The Righteous Mind

I have read this book twice already and I will read it again. It was written in 2012 and it seems to be more relevant every day. I have also heard Jonathan Haidt interviewed on a couple of occasions. He has been able to see and evaluate current affairs from a fairly wide and long perspective and it is a useful tool for saving one's sanity.

If you find yourself perplexed or even enraged over current events, this philosophical look at people and how they think will, at least, explain how we can seem so different from each other. In a nutshell, we all arrive at our conclusions by means of emotional cues, and then try to come up with reasons for why we think and feel the way we do. We like to think of ourselves as rational, fact based creatures, so we go out and search for evidence that we are correct about the things that we have already concluded to be true. In so doing, of course, we skip over a great deal of information that doesn't square with our already formed conclusions.

The biggest question is whether there is hope for us getting along better, and the answer is: Some. In the meantime, if we understand that our neighbors, our family and our friends are not so different from us, we feel a bit more sanguine about our differences.

Sometimes it seems like current events move along so quickly that any political theory has an extremely short shelf life. By Friday, a show aired on Tuesday is hopelessly irrelevant. The ideas in this now five year old book have become more rather than less relevant. It is definitely worth a look, or even a second look.