America’s Slippery Slope
An article by Sarah Nardi in Adbusters magazine #78.
That’s the problem with infotainment media, says Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason. It has created a culture of passive, uninformed Americans accustomed to being spoon-fed their informaiton. At its most innocuous, infotainment is grossly over-simplified, occassionally inaccurate and often irrelevent “news” passed along to a less than vigilant public. At its most insidious, infotainment is the carrier of disinformation – partisan agenda maquerading as fact. It’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, the War on Terror. It’s the vague and ill-defined threat to our Democratic ideals.
But we know all of this. We know the story is bullshit, we wknow the network is owned. We know that every second of soft-interest celebrity update peddled to us with the manic urgency of breaking news is a fallen soldier unrecognized, a humanitarian crisis ignored. We know that We Were Lie To. But still, we come back for more.
Why?
Jacoby’s argument – explicated in the book with frightening historical support – contends that since the time of our nations inception, we have become steadily more divorced from the process of reason. Citing factors such as the rise of religious fundamentalism, the decline of educational standards and our growing technological dependence, Jacoby argues that, as a nation, we have become not only dumb, but increasingly incapable of rational thought. Six out of ten adults can’t find Iraq on a map, but we fail to see how that’s a problem. Fewer Americans are learning foreign languages because more and more of us don’t believe that it’s necessary. Our collective standards for knowledge have become frighteningly low. Our expectations of each other and ourselves, increasingly slight. And with each generation born into the ever-darkening age of unreason, we move further from the enlightened ideals out of which this country was born.
But Jacoby’s arguments, no matter how fresh, how sound, how meticulously researched, are all-too easy to forget. That failure isn’t hers, it’s ours. Jacoby offers perspective – a map charting the paths that have brought us here. It’s a tool designed to help us understand the past. But history offers nothing if we’re unable to understand ourselves in relation to it. Every shrug, every mindless utterance of baseless fact – every time we roll our eyes at the depraved state of media but continue to watch – we contribute. We look around and see the problem. We sadly shake our heads. And then we go about our lives. We are the reason behind unreason.