”The Age of American Unreason”By Susan Jacoby

2008, Pantheon, $26

Hardback, 356 pages

My first encounter with the term “intellectual history” came within the past three years.

I was searching through the online faculty directories at area universities, trying to determine the specialties of various history professors, so I could get their expert opinions on a wide array of current events and places — from Appalachian poverty to Zambian politics, as it were.

I looked at Rhodes College’s Web page for Prof. Lynn Zastoupil. Under “Areas of Expertise,” it listed “European Intellectual History.”

“Cool,” I thought. “That would be a fun area to work in. Imagine researching, writing and teaching that all day.”

I have an uncanny ability to find the least remunerative fields fascinating and fun. The newspaper business, for example.

A century ago, I’d have been jumping into the buggy whip and horse-drawn wagon business with a great deal of enthusiasm.

So, Susan Jacoby’s latest book provides an unwelcome, sobering two-by-four upside the head for anyone who might think that the life of the mind is something the American public is ready to embrace on a large scale — after seven years under a president who can’t properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”

Jacoby’s book is a history of American anti-intellectualism. In clear, pithy sentences that aren’t dumbed down for a mass audience, the former Washington Post reporter takes the reader on a trip from where we are now, “Just us folks,” back to our nation’s roots in the Enlightenment, through periods in which education, science and reason fought losing battles with religious fundamentalists, industrial robber barons, McCarthyist Red-baiters and those who profit from the military industrial complex.

I’m afraid my own industry has played a significant role in those defeats.

“Another symptom of the embattlement of print culture is the slash-and-burn approach of newspaper executives toward coverage of those arts — especially literature and classical music — considered minority tastes. The declining amount of newspaper space devoted to book reviews is a story dating from the late sixties, but the process has accelerated during the past decade.” (P. 259-260)

Hello! You’re reading this in a book blog, not in the pages of The Commercial Appeal!

“The proliferating array of online literary blogs cannot take the place of regular newspaper reviews, although they would add more to literary discourse if the overall print culture itself were healthier. … Many book review blogs … are little more than the aggrieved ramblings of would-be writers whose work has been rejected by print editors and publishers.” (P. 261)

Ouch!

What Jacoby describes is not a pretty picture.

In fact, it’s pretty horrifying.

But, like Picasso’s “Guernica,” it’s worth studying.