Susan Jacoby > Quotes

“This mindless tolerance, which places observable scientific facts, subject to proof, on the same level as unprovable supernatural fantasy, has played a major role in the resurgence of both anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“The specific use of folks as an exclusionary and inclusionary signal, designed to make the speaker sound like one of the boys or girls, is symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards. Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls (unless the victims are, in fact, little girls and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in the history of the United States before 1980, and you will find not one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: 'We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain; and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four.”
― Susan Jacoby

“High culture can never be obliterated as long as the species continues to produce individuals with the inclination and fortitude to pursue their interests and talents against the grain of the mass culture surrounding them.”
― Susan Jacoby

“That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.”
― Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

“We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.”
― Susan Jacoby

“Ingersoll was introduced as one of the main speakers by Frederick Douglass and proceeded, unlike most leaders of his party, to eviscerate the court’s logic. “This decision takes from seven millions of people the shield of the Constitution,” he said. “It leaves the best of the colored race at the mercy of the meanest of the white. It feeds fat the ancient grudge that vicious ignorance bears toward race and color. It will be approved and quoted by hundreds of thousands of unjust men. The masked wretches who, in the darkness of night, drag the poor negro from his cabin, and lacerate with whip and thong his quivering flesh, will, with bloody hands, applaud the Supreme Court. The men who, by mob violence, prevent the negro from depositing his ballot—those who with gun and revolver drive him from the polls, and those who insult with vile and vulgar words the inoffensive colored girl, will welcome this decision with hyena joy. The basest will rejoice—the noblest will mourn.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“Printed works do not take up mental space simply by virtue of being there; attention must be paid or their content, whether simple or complex, can never be truly assimilated. The willed attention demanded by print is the antithesis of the reflexive distraction encouraged by infotainment media, whether one is talking about the tunes on an iPod, a picture flashing briefly on a home page, a text message, a video game, or the latest offering of "reality" TV. That all of these sources of information and entertainment are capable of simultaneously engendering distraction and absorption accounts for much of their snakelike charm.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“What Ingersoll, like Voltaire and Paine before him, understood was the indivisibility of human rights, and he understood this not in spite of but precisely because of his disbelief in a deity who had supposedly “designed” the order of nature.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“Throughout the nation, the American tendency to value education only in terms of its practical results—a phenomenon as old as the republic—reasserted itself strongly in the “no frills” decisions of many local and state school boards. That the eliminated frills had once provided children with some exposure to a higher culture than pop was a matter of little concern to the public.           A”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“In 1882, Congress passed the first immigration law in the nation’s history—the Chinese Exclusion Act—specifically to bar the entrance of workers from a particular country. The Chinese had, of course, been welcome when there was a labor shortage and “coolies” were needed to build the transcontinental railroad. In 1892, the Exclusion Act was toughened under a law written by California representative Thomas J. Geary (the Geary whose memory is lionized in street names and other monuments throughout San Francisco). Under the Geary law, upheld by a 5–4 Supreme Court vote, all Chinese residents of the United States were required to carry a residence permit. Chinese were forbidden to bear witness in court should they be arrested for not carrying their internal “passport” and were denied”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. The creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“How pathetic it is that such products now appeal to a huge market of people who do not understand that the way to introduce children to music is by playing good music, uninterrupted by video clowns, at home; the way to introduce poetry is by reciting or reading it at bedtime; and the way to instill an appreciation of beauty is not to bombard a toddler with screen images of Monet’s Giverny but to introduce her to the real sights and scents of a garden. It is a fine thing for tired parents to gain a quiet hour for themselves by mesmerizing small children with videos—who would be stuffy enough to suggest that the occasional hour in front of animals dancing to Tchaikovsky can do a baby any real harm?—but let us not delude ourselves that education is what is going on.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter writes. “Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: ‘Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!’”5”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Broadly speaking, there are two divergent strains of American secular thought. One can be traced to the radical humanism of Tom Paine, who saw the separation of church and state not only as the guarantor of personal freedom of conscience but also as the foundation of a world in which inherited status and wealth would be replaced by merit and intellect as the dominant forces in the lives of individuals. Recognition of a common humanity, not tooth-and-claw competition, would create social progress. The other distinct current of American secularism begins with the social Darwinists of the nineteenth century and continues through the “objectivism” and exaltation of the Übermensch preached by the twentieth-century atheist and unregulated market idolator Ayn Rand. These diverging currents can also be found within the “new atheist” movement today, in which people often make a point of labeling themselves as either secular humanists, who are usually liberals, or skeptics, who are generally libertarian conservatives.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“Constantine soon began to renege on the promise of religious freedom as far as Jews were concerned. In 315, he issued a new edict, forbidding Jews—and only Jews—from proselytizing. Much later in the fourth century, however, Judaism demonstrated its continuing appeal for outsiders by attracting large numbers of Arabs, with whom the Jews had generally lived in amity throughout the early Diaspora, in Himyar (now Yemen). The Arab converts to Judaism proved just as intolerant of Christians as Christians were proving to be of Jews in late antiquity, and expended a fair amount of effort in the fifth century trying to wipe out the Christians among them. In the end, around 525, the Arab Jews of Himyar were vanquished when a much larger force of Ethiopian Christian troops crossed the Red Sea to attack them. (Today a tiny remnant of those Arab-descended Jews—no more than a few hundred—still live in a Yemen descending into chaos as militant Shia Houthi rebels—whose slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Damnation to the Jews”—have seized power. The United States and Britain, which tried to get the remaining Jews out of Yemen, both closed their embassies as a result of escalating violence in 2015. Suleiman Jacob, the unofficial rabbi of a community of just fifty-five Jews in the capital of Raida, said in a poignant interview, “There isn’t a single one of us here who doesn’t want to leave. Soon there will be no Jews in Yemen, inshallah.”8)”
― Susan Jacoby, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion

“To add to the muddle, it seems that Americans are as ignorant and poorly educated about the particulars of religion as they are about science. A majority of adults, in what is supposedly the most religious nation in the developed world, cannot name the four Gospels or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible.19 How can citizens understand what creationism means, or make an informed decision about whether it belongs in classrooms, if they cannot even locate the source of the creation story? And how can they be expected to understand any definition of evolution if they were once among millions of children attending classes in which the word “evolution” was taboo and in which teachers suggested that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together?”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“THE MIND OF THIS COUNTRY, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” In 1837, Emerson struck that note mainly as a rhetorical device, in a young nation obviously engaged in building up its intellectual capital.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“We are not endeavoring to chain the future, but to free the present. We are not forging fetters for our children, but we are breaking those our fathers made for us. We are the advocates of inquiry, of investigation, and thought. This of itself, is an admission that we are not perfectly satisfied with our conclusions. Philosophy has not the egotism of faith.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“Public ignorance and anti-intellectualism are not identical, of course, but they are certainly kissing cousins. Both foster the rise of candidates who regard a broad knowledge of history, science, and culture, and a decent command of their native language as political liabilities rather than assets - and who frequently try to downplay these qualities, even if they possess them, in order to pander to a public that considers conspicuous displays of learning a form of snobbery.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“A scientist looks at emperor penguins and sees a classic example of random mutation, natural selection, and adaptation to the harshest climate on earth. A believer in creationism or intelligent design, however, looks at the same facts and sees not the inefficiency but the “miracle” of the survival of the species. Exactly why an “intelligent designer” would place the breeding grounds seventy miles from the feeding grounds or, for that matter, would install any species in such an inhospitable climate, are questions never addressed by those who see God’s hand at the helm.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“Only when Christianity came into its own as a political force, and emperors as well as other Roman officials embraced the Christian faith and were subject to pressure from Christian leaders, did Jews everywhere began to experience physical peril regardless of whether they had long maintained peaceful relations with governing authorities. The question of what to do about the Jews was far more pressing than what to do about pagans for the church fathers, given that Christianity developed out of Judaism and was seen as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. These prophecies eventually had to be twisted to fit the official events of the Christian story. The refusal of faithful Jews to accept that the story of their faith ended and was fulfilled by the arrival of Jesus was a constant challenge and reproach to Christianity in a way that the unrelated beliefs of pagans could never be.”
― Susan Jacoby, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion

“I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will.”
― Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

“When the Constitution was being written in Philadelphia in 1787, only two decades had passed since the horrifying execution in France of nineteen-year-old Jean-François Lefevre, Chevalier de la Barre, for blasphemy—a case, publicized by Voltaire, that shocked the educated world.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“The greater accessibility of information through computers and the Internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“On a deeper level, though, the article exemplifies the journalistic conviction that anything “controversial” is worth covering and that both sides of an issue must always be given equal space—even if one side belongs in an abnormal psychology textbook. If enough money is involved, and enough people believe that two plus two equals five, the media will report the story with a straight face, always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that “mathematicians, however, say that two plus two still equals four.” With a perverted objectivity that gives credence to nonsense, mainstream news outlets have done more to undermine logic and reason than raptureready.com could ever do.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason

“There are two distinct threads in the history of American secularism—the first descending from the humanism and egalitarianism of Paine and the second from nineteenth-century social Darwinism through the twentieth-century every-man-for-himself “objectivism” of Ayn Rand. A true intellectual descendant of Paine, Ingersoll linked reason and science to the success and survival of democracy, as the Enlightenment deists among the founders did, and contended that the capacity for rational thought existed among all races and social classes.”
― Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

“Augustine’s particular contribution to the Adversus Judaeos genre of sermons, which permeates all of the patristic writings, was his admonition that Jews should be harassed, dispersed throughout the world at the pleasure of Christian rulers, treated as constant targets for conversion, but not, in the end, exterminated. To Augustine, the physical survival of some Jews—even though they were so wrongheaded and oblivious to God’s grace as to reject Jesus as the Messiah—was necessary to attest to the truth of Christianity and its fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy. He”
― Susan Jacoby, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion

“The revolutionary idea that children have rights was born in the Enlightenment, but the practical application of that concept, in schools and within families, was very much a product of the progressive side of the Victorian era.”
― Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

“Were it not for Augustine’s “harass, but do not destroy” formula, Christians and Jews would certainly have had much less to do with each other throughout the many centuries before exterminationist anti-Semitism entered the West’s historical consciousness and conscience. Moreover, many Westerners today see Christianity as the beginning of Western proselytizing and do not realize that Judaism itself, in its historical infancy, was a proselytizing religion using tactics, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible, that could sometimes be summed up as “harass and destroy.”
― Susan Jacoby, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion