Reading and thinking critically in the age of disputation

Abstract

This essay will examine the methodology that lies at the heart of critical thinking, its strengths and its weaknesses. It will consider the history of the book and its corollary, the "enlightened reader", while assessing the decline of readerly excellence and the social consequences that gave rise to disputatious thinking. The argument will be that the loss of sustaining values brought about by countercultural influences ensured the triumph of narcissism and the emergence of a reinvented orality founded on modern media, especially the Internet, which celebrates emotional groupthink at the expense of the "enlightened self". The result is the diminution of reason that all but precludes the possibility of critical thinking.