One of the three book clubs to which I belong just finished Benjamin Wiker's Ten Books that Screwed Up the World - and 5 others that didn't help. While Wiker strongly recommends reading the originals (the books themselves), I would recommend reading his anaysis first (but afterwards works, too).
Wiker, a Ph.D. graduate of Vanderbilt, is a Catholic scholar who has taught at Marquette, St. Mary's, Thomas Aquinas College, and Franciscan University, is also a senior fellow with the Discovery Institute. He has also authored A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature and Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Richard Dawkins' Case Against God. His newest (which I look forward to reading soon) is Ten Books Every Conservative Must Read: Plus Four Not to Miss and One Imposter. I'm not going to reveal the imposter; you'll have to look it up for youself!
Wiker begins with his review of four of the five that "didn't help": classic works by Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Wiker makes the case that historically, these set the stage for the insidious ideas that followed in books by the "top Ten": Marx, Mill, Darwin, Nietzsche, Lenin, Sanger, Hitler, Freud, Mead, and Kinsey. The book concludes with the fifth "also-ran," the more contemporary Betty Friedan.
After reading Wiker's insightful analysis of each of these works, one can only shake one's head in wonderment at how so much of the world managed to be taken in by these silly, but dangerous, notions. Hobbes, Rousseau, and Mill were pioneers of amorality to which purveyors of modern slogans such as as "If it feels good, do it" owe much of their thinking. Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Sanger managed to candy coat violent imposition of their will on others as a moral virtue, while Darwin and Mead raised animalistic naturalism to the kind of parlor respectability one can find in National Geographic and PBS specials.
Why do I like this book? We need to be knowledgeable of these classic influences on the current societal woes with which thinking Christians struggle each day. This book gives us analysis we can trust, and verbiage we can quote. Arm yourselves!
I have not been able to get my hands on a copy of Ten Books That Screwed Up the World but I have read quite a bit of it via Google Books.
ReplyDeleteEven if you find his opinions hard to accept - and my relatives hound me time and time again into believing that Wiker is completely wrong - it is hard to say he is anything other than a talented writer who knows his topics very well. I do have some disagreements with the writers he covers because I know secularism is far more advanced in Europe, Canada and New Zealand than in the US.
On page four of his newer title Ten Books Every Conservative Must Read, Wiker suggests he could write a Ten More Books That Screwed Up the World. I would love Wiker to write a Ten More Books That Screwed Up the World and feel that in doing so he should cover topics like history, radical literature, and even popular music (e.g. AC/DC's Back in Black or N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton) to illustrate how liberal and libertine ideas have come to influence the world.