Review: The Righteous Mind

Title: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Author: Jonathan Haidt

Genre: Philosophy/Current Issues

Trigger Warnings: Racism (mentions)

Back Cover:

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain.

He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

Review:

This book was recommended to me somewhere. Potentially it was mentioned in another book I read. I don’t really remember. I don’t really know what got me to check it out from the library, either. It may have just been random.

But regardless of why, I’m so glad I did. This is a spectacular, remarkable, eye-opening book. From the back cover, it sounds like a book about politics. It is, in a way, but it’s about so much more than that.

In less than four hundred pages, Jonathan covers a lot of ground. He covers the general idea of morality – how we conceptualize morality consciously and subconsciously, how human “moral minds” work, probable reasons why we evolved to have a moral sense in the first place, why different cultures end up with different moral values, how morality affects society. By far the most revolutionary concept of the book, though, is the moral foundations. He identifies six different foundational values that systems of morality can be built upon, and explains how placing varying levels of importance on each foundation can lead to different systems of morality. And relating to the political bent of the back cover, he goes over in detail how American liberals, American conservatives, and American libertarians give different priority to the six foundations, leading to each group thinking the other is not just politically stupid but morally corrupt.

It was fascinating, and it explains so much. I don’t like books about politics, and I enjoyed this because it’s not about politics – it’s about the foundations behind political beliefs. The fundamental disconnect between liberals and conservatives causing America’s extreme partisan politics just got thoroughly explained to me in this book. And honestly, I think I can see the other side’s point.

We humans have a tendency to get immediately and defensively furious when someone criticizes a group we belong to. And no matter where you are on the political spectrum, there will be something in this book that will get you irrationally angry. When that happens, stop reading and take some time to cool down if you need to. Because if you can get past that anger and really listen to what this book is saying, you’ll learn a ton. So many things will make so much more sense. You may even start to look at people with different views in a new light.

I hesitate to say that one book could single-handedly fix partisan divides. But if everyone read this book and understood the ideas, it might help make some major progress towards less partisan politics. If nothing else, it will help on an individual level.

I learned so much just reading this straight through without stopping to think or take notes. But this is the kind of book that I want to reread and reflect on. The emphasis is on politics, but the moral foundations can explain so much of the world. I feel like my eyes have been opened. I legit think I need to rethink my political positions … and moral thoughts … and lots of things.

Review: The Analects of Confucius

Title: The Analects

Author: Confucius

Genre: Classic/Philosophy

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), animal death (mentions)

Back Cover:

One of the undisputed giants in the history of human thought, and the founder of one of the world’s longest-lasting cultural traditions, Confucius (known as Kong Fuzi in his native China) is arguably the most enduring of all the world’s great thinkers. The Analects, the slender volume thought to have been compiled by his followers, has the strongest claim to represent Confucius’ actual words. Sometimes pithy, sometimes conversational, occasionally enigmatic, often profoundly searching, the book contains memorable sayings about the moral health of the individual, the family and the body politic, and continues to be a source of inexhaustible wisdom after more than two and a half millennia.

Review:

This isn’t a review in the strictest sense. I’m just a white American twenty-something who reads too much – I don’t think I get to pass judgment on a book that’s been a cultural cornerstone for billions of people since the 300s BCE. However, I do have some thoughts on my experience of reading it, so that’s what this is.

Reading the Analects was a very similar experience to reading The Art of War – I could tell that this was full of great wisdom, but without context, a teacher, and many hours of study, all but the most obvious advice seemed beyond my grasp. However, this time I had the foresight to find a 12-hour lecture series about the Analects to listen to after reading the book. And I have to say, reading 2000+-year-old Eastern wisdom directly followed by listening to a professor of ancient Chinese history and philosophy explain it for 12 hours is the way to go. I’m tempted to reread The Art of War just so I can follow it up with a lecture series and comprehend it better.

Anyway. I frequently hear Confucianism classified as a religion, but after reading the Analects (and having a professor of ancient Chinese history and philosophy explain them to me), it’s an odd classification for a Western understanding of “religion.” Confucius as presented here isn’t concerned about deities or spirits or anything supernatural at all. The Analects is purely about how to live with the goal of becoming an “exemplary man” whose conduct is beyond reproach. This mostly involves filial piety (respect and subservience to parents, and to a lesser extent older siblings), dedicated and disciplined devotion to learning, and strict observance of ritual.

I have a hard time getting behind Confucian ideas of filial piety. I get respecting your parents, but I don’t get the eternal and complete submission to them that Confucius seems to be advocating, and I really don’t get letting older siblings have some control over your life by virtue of being older. I think I need more than 12 hours of lectures for my modern Western sensibilities to really grasp that one.

Devotion to learning, though, I can really get behind. Listening to hours and hours of content about how much Confucius valued learning and study made me want to go back to school and get a Master’s degree. I also appreciated his emphasis on the value of ritual. I’ve somehow gained even more appreciation for ritual since leaving religion and I appreciate the value that Confucius ascribes to it (which mainly seems to be community cohesiveness and respect for tradition).

There are a lot of things to appreciate in the Analects. They have great historical value, they give insight into politics and culture at the time they were written, they have influenced East Asia strongly for literally thousands of years, and much of their focus on right living is still applicable to the modern day. None of the individual sayings are particularly long, and they feel a bit like they’re intentionally bite-sized to make it easier to puzzle over each.

And there’s definitely plenty to puzzle over. Some sayings are easy to comprehend, others I would not have figured out without the lecture series explaining the historical and cultural context that gives it meaning. I recommend reading the Analects, but if you have the opportunity to read them and then have someone spend several hours explaining the intricacies to you, that’s the way to do it.

Review: For Small Creatures Such As We

Title: For Small Creatures Such As We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

Author: Sasha Sagan

Genre: Philosophy

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parent, medical content, grief

Back Cover:

Sasha Sagan was raised by secular parents, the astronomer Carl Sagan and the writer and producer Ann Druyan. They taught her that the natural world and vast cosmos are full of profound beauty, that science reveals truths more wondrous than any myth or fable.

When Sagan herself became a mother, she began her own hunt for the natural phenomena behind our most treasured occasions–from births to deaths, holidays to weddings, anniversaries, and more–growing these roots into a new set of rituals for her young daughter that honor the joy and significance of each experience without relying on religious framework.

As Sagan shares these rituals, For Small Creatures Such as We becomes a moving tribute to a father, a newborn daughter, a marriage, and the natural world–a celebration of life itself, and the power of our families and beliefs to bring us together.

Review:

After getting so much out of Casper ter Kuile’s The Power of Ritual, I had really high hopes for this one. And I think those high hopes are ultimately what ended up being the problem.

I had expected this to be similar to The Power of Ritual – why humans like and/or need rituals, what makes them meaningful, and what kinds of rituals we do. I was also hoping for some more how-to, some sort of instruction manual for creating my own meaningful rituals in a secular life. But that’s not really what I got. This is mostly memoir, combining Sasha’s memories of her father and her childhood, the secular rituals she experienced growing up, her experience with Jewish rituals as a secular Jew, and her hopes for ritual-making with her baby daughter.

It’s divided into chapters focusing on the different kinds of rituals that humans have done across the centuries. The main themes are seasons of nature (winter, spring, summer, fall) and seasons of the human life (birth, puberty, marriage, death). Sasha touches briefly on traditions across the world around these seasons, and illustrates each one with her life and the rituals she experienced – either from the wider American culture, her Jewish heritage, or ones she or her parents created – around those seasons.

This feels in many ways like an overview. I learned a lot more about Jewish life-phase rituals from Here All Along and more about seasons of nature rituals from my own research during my pagan phase. I did find the insights about how many disparate rituals can be grouped under the categories of “seasons of nature” or “important times in the human life cycle” interesting, and I appreciated the connections Sasha drew between so many different religious and cultural traditions. But the heart of this book is memoir – Sasha’s life as Carl Sagan’s daughter, her childhood, and her hopes for her daughter in the future. I think I would have been more interested in the memoir aspect if I knew anything about Carl Sagan and had that connection to draw on.

This is not a bad book. In fact, it was quite interesting in a lot of ways. I had just hoped for more information about how to set up rituals and make them meaningful in a secular life, and did not expect it to be so much memoir.

Review: Four Thousand Weeks

Title: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Author: Oliver Burkeman

Genre: Philosophy/Productivity

Trigger Warnings: Discussions of death and mortality

Back Cover:

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless struggle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society–and that we could do things differently.

Review:

This is a bizarre book to review. While I was reading it I found it groundbreaking and earth-shattering, but as soon as I stopped reading for a moment I could no longer remember what was actually so profound about it.

I can’t even really give you a succinct statement on what the book was about, because it was “about” many things. It was about how leisure has become another task, the failure of time management systems, the invention of the modern idea of time during the Industrial Revolution, the creation of meaning through conscious choices, and that you are definitely going to die someday and the end is sooner than it seems. And probably a few other things too, there were a lot of topics in this book.

If I boil it down to a single message, it would be something like, “Life is short and you can’t do everything, so pick what you actually want to do and ignore the rest.” Which is not at all groundbreaking and is a message I’ve heard from a good 80% of self-help products. Oliver does make some good points. He points out that time management systems fail because they’re built on the premise of helping you to do everything when we, as finite mortals, are inherently incapable of doing everything. He also proposes that doing things has meaning because we are choosing to do that with our limited time to the exclusion of all the other things we could do with our time – which is an interesting point to think about, but he uses the example of a marriage having meaning because you chose this one person to the exclusion of all others, and as a polyamorous person that’s not at all what gives my marriage meaning.

I think it’s the way that it’s written that makes this book feel so profound, because every time I put it down the feeling of this book containing incredible deep wisdom completely disappeared. You can’t do everything, and this fact should be obvious. But I suppose we all need reminders every now and then, and this is a good book to remind you of that fact.

Review: How Propaganda Works (DNF)

Title: How Propaganda Works

Author: Jason Stanley

Genre: Philosophy

Trigger Warnings: Racism (mentions), the Holocaust (mentions)

Read To: 20%

Back Cover:

Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren’t problems for us–not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. In “How Propaganda Works,” Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy–particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality–and how it has damaged democracies of the past.

Focusing on the shortcomings of liberal democratic states, Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda’s selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is sometimes used to mask an undemocratic reality. Drawing from a range of sources, including feminist theory, critical race theory, epistemology, formal semantics, educational theory, and social and cognitive psychology, he explains how the manipulative and hypocritical declaration of flawed beliefs and ideologies arises from and perpetuates inequalities in society, such as the racial injustices that commonly occur in the United States.

“How Propaganda Works” shows that an understanding of propaganda and its mechanisms is essential for the preservation and protection of liberal democracies everywhere.

Review:

I was expecting this book to be about how propaganda works. The psychology behind it being effective, why it’s so insidious, how nobody is immune to its influences but a few tips you can use to be more aware of it or idenitify if what you’re seeing is actually propaganda, maybe some case studies of propaganda campaigns and why they worked and what they did. I was, however, very wrong.

This is a work of political philosophy. It’s about how the bad kind of propganda (he tries to make a distinction between regular propaganda and bad propaganda but I didn’t really understand the difference) undermines liberal democracy. Philosophy can be interesting, but I am not much into politics and I don’t understand political philosophy at all really. I can’t discuss the content of this book ecause it was hard to focus on and I had very little idea what it was talking about.

This is an academic work more than anything else. I’m not saying that lay people should never read academic works (I’m currently reading an academic work about women’s dress in modern India, and it’s fascinating), but I am not interested in academic works of political philosophy. I had expected it to be more of a psychology book for the average person. I don’t think it’s a bad book, and for someone interested in political philosophy it will probably be quite good. It just wasn’t what I wanted or expected.

Review: The Art of Dying Well

Title: The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life

Author: Katy Butler

Genre: Philosophy/Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parents, medical content, terminal illness, cancer, grief

Back Cover:

The Art of Dying Well is about living as well as possible for as long as possible and adapting successfully to change. Packed with extraordinarily helpful insights and inspiring true stories, award-winning journalist and prominent end-of-life speaker Katy Butler shows how to thrive in later life (even when coping with a chronic medical condition), how to get the best from our health system, and how to make your own “good death” more likely. This handbook of step by step preparations—practical, communal, physical, and sometimes spiritual—will help you make the most of your remaining time, be it decades, years, or months.

Butler explains how to successfully age in place, why to pick a younger doctor and how to have an honest conversation with her, when not to call 911, and how to make your death a sacred rite of passage rather than a medical event.

This down-to-earth manual for living, aging, and dying with meaning and even joy is based on Butler’s own experience caring for aging parents, as well as hundreds of interviews with people who have successfully navigated a fragmented health system and helped their loved ones have good deaths. It also draws on interviews with nationally recognized experts in family medicine, palliative care, geriatrics, oncology, hospice, and other medical specialties. Inspired by the medieval death manual Ars Moriendi, or the Art of Dying, The Art of Dying Well is the definitive update for our modern age, and illuminates the path to a better end of life.

Review:

This is not really what I expected. I expected something more about getting your affairs in order and Medical Power of Attorneys and deciding what kinds of medical interventions you do and don’t want – something similar to Being Mortal. There is some of that in this book, but it’s also much, much more.

The Art of Dying Well is basically a step-by-step (or more accurately, stage-of-aging-by-stage-of-aging) guide to both the years leading up to your death and the dying process itself. The focus is on what you can do to maintain your functionality and independence as long as possible and limit your suffering when the inveitable becomes immediate. Whether you’re just starting to realize you’re no longer a spring chicken (or just received a terminal diagnosis), too far gone to make your own decisions (that chapter is addressed to caretakers), or somewhere in between, Katy talks about what’s going to be most important going forward, what you should focus on at this stage, some recommendations for programs, tools, and care, and which medical interventions are worthwhile and which will do more harm than good. Interspersed with all this is invaluable advice about having hard conversations, making sure your doctor and family are clear on what you want, getting paperwork in order, and navigating the American healthcare system.

Despite what you may guess from the fact that I have a “Required Reading” page on this blog, I don’t often like saying “everyone should read this book.” But if you are going to die someday or know someone who will, this book is full of useful information. Not all of it will be entirely relevant if you’re not American, but there’s still enough that isn’t America-specific to make this an invaluable resource. Death is scary and nobody knows for sure what happens after, if anything, but The Art of Dying Well is as close to a how-to manual for dying as you’re going to find.

Review: Being Mortal

Title: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Author: Atul Gawande

Genre: Current Issues/Philosophy

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of parents, dying, aging, medical procedures, cancer

Back Cover:

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.

Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.

In his bestselling books, Gawande has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures–in his own practices as well as others’–as life draws to a close. Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life–all the way to the very end.

Review:

This is a really interesting book, and though the topic of illness, aging, and inevitable death is not exactly one people like thinking about, Atul Gawande proposes that the process of dying would be a less horrible experience if we did think about them.

There are a lot of different examples covered in this book, from people interviewed for this book to people Atul has seen in his own practice as a surgeon to his own father’s process of dying. But everything really comes down to a few main ideas:

• You are 100% going to die eventually and it will likely be a process, so it’s essential to think about what you want and tell the people who will be making decisions for you when you’re incapacitated.
• The medical profession is more focused on solving individual problems than how those solutions will affect quality of life, even in terminal patients, and that’s something that should be changed.
• Elder care facilities like nursing homes are more focused on safety than supporting those people who need daily assistance to live the life they want, and that also should be changed.
• Every medical intervention comes with a quality of life tradeoff, and people who are terminal (whether from age or illness) and their families are usually happier and more satisfied if quality of life takes precidence over extending life.

Though at times the book felt a little longer than it needed to be and the tendency to start an example, move on to another one, and then go back to finish the first made it hard to follow at times (possibly exaggerated by the fact that I read this as an audiobook), this was a really good read. Not necessarily one that I enjoyed, but it was engaging and I think the topic is important.

I have been thinking about and preparing for my death for the last few years. I’m not terminally ill or elderly or anything, I just have a certainty (despite a complete lack of evidence) that I’m going to die at or before age 30. So these kinds of discussions don’t make me uncomfortable because I’ve been having them with myself and my husband fairly regularly. If you’re not prepared to face your own mortality, this book may make you very uncomfortable. But at the same time, it’s important to think about what trade-offs you’re willing to make and what things are non-negotiable for you. If it came down to “This surgery will save your life but you won’t be able to do X anymore,” is it worth it to you to live without X or would you rather focus on comfort care than live without X? These are the kinds of questions this book makes you consider.

It also makes you rethink nursing homes. If you’ve ever visited an older relative in a nursing home, looked for a nursing home for yourself or your parent(s), or happen to be like me and did nurse aide clinicals in a nursing home, you know nobody likes being there and they’re sad, depressing places full of sad old people waiting to die. And this book makes a good point that nursing homes focus on safety over agency – keeping the people alive at the cost of giving them any control over their lives, being an institution instead of “home” for the people who live there.

This review could get really long if I addressed every good point it made. It made a ton of them, and has a bunch of stuff worth talking about. Though it doesn’t really give advice for actually having these conversations (my husband really does not think, “Happy birthday! Now that you’re getting older, let’s talk about end-of-life wishes” is going to go over well), they’re essential.

Review: How to Do Nothing

Title: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Author: Jenny Odell

Genre: Sociology/Philosophy

Trigger Warnings: Racism (mention), sexism (mention), destruction of environment, seizure (mention)

Back Cover:

This thrilling critique of the forces vying for our attention re-defines what we think of as productivity, shows us a new way to connect with our environment and reveals all that we’ve been too distracted to see about our selves and our world.

When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as… doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process.

Review:

I hate the title of this book, because How to Do Nothing has very little to do with how to do nothing. Why to Do Nothing would be slightly more accurate, but still misleading, because this book is not about “doing” at all, even doing nothing. It’s not a how-to guide in any sense, and in many senses it’s not even about doing nothing.

More than anything, this is a work of philosophy. It’s about context and temporality and how the modern world strips us of both. It’s about art, perception, communication, community, the destructive nature of capitalism, and birdwatching. It offers no how-tos and very few whys. The experience of reading it seemed very much like reading a long and rambling philosophy essay about how capitalism is commodifying attention, the value of art, the possibilities and benefits of changing your perception, how much humans need community, and the importance of seeing and experiencing nature.

I didn’t dislike this book. In fact, I enjoyed it a lot. It’s the first book in this vein I’ve read that acknowledges that capitalism is the underlying problem here. Even though it reads like a long and rambling philosophy essay, it’s highly engaging and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The only practical tips are those that the author talks about working for her, but read it like a personal journey and a work of philosophy and you’ll get a lot out of it. But whatever you think you’re going to get from a book titled How to Do Nothing, it’s not what you’re getting at all.