Dangerous things
by jcf. Average Reading Time: less than a minute.
The list of the 10 most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th century disturbs me no end. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss it by looking at the organization that created that list, but I wonder how influential that institution really is.
Of course “Mein Kampf” is in there, “The communist manifesto”, “Das Kapital”. But books like “The Kinsey report”? Nietzsche? John Maynard Keys?
And of course in the runners up section there is Darwin and Freud, Skinner and Margaret Mead, Club of Rome, Simone de Beauvoir
What is it that makes these people feel so threatened by ideas that changed the world? Some of them for the better, some for the worse. And a critique of a book that says:
His views had great influence on the direction of American education–particularly in public schools–and helped nurture the Clinton generation.
is laughable.
When will those people that maintain that list, ask for these books to be removed from public libraries? When will they demand that they be burned?
Those people already HAVE demanded that books they deem ‘offensive’ be removed from public libraries. Here in USA, anyway. OK, I can’t speak for all cities, but where we used to live (in Washington state), there were numerous efforts by conservative groups to have books removed from the library. Fortunately, these efforts were unsuccessful – at least so far. Hopefully when someone goes to the humaneventsonline site and sees that they promote the likes of ann coulter and rob novak, the visitor will realize that the site is little more than a bin of hatred and fear. The very disturbing thing to me is that there definitely ARE many people who will see such a list and not bother to actually READ any of the books on the list, but rather accept the list blindly.