Posted on 08/24/2008 7:16:12 AM PDT by Publius804
A Good Book About Bad Books
by Logan Gage
8/23/08
10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help
Benjamin Wiker, Regnery, 260 pages, $27.95
If ever there were a book designed specifically for the enjoyment of InsideCatholic readers, surely it is Benjamin Wiker's new 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help. Wiker should be renowned (if he is not already) for Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists -- a book that at once exposes both the ancient philosophical antecedents and modern cultural consequences of Darwinism.
In the present book, the professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville proposes not a new era of book burning, as some might suppose, but rather a learned critique of toxic ideas floating in our cultural water. Wiker plays the role of EPA in the "Great Books" world, covering Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx/Engels, Mill, Darwin, Nietzsche, Lenin, Sanger, Hitler, Freud, Mead, Kinsey, and Friedan.
10 Books's two main virtues consist in exposing our often blind worship of "Science" and revealing the central mistake of the past several centuries of intellectual thought: the attempt to destroy and replace the West's traditional understanding of the human person and his place in the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at insidecatholic.com ...
Silent Spring may have lead to the death of 30 million (coincidently non-white) children by malaria in the past 40+ years. On the basis of body count alone it deserves serious consideration.
Silent Spring was also the first “environmental crisis” book. I don’t think Al Gore would have gotten nearly as much traction as he has if Rachael Carson hadn’t led the way.
I guess that makes her Margaret Sanger's soul-sister.
Keep in mind that, when released, Mein Kampf was not widely read. It was sold heavily AFTER Hitler took power, and not before. In fact, I have read many who said it was only bought by many Germans to seem like good members of the party, and that many either never read it, or never finished it (because it is so horribly written).
Also, do not forget that most who did read the book already held the same beliefs as Hitler. Both his anti-semitism and his feelings of betrayal after the First World War were fairly common.
The greatest influence of Mein Kampf is the one it didn’t have, which is the fact it was ignored by the leaders of the west as being a road map for what to expect if Hitler was appeased.
Its not rational science and reason we blindly worship, the list of those things includes religion.
Kinsey is too disgusting to mention in mixed company, .
One cannot reasonably expect reasoned discourse to follow such a predicate statement;
and one is not disappointed.
To be fair, Mead, Marx, Engels and many of the rest on this list were way wrong and, in Mead's case, simply dishonest. The books didn't screw up our culture, the screwed up among us wrote books. This book would easily make the list of such books.
Your explanation is inadequate.
Succeeding launches and orbits mystifyingly confirmed the same thing.
And, you also fail to account for the extensive research uncovering von Braun’s wise-spread but quiet efforts to get other physicists to explain the discrpencies.
Raging blind bias is not a very good foundation for truth.
I clicked on this link from another post. THANKS A BUNCH! This looks like an excellent book and I love the title. Who says those Franciscans don’t have a good sense of humor?
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