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556. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Pat Walsh

Author:   Martin Luther King, Jr.

Genre:   Non Fiction, Race, History

Summary

Stride Toward Freedom tells the story of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in 1955 led by Martin Luther King, Jr. that changed the trajectory of the civil rights movement.  Written by Dr. King, it includes his letters, speeches and a first hand account of the 50,000 Blacks who incorporated the  principles of nonviolence into their fight for equality.

Quotes 

“[Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.”

 

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.”

 

“…the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”

 

“There are several specific things that the church can do. First, it should try to get to the ideational roots of race hate, something that the law cannot accomplish. All race prejudice is based upon fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings, usually groundless. The church can be of immeasurable help in giving the popular mind direction here. Through its channels of religious education, the church can point out the irrationality of these beliefs. It can show that the idea of a superior or inferior race is a myth that has been completely refuted by anthropological evidence. It can show that Negroes are not innately inferior in academic, health, and moral standards. It can show that, when given equal opportunities, Negroes can demonstrate equal achievement.”

 

“The mere fact that we live in the United States means that we are caught in a network of inescapable mutuality. Therefore, no American can afford to be apathetic about the problem of racial justice. It is a problem that meets every man at his front door. The racial problem will be solved in America to the degree that every American considers himself personally confronted with it. Whether one lives in the heart of the Deep South or on the periphery of the North, the problem of injustice is his problem; it is his problem because it is America’s problem.”

 

“God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men, and brown men, and yellow men; God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.”

 

“There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North which is truly liberal, a liberalism that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the Deep South. It is one thing to agree that the goal of integration is morally and legally right; it is another thing to commit oneself positively and actively to the ideal of integration—the former is intellectual assent, the latter is actual belief. These are days that demand practices to match professions. This is no day to pay lip service to integration; we must pay life service to it.”

 “Economic insecurity strangles the physical and cultural growth of its victims. Not only are millions deprived of formal education and proper health facilities but our most fundamental social unit—the family—is tortured, corrupted, and weakened by economic insufficiency. When a Negro man is inadequately paid, his wife must work to provide the simple necessities for the children. When a mother has to work she does violence to motherhood by depriving her children of her loving guidance and protection; often they are poorly cared for by others or by none—left to roam the streets unsupervised. It is not the Negro alone who is wronged by a disrupted society; many white families are in similar straits. The Negro mother leaves home to care for—and be a substitute mother for—white children, while the white mother works. In this strange irony lies the promise of future correction.”

 

 “The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality.”

 

“Since crime often grows out of a sense of futility and despair, Negro parents must be urged to give their children the love, attention, and sense of belonging that a segregated society deprives them of.”

 

“Casualties of war keep alive post war hate.”

 

“During a crisis period, a desperate attempt is made by the extremists to influence the minds of the liberal forces in the ruling majority. So, for example, in the present transition white Southerners attempt to convince Northern whites that the Negroes are inherently criminal.”

 

“The accusation is made without reference to the true nature of the situation. Environmental problems of delinquency are interpreted as evidence of racial criminality. Crises arising in Northern schools are interpreted as proofs that Negroes are inherently delinquent. The extremists do not recognize that these school problems are symptoms of urban dislocation, rather than expressions of racial deficiency. Criminality and delinquency are not racial; poverty and ignorance breed crime whatever the racial group may be.”

 

“Many white men fear retaliation. The job of the Negro is to show them that they have nothing to fear, that the Negro understands and forgives and is ready to forget the past. He must convince the white man that all he seeks is justice, for both himself and the white man.”

 

“After the opposition had failed to negotiate us into a compromise, it turned to subtler means for blocking the protest; namely, to conquer by dividing. False rumors were spread concerning the leaders of the movement. Negro workers were told by their white employers that their leaders were only concerned with making money out of the movement. Others were told that the Negro leaders rode big cars while they walked. During this period the rumor was spread that I had purchased a brand new Cadillac for myself and a Buick station wagon for my wife. Of course none of this was true.”

 

 “Even where the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference to this obligation of citizenship. In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.”

 

“As he continued, one could see obvious disappointment on the faces of the white committee members. By trying to convince the Negroes that I was the main obstacle to a solution they had hoped to divide us among ourselves. But Ralph’s statement left no doubt. From this moment on the white group saw the futility of attempting to negotiate us into a compromise.”

 

“Many of them had predicted violence, and such predictions are always a conscious or unconscious invitation to action. When people, especially in public office, talk about bloodshed as a concomitant of integration, they stir and arouse the hoodlums to acts of destruction, and often work under cover to bring them about. In Montgomery several public officials had predicted violence, and violence there had to be if they were to save face.”

 

“I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

 

“Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for “the least of these.”

 

“One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.”

 

“The American racial revolution has been a revolution to “get in” rather than to overthrow. We want a share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. This goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent. If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down, the factory. If one needs more adequate education, shooting the principal will not help. If housing is the goal, only building and construction will produce that end. To destroy anything, person or property, cannot bring us closer to the goal that we seek.”

 

“It seems to me that this is the method that must guide the actions of the Negro in the present crisis in race relations. Through nonviolent resistance the Negro will be able to rise to the noble height of opposing the unjust system while loving the perpetrators of the system. The Negro must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as a citizen, but he must not use inferior methods to gain it. He must never come to terms with falsehood, malice, hate, or destruction.”

 

“…Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. It is an entirely ‘neighbor-regarding concern for others,’ which discovers the neighbor in every man it meets. Therefore, Agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both. If one loves an individual merely on account of his friendliness, he loves him for the sake of the benefits to be gained from the friendship, rather than for the friend’s own sake. Consequently, the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.”

 

My Take

While a short book, Strive Toward Freedom packs a lot of punch.  I learned a lot about the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s moral philosophy, strategy and tactics.  I came away with an increased respect (from an already high level) for this extraordinary man and the movement he championed.

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536. Humankind: A Hopeful History

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Rutger Bregman

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Public Policy

462 pages, published June 2, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

In Humankind, author Rutger Bregman rejects the widely accepted idea that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested and instead presents and supports his thesis that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the key factor to their success.  After giving the reader a 200,000 year history, Bregman demonstrates that we are evolutionarily adapted for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.  He also debunks commonly believed understandings of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment, the Kitty Genovese “bystander effect,” and shows that a real life shipwreck of boys on a remote island resulted in cooperation and teamwork rather than a Lord of the Flies style degeneration.

Quotes 

“So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.”

 

“Imagine for a moment that a new drug comes on the market. It’s super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, and desensitization’……That drug is the news.”

 

“Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes.”

 

“An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’

 

“Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is – be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster – the bigger its newsworthiness.”

 

“It’s when crisis hits – when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise – that we humans become our best selves.”

 

“Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.”

 

“If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries.’ George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)”

 

“Also taboo among hunter-gatherers was stockpiling and hoarding. For most of our history we didn’t collect things, but friendships. This never failed to amaze European explorers, who expressed incredulity at the generosity of the peoples they encountered. ‘When you ask for something they have, they never say no,’ Columbus wrote in his log. ‘To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.”

 

“News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”

 

 “For centuries, even millennia, generals and governors, artists and poets had taken it for granted that soldiers fight. That if there’s one thing that brings out the hunter in us, it’s war. War is when we humans get to do what we’re so good at. War is when we shoot to kill. But as Colonel Samuel Marshall continued to interview groups of servicemen, in the Pacific and later in the European theatre, he found that only 15 to 25 per cent of them had actually fired their weapons. At the critical moment, the vast majority balked. One frustrated officer related how he had gone up and down the lines yelling, ‘Goddammit! Start shooting!’ Yet, ‘they fired only while I watched them or while some other officer stood over them’.14 The situation on Makin that night had been do-or-die, when you would expect everyone to fight for their lives. But in his battalion of more than three hundred soldiers, Marshall could identify only thirty-six who actually pulled the trigger. Was it a lack of experience? Nope. There didn’t seem to be any difference between new recruits and experienced pros when it came to willingness to shoot. And many of the men who didn’t fire had been crack shots in training. Maybe they just chickened out? Hardly. Soldiers who didn’t fire stayed at their posts, which meant they ran as much of a risk. To a man, they were courageous, loyal patriots, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their comrades. And yet, when it came down to it, they shirked their duty. They failed to shoot.”

 

 “To understand where things went wrong, we have to go back 15,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. Up until then, the planet had been sparsely populated and people banded together to stave off the cold. Rather than a struggle for survival, it was a snuggle for survival, in which we kept each other warm.22 Then the climate changed, turning the area between the Nile in the west and the Tigris in the east into a land of milk and honey. Here, survival no longer depended on banding together against the elements. With food in such plentiful supply, it made sense to stay put.  Huts and temples were built, towns and villages took shape and the population grew.  More importantly, people’s possessions grew. What was it Rousseau had to say about this? ‘The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine”’–that’s where it all started to go wrong. It couldn’t have been easy to convince people that land or animals–or even other human beings–could now belong to someone. After all, foragers had shared just about everything.24 And this new practice of ownership meant inequality started to grow. When someone died, their possessions even got passed on to the next generation. Once this kind of inheritance came into play, the gap between rich and poor opened wide.”

 

“Reading through the 1300 pages of interviews … it’s patently obvious that Eichman was no brainless bureaucrat, He was a fanatic. He acted not out of indifference, but out of conviction. Like [Stanley] Milgram’s experimental subjects, he did evil because he believed he was doing good.”

 

“The emergence of the first large settlements triggered a seismic shift in religious life. Seeking to explain the catastrophes suddenly befalling us, we began to believe in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done. A whole clerical class was put in charge of figuring out why the gods were so angry. Had we eaten something forbidden? Said something wrong? Had an illicit thought?37 For the first time in history, we developed a notion of sin. And we began looking to priests to prescribe how we should do penance. Sometimes it was enough to pray or complete a strict set of rituals, but often we had to sacrifice cherished possessions–food or animals or even people.”

 

 “In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’  He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’. Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.  And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her. ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”

 

 

 “One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies. The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.”

 

My Take

In the same vein as Factfulness, Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks, I found the optimism of author Rutger Bregman in Humankind to be a hopeful and encouraging look at human nature and our future together on this planet.  A nice antidote to all the doomsayers out there.

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486. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   J.D. Roth

Author:   Greg McKeown

Genre:   Non Fiction, Self Improvement, Business, Philosophy

260  pages, published April 14, 2014

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The theme of Essentialism is that your life can be markedly improved if you focus on the things that are truly important to you and cut out the superfluous.  Author Greg McKeown advocates the Way of the Essentialist which isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done.  It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so that we only focus on the things that really matter.

Quotes 

“Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.”

 

“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.”

 

“Weniger aber besser. The English translation is: Less but better.”

 

“The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.”

 

“If it isn’t a clear yes, then it’s a clear no.”

 

“Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.”

 

“What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?”

 

“The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.”

 

“Today, technology has lowered the barrier for others to share their opinion about what we should be focusing on. It is not just information overload; it is opinion overload.”

 

“Essentialists see trade-offs as an inherent part of life, not as an inherently negative part of life. Instead of asking, “What do I have to give up?” they ask, “What do I want to go big on?”

 

“We overvalue nonessentials like a nicer car or house, or even intangibles like the number of our followers on Twitter or the way we look in our Facebook photos. As a result, we neglect activities that are truly essential, like spending time with our loved ones, or nurturing our spirit, or taking care of our health.”

 

“We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.”

 

“Sleep will enhance your ability to explore, make connections, and do less but better throughout your waking hours.”

 

“the killer question: “If I didn’t already own this, how much would I spend to buy it?”

 

My Take

In Essentialism, Author Greg McKeown makes a strong case for the benefit of focusing only on the essential things in your life and eliminating the trivial, superficial and things that are unimportant to you.  By doing so, we can lead a more meaningful life on our own terms.  The book also contains a lot of practical advice (e.g. how to say no tactfully) that I appreciated.

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466. The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ross Douthat

Genre:   Non Fiction, Sociology, Cultural, Economics, Politics, History, Philosophy

272 pages, published February 25, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In The Decadent Society, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explores his thesis that the Western world is facing a crisis of decadence.  Douthat describes how the combination of wealth and technological advancement combines with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline create a kind of “sustainable decadence,” i.e. a civilizational malaise and drift.

Quotes 

 

My Take

While Douthat posits some interesting ideas in The Decadent Society, the sum is less than its parts.  He stretches hard with various anecdotes and data to validate his theme that we are in the midst of societal decline and decadence.  A few weeks after finishing, there is little memorable that I took away from this book.

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435. The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author: Arthur C. Brooks

Genre:   Non Fiction, Public Policy, Politics, Philosophy, History, Economics

261 pages, published July 14, 2015

Reading Format:  e-Book on Hoopla

Summary

In The Conservative Heart, former American Enterprise Institute President and author Arthur C. Brooks writes about his vision for conservatism as a movement for happiness, unity, and social justice that will challenge the liberal monopoly on “fairness” and “compassion.”  While Progressives have always presented themselves as champions of the poor and vulnerable, Brooks argues that they have failed the people they are trying to help as more and more people are hopeless and dependent on the government while Conservatives possess the best solutions to the problems of poverty and declining mobility.  However, because the right doesn’t speak in a way that reflects their concern and compassion, many Americans don’t trust them.  In response to this problem, Brooks presents a social justice agenda grounded in the four “institutions of meaning”:  family, faith, community, and meaningful work.

Quotes 

“No one sighs regretfully on his deathbed and says, “I can’t believe I wasted all that time with my wife and kids,” “volunteering at the soup kitchen,” or “growing in my spirituality.” No one ever says, “I should have spent more time watching TV and playing Angry Birds on my phone.” In my own life, nothing has given my life more meaning and satisfaction than my Catholic faith and the love of my family.”

 

“The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars.”

 

“There is a lot to be mad about in America today, but we must never forget that our cause is a joyous one. Conservatives should be optimists who believe in people. We champion hope and opportunity. Fighting for people, helping those who need us, and saving the country—this is, and should be, happy work.”

 

“Meaningful progress toward social justice cannot be made in sclerotic education systems that put adults’ job security before children’s civil rights.”

 

“the best data consistently show that more than eight in ten Americans like or love their jobs. And incredibly, that result holds steady across the income distribution. This notion that “knowledge work” is fulfilling, but everyone who works in a garage or a restaurant loathes his or her life, is an incredible act of condescension masquerading as concern. The truth is much more egalitarian. Again, economic mobility is crucial, and stagnant wages are a huge problem for American families. But this doesn’t change the deep truth that work, not money, is the fundamental source of our dignity. Work is where we build character. Work is where we create value with our lives and lift up our own souls. Work, properly understood, is the sacred practice of offering up our talents for the service of others.”

 

“When Ronald Reagan made his case to the American people, he didn’t spend a lot of time talking about what he was fighting against. He spent most of his speech talking about who he was fighting for. This is what conservatives too often forget.”

 

“Households headed by a “conservative” give, on average, 30 percent more dollars to charity than households headed by a “liberal.”

 

“First, we should concentrate each day on the happiness portfolio: faith, family, community, and earned success through work. Teach it to those around you, and fight against the barriers to these things. Second, resist the worldly formula of misery, which is to use people and love things. Instead, remember your core values and live by the true formula: Love people and use things. Third, celebrate the free enterprise system, which creates abundance for the most people—especially the poor. But always remember that the love of money is the root of all evil, and that the ideal life requires abundance without attachment.”

 

“But at the same time, a bloated welfare state that nudges middle-class citizens away from the labor force is moving our society away from the dignity of earned success.”

 

My Take

I had previously read and enjoyed Love Your Enemies by Arthur Brooks, so I had high hopes for The Conservative Heart.  I was not disappointed. Brooks posits compelling ideas and makes a strong case for him.  He also weaves in a lot of on point anecdotes which makes the book very readable.  I was also struck by his thought that the ideal life requires abundance without attachment.  It made me think about my relationship to things and how I need to hold them loosely.  Recommended.

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391. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Jonathan Haidt

Genre:    Nonfiction, Psychology, Politics, Theology, Philosophy

419 pages, published March 13, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our cultural polarization and explores way to bridge the chasms that divide us.  Haidt mixes his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain. He examines the origins of morality, rejecting the view that evolution has made us selfish.  Rather, we are tribal creatures which accounts for most of our religious divisions and our political affiliations.

Quotes 

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

 

“Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.”

 

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”

 

“If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.”

 

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”

 

“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”

 

“People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.”

 

“We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”

 

“Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.”

 

“The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship.”

 

“Societies that exclude the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully to what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).”

 

“Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.”

 

“Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.”

 

“Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.”

 

“The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.”

 

“If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.”

 

“The “omnivore’s dilemma” (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as “openness to experience”), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what’s tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.”

 

My Take

The Righteous Mind fulfills one of my basic criteria for a worthwhile read; I learned something new or gained some interesting insight.  With this book, I came to a better understanding of how we make moral judgments and why it is nearly impossible to persuade someone to change their mind on a moral issue with logic and rational arguments.  I also learned why we are so tribal and how banding together has advanced the course of human civilization.  I appreciated that Jonathan Haidt backs up his conclusions with lots of research and anecdotes.  A thought provoking read.

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361. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Ben Shapiro

Author:   Greg Lukianoff,  Jonathan Haidt

Genre:  Non Fiction, Public Policy, Education, Philosophy, Psychology, Parenting

352 pages, published September 4, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Coddling of the American Mind, by First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, explores significant changes in what the authors refer to as the iGeneration (also known as Generation Z), who are comprised of kids and young adults born after 1995.  This is the first generation to grow up with smart phones (and other digital devises) as a constant presence in their lives.  This generation has also been raised with much more attentive and safety conscious parents than any previous generation.  The combination of these factors has led to a culture of “safetyism” which has resulted in a campus assault on free speech and what that means for kids and our country.  According to the authors, iGeneration has been taught three Great Untruths: their feelings are always right; they should avoid pain and discomfort; and they should look for faults in others and not themselves. These three Great Untruths are part of a larger philosophy that sees young people as fragile creatures who must be protected and supervised by adults. But despite the good intentions of the adults who impart them, the Great Untruths are harming kids by teaching them the opposite of ancient wisdom and the opposite of modern psychological findings on grit, growth, and antifragility. The result is rising rates of depression and anxiety, along with endless stories of college campuses torn apart by moralistic divisions and mutual recriminations.

Quotes 

“From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.”

 

“But efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience— such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors— are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment.”

 

“Grant offers the following four rules for productive disagreement:10 Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict. Argue as if you’re right, but listen as if you’re wrong (and be willing to change your mind). Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective. Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.”

 

“A culture that allows the concept of “safety” to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”

 

“But efforts to protect kids from risk by preventing them from gaining experience— such as walking to school, climbing a tree, or using sharp scissors— are different. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment.”

 

“there are just two activities that are significantly correlated with depression and other suicide-related outcomes (such as considering suicide, making a plan, or making an actual attempt): electronic device use (such as a smartphone, tablet, or computer) and watching TV. On the other hand, there are five activities that have inverse relationships with depression (meaning that kids who spend more hours per week on these activities show lower rates of depression): sports and other forms of exercise, attending religious services, reading books and other print media, in-person social interactions, and doing homework.”

 

“parenting strategies and laws that make it harder for kids to play on their own pose a serious threat to liberal societies by flipping our default setting from “figure out how to solve this conflict on your own” to “invoke force and/or third parties whenever conflict arises.” 

My Take

This was my second time reading this book (taking Gretchen Rubin’s adage that the best reading is re-reading to heart).  I found The Coddling of the American Mind to be a fascinating inquiry into what has turned many of the young adults in our country into the “snowflake” generation who are afraid of micro aggressions, being exposed to speech they disagree with, and anything else that threatens the cocoon of safety they were raised to expect by their overindulgent, protective parents.   In addition to diagnosing the problem, Lukianoff and Haidt offer a comprehensive set of reforms that will strengthen young people and institutions and encourage diversity of viewpoint.  I have already raised my kids for the most part (they are currently 20 and 17 and right in the middle of the iGeneration), but am pleased to see that they are not snowflakes who will melt at the first differing opinion they encounter.  That is partly due to the fact that we are conservatives in one of the bluest counties (Boulder, Colorado) in the country.  My children grew up surrounded by people who disagreed with our political viewpoints.  That was extremely beneficial for them.  They were constantly challenged on their beliefs and had to deliberate and think about why they believed what they did rather than exist in an echo chamber that validated their every view.  Consequently, they are very experienced at hearing viewpoints that differ from their own and have no problem engaging with others on a myriad of topics without taking offense.

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347. The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Nick Reader

Author:   Ben Shapiro

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Philosophy, Theology

288 pages, published March 19, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Right Side of History is Ben Shapiro’s take on the history of religion and philosophy in Western Civilization and how those two things were integral to America becoming a great and unique country.  However, he argues that we are in the midst of a crisis of purpose and ideas.  Our freedoms are built upon the two ideas that every human being is made in God’s image and that human beings were created with reason capable of exploring God’s world.  These precepts led to the birth of science, human rights, prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty.  They also built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty and gave billions spiritual purpose. Civilizations that rejected these ideas have collapsed into ignominy.  The USSR, Maoist China, Nazi Germany and modern day Venezuela rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting a new utopian vision of “social justice.”  The result was mass starvation and slaughter of tens of millions of human beings.  Shapiro warns that the United States is in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring instead moral subjectivism and the rule of passion.  The result if civilization collapse into tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism.  The solution is to regain the moral purpose that drives us to be better individuals and assume the duty of working together for the greater good.

Quotes 

“We don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in the best world that has ever existed.”

 

“What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.”

 

“The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the “greater” good. Flourishing societies require a functional social fabric, created by citizens working together—and yes, separately—toward a meaningful life.”

 

“Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.”

 

“The creation story itself is designed to demonstrate how the first man, Adam, used his innate power of choice wrongly—and we are all Adam’s descendants.”

 

“What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.”

 

”a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic.”

 

“That virtue took the form of courage—willingness to sacrifice life, fortune, and sacred honor in pursuit of defending the rights necessary to pursue virtue itself. That virtue took the form of temperance—no better founding document has ever been penned than the Constitution of the United States, the product of compromise. That virtue took the form of prudence—the practical wisdom of The Federalist Papers has not yet been surpassed in political thought. And that virtue took the form of justice—the rule of law, not of men, and the creation of a system where each receives his due.”

 

“Nazism didn’t arise from consumerism. It arose from communal purpose overriding individual purpose, and individual capacity abandoned in favor of worship of the communal capacity of the state. Nazism, in other words, lay a lot closer to Marxism than capitalism did.”

 

“Politics is about working to build the framework for the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it; politics helps us establish the preconditions necessary for happiness, but can’t provide happiness in and of itself.”

 

“Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

 

“Christianity’s focus on grace rather than works makes it a far more accessible religion than Judaism in a practical sense. The commandments of Judaism are intricate and difficult. Christianity dispensed with the need for them. Faith is paramount.”

 

“We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.”

 

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society,” Rousseau wrote. 

My Take

The Right Side of History was a Mother’s Day gift from my son Nick, a devotee of Ben Shapiro.  Nick and I share a conservative/libertarian philosophy and I was looking forward to reading Shapiro’s take on Western Civilization.  While the book is a bit dense at times with its lengthy history of philosophy, I wholeheartedly agreed with Shapiro’s conclusions and prescriptions for keeping America from plunging into the historical abyss and towards a free society that recognizes and values the individual while still expecting that individual to work within his or her community to improve the lives of others.  An interesting and worthwhile read.

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324. Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Margo Funk

Author:   Thomas Cathcart, Daniel Klein

Genre:  Non Fiction, Philosophy, Humor

200 pages, published May 1, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

An overview of the great philosophical traditions, schools, concepts, and thinkers as told with humor and jokes.

Quotes 

“Moses trudges down from Mt. Sinai, tablets in hand, and announces to the assembled multitudes: “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. Thebad news is ‘adultery’ is still in.”

 

“Some have argued that because the universe is like a clock, there must be a Clockmaker. As the eighteenth-century British empiricist David Hume pointed out, this is a slippery argument, because there is nothing that is really perfectly analogous to the universe as a whole, unless it’s another universe, so we shouldn’t try to pass off anything that is just a part of this universe. Why a clock anyhow? Hume asks. Why not say the universe is analogous to a kangaroo? After all, both are organically interconnected systems. But the kangaroo analogy would lead to a very different conclusion about the origin of the universe: namely, that it was born of another universe after that universe had sex with a third universe. ”

 

“Sorting out what’s good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, “Why?”

 

“The optimist says, “The glass is half full.”

The pessimist says, “The glass is half empty.”

The rationalist says, “This glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”

 

“A man stumbles into a deep well and plummets a hundred feet before grasping a spindly root, stopping his fall. His grip grows weaker and weaker, and in his desperation he cries out, “Is there anybody up there?” He looks up, and all he can see is a circle of sky. Suddenly, the clouds part and a beam of bright light shines down on him. A deep voice thunders, “I, the Lord, am here. Let go of the root, and I will save you.” The man thinks for a moment and then yells, “Is there anybody else up there?” 

My Take

If you want to learn more about philosophy and philosophical traditions, this humor book is a fun way to do so.

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319. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen Greenblatt

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Philosophy

356 pages, published September 4, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Swerve tells the story of the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a poem containing dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.  The copying and translation of this ancient book inspired Renaissance figures including artist Botticelli, shaped the thought of Galileo, Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and influenced writers Montaigne, Shakespeare and Thomas Jefferson.

Quotes 

“What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.”

 

“The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear. Even the dreaded plague, in Lucretius’ account—and his work ends with a graphic account of a catastrophic plague epidemic in Athens—is most horrible not only for the suffering and death that it brings but also and still more for the “perturbation and panic” that it triggers.”

 

“The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.  Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.”

 

“The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.”

 

“In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.”

 

“books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”

 

“We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.”

 

“I am,” Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, “an Epicurean.”

 

“The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views.” 

My Take

While there are lots of interesting ideas in The Swerve, I found it pretty dense and a little boring to plough through.  It would have benefited from a more engaging writing style.

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