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“The book takes aim at fundamentalism in all its forms, political and personal, secular and religious. It examines how rigid belief systems flatten public debate and turn difference into betrayal, whether through outrage, exclusion, or cancellation. Along the way, it raises uncomfortable questions about what happens to art, politics, and everyday conversation when curiosity gives way to purity tests.
Sharp, accessible, and laced with keen humour, even as it tackles serious ground, The Right to Be Wrong makes a clear case for intellectual humility and independent thought. All while arguing that the freedom to be mistaken is essential if we hope to learn, grow, and live with one another in a divided world.”
—Open Book
“Robertson’s slim volume – published, appropriately enough, at the start of Freedom to Read Week – takes as its subject the cleavages – political, religious, ideological – that divide us into reactionary groups incapable of countenancing debate or dissent. It offers a cogent critique of binary distinctions like right and left, which are not only political fictions but are frequently used as a mechanism to separate complex individuals into undifferentiated tribes, the better to enforce ideological conformity upon them.
The flip side of self-righteousness is self-awareness, and while we are drowning in the former, the latter is in regrettably short supply. This is what Robertson argues for in his book: supplanting sanctimony and certainty in the absolute correctness of one’s own ideas and opinions with qualities that are much more useful but also more difficult to sustain: doubt, empathy, and humility. It is these attributes that might ultimately permit us to break through the miasma of self-serving cultural flotsam surrounding us and more directly tap into what makes us essentially human.
The ability, not to say the responsibility, to disagree is one of the key factors missing from our discourse and Robertson argues persuasively for its restoration.”
–-Steven Beattie, That Shakespearean Rag
“`To be able to destroy with good conscience — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.’” This line, attributed to Aldous Huxley, comes up frequently in my conversation with novelist Ray Robertson when we meet to discuss his new book, The Right to Be Wrong (Cormorant Books, 2026).
A book which would have been classified as a polemic, if it were polemical. He chose a decidedly calmer tone for it, and turned to what he calls his Great Dead heroes, the writers and thinkers from the past who grappled with the question of tolerance of difference – of opinion and creed. And those who acknowledged that humans are flawed, even when we park ourselves “on the right side of history”. Robertson decided to avoid the giddiness that comes from tearing things down in a book about the giddiness of tearing things down. OK, I tell him, but what’s wrong with an angry op-ed piece tone? The period in Canada and the US from at least 2020 to today damn well deserves an angry polemic or three.
`It was too easy,’ he says. `I don’t want to yell back at people who yell.'”
—Lydia Perovic, Long Play
