Posted on 06/09/2005 2:40:26 PM PDT by hinterlander
Los Angeles Times and New York Magazine blast conservative values.
Some on the Left continue to believe conservatives want to burn books.
When Congressional Quarterly columnist Craig Crawford, guest-hosting MSNBC’s “Countdown,” June 3, suggested that the May 30 Human Events list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries” might somehow be a first step toward banning books, Don Devine—a professor at Bellevue University and one of the “judges” who voted on creating the Human Events list—pleasantly pointed out that far from trying to ban the listed books, he actually taught many of them in his own classes.
Crawford’s confusion, however, was representative of one liberal stream of “thought” in the flood of commentary on the Human Events list that last week swept across the Internet. A recent Google check of “Ten Most Harmful Books” cross-referenced with “Human Events” turned up 18,500 web citations.
Beyond the blogosphere, representatives of both the Los Angeles and New York liberal establishments felt compelled to register their outrage at the list. Vexed that works such as those of sexologist Alfred Kinsey and anti-traditional-family feminist Betty Friedan would be included on a list that also included Marx, Hitler and Mao, New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait said in a column in the Los Angeles Times that the list “offers a fair window into the dementia of contemporary conservative thinking.”
Kinsey and Friedan, presumably, offer a fair window into the wholesomeness of contemporary liberal thinking.
New York Magazine placed the Human Events list in the “highbrow” but “despicable” quadrant of its “Approval Matrix”—just below a Turkish official’s act of detaining a teenage boy for reading a banned poet.
Liberals beware! The book list was merely a warm up. Next month Human Events will publish our list of the “Ten Most Harmful Government Programs.”
These we really do want to ban.
Ironically, liberals are the true reactionaries, which is what conservatives are often accused of being.
If they want to talk about book banning, they should talk to the ACLU about the Bible.
I seem to remember a certain liberal senator who ran for president recently who called for the banning of the book "Unfit for Command."
Uh, sorry to disappoint, but I understood HR's point to be to highlight the harmful consequences of social Darwinism and it's deterministic, materialist philosophy, not biological science. They probably should have put Spencer on the list instead of Darwin, but the point would have been lost because hardly anyone knows Spencer.
I would certainly like to know why they included that book among the most harmful. However, the way the concept of "Evolution" has become a quasi-justification for the notion that every change is a change for the better and that the values of the past are suspect merely because they are "of the past" -- that is indeed harmful. But I don't blame that on Darwin, myself.
You do know that many Southerners in the 1850's and thenabouts justified slavery on what they called "scientific" grounds and that some Nazis had an elaborate (and elaborately wacky) theory of racial superiority which pretended to have a basis in the idea of natural selection.
And some social theorists justified greed on the basis that aid to those in need worked against "evolution".
Again, it's hard to see how that's Darwin's fault, but it's also not entirely irrelevant to a discussion of Evolution considered not as a biological theory but as a kind of hermeneutic of history.
And sarcasticaly sneering at those who hold a view different from yours probably changes few minds, if that matters.
I view it as a list of books to be read to 'know your enemy'.
This entire report was an embarrassment. Human Events Online ought to just drop the matter and hope people forget about it.
And there's quite a difference between the two classes or levels of harm. You can certainly say that Kinsey or Mead was harmful -- they were -- but better not say it in the same breath as you say the same thing about Hitler or Mao. To put Ralph Nader on the same list as Marx or Lenin looks more like laying down a party line than saying anything real or significant.
Somebody who really knows the territory can say that Comte's or Mill's or Dewey's or Croly's book is dangerous, because he knows that the situation is more complicated than that and other statements can be made about such books as well. To tell people who've never heard of such writers that their books are dangerous looks shallow and even irresponsible. You have to take the time and go the distance with something, look at it from different angles and weigh its good and bad points before you can really pass judgment. Predigested condemnations beforehand can sometimes do more harm than good.
There've been a lot of liberal or leftwing responses to this and they show the same weakness. To say that Buckley's or Chambers's or Hayek's or Rand's books are dangerous looks ignorant and superficial. What they're saying is "I don't like this book or this author because of the consequences or associations such a work has." But for England in the 1940s or America in the 1950s, Hayek and Chambers gave well-needed insights. Those who aren't wholly given over to partisanship will recognize that. And something similar is probably true of some of the writers and books on HE's list as well.
A book that offers a hypothesis, whether it's the Origin of Species or Silent Spring or The Bell Curve shouldn't be condemned simply because we disagree with the uses the book is put to by others who want to exploit it. Ayn Rand, hated by plenty of people, finds a place on a lot of the left wing lists of bad or dangerous books, but as bad as her books are in some ways, they also made a contribution, and I'd have to say that the same may be true of Mill or Comte or Keynes as well.
They turn pale, shriek, and try to hide from it.
No, we've "moved on" to using the bilge leftists write as toilet paper. Let me tell you, Al Franken's books make Charmin feel like 80 grit sandpaper.
You forgot the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' as one of the most harmful books published in the last two centuries.
Not one of the fields of scientific inquiry cited requres acceptance of the evolutioniary world view as a pre-requisite to its frutiful study,interpretation or application.
>>And sarcasticaly sneering at those who hold a view different from yours probably changes few minds, if that matters.<<
Indeed.
No I am suggesting that without a theory of natural selection to explain the fact of evolutionary change there would be little cognitive understanding of genetic drift, the founder effect, hardy-weinburg equilibrium, allelic differences observed in molecular biology, allelic differences as it is applied to pharmacology, selective breeding, and paleontology. How can one make sense of all this without a rational theory to explain it? One can pre-suppose a supernatural explanation for all geological change and the observed mass extinctions; but that doesn't lead to any deep understanding of the actual history and forces that shape our planet.
Social darwinism is a red-herring. What most object to is dismissing the notion of a "special" creation for man. Social darwinism is, like most social "science", mainly a collection of one sided conjecture and pontification. Social darwinism ignores all the numerous symbiosis altruism and cooperation observed in nature that is needed to be a succesful species, especially among humans.
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