The Righteous Mind

3.5 but rounded up for the internal dialogue this book triggered.

First, this book debunked some of my preconceived notions and biases. I consider myself from the left/progressive and never felt there was anything wrong with it, I still don’t but this book helped me to understand the mindset of the conservative right. Some of it is evolutionary, as presented in the book, and which makes more or less complete sense. The first and second half of the book is steeped with science and philosophy and that makes for quite an interesting read on such a topic. Then, the author develops his own theory and then allocates slots for the different ideologies within the theory’s fairly narrow spectrum, namely left and right.

The author carefully jots down where the left vs rights sit on the spectrum of morality with the conservatives scoring points in almost all of the different moral foundations while the left scoring on only 2 of them. It has been claimed that the left only cares about the care/harm moral foundation and that other moral foundations such as authority, and sanctity are equally crucial for a society to flourish. The author argues how religion has played an essential role in human evolutionary history to bring together groups of people and helped their survival. Although I agree vaguely with the statement, I believe things have gotten out of hand, especially with religion and polarization taking center stage nowadays for all the wrong reasons. As Dr. Ambedkar had expressed in Annihilation of Caste, religion doesn’t work because times change, and living by a set of rules meant for a society thousands of years ago, would only lead to conflicts. And so at this point, attributing groupishness and religion for the betterment of such a society seems like a myopic view.

He tries to stay neutral throughout which is a bummer because it’s so painfully obvious. He tries to also, rather unconvincingly according to me, refute the claims that religion is evil, by the New Atheists, especially Richard Dawkins. And in this regard, he compares a lack of religion with anarchy based on certain controlled experiments while in reality there have been such observational studies/surveys done in the least religious societies which outright contradict these claims.

I think it’s a book that helped me clear out part of my faulty understanding of how ideologies stem and I’m very grateful for that but It’s hard for me to agree with the conclusions drawn in the book. Still, a good, thought-provoking read.