the Greater Nomadic Council

Books That Need Burning

Human Events, a self-proclaimed "national conservative weekly," has a list of the ten most harmful books of the last two centuries. Jim Henley thinks it's funny that they're trying to make money off these books. Jonathan Goodwin wonders about the rankings. I, too, find their choices fascinating. A number of authors that you might find regularly praised or, at least, mentioned among the more theoretically or politically-minded professors in an English department appear on the list: Marx and Nietzsche, in particular. Darwin, Mills, Foucault, and de Beauvoir all get honorable mentions. Any list of evil books that includes Darwin, even if only as an honorable mention, clearly deserves mocking.

While this sort of list is moderately ridiculous, inviting people to make the comparison with book-burning, even if such a comparison is not entirely accurate, I do agree with Henley that books can, in fact, be dangerous. Or, more accurately, the ideas contained within them can be implemented in a dangerous way. Suppression, however, fails. Only open debate and even better, more forceful books can successfully counteract nefarious or simply misguided ideas. The question is, who decides which books are Bad? Is it possible to know without hindsight? After all, Marx's desire for social and economic equality is admirable and widely accepted. His theory of materialist identity-formation is a useful and valid (if incomplete) tool even today. The idea that "the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union put the Manifesto into practice" would be laughable, were it not so misinformed. A more useful discussion would be how and why the Soviet Union's policies diverged from and distorted Marx's ideas. In a similar vein, I can't help but think that Beyond Good and Evil, which likewise contains some wonderful and important insights into human nature, made the list because of Nazi enthusiasm for and misunderstanding of Nietzsche's ideas. They liked Wagner, too. That doesn't mean we should plug our ears against Der Ring des Nibelungnen. Even Mein Kampf is crucial as a historical document. While I realize Hitler's book sold incredibly well, I seem to remember that those sales only came after he was already in power. Before then, it was far from a best seller. In other words, it appears more likely that Hitler's demagoguery was far more influential than his book. The book did not give rise to Nazism. If anything, his book should have served as a warning to the West, a clue to his true intentions that was routinely overlooked.

The article's authors' unhidden desire to unwrite the books on this list acknowledges the power of words, but fails to draw any interesting conclusion from this. The list says nothing more than, "We disagree with these authors' ideas; therefore, these books are evil." Clearly, they determine each book to be bad for wildly divergent reasons worth considering in more detail (by someone else). The books on this list cannot simply be lumped together as "bad." The specifics of each should be investigated beyond simplifying blurbs. As it stands, the list does little more than vilify ideas and, to an extent, books in general. What difference is there between this list and one that wants to ban Huckleberry Finn?

UPDATE: Mark in Mexico weighs in and has a nice collection of links to others discussing this list. The most substantial of these are PoliBlog, Pandagon, BunkoSquad, and Bostondreamer. He writes, "The top 3 on the list as well as number 6 are books that either directly or indirectly lead to the deaths of more than 300 million people." While I certainly won't defend the content of those books, I think most of their impact was more indirect than direct. As I wrote about Hitler's book, it had far less effect than Hitler himself (as far as I know; history buffs, feel free to dispute this). I imagine a similar situation is the case with Chairman Mao's book. This raises the question of whether a book advocating harmful beliefs that are already being put into place can really be considered that dangerous. As a comparison, what if Bush were to write a best-seller justifying his reasons for invading Iraq (with heavy ghost-writing help, of course)? Should we consider the book itself dangerous?