I Like Trouble

Human Events Online published a list of the Ten Most Dangerous Books a while ago. Majikthise has read four of them, plus two honorable mentions.

I’ve done pretty well, or badly. The grey level indicates how confident I am that I’ve read the book, and how much I remember having read of it.

Really dangerous books

• 1. Communist Manifesto
• 3. Quotations from Chairman Mao (I bought a copy)
• 4. Sexual behavior in the human male
• 6. Das Kapital (how much must you read to be endangered?)
• 8. Cours de philosophie positive (in French, no less)
• 9. Beyond good and evil (I’ve taught it, I’ve even read it)

Almost as dangerous

• On liberty
• Beyond freedom and dignity
• Origin of species
• Madness and civilization
• Second sex
• Silent spring
• Introduction to psychoanalysis
• Greening of America
• Descent of man

Clearly I’ve been depraved by reading all this toxic literature. I think that the Iraq war is a mistake, that the regulation of government by business is a bad idea, that I share ancestors with my cats, that censorship of political discourse is wrong, that women have often been systematically oppressed, that DDT is bad for birds, and that psychiatry has sometimes been an instrument for punishing deviance.

On the other hand, I’m inclined to hold that state socialism is a bad idea, that religion is not about to be replaced by a “cult of progress”, and that behaviorism à la Skinner was a scientific dead end.

So I must have dozed off a few times.