What I Am Reading

Books on my pile include:

• Katherine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975).
• Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality (John Wiley & Sons, 2012)

Tait describes how Russell's vision of how children should be raised erected barriers between her father, herself, and other family members. (Tait and her older brother John were by Russell's second wife, Dora Winifred Black.) If only men and women were raised rationally and to live by reason, life would be much improved. But this belief did not work out all that well for her in many ways.

And that humans do not follow reason is a theme of Mooney's. The science of motivated reasoning, behavioral economics, etc., shows that humans cannot be made to follow reasoning. I've previously noted some of the studies on which Mooney draws.

So these two books share a common anti-utopian theme.