Dr. Sanity: LACK OF CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT

"I remember a really excellent Mark Steyn piece that came out in The New Criterion in 2007. This article discussed the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom's controversial exposé of the shallowness and meaninglessness of American pop culture was a bombshell when it first was published in 1987; and, his analysis seems even more prescient when one considers the evolution of that pop culture over the last 20 years.

Bloom was the quintessential academic and a true liberal intellectual (in the traditional meaning of that word), and he could not help noticing that the university--which used to see its mission as the maintainence and transmission of civilization and learning--was failing in that mission. Instead of countering the pervasively vapid 'pop' psychology that passed for deep thought about the meaning and purpose of life, it gave credibility to the emptiness and facilitated and celebrated the shallowness."