tothesource: That’s a rather provocative title! I suspect one of the responses you tend to get is, “You’re for book burning!”

Dr. Benjamin Wiker: Unfortunately it is. But I call for precisely the opposite of book burning or censorship. I want people to read these books—all fifteen of them.

TTS: But if they are so dangerous, why should we read them?

Wiker: 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.

TTS: Let’s look at some of the books, Adolf Hitler’s, Mein Kampf, Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto—they’re certainly books you’d likely see on anyone’s list of books that screwed up the world.

Wiker: It’s hard to argue that the world has been a better place because of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  Clearly the world would have been spared a lot of grief if it had never been written. And the Communist Manifesto? Marxist ideology led to the slaughter of upwards of 100,000,000 people in the name of bringing about an entirely fictional communist utopia. Humanity would have had significantly less misery had the Manifesto not seen the light of day.

TTS: Who could argue with that?

Wiker: Surprisingly enough, many do. They say things like, “Books don’t kill; people do” or “Well, do you want to go back to the times when the Church was censoring everything”?

TTS: What do you say to that?

Wiker: To take the last point first, I repeat: I don’t want these books to be censored. I want them to be read, and read critically. I’ve been reading the Great Books for a quarter of a century, both the profoundly good ones and the profoundly bad ones. It’s been the greatest education imaginable. 

When I hear the gibe about religion and censorship, I like to throw back a little irony. By far the greatest totalitarian control of books and ideas has occurred under Marxist regimes, not Christian regimes. Lenin and Stalin even crushed their fellow Marxists who dared to deviate in the slightest degree from the official ideology. And who could forget Cambodia’s Pol Pot killing people with eyeglasses simply because he thought it likely that they were intellectuals?

That helps to answer the retort that “Books don’t kill; people do.” Sure, books that stay on the shelf and no one reads, don’t have any effect. But books that change people’s minds, and give them a distorted view of reality, are destructive. So we obviously aren’t talking just about the physical book doing harm, but its “incarnation” in intellectual culture and in political structures. For example, it was Lenin’s State and Revolution that gave Marxism its political structure in the Soviet Union, the structure that allowed it to be the world’s greatest tyranny.

TTS: What about some of the lesser-known books, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. That sounds like a book of merely academic interest. How could a book written in the mid-18th century have anything to do with us in the 21st century?

Wiker: 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. Needless to say, they helped form the foundation of the sexual revolution in the 20th century. That’s how bad ideas work, and the consequence has been to create an abundance of rootless male sexual predators who view marriage and the family as burdens upon their personal freedom and happiness.

TTS: What about Charles Darwin?

Wiker: A lot of people know about Darwin’s more famous Origin of Species, but have never heard of his later book, The Descent of Man, where he applies his evolutionary theory to human nature. This is really the founding book of the modern eugenics movement that spread all over Europe and America, spawning such destructive books as Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,and Margaret Sanger’s Pivot of Civilization, but also Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male—all books that I treat in 10 Books that Screwed Up the World. I’ll leave it to readers to discover all the connections!

Thomas Hobbes is the father of the all too familiar belief that we have a right to whatever we want—however morally degraded, vile, or trivial it may be—and further, that it is the government’s job to protect such rights.

According to Thomas Hobbes, there is, by nature, no good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust. Left to ourselves, independent of society and in our natural condition—the “state of nature”—we are creatures entirely without conscience, ruled solely by pleasure and pain, ravenous in our desires and ruthless in their pursuit. If that redefinition of human nature weren’t bad enough, Hobbes added the insidious notion that human rights are simply equivalent to human desires (however sordid), so that whatever we happen to desire, we have a right to by nature.

Hobbes established these fictional rights not by argument but by mere definition, i.e., by bald declaration (and few people were as bald as Hobbes, as his portraits attest). “The right of nature … is the liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own judgment, and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.”

Of course, acting this way would lead to an all out war and end in violent death, as each person pursues anything and everything he desires. Hobbes agreed, and asserted that rights-driven human beings enter civil society to escape this “state of war,” and do so to protect these rights.

A Hobbesian society is therefore one in which each person considers himself first and foremost as an individual brimming with rights but with no fundamental responsibilities to anyone else. For the Hobbesian individual, then, it is the entire job of government to protect and maximize the expression of these individual rights while simultaneously minimizing conflict with other rights–bearing individuals. In short, the one and only task of government is merely to reproduce a happier version of the Hobbesian state of nature, where there is a maximum of liberty to pursue one’s personal desires but without the nasty violent death part.

Sigmund Freud was, by his own proud and accurate description, a “godless Jew.” By all accounts, his Jewishness was at most cultural, never religious, but the Christian-based anti-Semitism Freud encountered perhaps confirmed his animosity to all religion, especially Christianity. The Future of an Illusion was his revenge.

The Future of an Illusion is a fundamental attack on religion, dismissing it as mere illusion, foolish wish-fulfillment by infantile minds. Freud’s ideas were not wholly original; he built on an intellectual structure of atheism that began with Machiavelli and reached its philosophical culmination in Nietzsche. Freud provided a new variation on the theme by taking atheism for granted. Atheism was, in his imagination, simply true. Rejecting the idea that religion exists because God exists and that human beings therefore have a natural propensity to worship, Freud believed that he had to give another explanation for religion.

But even from an atheist’s standpoint, Freud’s explanation is bizarre. First given full sail in his Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud’s theory was that the origin of the religious cult (the origin of culture) was the killing and eating of a father by his sons. And why would sons want to murder their father? Because, naturally, they desired to have sex with their mother. In true primitive fashion, they believed that by eating their father they gained his strength and privileges. Nevertheless, they did feel guilt, which at first they repressed, but then expressed through sacred meals that simultaneously commemorated, condemned, and covered up the original gruesome patricidal feast. This sacred meal in turn became the foundation of religion and its moral prohibition of incest and patricide.

If you would like to purchase your own copy of Margaret Sanger’s book The Pivot of Civilization, you will not find a copy for sale on the Planned Parenthood website. That is rather strange, given that Sanger is the foundress of Planned Parenthood and this is one of her most famous books.

Sanger was a red-hot eugenicist, publishing her great eugenic work, The Pivot of Civilization, three years before Adolf Hitler wrote his own eugenic masterpiece, Mein Kampf.

The Pivot of Civilization addresses “the greatest present menace to … civilization”: the “lack of balance between the birth-rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’” a menace precisely because of the “fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, [and] the poverty-stricken.” Sanger believed that “the most urgent problem of to-day is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” This scourge calls for hard-knuckled action, and indeed “possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.”

Sanger’s book is one long rant against the existence—and worse, the breeding—of the “feeble-minded” in general, and the “moron,” “imbecile,” and “idiot” in particular, those “who never should have been born at all.”

The Crucial Role of Good Thinking Today

"The prospering of God's cause on earth depends upon his people thinking well. Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith. They do not realize that in so doing they are not honoring God, but simply yielding to the deeply anti-intellectualist currents of Western egalitarianism, rooted, in turn, in the romantic idealization of impulse and blind feeling found in David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their nineteenth-and twentieth-century followers. They do not realize that they are operating on the same satanic principle that produced the "killing fields" of Cambodia...We too easily forget that it is great thinkers who have given direction to the people of Christ in their greatest moments: Paul, John, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, to name a few. At the head of the list is Jesus Christ himself, who was and is the most powerful thinker the world has ever known."

Dallas Willard
Renovation of the Heart

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