This book is about how the United States has arrived where it is, intellectually and morally, over the past century or so. Pragmatism has provided the culture its characteristic conceptions of truth, particularly welcomed to a Fundamentalist religious perspective otherwise besieged by modern philosophy and science. The anti-intellectual current now so conspicuous has always been a powerful force in American life, and it has survived and flourished in the face of all challenges: Darwinian evolution, Marxist and other economic determinism, the discoveries of psychology, social science, and...