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Comment by doone on May 21, 2012 at 4:45pm

Bookcase of the Day: Going Up

May. 21, 2012

I always wanted to be a tiny elf who could use books as stairs and drink tea out of acorn tops and such. Maybe I’ll just paint my staircase.

Comment by Adriana on May 18, 2012 at 7:24am

I'm not too keen on reading Haidt's book right now. I understand his point about moral intuitions very well, but his assertion that conservatives have a wider or better map of the "moral domain" is absurd. Haidt makes 5 categories (like any categories, they are human-made), then claims conservatives get all 5, liberals though, and on the basis of that declares conservatives have a better grasp of morality. It seems like a really big tautology to me. We discussed this in Atheist Morality at some point, at length.

Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on May 18, 2012 at 1:23am

Another one for your lists:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt

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, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. 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.

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Comment by doone on May 17, 2012 at 7:07am

Read More!

May. 16, 2012

Comment by Dallas Gaytheist on April 23, 2012 at 2:56pm

I just ran across this browsing some of the links from a link doone posted in another group. This looks like a very interesting book, one I'll have to add to my list.  - Dallas

 

Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives

by Maria Popova

What Galileo has to do with the economy, or how Wall Street is moulding your taste in art.

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Some stories become so sticky, so pervasive that we internalize them to a point where we no longer see their storiness — they become not one of many lenses on reality, but reality itself. And breaking through them becomes exponentially difficult because part of our shared human downfall is our ego’s blind conviction that we’re autonomous agents acting solely on our own volition, rolling our eyes at any insinuation we might be influenced by something external to our selves. Yet we are — we’re infinitely influenced by these stories we’ve come to internalize, stories we’ve heard and repeated so many times they’ve become the invisible underpinning of our entire lived experience.

That’s exactly what F. S. Michaels explores in Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything — a provocative investigation of the dominant story of our time and how it’s shaping six key areas of our lives: our work, our relationships with others and the natural world, our education, our physical and mental health, our communities, and our creativity.

The governing pattern a culture obeys is a master story– one narrative in society that takes over the others, shrinking diversity and forming a monoculture. When you’re inside a master story at a particular time in history, you tend to accept its definition of reality. You unconsciously believe and act on certain things, and disbelieve and fail to act on other things. That’s the power of the monoculture; it’s able to direct us without us knowing too much about it.” ~ F. S. Michaels

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Comment by Bo Fowler on April 10, 2012 at 5:04am

Just had a fun interview with Indie Bookspot  http://indiebookspot.com/2012/04/08/bo-fowler-interview-you-can-say...

Comment by Sydni Moser on March 14, 2012 at 8:35am

Comment by Sydni Moser on March 14, 2012 at 8:31am

Comment by Sydni Moser on March 14, 2012 at 8:11am

Comment by Sydni Moser on March 14, 2012 at 8:10am

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