The Righteous Mind- Jonathan Haidt (2012)
This book explores the basis of moral reasoning. The tagline under the title is: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. For a while I’ve noticed the tendency we all have to claim principles, but the principles change if the situation does. Clearly then, something else is driving the car beside principles. This book explores that question. It’s divided into three sections. The first covers the hypothesis that intuitions comes first, reasoning follows after.
The basic idea in the first section is that quick intuitive reasoning has evolved. It is largely workable, as is evidenced by the fact that we are here. If it weren’t a good guide, we would never have gotten to this far, so clearly it works. Reasoning developed later with language, as a way of justifying ourselves and building alliances, so that we could maintain allies in conflicts, NOT as a tool of seeking truth.
The second section is an exploration of six different foundations of morality: Care/harm, Liberty/Oppression, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation. Each of these is an adaptive response to selective pressures. The main takeaway is that “there is more to morality than harm and fairness. These two foundations are perhaps THE primary concerns of Western liberals. But experiences in other countries where the moral matrices developed differently taught the author to see that conservative societies often place morality on a more balanced set of foundations.
The third section explores how evolution selects for efficiency by selecting both individual traits, AND group traits, because the ability to bind together increases our fitness. We have mechanisms that bind us to groups, but we can’t bind to everyone else, since 1) the group would be too large, and 2) we still compete with other groups evolutionarily. Religion played a crucial formative role in our ability to bind together. This also shows through politics.
The Progressive Miseducation of America- Corey Miller (2025)
This book was written by a friend of mine. Corey and I attended the same church when he was a student at Talbot, and we used to pray together in the mornings. He went on to become the president of Ratio Christi, a ministry aimed at impacting universities- at both the student and professor level. As he states, “As goes the university, so goes the culture”. The university is the incubator and disseminator of ideas in culture, and there are some highly destructive ideas that have come out of the universities in the last decades. But those ideas haven’t stayed on campus. Particularly over the last decade, these toxic ideas have become much more mainstream.
Corey is a philosopher by training, so he thinks deeply about these issues, and has a deep grasp of their philosophical roots. We use the word “woke” a lot in our cultural battles. A lot of people are unsure what exactly it even means. Corey defines it. Philosophy is built on three branches: metaphysics– the nature of reality; epistemology– theories of knowledge (how do you know what is real), and ethics– how then should we live given that reality.
Because these terrible ideas have become so mainstream, and we see the effects, this book is more focused on current political events than I am usually concerned with. I tend to focus more on the philosophical concepts rather than the day to day outworkings, and because Corey understands the conceptual roots, it makes the current events more interesting. But arguing over current events without an understanding the ideas that drive them, and why the specific implementations are so nasty, tends to devolve into team arguments, where we find ourselves supporting X because our team supports X, not because we really understand it.
The first part of the book describes the major component results of critical social justice, starting with the spread of “woke” itself. It covers gender ideologies, race, how critical studies are undermining even hard sciences, and finally how it has infected the church.
The second part of the book goes into more detail about the major ideological movements that have led to the situation: scientific naturalism, cultural Marxism, and postmodernism.
Scientific naturalism was the first ideological shift. It shifted the idea of truth to what could be demonstrated only through science. But empirical study can’t produce certainty. So truth was moved away from certainty to probability. By the time we got to Kant, philosophy had been reduced to a type of agnosticism.
The second ideological revolution was cultural Marxism. This was an offshoot of classical Marxism. But where classical Marxism saw the world in economic terms, cultural Marxism recognized that the proletariat wasn’t moving towards revolution because the foundational ideas of liberal capitalism had thoroughly penetrated not only the political institutions, but independent institutions as well. Therefore, if change was going to happen, those institutions would need to be changed first. Thus began a project of the long march through the institutions. Corey’s thesis is that the university is the curator of ideas, therefore the university is the first institution that must be taken over.
The third component, closely tied to cultural Marxism, is postmodernism. Ostensibly, postmodernism is about a radical skepticism in grand metanarratives. Truth and reality are constructed through sociolinguistic means. While there may be an objective reality out there, no one has access to it, so “reason” is a nonsensical term as far as getting us to objective reality. Theoretically, no system is any “better” than any other.
But if this were actually the case, one would expect postmodernists to be evenly distributed along the political spectrum. But they are not. They are monolithically left, and all the most important postmodernists: Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Rorty, were either communists, or sympathizers. Postmodernism is perhaps a way to deal with the repeated failed predictions of classical Marxism. Marx considered socialism the most scientifically valid and provable system. But after 100 years of failed predictions, Marxists had to deal with why. The answer, at least in some circles, was a rejection of objective truth altogether. Truth and reality were said to constructed primarily by language, which was linked to the dominant power. Whoever had the power, could prescribe the way language was used, and those usages would become truth.
Scientific naturalism first divorced truth from any absolute grounding in God, and instead grounded truth in human reason, acknowledging that we could never reach certainty.
The postmodernism divorced truth from any empirical grounding and declared it to be what we construct through language. In essence, we construct reality and truth from our words.
The third section of the book concerns itself with how Christians might respond to the ideological structure that dominates the intellectual landscape in the West. This will be done through demonstrating that Christianity is good for the world, Christian belief is reasonable, and then Christian belief is true.
The Italians- Luigi Barzini (1964)
The tagline on this book is “A full-length portrait featuring their manners and morals”.
Barzini writes of the tourists that come from all over to experience Italy, and how they are so often charmed. He speaks on what exactly that charm consists of. Part of it is the importance of spectacle to the Italians, which he says may simply be a way of making life seem less mundane. This of course leads to a lot of illusion, some of it purposefully deceptive, some of it self-deceptive, some of it for the mere attempt at making things “better”.
One really interesting chapter talks about 4 “evil spirits” that haunt Italians: Poverty, ignorance, injustice, and fear, and the corresponding hope in sistemazione– the hope that everything can be put in place, arranged, so that they can just finally not have to worry so much. “The hope of defeating fear, the mirage of a final sistemazione to end all sistemazioni, the dream of constructing a perfect and everlasting papier mache State, is so fascinating that they keep on voting for the same mass parties election after election.”
The story of Cola di Rienzo, from the 14th century, is told as an illustration of the showmanship. He tried to unite Italy but failed. To quote Barzini “He never for a moment suspected that it was not enough to build a life-like persuasive façade. The façade and reality, for him too, were one and the same thing.”
Barzini next looks at life in Italy and concludes that much of it is navigated purely through one’s own wits. Most Italians, he says, quickly grasp that personal power, to some degree, is about all that they can count on. That gets extended out to the individual’s role in the family too.
He looks at the Italian way of always hedging one’s views in public so that any way the wind blows, he can be seen as having been in support. This is only partly risk avoidance; it is also due to deep skepticism of solutions.
Sicily is covered, as the most prototypically Italian province in Italy. The older familial and feudal ties held most strongly in Sicily. Of course, the Mafia had to be covered as well, as an example of how this mindset manifests itself.
The Italian army defeat at Fornovo against a fleeing, weakened, and demoralized French force in 1495 is seen by Italians as a judgment on their nation for their sins, their character, and their vices. This set the table for the next few centuries of subservience, and the general consensus among the surrounding nations that Italy could be invaded at will, since the Italians were incapable of defending themselves.
The Baroque style, highly ornate to the point of superfluous, is the metaphor for the penultimate chapter. While Italy was under Spanish or French domination, Italian’s chafed at their domination, but excelled at certain arts. There was a lot of “Italian” stuff being done, at times exceptionally, but underneath there was no independent Italy. Baroque is also the symbol of regimentation- the new large superstates like France and Spain that were imposing their will. The Italians went along only on the surface.