Thank you America, we can THINK again!

Malcolm Gladwell's book, 'blink' is "about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye" according to the author's notes on www.gladwell.com. 'blinkThink' is my term for making a fetish of the 'blink', and blinkThink took a well-deserved drubbing in Barack Obama's Inauguration Speech yesterday. Obama proposes -- and, most importantly, he symbolizes -- a spirit of deliberation, of considering different points of view and different facts, which is nothing less than a pivoting of American discourse away from the harsh moral certainties of Bush and Reagan toward the nuances of political virtue.

Gladwell himself signals the valorization of the blink, claiming on his site that "we live in a society dedicated to the idea that we're always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation." Huh? Where do you live, Malcolm? Oh right, the offices of the New Yorker mag and the international lecture circuit, I forgot. I'll tell you something, MG, where I live -- and I daresay most of us live -- we are under constant and unremitting pressure to make snap judgements, to act on impulse, and generally to equate deliberation as a sign of ineffectiveness. In the mall, and in the public discourse, we are encouraged to slam shut the gates of thought. Political mavens tout the idea that values drive voter choice; the framing of key messages supposedly explains public receptiveness to policy ideas; and marketers ramp up the emotive or sexual quotient at every so-called 'touch point' (but, actually, don't TOUCH me!)

The blink way of making judgements lends itself to moral judgements. In its rapidity, it relies on pre-established ideas and frames of reference. As Decision Research has recently shown (www.decision research.org) many of us will prefer to help one 1000 people out of 5000 escape violence in a place such as Darfur, instead of helping 1000 people out of 100,000. It seems we value the larger slice of the pie represented by 1000/5000 even though it is exactly the same number of people. This isn't reasoning - this is 'blink', and blinkThink is the tendency to value this sort of snap judgement more highly than the sort of deliberation that would reveal just how wrong-headed it is.

Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Mike Harris, Stephen Harper -- these fellows have urged us to blink about each other in a myriad of ways -- now hate public school teachers, now unionized pilots, now the artistic 'elite' -- the better to wrap themselves in a homogeneous sheet of public approval.

But Obama asks us all to be more deliberative, to think more, take more time before making judgemetns. And this may be among his greatest contributions to 'remaking' America, for it opens the way to considering every individual on their own merits, every situation for its inherent possibilities, every outcome for its actual contribution to human progress. Above all, it takes us back to the idea that politics is about public virtues -- doing the right thing at the right time -- not absolute right and wrong.

An appropriate moment to launch this blog, the day after he offered us this gift at his Inauguration. Here at northern communique we will consider just about anything that's interesting, with an inevitable political and Canadian spin -- and welcome all your feedback.

Here we go, thank you America, we can THINK again!