The Right to be Wrong by Ray Robertson: A book review
Originally published on Medium on Aug. 6, 2026
The comedian George Carlin supposedly once observed:
“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”
I was thinking about this joke after reading Ray Robertson’s The Right to Be Wrong. The recent book by the novelist and essayist from Toronto, who grew up near my hometown of Windsor, examines fundamentalism in today’s world. Not necessarily religious fundamental thinking, although there is some of that, but people who have a narrow-minded view about politics, art and other matters. People who think their opinions are revealed truths and that everyone else’s opinions are wrong.
Just visit Facebook or, better yet, Twitter if you want to see what I mean.
Robertson’s short book — it’s really a long essay, he explained during an appearance recently at Biblioasis Bookshop — reveals how most of us (present company included) fall into the trap of “moral certainty.” He’s guided by luminous figures in the arts and philosophy, especially the father of the essay Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Stoics.
For instance, Robertson cites Seneca in reminding the reader that opposites are a necessary part of life. Indeed, this is how we discover the nature of existence.
“To the Stoic, oligarchs and demagogues like Putin and Trump, for example, aren’t anomalies of existence or mere perverters of democracy and decency — they’re inevitable and necessary parts of life’s changing seasons, even if in the muddled moment it’s difficult to see how or why.”
According to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (who reminded us no man ever steps in the same river twice), evil and sickness exist in the world as do goodness and health. Robertson writes:
“‘To God all things are beautiful, good, and right,’” Heraclitus wrote; ‘men, on the other hand, deem some things right and other things wrong.’”
As Thomas Merton once observed: people aren’t necessarily seeking the truth but to “be in the right.”
Robertson touches on some hot-button topics in his book including, of course, Trump. And while The Right to Be Wrong delves into serious subjects and offers weighty ideas, his writing is easy to understand and leavened with humour.
For instance, he writes about how authority figures and authoritarian ideas thrive when people feel under threat. I guffawed when I read his next line: “Ergo, Donald Trump. It takes a village to raise an idiot.”
In our increasingly polarized political world, the left does not get a free pass either. Robertson, an avid music writer (and dedicated Deadhead), tells the reader how the word “woke” originated from a Lead Belly song about nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Arkansas but has been corrupted in recent years.
He writes woke “began as an African American call to remain alert to the fuckery afoot in everyday life — and particularly to police brutality and unjust police practices — and ended up being appropriated by academicians and other simple-minded single-cause reductionists as a one word solution to the majority of society’s ills.”
Robertson concludes The Right to Be Wrong with an admission: the final version of the book was very different from his first drafts which were flawed by angry outbursts. I liked that. It reminded me of how turned off I got after reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I felt that Dawkins’ reasoned arguments got lost in the same murky fundamental sea of religious zealots that he decries by coming across like a fundamentalist atheist. Robertson, who didn’t fall into that trap, says:
“In my blank castigation of others, I was often guilty of the same sort of easy theorizing, intellectual narrow-mindedness, and moral smugness that had initially started me writing the book in the first place.”
To be sure, the author doesn’t adopt a “relativistic apathy” in allowing others’ their own opinions or beliefs. Hence, his caustic comment about Trump and his MAGA cult.
Rather, like those earlier drafts of his book and the writer-editor relationship he cites in making it better, Robertson says differing opinions and ideas “can be illuminating and enriching and instructive and even necessary (if often initially painful to hear).”
The author returns to the intellectual giants — Montaigne, Marcus Aurelius and Nietzsche — in telling people that it is impossible to ascertain inviolable moral or metaphysical truths. Kinda like those drivers who share the road with you.
“In writing and thinking deeply, we gain entry to aspects of our ideas, emotions, and personalities that we often aren’t even aware exist. Transformative personal epiphanies tend not to occur, though, when your primary goal is to make sure you look smart and someone else looks stupid. And what could be more foolish than putting someone else’s condemnation ahead of your own personal growth and happiness?”
He concludes by citing Montaigne again in reminding readers there is no us and them, him/her and me: “they (Robertson’s emphases) are often, in part or in whole, us. And she and he are just as frequently you. And me.”
(My mind swerves here to the Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus” but I digress.)
There is a final observation from Montaigne that this doesn’t mean a person should not “criticize another unless he is clean himself, for then no one would criticize; nor indeed that he must be clean of the same sort of fault. But I mean that our judgment, laying upon another the blame which is then in question, should not spare us from judging ourselves.”
Reading a well-written and well-reasoned book like The Right to be Wrong whet my appetite for more and I found myself cycling back to Biblioasis to pick up a copy of Montaigne’s Essays. Which can be the ultimate compliment.
As Neil Peart, the legendary drummer for Rush, said when he quoted Bob Dylan in his acceptance speech to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: “The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”
Maybe Robertson’s book will inspire you too?
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and online publications for about 40 years and has published a book of short fiction, Stories in the Key of Song. Visit him at claudiodandrea.ca or read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Bluesky.
Claudio D'Andrea 
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