Most Harmful Books

[psocoptera]

You cannot buy advertising like this! A bunch of conservatives have helpfully figured out the Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries so that we can make sure we've read them all. Actually I'm kind of disappointed in myself for how few of these I've read. But anyways, it's kind of interesting to see who makes the "most dangerous authors" list : Marx, Hitler, Mao, *Kinsey*? Because of course being a pervy sex researcher is right up there with the slaughter of millions!

1. The Communist Manifesto
Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
Publication date: 1848

2. Mein Kampf
Author: Adolf Hitler
Publication date: 1925-26

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao
Author: Mao Zedong
Publication date: 1966

4. The Kinsey Report
Author: Alfred Kinsey
Publication date: 1948

5. Democracy and Education
Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916

6. Das Kapital
Author: Karl Marx
Publication date: 1867-1894

7. The Feminine Mystique
Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy
Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842

9. Beyond Good and Evil
Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
Publication date: 1886

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publication date: 1936


Honorable Mention

The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
What Is To Be Done by V.I. Lenin
Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner
Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel
The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader
Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
The Greening of America by Charles Reich
The Limits to Growth by Club of Rome
Descent of Man by Charles Darwin


Some of these I haven't even heard of (who's Sorel, or Croly, or Reich?), but I'm totally now picturing a big cocktail party (possibly in the afterlife) where people are bickering over whether, no no, *their* book was *totally* more threatening.

But seriously, I'm very tempted to take this as a personal non-fiction reading list for the next ten years. Or maybe organize a book club. I don't think I could stomach Mein Kampf but the Communist Manifesto and Feminine Mystique were both pretty engaging as I recall - a good balance of things to agree and disagree with - so that speaks well for the rest of the list.

Comments

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Hahaha. Absolute best comment, found in the comment thread at Reason:

"How many people have suffered unquenchable frustration or, even worse, eye damage trying to peer into those Magic Eye books?"

[cereph.livejournal.com]

hahahahahah! i started laughing so hard at that comments i coughed for minutes afterwards!

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

Lessee. 5 for 10 on the first list; in addition I've read bits of Das Kapital and own the Kinsey report(s).

Second list, read 5 as well. But I own 3 others. That's a pretty good list actually, with a few exceptions: the ecology and science books, apart from the Darwin, are not so strong.

[carnap.livejournal.com]

You're way ahead of me. I've read exactly zero on the first list and exactly two (Freud and Skinner) on the second.

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

You didn't take the right classes at Swat.

You're also not a dirty hippy like me who reads things like The Population Bomb for fun. (Yay junk science!)

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Well, I have read a grand total of one from either list. Of course, the one that I have read does happen to be the single most harmful book ever, so perhaps I have already been irreversably harmed.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm sorry. It's too late for you. You may not realize it yet, but your mind has already been twisted beyond recognition, since we all know the brain is defenseless against Bad Ideas Encountered Whilst Reading. This is why we all went sledding after being forced to read Ethan Frome.

[aryky.livejournal.com]

It's funny. I don't associate Ethan Frome with sledding, I associate it with Sex with Doughnuts. Mainly because I really wasn't expecting my tenth grade English teacher to start talking about Sex with Doughnuts, I suppose, so the startling event stayed with me.

[ccommack]

Marx, Hitler, Lenin... J.S. Mill.

Why has the conservative-libertarian not collapsed spectacularly yet? Because the conservatives seem to be trying their darnedest to make that happen...

(On the flip side... Maynard Keynes? Yes, he was wrong, but it honestly took 40-50 years to figure that out. And in the end, that particular mistake can be solved at the ballot box, instead of invading Europe...)

[carnap.livejournal.com]

As for Keynes, it's not like he was wronger than the alternative theory they're probably pushing, in the form of neoclassical economics, black, no sugar.

As for the conservative/libertarian thing, it hasn't collapsed because grassroots liberals aren't interested, so the libertarians have nowhere to go. If you, a libertarian, go to a left-wing conference or social event, anti-market rhetoric will be everywhere. You won't be able to open your mouth without getting into a fight. That's not true if you go to a conservative conference, where people will be wearing Adam Smith neckties and will at least pretend to share ideological common ground with you, and they share your interest in cutting taxes on *someone*.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

Because conservative-libertarians, as far as I understand the term, tend not to be *philosophical* libertarians the way capital-L Libertarians who voted for Michael Badnarik are. If by conservative-libertarians you mean doctrinaire libertarians who strategically vote Republican, you might have a point, but that's still a very small minority. Most "conservative-libertarians" (like, say, the most common kind of Swarthmore Republican) mostly care about cutting taxes and ending aff-action but don't see what the big deal is about gay marriage and would begin to get seriously freaked out if they spent time listening to a dyed-in-the-wool anarcho-capitalist.

The stuff Mill says, if you take it completely seriously rather than as a benediction for a general kind of way of thinking about government, seriously freaks out anyone who has the word "conservative" anywhere in their self-description. At the very least, being at all "conservative" means you're leery of the idea that the government and social institutions can and should be thrown aside at a whim of the majority of the people.

[carnap.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure ccommack meant "conservative/libertarian alliance", not "libertarian conservative" or "conservative libertarian".

Even modestly hardcore libertarians are a small minority, but they wield political influence vastly disproportionate to their numbers. This is because ideological libertarianism is almost entirely an upper-class phenomenon, so libertarians who want to become politically active find it comparatively easy to get started by showing off their Ivy League diplomas. No one who said the New Deal was a sell-out to capitalist oppression could ever be confirmed as a federal appellate judge, but Janice Rogers Brown, who basically thinks the New Deal was the end of freedom in America, just did.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Well, I wait and hope for the Left to try reaching out to the libertarian-leaning, but I just don't see a lot of interest there. The Right at least uses the keywords of liberty, so it's easy to think "they at least get it in theory".

Yeah, Keynes seemed like a dubious inclusion too. It gets at why I don't really like the idea of a "harmful books" list - even if, in practice, the application of some idea led to some unfortunate decisions, I don't feel like we want to go around saying it's bad to earnestly try to come up with a good theory about a complex topic and turn out to be off-base as more evidence comes in. Yeah, economics is an area of study where mistakes can be very costly, but they still don't seem *blameworthy* to me the way this list suggests.

[carnap.livejournal.com]

Interesting. A very revealing list. The Feminine Mystique. As feminist tracts go, it's pretty mild. The fact that it made this list is damn clear proof that whatever they may say, conservative elites really do think women should be in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was kinda baffled at that showing up as well.

But honestly, if these guys are criticizing *Darwin* and *Kinsey*, it makes a lot of sense: obviously these are benighted theocons, who do believe that women should be in the kitchen, barefoot, and pregnant (and not taking anesthetic during childbirth, since god gave eve labor pains as a result of original sin.)

[carnap.livejournal.com]

Kinsey's report is hardly a sterling example of high-quality science. Believing that the report was dangerous isn't about opposing science; it's about believing that it contributed to the ideological justification of the sexual revolution (yes) and that the sexual revolution was a Very Bad Thing.

Getting into the "honorable mentions" category only indicates that two of their poll subjects gave it a nonzero badness ranking, so the presence of Darwin doesn't mean as much.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I definitely think bad science can be harmful, but I agree that Kinsey isn't on the list for sloppy research practices or biases in his findings, they'd be condemning it just as much if it was done perfectly, so long as the findings were similar.

The list is actually kind of interesting as a tool for getting me to think about what sort of intellectual errors I hold people responsible for... I mean, sloppiness and bias seems like Bad Science in a way that plain old being wrong does not. Lots of people have to be wrong usually, in the process of figuring things out. But what are the actual factors leading me to feel like Keynes made good-faith errors while Mao was immoral? Just that Mao was also criminal? Possibly I should actually *read* Keynes (or Kinsey) before having opinions about this...

[carnap.livejournal.com]

The first criterion that jumps to mind is something like "degree of obvious immorality." I don't know what Mao said, but that murdering people en masse is evil is (or should be) obvious enough that advocating it is presumptively immoral.

Another criterion is motive. Mao was trying to increase his personal power. Keynes was making a good-faith effort to contribute to economic theory, and can be accused of being a power-grabber only insofar as he probably wanted to see his ideas implemented.

I would also hold people responsible for intellectual errors that are obviously rationalizations aimed at making the facts conform to preconceived value judgments ("X is the right thing to do; therefore, the consequences of doing X are, on balance, good" is a tempting but invalid line of reasoning). Likewise with "If Y were true, it would mean that doing good thing Y is essentially impossible; therefore X is false." These are not to be condemned as strongly as the examples in the previous paragraphs, since they are easy to fall into without realizing it, but they are still intellectual failings different from just being wrong.

A good example of the kind of thing I'm talking about would be "Public policy X is a morally required (or prohibited) policy; therefore the constitution mandates (or prohibits) X." People never phrase the argument in those terms, but it's clear most constitutional reasoning, especially by legal scholars, whether liberal or consertvative, is a form of it. Another would be "single-payer, government-run health insurance would be morally good if it worked; therefore it must work." The reverse would be "socialized medicine would be bad for freedom; therefore it must also be bad for health." The positive economics should come before the normative conclusion, but too often it comes first, and that's a moral failing as well as an intellectual one.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

Let's quit speaking so neutrally here -- it's pretty obvious that Kinsey made the mistakes he did at least partly because he, personally, got fascinated by how many kinds of sex there were out there and wanted to promote their existence, often without regard for the potential damage to people's lives should his sometimes painfully bad science prove wrong. For one thing, Kinsey's questionable conclusions regarding children's sexual maturity and capacity for feeling sexual pleasure gave organizations like NAMBLA a lot of rhetorical ammo, something that I think most lefties and righties can agree was a bad thing.

Just because Kinsey was a scientific researcher doesn't clear him of having a bias in his own work. I don't absolve Tim Leary's role in getting kids into high-power hallucinogens either.

[carnap.livejournal.com]

I know very little about Kinsey, so I can't much comment further. But I agree with psocoptera that he'd be equally as condemned had his research been impeccable.

Representative Judges

[ashsong.livejournal.com]

Did you notice that only one of the 15 judges was a woman?

Re: Representative Judges

[carnap.livejournal.com]

No. And it was the anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, head of the Eagle Forum, "Leading the pro-family [sic] movement since 1972".

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

_Feminine Mystique_ is mild by today's standards next to an Andrea Dworkin, sure. It's still a lot further than lots of conservatives -- even conservatives who'd say they were "conservative feminists" -- want to go.

For the most part, it's the perception that _Feminine Mystique_ doesn't just rail against women being forced into a certain gender role but the existence of that gender role itself. The description of the very idea of doing housework and caring for children as intrinsically being a form of slavery, and whatnot.

There are plenty of conservatives who are convinced that having a devoted stay-at-home parent/homemaker is essential for the maintenance of a family structure and proper childrearing, and who are justifiably afraid that this way of living is going out the window with negative effects on society, and blame feminism for it. The attitude could be mistaken, sure, but I wouldn't regard it as automatically being an anti-women, sexist one.

[carnap.livejournal.com]

I've never read Feminine Mystique, so I can't make specific comments on it. But the other books on the list clearly aren't there because of their specific contents. Most of them are there because they provided an ideological justification for socio-political movements that the judges regard as harmful - communism, Nazism, environmentalism, the welfare state, etc. - without policy programme to whether the socio-political movement actually followed whatever advice was in the book. Perhaps your theory is right, but I don't find it plausible - it's much more plausible that Feminine Mystique was a popular ideological justification of feminist ideas, and feminism is bad.

There are plenty of conservatives who are convinced that having a devoted stay-at-home parent/homemaker is essential for the maintenance of a family structure and proper childrearing, and who are justifiably afraid that this way of living is going out the window with negative effects on society, and blame feminism for it.

I mostly agree with this. I'm certainly convinced that the devoted stay-at-home caretaker model is superior to the dominant model among our social class where both parents work full-time and the kids get ignored. Where I differ from the social conservatives is that they think the stay-at-home caretaker should always be the woman, (almost) all women should be stay-at-home caretakers, and the man should always be in control. Conservatives never come out and say it in those words. But if you read conservative publications and advocacy-group websites, you'll see no end of subtle references to women's "natural" desire to be "wives and mothers", praise for women who stay home with the kids, positive comments about "father's rights" legislation, and so forth and so on. You'll never see a "Concerned Women for America" press release expressing support for expanded mothers' rights, men who stay home to take care of the kids while their wives work, or the decision of some women to forego childrearing in favor of their career. Any individual one of these things could be defensible within a feminist framework, but when every social conservative group comes down on the facially anti-feminist side of every women's issue every time, you have to conclude that the real agenda is the preservation of traditional gender roles: man at work, woman in kitchen.

My stay-at-home-caretaker agenda is completely different. Here's some stuff I support and the conservatives don't:

* Expanded rights for mothers. Stay-at-home motherhood is a raw deal on pretty much every axis other than the intangibles. Example: If the marriage doesn't last for whatever reason, you have no income. Even if your marriage was theoretically an equal partnership, the law doesn't think so. You accepted the loss of years of experience on the job market in exchange for a share of your husband's income, but the law says that income is his alone even though your loss of experience is for life. You may get "child support", but that's completely different.

* Promotion of stay-at-home fatherhood as an option every bit as valid as full-time employment. Not many men express a desire to stay home, but most of that is because (1) motherhood is a raw deal financially (see the previous point) and men know it (2) our society says a man works full-time or he's nothing (3) concurrently with (2), straight women are likely to look down on and reject a man who wants to be a stay-at-home father, and so on. The socially imposed costs are very high. If you believe in stay-at-home parenthood, either you sign on to a political and social movement to break down the barriers to fatherhood or you say that all and only women must stay at home full-time.

[cereph.livejournal.com]

gee. books that make people think and also question the status quo are "harmful."

oh wait, right, we're supposed to be mindless zombies that don't think.

interstesting list, thats for sure.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

That's massively unfair, given that a good number of these books have at some point in the past *been* the status quo, and that the "conservative" movements against them developed late and iconoclastically. I'm thinking especially of Keynes, but Dewey fits that category too, and Rachel Carson.

I mean, sure, the books changed a lot of people's minds and challenged the status quo at the time, but if they hadn't done that they wouldn't even be relevant books that anyone would know about, much less harmful ones. But the progressive view of history -- that these books are always speaking for the "new" and their detractors for the "old" -- fails here. Darwin, for instance, has become progressively *more* controversial in the popular press as time has passed, not less -- the Scopes Trial was the *beginning* of the religious and political attack on evolution, not the end of it.

Low score

[kairon-gnothi.livejournal.com]

Gee, only read four of the top 10; but I used to own a first edition of The Second Sex in French (eventually gifted it, I think); do I get a bonus-of-evil?

These books are all fairly old, at least the ones I recognize. Was nothing repulsive published in the late 80s and 90s?