Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason. New York: Vintage Books, 2009 (an update of the original hardcover edition published by Pantheon Books in 2008). 357 pages.

In 1963, Knopf published historian Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life–not a jeremiad, but a thorough historical consideration of the place of the thinking citizen, as opposed to the feeling citizen, in American culture. Already we reach a thicket, for surely thinkers feel, and feelers think; the dichotomy is not as binary as some would like, for the sake of facility, to assume. Nor does the intellectual value ideas over people. Intellectualism is an approach to the world and culture that valorizes a clear-eyed balance of the two. For the intellectual, history has much to tell us (but it should be a history that maintains a sense of context and is validated by determinable facts, rather than ideological assumptions); the scientific method is the court of last resort for the natural world (but not for the social world of human beings, in which culture and nurture may trump genetic, racial, or gender essentialism); and the products of aesthetic endeavor more than simple emotional self-expression. All of these are essential for the health of a functioning democracy, which must choose its leaders carefully and conduct important public discourse with a right respect to the world in which it either flourishes or decomposes.

At least, this is how it should go, argues Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason, a recent sequel to Hofstadter’s pioneering work; unfortunately those who style themselves intellectuals today (on both the left and the right; with a mordant wit, Jacoby castigates the worst excesses of both ends of the spectrum) have more often than not betrayed at least one, and often all three, of these characteristics, and to be fair they must take their share of blame for the parlous state of public discourse in America. No wonder, then, that Jacoby in the title of her book shifts the emphasis from “anti-intellectual” to “unreason.” This unreason, alive in the continuing distrust of the American intellect that Hofstadter so ably documented, is pursued through chapters on politics, including the various Red Scares of American history; a middlebrow culture that once held open an avenue for educational and cultural ambition among the lower, middle, and working classes of all races and backgrounds; the debated legacy of the 1960s; science and religion, especially regarding the teaching of evolution and creationism in American classrooms; and of course digital/visual versus print culture.

In the disciplines in which I operate, theatre and literature, the upswing of this rhetoric of unreason has had its effect too. The one thing that the educational system today seems to lack (and Jefferson, a pioneer in the thinking about the definition and value of public education in America, is rolling in his grave) is the attempt to create a habit of critical thinking in young men and women, necessary to the health of a democracy as well. The citizen must be able to recognize when the wool is being pulled over his eyes, whether it’s by a politician or an artist, but without this habit you get to be anyone’s fool.

Of course thinking is hard. Responsible intellectualism demands a constant attention to the difference between one’s own ideological prejudices and those valid facts and ideas that may undermine those prejudices; a due regard for context means that one can’t cherrypick the facts and ideas that support one’s conclusions but must regard the situations and arguments from which they emerge; and, however fun they might be over drinks at a cocktail party, ad hominem arguments are utterly irrelevant.

All this is as true for aesthetic criticism as for political discourse. I wonder whether this refusal to bear these laudable qualities in mind has led to the low regard in which literary Modernism is currently held–for the Modernists, history and context were nearly all; in searching for what may have been lost, they hoped to shore up some decent regard for the human individual in a world stripped of spiritual certainty. They were certainly intellectuals, and public intellectuals at that.

And in contemporary theatre criticism one needn’t look far for the damage that the absence of these qualities can do to intelligent discussion of drama and theatre. In a quite silly essay about Kenneth Tynan that was printed in the Wall Street Journal recently, critic Terry Teachout manages to slander the late drama critic as well as falsify Tynan’s influence in an ad hominem attack that beggars the imagination. “He failed to appreciate Gielgud’s refined art, underrated William Inge and Eugène Ionesco, misunderstood Terence Rattigan,” Teachout writes, as if the apparent importance of these artists was a matter of fact, not opinion. “He was also a moral idiot, a pornography addict who went in for what he euphemistically called ‘spanking,’” Teachout continues, without explaining just what this has to do with Tynan’s critical acumen. (And if one’s sexual appetites do have some bearing on a writer’s critical acumen, I think Teachout must be obliged to, in the interests of honesty, offer an account of his; otherwise, this is mere condescending puritanism and indefensible namecalling.) “In 1963 he [became] the first literary manager of London’s National Theatre. Alas, his work there is now forgotten,” Teachout writes; but not forgotten, perhaps, by Tom Stoppard, whose landmark Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was plucked from an Edinburgh fringe stage for the NT by Tynan personally, thereby changing the landscape of the English language theatre for decades to come. (Tynan did more than this too, none of which, anyway, I forgot.) “In order to be a great critic, it’s not enough to be clever—it also helps to be right,” Teachout concludes. And drama criticism, as Mr. Teachout surely knows, is not a matter of right and wrong, but of opinion, which by its very definition is neither right nor wrong.

I wouldn’t single out Mr. Teachout’s essay for this treatment (unfortunately such things are more common than anyone interested in the health of theatre would like to see) if it didn’t demonstrate the very dangers that, according to Jacoby, a culture of unreason exhibits. For those who read the essay and have neither the time, the resources, nor the interest to ascertain the accuracy or validity of Mr. Teachout’s assessments, this will be Mr. Tynan–and so the readership and the state of aesthetic criticism will be badly served. Good criticism of any kind–whether it’s of a play, an idea, or even another critic–exhibits nuance, good faith, shades of meaning, knowledgability, apt and entertaining expression, and discernment, even in the space of 750 words. And this ain’t that. That such a bluntly inaccurate and ad hominem essay found its way into one of America’s leading newspapers as “criticism” skirts the edge of journalistic irresponsibility.

Jacoby’s welcome volume, obviously, is about much more than this; and for anyone interested in the state of the culture and the nation, it is required reading–not to agree with all of Jacoby’s conclusions, but at least to know the high stakes of the current anti-intellectual game.