10 Books That Screwed Up The World [Reader Post]

How can you leave off the “noble” Koran? I would nominate it as first among equals.

Harold Robbin’s life works probably merits an honorable mention.

Nothing by Gore Vidal or Chomsky?

Yeah, the Holy Cow Ran should be on the list.

But, without these books, we never would have had Al Gore’s books!!11! Oh noes!

What about Silent Spring?

Atlas Shrugged

“… I’ve been reading … [“10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help” ] that I think is giving me the straight answer. … I don’t want to give too much away”

SG: Ruin ‘The End’, will it … !?

Snerd

How can you leave off the “noble” Koran?

Wiker is religious and his principal bone to pick is not with competing religious works, but with various kinds of materialist philosophies which propose to make religion obsolete. He’s certainly fighting on a lot of fronts here – broadly I’d say you have books on eugenics, communism, utilitarianism, and sexual psychology, together with Nietzsche who is a little hard to classify.
Meade, Kinsey and to a lesser extent Freud are all easy targets who fabricated many of their results to suit their own ideas.
I like his list of utilitarian books as a sketch of the history of ideas – Machiavelli, then Hobbes and finally Mill, followed by the split into two competing schools of thought: the eugenicists who thought to remake man, and the communists who wanted to remake society. Identifying Rousseau as a precursor to the Communists is insightful.
It’s interesting that Meade, Kinsey and Friedan even make the list, in my opinion – these are people who are largely unknown outside the US and I would say that their role in the shaping history is slight compared to the others. But after all I haven’t read what Wiker has to say on the topic.

joie2: “… Blaming the Bible or any of these books, for that matter, is too simplistic. As Shakespeare said, “The fault lies in ourselves, Horatio, not in our stars” … ”

SG: I am glad to see Will did not buy into all the ‘Celebrity’ and ‘Hollywood’ “stars” crap either ….!

joie2: “… People will twist holy books any way they can. With the books above, they don’t have to do quite so much twisting!”

SG: Hermeneutic ‘accuracy’ ‘twisting’ towards absolutism … Surely the context into which these books spoke is where the value of their concepts really apply? Surely the ‘I think, therefore I am’, speaks to freeing the individual from Church Authority and the current Social Consciousness of the time, in spite of the problematic Dualism introduced?

joie2: “… My main point is the culture that has been formed. There is a pattern and a direction that I recognize in what has been happening. Most of us no longer have the background that an education used to give us. The thought that has arisen from these books are a poor substitute for some of the classic knowledge we have abandoned.”

SG: Well … what for example? And how would we how what the ‘abandon classic knowledge’ was, but for books!?

Hopefully you aren’t going to go on about the “Culture Warz” stuff …. talk about exploiting the “Most of us no longer have the background that an education used to give us”, problem.

Snerd

mlajoie2,

Thank you for your gracious response to my deliberately provocative post. It is to your credit.

I didn’t really think you advocated burning books. But if certain books can be said to have led to a debased and destructive culture (a premise with which I disagree), wouldn’t the world be better off without them? If on the other hand, as I believe, we all benefit from a free marketplace of ideas, why subscribe to Mr. Wiker’s calculatedly low-brow assertion that certain books “screwed up the world?”

Nor do I believe you that think Obama is Hitler. But then why link him in even the most tangential way to Hitler?

Ideas do have consequences. On the other hand, is your post to blame for Starboard’s bigoted characterization of the holy book of 1.3 billion human beings? I think not. Starboard is responsible for his own positions.

No hard feelings, my friend. There never were, nor should there be.

Sne(R)d G(R)onk,

How long will it be befo(R)e you stop you(R) childish stupidity?

c(R)aig: “… Sne(R)d G(R)onk, How long will it be befo(R)e you stop you(R) childish stupidity?”

SG: Well c(R)aig, if you got the point, wouldn’t it read … Sner(D) Gronk, How long will it be before you stop your chil(D)ish stupi(D)ity?”

It’s gettin’ pretty bad, we I have to “(R)ight” your lines for you …!

Snerd

Re “It’s interesting that Mead, Kinsey and Friedan even make the list, in my opinion – these are people who are largely unknown outside the US and I would say that their role in the shaping history is slight compared to the others”

You have a major point there. Trends towards atheism have gone massively further in Europe, East Asia, Canada and New Zealand than in the United States, and by that logic alone Wiker’s focus needs to be on authors who are as well-known as possible in those nations, rather than those chiefly known in the United States.

This is particularly true for Kinsey. Contrary to what many of both his supporters and his detractors claim, Kinsey in no way invented the idea of “free love” or the legitimacy of extramarital sexuality. Havelock Ellis – old enough to have been Kinsey’s father – advocated free love in the 1900s and the Weimar Republic attempted to practice it in the 1920s before Kinsey even began his research and at the same time Mead did hers. Given that Wiker says the books he includes were meant to be in “pamphlet” form, including Havelock Ellis’ “The Psychology of Sex” or something by Fromm or Wilhelm Reich would be more consistent than having “Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male”, which I coudl never understand.

As for Friedan, there would logically be little point including her had he looked at “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir, which came out fourteen years before the Feminine Mystique. As for atheism, Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not A Christian” would have been better known in Europe, Canada and New Zealand and Michelet’s “La Socière” gave notions of a prehistoric matriarchy that scholars now view as impossible but which had major influence on radical feminism during the 1970s.