MY PERSONAL LIBRARY 99

Today I want to discuss two books.

In his The Moral Animal: Why We Are The Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

(1995), journalist Robert Wright writes about what was back then, in the 1990s, a new science: evolutionary psychology. It’s a science that explains human psychology using neo-Darwinian logic, in the sense that our moral choices are explained in terms of the evolutionary advantage deriving from them. Essentially, evolutionary psychology is predicated on the idea that all of human moral behaviour is aimed at increasing the individual’s chances of passing on his/her genes to the next generation.

Jordan Peterson, considered one of the foremost intellectuals of our times, is an exponent of evolutionary psychology and Wright’s book is a good primer for those who follow Professor Peterson’s lectures on YouTube. It is telling that those values we consider “conservative” are actually the most consonant with evolutionary psychology, whereas “liberal” values are the product of armchair thinking divorced from empirical observation and scientific deduction from such observation.

For instance, Peterson makes the point that whereas liberals insist on positive discrimination to achieve gender equality, in Scandinavia, where society has fully embraced hardcore liberal values, people move toward “traditional” gender roles. It would seem that “traditional” gender roles are embedded in our psychology.

Some people argue that we’re now creating “evolution” – modern humanity’s “evolving” toward liberalism. I think such wild assertions are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the long-term nature of “evolution”. But, yes, self-delusion could lead to a willed misunderstanding of “evolution”.

The other book I want to highlight is Ġużé Bonnici’s In-Novelli

(Għaqda tal-Malti – Università, 2007). Here I must declare that I have a conflict of interest, as I was involved in the editorial board of that book and I even translated Bonnici’s short story La Pazza

into Maltese. Dr Bonnici, who died at the young age of 33, was one of the founders of the Għaqda tal-Malti and was also a prolific writer who not only wrote fiction but also published two books on medicine in Maltese and a book on politics.

There’s one short story in particular which I like a lot, called Ġenn! in which Bonnici writes about a megalomaniac who’s committed to a mental hospital and in his madness comes up with a theory on hypocrisy and hypocrites. Bonnici is obviously being devious and ironic – the madman is not mad at all, and his observations are as sane as can be. But because they are also offensive, the authors feels bound to shroud them in the words of a “madman”.