Announcing the 12th Speaker in the series: Susan Jacoby

7:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at the Holland Performing Arts Center

Locally: 402.345.0606 - Toll-free: 866.434.8587 - TTY: 402.341.1811 
Monday-Friday: 10 a.m.- 6 p.m. Saturdays: Noon-5 p.m. 
Each caller may request up to six free tickets to the lecture and for the reception that follows.

Ms. Jacoby is an American author, most recently of the New York Times best seller, The Age of American Unreasonabout American anti-intellectualism.

Should we be concerned that 25% of high-school biology teachers believe human beings and dinosaurs shared the earth?  That more than 1/3 of Americans can't name a single First Amendment right?  Or that a Roper poll found only 23% of college educated Americans between 18 & 25 could find Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Israel on a map even when the map clearly identified the countries as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Israel? "Cultural conservationist" (but by no means a cultural conservative), Susan Jacoby thinks we should. 

She will talk about a mutant strain of public ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism that has developed over the past four decades and now threatens the future of American democracy.  She argues that anti-rational government is not the product of a Machiavellian plot by “Washington” but is the inevitable result of “an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge” that has left many ordinary citizens and their elected representatives without the intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making. Her question is not why politicians have lied to the public, but why the public was so receptive and so passive when it heard the lies.

Jacoby graduated from Michigan State University in 1965. She lives in New York City and is director of the New York branch of the Center for Inquiry. Jacoby, who began her career as a reporter for The Washington Post, has been a contributor to a wide variety of national publications, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, The Nation, Glamour, and the AARP Bulletin and AARP Magazine. She is currently a panelist for "On Faith," a Washington Post-Newsweek blog on religion. As a young reporter she lived for two years in the USSR. Her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism was named a notable book of 2004 by The Washington Post and The New York Times. It was also named an Outstanding International Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement (London) and The Guardian. Her book Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (1984) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.