International Law

Are Americans hostile to knowledge?

In a piece for the New York Times, Patricia Cohen asks are Americans hostile to knowledge?

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from ?American Idol,? appearing on the Fox game show ?Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?? during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: ?Budapest is the capital of what European country??

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. ?I thought Europe was a country,? she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. ?Hungry?? she said, eyes widening in disbelief. ?That?s a country? I?ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I?ve never heard of it.?

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of ?The Age of American Unreason,? up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose ?Against Happiness? warns that the ?American obsession with happiness? could ?well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation.?

Then there is Lee Siegel?s ?Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,? which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog (?you couldn?t tie Siegel?s shoelaces?) and to praise himself (?brave, brilliant?).

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn?t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. ?I expect to get bashed,? said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on February 18, 2008 (boomark / email).