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The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves
by Curtis White
Product Group: Book
Publisher: HarperOne (2003-09-01)
ISBN: 0060524367
EAN: 9780060524364
Dewy Decimal #: 303.3720973
Hardcover: 224 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 2003-08-14
SKU: SA08050506
Condition: Used: Very Good
Comments: Exactly as shown, Dust Jacket intact with no damage. Text clean with NO marks.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
- What do George W. Bush, the Ivory Tower, Steven Spielberg, and Terri Gross have in common?
- Does a political scandal make for good news copy?
- Does network programming allow us to unwind from a day's work?
- Does the art at the local museum make for pleasant cocktail conversation?
An unflinching and wry look at the dumbing down of the American imagination. In this groundbreaking and incisive exploration, acclaimed social critic Curtis White describes an all-encompassing and little-noticed force taking over our culture and our lives. White calls this force the Middle Mind -- the current failure of the American imagination in the media, politics, education, art, technology, and religion. The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plainspoken, populist, contemptuous of the right's narrowness, and incredulous before the left's convolutions. It wants to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has bought an SUV with the intent of visiting it. It even understands in some indistinct way how that very SUV spells the Arctic's doom. The Middle Mind is not about left or right, highbrow or lowbrow, academia or pop culture; in fact, it pervades society without discrimination. The danger is not in a specific point of view, but rather in how the Middle Mind thrives in the common ground of unquestioned mediocrity. All we seem to ask about the culture we experience is whether it's entertaining. White argues that we have forgotten how to read, to watch, to think for ourselves. Because it is neutral, widespread, and easily digestible, the Middle Mind has lulled the American imagination to sleep. As we sit comfortably amused and distracted, just outside the door there is an immediate crisis of a nation blindly following the path of least resistance. Irreverent, provocative, and far-reaching, White presents a clear vision of this dangerous mindset that threatens America's intellectual and cultural freedoms, concluding with an imperative to reawaken and unleash the once powerful American imagination.
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Amazon.com Review
Curtis White’s The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves--which grew from a 2002 Harper's article—examines as its titular object the dominant American liberal, pseudo-intellectual consciousness. "The Middle Mind" disdains hard thinking and true examination of corporate and political forces that act upon it. In the book, White dilates on his notion of an American Middle Mind to imagine a world beyond it, but he frequently gets lost on his journey. He finds three sources for this American malaise: the entertainment industry, academic orthodoxy, and political ideology. But, as in the original magazine piece, the figures he picks to condemn within this triumvirate are a bit surprising, even while his attacks are unremitting. NPR's Terry Gross, for example, is characterized as one whose work is "useless for the purposes of intelligence," and her show is dismissed as a "pornographic farce." In his critiques, White claims to be resisting the classic high-brow/low-brow cultural distinctions; or, rather, he sees the Middle Mind as having absorbed them. But his frequent allusions to Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and high Modernism long for a world that never was, a world of art and political resistance that was somehow accessible in its full complexity to all of America. While White wants a creative, intelligent, politically engaged American mass culture, his exemplars look remarkably like high culture icons and few modern intellectuals are left standing (notably Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Bill Moyers). By the end, his call for a "pragmatic sublime" diffuses into vague, postmodern-theory-laden discussion of artistic formalism and a celebration of David Lynch's film Blue Velvet as a model for resistance. In this context of exclusivity, Terry Gross's inclusive "Middle Mind" seems the more open space for true discourse. --Patrick O’Kelley
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Customer Reviews
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Oy
Rating  (1)
Date: 2008-10-16
In a word, Curtis White's 2003 HarperCollins book The Middle Mind, which is an extrapolation upon a Harper's article of the same name published a year earlier, is bad. But, the attempted discursions in the book, while bad, are not nearly as bad as the book's biggest detractors would have you believe. That's because both the book and its detractors are part of what White, himself, terms `The Middle Mind'- or the de facto bourgeois mindset that most people in modern America use in discourse. The problem is that White's very definitions and remedies are so convoluted that he often contradicts himself. Where to begin? How about his very definition of the Middle Mind. White sees it as a sort of limousine liberal mindset admixed with a few plebeian pleasures, wanting `to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has bought an SUV with every intent of visiting it.' In fact it is decidedly blue collar, working- or lower middle- class, with a disdain for eggheads as White seems to be, as vividly displayed within the text of his own book. Perhaps his definition rings true in White's world, where bland pop bands like Radiohead are the standard for cultural genius. But in the real world the Middle Mind, both in the average and median way, is not affiliated with either political party, is too worried with bills to care about Terri Schiavo or the greenhouse effect, and most certainly cannot afford an SUV- even a used one. They do not go to Starbuck's, unless to work, and they couldn't find their local National Public Radio station if you paid them.
Yet, this critical misreading, at the book's central thesis, is typical of the book as a whole. Another misreading comes when White rips into Ken Burns' PBS documentaries, declaring them `interesting', but sentimental and `blandly informative'. Now, there is no doubt that Burns has his detractors, and his acumen as a historian is well-disputed (see Ken Burns's The Civil War: Historians Respond, edited by Robert Brent Toplin), but the very fact that Burns has almost singlehandedly revived the documentary as a historical tool and pop cultural event far outweighs his flaws, for even Burns has always declared his films are art first, and history second. The very indulgent and sentimental waxing, often accompanied by the `banjos playing or Coplandish strings sighing' is why there is an interest in history in the private sector these days, vis-à-vis the pre-Burnsian 1980s. To equate his minor historical flaws (admixed with great filmic and artistic skill)- or his artistic shortcomings (which White seems to find more damning) with, say, the PC dreck foisted upon literature in the first wave of schlock tv host Oprah Winfrey's noxious book club is ridiculous. The books she pushed had no cultural nor artistic value, and were pushed for purely financial gain, since everyone knows Oprah's fat, middle class hausfrau fan base is unable to comprehend real literature. The same motives cannot be ascribed to Burns, even by his worst detractors. Yet, this sort of misconstruing of a person's or thing's essence or value is all too typical of White's work....Yet, White is not the deluded professor many other critics have labeled him; the one who thinks he's a misunderstood genius, and hates the world for that fact. He actually tries in this book, despite his ridiculous conflations, misinterpretations, and flat-out hypocrisy, but is simply incapable of deep thought. Or to quote that Midwestern purveyor of Middle Mind pap, Rain Taxi, in its review of White's book: `It's vital that the Middle Mind be battled because- as White points out- it exists in denial of itself....' The irony of this quote, from both its source and at its target, is just too precious for me not to use. Yet, as clueless as White is, he subscribes to the quote from journalist I.F. Stone at book's end: `The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing- for the sheer fun and joy of it- to go right ahead and fight, knowing you're going to lose. You mustn't feel like a martyr. You've got to enjoy it.'
In short: been there, done that. The battle against the deliteracy of America, which is not the intellectual inability to actually read, but the willfully ignorant choice to not read and promote good and great literature, is a neverending one, and one which I have waged and will continue to wage against those who would destroy it, from Left or Right, above or below, willfully or not. I'm just saddened to have to conclude that, despite his stated desires to the contrary, Curtis White is one of the destroyers, not saviors, of what he claims to love. This is most aptly demonstrated by his monumentally flawed readings of the great poet Wallace Stevens' sparse criticism, and worse, his great verse. Yet, although this point angered me most of all in the book, and pointed most aptly to White's ignorance of his subject matter, I dare not get into it, lest push this in depth review near ten thousand words, thereby recapitulating its subject's flaws. I know what White does not, and now prove it!
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Barely Even A Screed
Rating (1)
Date: 2007-11-05
1 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
As stated in an earlier review, "It's hard to dislike a book that skewers John Seabrook, not to mention Bloom, D'Sousa, and English Department faculty who think they are political scientists . . . " but White makes it easy.
This self-congratulatory middle-aged rant (formerly subtitled "Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves," and who could deny that?) attracts the reader with its provocative title and lurid cover featuring zombies at a cinema. Yet once begun it is little more than a rambling 200-page editorial written in first person, with no cohesive thesis or logic, going to great pains to skewer the demographic which is not only its target, but its target market. It is the merest of rhetoric. Should be printed on softer, more absorbent paper.
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Proof that at least a few Americans think for themselves
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-10-03
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
Despite the fact that White's indictment of Terry Gross is somewhat one-sided and superficial (he ought to have devoted an entire chapter to her and her radio show), there is much truth in his complaints about her. Academic Cultural Studies deserves an even stronger negative critique here than White provides, although it must be said than any honest assessment of it would have to include an acknowledgment of the various useful insights and interpretations that have come out of that thick and tangled intellectual forest. My favorite discussion, and perhaps the most urgently needed, is his skewering of the awful movie Saving Private Ryan.
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DNF
Rating (1)
Date: 2007-08-08
1 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
a rambling rant about modern culture. Any positive points are lost in the angry rant
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a brilliant mind
Rating  (2)
Date: 2007-04-09
3 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
White is clearly a very intelligent writer, but he is also a cultural snob. His attacks on Terry Gross are just ridiculous and to chose her as your enemy at time when the Bushes, Cheneys, and Roves rule the country is patently stupid and banal.
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