Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

Some months ago, when I was trying to figure out what happened with that assembly action/manager termination which eventually became two paid commentaries here in CVN, Kyle Clayton suggested I read a book, an amazing book in fact, called “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt, subtitled “Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.” The author is a moral psychologist. He takes the reader on a thoroughly engaging journey to name and understand what goes into our taking a moral stance. No surprise that those we call “progressive” and “conservative” are not speaking the same language. However, it’s really, really, really interesting that they are operating from very different sets of what he calls moral matrices. He comes up with six matrices (not listed here) with these results: American liberals lean heavily on two, American libertarians lean heavily on one, and American social conservatives (not the Republican Party) lean on all six fairly equally. What an eye-opener! If you’re like me, you do much better when you understand how things work. Can there please be a mayor/assembly (and anyone who wants in) book club to read and discuss this book? Though there are four new members in that group. Unless Doug Olerud is some sort of whiz kid social conservative who can lead, I’m going to predict that this assembly will be the same old, same old, us vs. them ad infinitum. It’s virtually impossible to do otherwise. We are both chimp (individualistic) and bee (we appreciate a hive).

Evelyna Vignola