Posted on 05/31/2005 8:48:47 AM PDT by hinterlander
HUMAN EVENTS asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Each panelist nominated a number of titles and then voted on a ballot including all books nominated. A title received a score of 10 points for being listed No. 1 by one of our panelists, 9 points for being listed No. 2, etc. Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing.
(Excerpt) Read more at humaneventsonline.com ...
This is not to say we should allow our children access to just anythng at all: there are CDs and tv shows and video games and yes, books, that I do not allow my daughter to see..
However I also believe in personal responsibility, including personal responsibility for the future. I make it a POINT to collect banned books and "subversive literature" because I want an historical record amongst other things.
Then there is this: depending on how thngs go, I may SOMEDAY actually REQUIRE my daughter to read some of these books.
Know thine enemy.
Very well put. Thank you.
I've done some Googling around and I've found that a number of commentators have construed his writings as advocating full license for all manner of private sexual deviancy. But since he never came out and said that, and since his book would have been resoundingly denounced if he had, I'd say that a lot of his comments were taken out of context by modern libertarians. Apparently, modern social conservatives like Bennett and Bork have done the same.
"Harmful books? No. No harmful books. Harmful people."
Ah, really, ideas and books had *nothing* to do with the 100 million killed by communism, the 40 million killed by WWII that Hitler (author of Mein Kampf) started? Ideas are all 'okay' no matter the consequences of the actions of those who believe those ideas? ...
sounds like you were raised on bad book #5 ....
"#5. Democracy and Education
Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36"
Darwin did not say man came from apes. Even if he did, who made the Apes? God did. And who here can say that God is not capable of instilling within His creation the ability to adapt by changes in allelles?
Alls Darwin did is propose that by natural selection those who have mutations that provide a reproductive benefit are likely to thrive, passing on that phenotype.
Is this as harmful as murdering millions of people in concentration camps? Please respond to that question.
Comte was first to apply materialistic reduction to all elements of human society in detail.
That foolish fancy, 'positivism', is the root cause of present day social breakdown induced by 'social democracy' and the 'welfare' state, or any other variant of 'progressive', 'modern' thought that seeks to 'improve' humankind..
Wagner's philosophy was most certainly bad, and I believe it is expressed to some extent in his music. That doesn't mean he wasn't a genius though.
Utilitarianism was Jeremy Bentham and Nominalism goes back to Epicuris if not further.
Stuart was a mini-me to Bentham and then he met a girl. That kinda changed his outlook on the "purely intellectual".
Oddly enough in Mill's only work on Utiliarianism he set himself up against Emmanual Kant the bete noir of some folks here.
I tend to think that the vile ideas in those books (at least some of them) have caused real harm. I wouldn't suggest banning them or burning them, but quite often the end result is that when people pick up those books and start acting out those vile ideas, rather than a book getting burned, people (often thousands or hundreds of thousands) get killed.
So you are ok with the liberals acalling any books that are clearly pro-USA as harmful, right? Or are the only books that are "harmful" the ones disliked on FR?
"Personally I would place Origin of the Species at number 1. Certainly neither Marx, nor Hitler's books would have had the philosophical underpinnings they did except for Darwin's efforts."
I completely disagree.
In Marx's case, there is no connection and moreover, his work (Communist manisfesto) was published *before* Darwin, and rested on completely different foundations (errors about labor theory of value, German Hegelian philosophy and a very *unDarwinian* theory of history and economics).
I personally think Freud's work should have been on the list and Darwin's work off it.
If you want to see Darwin's real influence on economics, look at "Bio-nomics", a very good book that explains economic behavior and change in organic ways and which 'rescues' classical economics from the errors of 'equilibrium' economics.
Darwin has been influential and controversial, but not negative. Accusing Darwin of something bad because of the work of others is like saying Einstein's 'relativity' is some how responsible for moral relativism (they have nothing to do with eachother).
Marx and Freud otoh have been *proven wrong* and yet their work has influenced leftist scholars even up to today. Freud in particular, attacked traditional morality by positing dangers in the interactions with children by parents, assuming there is some 'repressed' urges, and wrongly concocting meanings in dreams. Wrong. Schizophrenia, we now know is brain chemical imbalances, not due to how you were potty-trained, etc. Freudian analysis was a fraud, helped only by the fact that every mentally imbalance person is helped by at least being aware of their emotions and impulses, but harmed by the phony Freudian assumptions built on how to change behavior. But what has made Freud harmful really is not how he retarded/distorted brain science, but how leftwing philosophers have used his ideas to apply it to societies, and assume that (a) ancient ills have effects today, and (b) people repress true immoral desires and 'repressing' such impulses is unhealthy.
In other words, phony science in the service of deconstructing morality.
... that is a constant theme of these 'bad books', they challenged the orthodoxy with a 'bright idea' that turned out later to be a hoax: Kinsey, Margaret Mead, Freud, etc. Same story different topic. Those hoexes in turn was used to get moraliy undermined.
I happen to agree with much of what Tancredo says about illegal immigratrion. However, to most liberals and some GOP'ers, and even some around here, his ideas are 'harmful'. ome here think they are 'harmful' to the GOP.
Mill jumped on to Benthamite "utilitarianism", did he not?
Utilitarianism is an incorrect and dnagerous moral stance that has been a basis for 'collectivism' ethics in the 20th century. It could be for that reason that it was deemed harmful.
If i do my job right, and teach her how to think, she should be..
(hello! Long time, no see!)
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