Credit: Enver Rahmanov via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.
Every now and then you come across a book, a film, an article or a TV show that helps you to make a little bit more sense of the world. I had such an experience recently when reading Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind. Rich in evolutionary theory and practical advice, Gilbert’s book describes how the coming together of our ‘mammalian’ and ‘human’ brains has created seemingly incompatible capacities for love and destruction. Modern society, he argues, has been structured in such a way as to encourage the latter while diminishing the former through our economies, the stories our politicians tell, and the examples they set.
