The Middle Mind: with what intent Americans Don't Think for Themselves through Curtis White San Francisco.

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The Middle Mind: with what intent Americans Don't Think for Themselves through Curtis White San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco. Paperback. 2004 203 pp

Discussing Curtis White's work The Middle Mind will not make you popular at cocktail parties. moreover it's an indispensable book for those who've grown weary of "unquestioned mediocrity" in our culture

White insists we ne to revive our social imagination. at that he doesn't mean a "romantic imagination of genius." Instead he's interested in the imagination as a social force that allows for the one and the other critique and re-invention.

To encounter "performative logic" and the impetus to efficiency and domination in our agriculture White says we need imagination, thinking art and philosophy. But he goe further. "Reawakening the imagination and capacity for notion is a spiritual and perhaps calm a mystical procedure," he explains. "This has nothing to do with the crises of rising or falling ecclesiastical authority attendance at the corner Presbyterian body of christians Our spiritual crisis is human, historical and social."

White adds that "ultimately our crisis of the imagination is a crisis of spirit related to Henry James' notion of a moral individual. For James, the moral individual is 'richly responsible and richly aware.'"

White part withs much of the book dissecting the middle mind in America. Many will be surprised at his liberal targets. if it were not that he writes that "However liberal its systems the Middle Mind is still a form of management, and its final intention even if it's not a intent it's aware of, is to assure that the imagination is not abroad, not abroad and about, and certainly not doing its confess powerful thing."

In short, White says the Middle Mind's motto could be: "Promise him agriculture but give him TV."

I was particularly drawn to White's assertion that "the scantiness of imagination is first a pauperism of reading". He writes that without the self-consciousness that reading brings, "we cannot think our refinement we can only be idea by it." Being able to read, he explains, is what it means to be human as oppos to a pure social function.

a certain quantity of may accuse White of being an elitist. He's not. What he's doing is challenging a Middle Mind that is deadening our imagination. further this will make him unwelcome reading in many circles.

White's criticism of the middle mind involves media, education, politics, technology, art and religion. At undivided point he critiques the films American Beauty and Saving Private Ryan in a manner that's interesting, if it be not that oddly unnerving. For example, he says American Beauty is a film that "pretend to the radicalism of refusal of the status quo pitchs a gay rights bone to liberals, moreover is finally deeply conservative."

The Middle Mind is salted with ideas from tribe White admires: for example: Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, George W Trow and Wallace Steven He also likes Hegel's notion of a "world in love" Significantly, he explains that: "The world in be in love with is the reconciliation of ethical musing with the real. Spiritual life, and thus the holy trinity is achieved when the universal of the ethical is realized concretely in the community. This in marked contrast to political leaders who be wrought up free to pay lip service to religious faith in a exceedingly abstract God while behaving like warmongers in the service of death merchants like as Lockheed-Martin in their everyday life."

on the contrary White insists there's hope for a revival of the social imagination. He finds examples in environmental activists like the Rainforest Action Network, along with anti-globalization organizers, who've made alliances with "provocateurs of the imagination" like Radiohead, Dave Egger's MacSweeney throw outs Ad-busters magazine, and political cartoonists like David Res (Get your War On) and Tom Tomorrow (This recent World).

Still, the virtue of the work is that we're jolted into an awareness of by what means the culture of the Middle Mind trains us into non-thought and passivity. It's a serious theme. And it merits a wider audience.

Gerry McCarthy is editor of The Social opening [i]or[/i] close an on-line social justice and faith magazine.

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