The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

The subtitle of this book is: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.  I have a feeling that the objective our book group had in mind when we chose this book was to learn some techniques for bridging the liberal/conservative divide - or at least how we might have a civil conversation across that divide.  We should have paid closer attention to that subtitle.  Although Haidt offers some insights in the end, this is mostly a story about why the divide exists and will probably continue to exist - and about "elephants" and their drivers. His field of study is moral psychology and he starts from a premise of the existence of 6 or maybe 7 distinct moral matrices.  Although my pages were bursting with lime green important point indicators, I was glad to be done.  It wasn't that it was a slog or possible psyco-babble as much as I found myself looking for ways to dispute his arguments and of course discovering major flaws.  The discussion between myself and haidt being profoundly one-sided, we will never know.  However once his ideas get inside your head, it is hard to let them go.