Daniel Garber, The Orchard Window (1918)

“THERE is nothing so absurd,’ quipped the ancient Roman philosopher-statesman Cicero, ‘that it can’t be said by a philosopher.’ Unfortunately, philosophers’ absurdities aren’t limited to classroom sophistry and eccentric speculations. They make their way into print and are thereby released upon the public. They can be, and have been, as dangerous and harmful as deadly diseases. And as with deadly diseases, people can pick up deadly ideas without even noticing. These ideas float, largely undetected, in the intellectual air we breathe.

“If we take a good, hard, sober look at the awful effects of such deadly ideas we can come to only one conclusion: there are books that really have screwed up the world, books that we would have been better off without.

“This should not come as a shock, except to those who don’t believe that ideas have consequences. Thomas Carlyle, the eminent Scottish essayist and sometime philosopher, was once scolded at a dinner party for endlessly chattering about books: ‘Ideas, Mr. Carlyle, ideas, nothing but ideas!’ To which he replied, ‘There once was a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first.’ Carlyle was right. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a book that inspired the ruthlessness of the French Revolution (and even more destructive things after that).

‘Common sense and a little logic tell us that if ideas have consequences, then it follows that bad ideas have bad consequences. And even more obvious, if bad ideas are written down in books, they are far more durable, infecting generation after generation and increasing the world’s wretchedness.’

— Benjamin Wiker, Ten Books that Screwed Up the World, and Five Others that Didn’t Help

— Comments —

Kathy G. writes:

It always amazes me that foul losers like Darwin and Rousseau were able to cause so much human devastation with their childish theories. There is some small consolation in the knowledge that Robespierre, Saint Just, Trotsky, and Che Guevara were caught up in their own mad schemes and power grabbing.

Laura writes:

Dangerous books would never get anywhere without dangerous publishers and dangerous promoters.

No famous book has ever been produced by a single person.

A whole literary army has gone into making it famous. And some very shoddy books that aren’t even well-written — The Feminine Mystique is a good example — are well-known.

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

And fiction too, especially when it comes to reading requirements for the impressionable young.

I asked the librarian at my high school (or secondary school as my English teachers would call it) what books she would recommend. I was probably sixteen. I was holding some book, can’t remember what, which she deemed trite. She gave me Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

I never got past the first chapter. I went back to it years  later, and left it alone. It was to me an unintelligible collection of words.

Later, it was James Joyce’s Ulysses, with which I tried so hard to get into the psychic groove.

And this all helped me form my choices when I was a neophyte artist, as an adult student, leaving that turgid modern/postmodern milieu. I left behind young college students who to this day haven’t recovered, unable to create art.

Larry Auster posted a long blog post of the books that left a mark on him, and I am sure it was happily received by his readers. It certainly was by me.

I believe God gives us glimpses of the truth. We would do better to take courage and pay attention to them.

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