The Age of American Unreason: Defining Dumbness Downward
March 12, 2008, 7:00pm–8:30pm
Women's City Club, 254 E. Fulton, Grand Rapids, MI, View Map
Presented by Susan Jacoby, Author, Program Director, Center for Inquiry-Metro New York
Description
We are excited to have Susan Jacoby returning to CFI Michigan to speak on her newly published book: The Age of American Unreason.
In her presentation Susan will be discussing the major factors contributing to the rise of a toxic combination of anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism in American culture and politics. The major elements include: the domination of the culture by infotainment media, the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, and a massive failure of public education. She will relate her findings to the current political climate and the role that ignorance is playing in the current presidential campaign.
Copies of her new book will be available for purchase at the event, and Susan will be available for a book signing following her presentation.
In her book, The Age of American Unreason, Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment--from television to the Web--and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion. At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the “overarching crisis of memory and knowledge” described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.
For more on The Age of American Unreason visit: www.susanjacoby.com.
About the Speaker
The Age of American Unreason is Susan Jacoby’s eighth book. An independent scholar whose work now focuses on American intellectual history, the author began her writing career as a reporter for The Washington Post.
Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004), was hailed in The New York Times as an “ardent and insightful work” that “seeks to rescue a proud tradition from the indifference of posterity.” Named a notable nonfiction book of 2004 by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, Freethinkers was cited in England as one of the outstanding international books of the year by the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. Freethinkers was featured in an interview on NOW with Bill Moyers.
The author’s previous books, include Moscow Conversations (1972), based on her experiences in Moscow from 1969 to 1971. Among her other books are Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (Harper & Row), a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1984, and Half-Jew: A Daughter’s Search for Her Family’s Buried Past (Scribner, 2000).
Jacoby has been a contributor for more than 25 years, on topics including law, religion, medicine, aging, women’s rights, political dissent in the Soviet Union, and Russian literature, to a wide range of periodicals and newspapers. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Book World, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Newsday, Harper’s, The Nation, Vogue, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the AARP Magazine, among other publications. They have been reprinted in numerous anthologies of columns and magazine articles.
She is also program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City, a rationalist think tank and a regular panelist for On Faith, a Web site sponsored by The Washington Post and Newsweek. She also has her own political blog, The Secularist’s Corner on the Web site of The Washington Post.
Susan Jacoby has been the recipient of many grants and awards, from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ford Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2001-2002, she was named a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Susan Jacoby lives in New York City.
Additional Details
Meetings are open to the Public
After the meeting, join us at Vitale’s Restaurant, 834 Leonard NE, Grand Rapids, MI to socialize. View Map
Learn about Parking, Accessibility, Child Care and more.
Cost: $6.00 Suggested Donation or free for Friends of the Center.
Contact: Jennifer Beahan, , 616-698-2342
