Taking a short break from David Wells' books to finish The Divine Conspiracy (Dallas Willard) and to blast through "Th!nk", Michael R. LeGault's desperate plea for us not fall into the trap of Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink". A few chestnuts:
The only consistent finding of research done on the subject appears to be that people with high self-esteem are happier. One study conducted by a group of University of Iowa researchers on twenty-three thousand highschool students found little correlation between high self-esteem and better academic performance.
I would bet on the certainty that men and women have different brains before I would bet on the certainty that a water molecule has two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. … As a generation of feminists-cum-mothers has discovered: "Boys really are different."
In the most economically secure, culturally influential, politically powerful country on the planet, how is it that the best means of mass communication event invented [TV] can only be an outlet for the crude, stupid, mindless, and meaningless? The barbarians aren't at our gates, they're dining with us. Their names are J.Lo, Ja Rule, and Paris Hilton.
As a medium of images and emotion, television intersects with a number of the themes proposed by this book to account for the decline of critical and creative thinking in American society. Television, for exammple, has been an important factor in the spread of egalitarian intelligence - the view that all ideas and opinions are of equal value and that all knowledge and reasoning tend toward the same conclusions. In a society that spends five times more time watching television than it does reading, the view and thoughts of more of the public will inevitably begin to form around cliches–politically correct, ideological, or dogmatic.
I'm reminded of a post I made about a year and a half ago. The homoginization of our imaginations and critical thinking skills may have a lot to do with how uninteresting much of the Church has become in our age.
