World's ten worst books?: Read them so you don't end up living them

Among the ten books that, according to commentator Ben Wiker, screwed up the world (and five others that didn't help), I find some widely damned works such as Hitler's Mein Kampf and Marx's, and some lesser known sources of destructive ideas, including some of my own least favourites:

In an interview with Tothesource, Wiker expands on his theme:

Many books that still define us are no longer read, or read only in college survey courses and soon forgotten. But see if the following sounds familiar. Rousseau argued that our natural state, or original state, is entirely asocial and amoral. Or to put it another way, that the love between a man and a woman, the love between parents and children, the family itself-all of these are unnatural. In fact, they are the cause of all human misery because they create entanglements that destroy our original freedom to do exactly what we want to do, without any obligations to anyone else. Rousseau's picture of our original, happy condition is a man who merely follows his pleasures all day, eating when he's hungry, sleeping when he's tired, and having no-strings-attached sex with whatever woman happens to wander by. Sound familiar?

TTS: Sounds a lot like all too many men today!

Wiker: Exactly! We have a lot of Rousseauean men out there who have never read Rousseau. They don't have to. Rousseau's ideas spread all over Europe in the latter 18th century, and filtered down into popular philosophy, literature, and public discourse ...

Yes, precisely.

Usually, it's not that anyone argues directly that people are naturally asocial and amoral. That is simply an unexamined background assumption that lays the groundwork for bad social policy.

That's why it "feels" so right when we hear someone say "I have to do what's right for ME!" (as if what's right for the individual will be right for very long if it harms the society he depends on). Or better still, think how many times a policy is proposed that begins with the words, "let's not get into the morality of this ..." (as if the morality of a policy were somehow separable from what is proposed).

Indeed, if anyone argued for such propositions, they would be drowned out by masses of contrary evidence. Human beings are naturally social - the worst punishment in prisons is solitary confinement. We also naturally form and follow moral codes - people who do not follow them are labelled sociopaths, and most often they are shunned, locked up, or killed.

Wiker highlights other bad books, and he thinks they are bad for much the same reasons: They propose a simple explanation for human behaviour that filters through society, avoiding obvious facts, defining deviancy down, and often leading people to fail or suffer harm.

But ... Wiker makes a critical point, especially as Canadian writers and editors face censorship by "human rights" commissions: Wiker is not saying, don't read these books, still less that they should be banned:

I argue that these books need to be read because the ideas contained in them have so influenced the modern mind, yet so few people have read the books in which these destructive ideas originated. Ignorance is not bliss! If we don’t understand the destructive ideas that form our contemporary culture, then we are really slaves to someone else’s bad ideas. We are Freudian without understanding Freud, or Hobbesian without ever having read Hobbes.

One of the best ways to free ourselves from bad ideas that have become our cultural inheritance, is go back to the sources. Go back to the books where they were first set forth in clearest form. That’s a liberating experience. It allows us to see the argument for what it is, and we can then judge it accordingly.

Yes, precisely. Let's look at them critically, and see where they lead us. I could say the same of the "human rights" commissions, our Canadian experiment in social engineering, but editor/publisher Ezra Levant has said it better, in front of the recent annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Journalists (of which I am a member).

"Neural Buddhists", Christians, and the Mud that failed

Recently we heard about "neural Buddhism" - basically, the BoBos (bohemian bourgeois) are coming to come to terms with the fact that neuroscience is not proving that there is no soul, as Tom Wolfe suggested.

Materialism is in fact "the Mud that failed."

So the BoBos now hope to get by on "neural Buddhism" - they won't be materialists but they won't be much of anything else either.

Ben Wiker's To the Source weighs in heavily, seeing neural Buddhism as an attack on Christianity:

Back to the “latest” in neuroscience. The important thing to understand is that if the discovery of “self-transcendence” in the brain is slightly more scientific than crude soul-crushing materialism, it is far more potent an enemy to true religion. Brooks understands this with admirable but not entire clarity. The lovely hand-holding of mysticism and science is “bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day.”

Hmmmm. Why not plop a bit of ice in that brimstone, Ben?

First, it isn't Christians who should be insulted by this particular display of the BoBo genius for raising triviality to an art form, it's Buddhists! Real Buddhism is NOT about what you don't have to believe, think, say, or do. Real Buddhist monks get slaughtered fighting vicious tyrannies.

And a BoBo "neural Buddhist" does what? Buys a book on how to meditate under a blow dryer while surfing the Net?

Hey, prediction: Neural Buddhism will either grow up into Buddhism, get absorbed into Western theism, or dissipate before the next fad (rural nudism? feral foodism? Don't write to tell me. For truly momentous news like this I should wait for the New York Times).

Why lifelong atheist Antony Flew decided there must be a God ...

In this interview with Ben Wiker, Flew, once the world's best-known academic atheist (not village atheist), says,

Anthony Flew: There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself – which is far more complex than the physical Universe – can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a "lucky chance." If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion...

Richard Dawkins is predictablyunhappy about it.

Flew has just written a book, explaining it all, There is a God - which friends tell me is excellent.