Monday, July 07, 2008

Th!nk - or maybe you intuitively read that as Think

I'm reading Michael LeGault's Th!nk - why crucial decisions can't be made in the blink of an eye. It's a kind of antidote to the book, Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, which proposed that we do our best thinking by intuition - especially on the spot intuition. Here's a quote from pages 40-41 of the hardcover edition.

Allan Bloom was 'irritated by the moral relativism of the day's students and their galling indifference to the heroic elements of life. The relevance of Bloom's critique to this book is clear: If there is no such thing as good or bad, there is no meaning, no will to achieve, and no need for knowledge and inspired thought. Whereas Bloom traces this apathy toward noble pursuits, knowledge and the life of the mind to a perversion of moral values, mostly as a result of the introduction of foreign ideas into American society, I assign culpability to numerous social, cultural and historical trends. These are, in their most immediate guises, trash culture, marketing, reliance on therapy, aversion to risk, the self-esteem industry, lack of standards in the workplace and classroom, and lax, hands-off parenting. Taken together, these habits and fashions have institutionalized mediocrity and glorified mental indolence, leading to the documented decline in critical-thinking skills.

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