{"id":1988,"date":"2010-07-12T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2010-07-12T16:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theamateurfinancier.com\/?p=1988"},"modified":"2013-09-07T13:17:25","modified_gmt":"2013-09-07T17:17:25","slug":"deep-thoughts-harmful-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/deep-thoughts-harmful-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep Thoughts: Harmful Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m going to take a little detour from the discussions of money to talk about one of my other passions: books.\u00a0 Yes, as you might guess from my (ideally) weekly book reviews, I enjoy reading and find it quite beneficial.\u00a0 I’ve yet to read a book that didn’t provide me with some benefit, from learning something new to providing entertainment.<\/p>\n

Thus, I read this list of the Ten Most Harmful Books<\/span><\/a> of the past two centuries with great curiousity.\u00a0 What books could be so bad as to receive marks as the worst in recent history from a panel of conservative leaders and thinkers?\u00a0 Well, let’s find out.<\/p>\n

The List (Summarized)<\/h2>\n

The first three entries (The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf,<\/em> and Quotations From General Mao Zedong<\/em>) are fairly solid entries; being associated with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Communist China (back in its prime) are enough to get bad marks from most anyone, regardless of their political leaning.<\/p>\n

The Kinsey Report<\/em> (also known as Sexual Behavior in the Human Male<\/em>) comes in at number four, with much less justification (the list goes from books that were linked to mass murder and exile to one that ‘gave a scientific gloss to promiscuity and deviancy’.)\u00a0 The fifth book, Democracy and Education<\/em>, continues the trend denouncing the book more for the behavior of its author (John Dewey) than the content of the book (which, as Blog Critic notes<\/span><\/a>, is mainly about the advantages of teaching students how to think, rather than strictly focusing on memorizing facts).\u00a0 Book six gets back to Marx with Das Capital<\/em>, (which is one of the founding documents of the socialist movement, for all the good and bad that has come from that), while book seven criticizes Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique<\/em>, which, to go back to Blog Critic:<\/p>\n

“While Betty Friedan was quite militant by today’s standards \u2014 as almost all pioneers are \u2014 the only way one can say this book was harmful is if one also argues that it was okay to force women into subservient, gender-defined social roles. Friedan, whatever her faults or excesses, laid the groundwork for today’s society, in which women are (horrors!!) allowed to choose their own lives and career paths. How terrible.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Book eight continues the trend, taking down The Course of Positive Philosophy<\/em> for its promotion of the idea that man, through observation alone, could determine how things ought to be.\u00a0 Book nine hits Nietzsche, with his Beyond Good and Evil<\/em>, which denounces belief in God as a weakness and the ‘Will to Power’, where the strong men would dominate and overpower the weaker people in society (an actual, legitimate example of a book that should be on the list).\u00a0 The list rounds out with The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money<\/em> from Keynes, for its arguments about the need for government expansion to counteract a declining job market.<\/p>\n

There’s a list of Honorable Mentions that follows the main list, hitting just about every other book that would raise conservative ire, from Unsafe at Any Speed<\/em> by Ralph Nader to Silent Spring<\/em> by Rachael Carson.\u00a0 My personal favorite is On the Origin of Species <\/em>by Charles Darwin; it’s hard to argue that a book that provides the theoretical underpinnings of understanding antibiotic resistance and viral activity, among other important biological functions, did more harm than good for the human race.<\/p>\n

My Complaints with the List<\/h2>\n

As you might have guessed by now, I have a few qualms with this list.\u00a0 First, there’s the huge conservative bias.<\/strong> Yes, yes, I know; a list on a conservative site, generated by conservative experts, written for a conservative audience, happens to include some books that only a conservative could hate…big shocker.\u00a0 A liberal ‘Most Harmful Book List’ (which I have not located anywhere, but would be curious to read) would likely be just as biased, including books by Ayn Rand and William F. Buckley.\u00a0 I just wish the list included more books that could be objectively shown as damaging and fewer that simply happened to disagree with conservative orthodoxy.\u00a0 On the subject of objectively damaging…<\/p>\n

My second qualm is that there’s not an objective method to determine the most harmful book<\/strong>.\u00a0 The list goes from genocide and mass killing inspiring works to human sexuality and feminism without missing a beat.\u00a0 As with any list based on a survey (particularly one that only surveys a particular segment of the population), it’s full of books that simply raise the dander of the reviewers, rather than actually causing harm.<\/p>\n

My third (and by far the biggest) problem with this list, though, is the entire concept of a ‘harmful’ book<\/strong>.\u00a0 Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, it’s hopefully apparent that people acting on the ideas in books (and frequently, twisting or otherwise MIS-using those ideas to suit their own purposes) that cause real-life damage, not the books themselves.\u00a0 To paraphrase the NRA, ‘books don’t kill people, people who read books and draw homicidal conclusions kill people.’<\/p>\n

The Communist Manifesto<\/em> didn’t create the Soviet Gulags, The Kinsey Report<\/em> didn’t force anyone in the decades since to become a deviant, and The Feminine Mystique<\/em> didn’t destroy family values.\u00a0 At most, they inspired people to take action on their own (whether that action was good or bad); it was the action-takers who should be held responsible for the negative actions in history, not the books.\u00a0 Even the Bible could be seen as the ’cause’ of numerous negative events throughout history, from the Inquisition to witch trials to modern day family planning clinic bombings; just as we don’t talk about banning the Bible to avoid future negative influence, we shouldn’t ban any of the books on this list to avoid the ‘harm’ that they could cause in the future.<\/p>\n

That’s the whole reason I decided to write this article, to point out that no books should be banned due to ‘harmful’ ideas.\u00a0 Instead, reading, understanding, and learning as much as possible about other views, including those we don’t believe in, should be our goal.\u00a0 (It’s apparently a goal for Human Events, as well; they include links to Amazon for all the Most Harmful books on their list.)\u00a0 How else can we refute those ideas that we don’t accept, or defend our own ideas, if we don’t learn as much as we can about every idea?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m going to take a little detour from the discussions of money to talk about one of my other passions: books.\u00a0 Yes, as you might guess from my (ideally) weekly book reviews, I enjoy reading and find it quite beneficial.\u00a0 I’ve yet to read a book that didn’t provide me with some benefit, from learning 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learning…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theamateurfinancier.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}