05.17.08

Books and bad influences?

Posted in Booknotes at 9:11 pm by nemo

10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help;

As it stands (I haven’t read the book) this book has bungled its own thesis, and looks like another conservatizing attack on modernity.
The book represents an idea that might have gone somewhere if it had been more intelligently conceived.
But the rendition here ends up off the wall. To include poor old Margaret Mead with Adolf Hitler sinks the intent of this book. Let us subtract her from this list, and then skip the list altogether, because it is just as unfair to lump sundry classics, however controversial, with Hitler’s tome. A provocative idea becomes a dumb idea.

The real issue here is that we may legitimately question some of these authors where they have been made into false icons that we have to celebrate. Instead, with, say, Machiavelli or Nietzsche we need to engage a dialectical antithesis to some of their more outrageous or unsupported dogmas created by their fans. It is not right and proper that the whole of politics should be lost to Machiavellilanism. And certainly the tide of degenerated pastiche versions of Machiavelli constitutes a genuine threat to liberal democracy (I think of Alterman’s book on the politics of lying, for example).
And Nietzsche devotees need a bit of de-mesmerization. He pulled a clever coup, style is all, and how easy to sink Kant, and his revolution in thought, and his dreadful style, with a tour de force of genius level literary style that–well, amounts to nothing. Many have never recovered from Nietzsche and Darwin, it has to be admitted. Struggling intellectuals, hoping to be ‘with it’, profound?, can’t resist the armstwisting confusions of Nietzsche, whose bad view of things is a bit cockeyed if you follow it closely.

In a way, the impulse in this book is not without some logic to it, in the mindless and reactive anti-modernity of religious conservatives.
There are some treacherously ill-constructed roof beams in the cascade of modernist ideology (which isn’t really modernity at all).

I think, however, I will pass the book up.

From the Inside Flap
You’ve heard of the “Great Books”?
These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli’s The Prince to Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these “influential” books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors’ bad ideas are still popular and pervasive–in fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker. In his scintillating new book, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (And 5 Others That Didn’t Help), he seizes each of these evil books by its malignant heart and exposes it to the light of day. In this witty, learned, and provocative exposé, you’ll learn:

* Why Machiavelli’s The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)
* How Descartes’ Discourse on Method “proved” God’s existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego
* How Hobbes’ Leviathan led to the belief that we have a “right” to whatever we want
* Why Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written
* How Darwin’s The Descent of Man proves he intended “survival of the fittest” to be applied to human society
* How Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil issued the call for a world ruled solely by the “will to power”
* How Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a kind of “spiritualized Darwinism” that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism
* How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations
* Why Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was simply autobiography masquerading as science

Witty, shocking, and instructive, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World offers a quick education on the worst ideas in human history–and how we can avoid them in the future.

Permalink