Some items in recent issues of the New York Times have got me thinking – or maybe it's just hoping – that ideas about habit might be gaining some ground, taking a larger role in the way we talk about «The Public and Its Problems».
The Sunday (2012.09.2) Times list of business best-sellers had Charles Duhigg's Power of Habit in its number two slot, and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow in third. (A biography of Steve Jobs was first.) Duhigg's book actually involved consulting with many researchers who have been thinking about habit and routine, like Sidney Winter and Wendy Woods. Kahneman's, though he doesn't use the label 'habit', is clearly committed in his discussion of the fast processes he calls "System 1" to various automaticity and priming effects that underlie routine action.
Today's edition (2012.09.06) presents a long literary «portrait» of President Obama. The author, Peter Baker, reports on Obama's reading of Kahneman's book. Though I wouldn't claim the book somehow affected Obama's approach to his job, it's still striking how the author weaves through the piece the notion that successful action at the highest level requires more than just careful deliberation and persuasive argument.
The same issue contains an opinion piece by Michael Roth on educational policy. It relies centrally on arguments drawn from John Dewey on how education instills lifelong habits. Roth quotes Dewey: "The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living, is the finest product of schooling."
It's hard to imagine that Dewey would have been taken as authoritative in a piece like this written as little as a decade ago. But Roth, in warning about narrowly vocational education trends, quotes Dewey again. "The kind of vocational education I am interested in is not one which will 'adapt' workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that."
Seeing the two books doing so well, and the articles in which the ideas are coming into play, I was encouraged – a little, with all the usual hesitations – that the larger society might be getting ready to think more of a world where not every action is simply the result of a self-conscious rational deliberation, one where skills and dispositions acquired through experience play a fundamental role in shaping what we do.
Today's edition (2012.09.06) presents a long literary «portrait» of President Obama. The author, Peter Baker, reports on Obama's reading of Kahneman's book. Though I wouldn't claim the book somehow affected Obama's approach to his job, it's still striking how the author weaves through the piece the notion that successful action at the highest level requires more than just careful deliberation and persuasive argument.
The same issue contains an opinion piece by Michael Roth on educational policy. It relies centrally on arguments drawn from John Dewey on how education instills lifelong habits. Roth quotes Dewey: "The inclination to learn from life itself and to make the conditions of life such that all will learn in the process of living, is the finest product of schooling."
It's hard to imagine that Dewey would have been taken as authoritative in a piece like this written as little as a decade ago. But Roth, in warning about narrowly vocational education trends, quotes Dewey again. "The kind of vocational education I am interested in is not one which will 'adapt' workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not sufficiently in love with the regime for that."
Seeing the two books doing so well, and the articles in which the ideas are coming into play, I was encouraged – a little, with all the usual hesitations – that the larger society might be getting ready to think more of a world where not every action is simply the result of a self-conscious rational deliberation, one where skills and dispositions acquired through experience play a fundamental role in shaping what we do.
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