligent. Today, perhaps the most useful predictor of who will win an election - at any level - is the candidate who is not thought of as being the most informed on the issues but "who you would most like to have a beer with". This, both to Ms. Jacoby and I, is not a positive development in electioneering.

- All forms of media - magazines, newspapers (remember them?) and broadcast news have reduced the coverage of news to the point that they, for the most part, are useless to the public in trying to understand complex issues or events. For instance, in1992, The Washington Post reported research by Kiku Adatto of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at Harvard University, entitled: "The Incredible Shrinking Sound Bite." Adatto found that during the 1968 presidential race between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, the average length of the candidates’ statements on the evening network news was 42.3 seconds. Twenty years later, in 1988, the average length of presidential aspirants’ sound bites had dwindled to 9.8 seconds. By mid-1992, the average sound bite aired by the evening network news had become a mere 7.3 seconds. Little actual information is conveyed in such verbal snapshots. And the print media is just as guilty as they have all adopted the "USA Today format": i.e. 250-500 word "articles" with lots of eye-catching (if not actually decipherable or informative) graphics and full color photos.

As a end result, we are increasingly oblivious to the world, We are indiscriminate and passive television watchers: in 1979, 29 percent of people watched "anything that happened to be on television"; in 1995, the figure was 43 percent. Half of us have not read a book in the past year. Our high schools and, especially, our colleges are occupied with teaching courses on popular culture instead of actually educating the students. We addict our children (thanks to the "Baby Einstein" movement) to video "infotainment" in infancy, much to the detriment of their language and social development. And we wonder, liberals and conservatives alike, why America is in the mess it is in.

A similar situation was discussed by Emerson, in his address in 1837 to Harvard University, "The American Scholar". He observed:

I fear, in the description from Emerson, we have all become "the victims of society" or, at the least, of victims of our culture. We are, indeed, merely "parrots" of the ideas and "truths" we skim from the surface of the pool of knowledge and are satisfied and smugly content. We believe we know The Truth and guard it jealously. We communicate but do not take the time to really converse. Most tragically of all, we are raising our children to be even more impaired than we have become.

The end result is that we, to our great detriment, have become an attention deficient culture and, clearly, there is not enough Ritalin to go around. If in only this small point, Susan Jacoby and I can truly find "common ground."