Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries
Human Events Online has posted a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. It's quite a hoot. I find it hard to believe that the Kinsey Report was really the fourth most harmful book of the last 200 years.
But instead of making fun of the list, I want to mock the idea of the list itself. Are books really harmful? Take an example from the list: Mein Kampf. Does anyone really believe that this book caused the Second World War and the Holocaust? That it was even a contributory cause? How many Nazis even read Mein Kampf? (I don't know if Albert Speer ever read it, for example.)
I have a copy of MK in my office, and it has never harmed me. Not so much as a paper cut.
Or to take another example: The Communist Manifesto. Did Marx and Engel's turgid critique of competing forms of socialism cause the Russian Revolution? Did reading this book ever make anyone a Communist?
Conservatives like to say that "Ideas have consequences." I agree with that, in a sense. But books? I think that these folks are giving books a little too much credit. The best case that could be made would be that, in the opinion of these people, the ideas expressed in these books, when put into practice in the real world, were harmful. But books?
BTW, Comte made the list. Has anyone out there actually ever read Comte? (I haven't.)
Just to be clear: A more useful exercise would be The Most Harmful Ideas of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
posted by Number Three @ 3:24 PM
1 Comments:
Wilson makes good point. The Turner Diaries is actually a dangerous book in the sense that it planted a specific idea--blowing up a federal building (in the book, FBI HQ)--in the head of at least one individual, Tim McVeigh, who then blew up a federal building (the Murrah Bldg in OK City). But the Turner Diaries is a much more specific book than, say, The Communist Manifesto. Marx doesn't say, Here's how you shoot members of the bourgeoisie, or how you construct a blackjack to disable capitalists, and so on. This is not to say that The Communist Manifesto doesn't advocate violence, but it does so in a less direct manner.
(I really don't mean to sound so much like the Brandenburg v. Ohio opinion here. Really.)
I would also say that I doubt that anyone would become a violent white supremacist after reading the Turner Diaries, if they weren't already strongly predisposed toward those views (i.e., already a racist with violent tendencies). Again, it's more the ideas that are dangerous than their encapsulation in books, which may channel thought but rarely, in my view, convert their readers altogether.
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