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Book Reviews:
by David M. Kinchen
 The old saying "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is dead wrong, according to Benjamin Wiker, author of "10 Books That Screwed Up the World" (Regnery, 260 pages, notes, bibliography, index, $27.95).
Words in the 10 books he examines, plus five others "That Didn't Help," not only broke bones, they've been responsible for mass murder of tens of millions of people in the bloody 20th Century, says the senior fellow with Discovery Institute and the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.
Writing from a Christian perspective--most likely a Roman Catholic one, given Wiker's teaching posts at Milwaukee's Marquette University and other Catholic institutions--this main selection of the Conservative Book Club, delves deeply into books that have contributed to the decline and fall of Western Civilization, in Professor Wiker's view. He cites chapter and verse in the books under examination and provides quotations--except in the case of Alfred Kinsey's "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948), in which the Kinsey Institute denied Wiker's use of direct quotations from a book he calls a work of perverted pseudoscience by a truly monstrous individual.
Wiker, who lives on a farm in rural Ohio, says that if ideas have consequences, then it follows as day follows night that bad ideas have wretched consequences. Ideas that are permanently preserved in book form, from Nicolo Machiavelli's "The Prince" down to Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," infect generation after generation, contributing to the world's wretchedness through their lack of moral standards, he argues.
This seems to be in line with other books I've read and reviewed--books that academics, with few exceptions, cherish. Other conservatives have written about this dilemma, including David Horowitz and a stable of authors--including Elizabeth Kantor, author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature"--who have written the "Politically Incorrect Guides" published by Regnery and reviewed by me (check out the search engine on this site for my reviews).
Some might argue that Wiker has gone over the top in his citations from the books, but the Vanderbilt University Theological Ethics doctorate-holder writes in detailed, clear, non-academic prose that the ideas contained in these books have spawned war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, the breakdown of families and disastrous social experiments such as eugenics.
Here are the books, along with assessments of them by Wiker, with my comments in italics and parentheses:
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince--the owner's manual to a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand), whose blasphemous approach to Christianity has also made it the engine on the long train of modern atheism. (I have a book by Michael A. Ledeen, "Machiavelli on Modern Leadership," that puts a positive spin on the 1513 work by the famous--or infamous--Italian.)
Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method--which "proved" God's existence for the feeble of faith only by making it depend on our thinking Him into existence, thus making religion a creation of our own ego. (Hey, dude, "Je pense, donc je suis"--"I think, therefore I am.")
Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan--according to which there is no good and evil, only pleasure and pain, leading to the belief that we have a right to whatever we want, and it is the government's job to protect such rights. (Hobbes is famous--or infamous--for the assessment that life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." )
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men--a hymn to the "natural man" containing the seeds of the French Revolution and totalitarianism, Marx and Nietzsche, Freud and Darwin, modern anthropology and Margaret Mead, the sexual revolution and the dissolution of the family. (The concept of the "natural man" is one of the most dangerous ideas in the history of the world, in Wiker's view.)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto--which, on body count alone, could win the award for the most malicious book ever written, such that even the tenured Marxists are a bit squeamish about touting it as the road-map to Heaven on Earth. (Actually, Wiker has probably taught in places where tenured Marxists rule the roost.)
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism--which held that morality is merely a matter of calculating the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number, leading only to a society addicted to ever more intense, barbaric, and self-destructive pleasures. (Mill's ideas probably also lead inexorably to such wretched television shows as "America's Next Top Model," "American idol," and "Dancing with the Stars," not to mention Jerry Springer and Donald Trump!)
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man--proof positive that Darwin intended his theory of evolution through "survival of the fittest" to be applied to human society, so that "unfit" people(s) would be weeded out. (These ideas weren't in Darwin's "The Origin of Species" (1859), but they are spelled out in the 1871 "The Descent of Man" which along with those of Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, spawned the dreadful pseudoscience of eugenics).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil--which completed the modern rejection of God that began with Machiavelli, and issued the call to a world ruled only by the "will to power" that Hitler answered. (I've read books that try to separate Nietzsche, my fellow Libra, from the totalitarian views and the ubiquitous German anti-Semitism of his era. One in particular, "What Nietzsche Really Said" by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, Schocken, 2000, argues that Nietzsche's ideas were perverted by his sister, Elisabeth, an ardent Hitlerite, after Nietzsche's death in 1900).
Lenin, The State and Revolution--the blueprint for the murderously oppressive Soviet-style government which became the pattern for, and patron of, the other equally barbarous communist governments of Eastern Europe, North Korea, Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Cuba. (Lenin's ideas continue to be held by tenured Marxists in academe).
Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization--a kind of "Eugenicist Manifesto" by the foundress of Planned Parenthood, who believed that too many "misfits" were breeding, hence the "need" for birth control. (Sanger was part Irish, but she was vehement in her opposition to the breeding like rabbits of "the careless, squalid, uninspiring Irishman" in contrast to the "frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting Scot" who held off breeding until he was older.)
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf--a practical culmination of modern atheism invested with quasi-religious fervor, an expression of "spiritualized Darwinism" identifying Jews as the greatest problem facing genetic progress--proving that Hitler's genocidal anti-Semitism was a malevolent effect of the unholy spirit of the age. (It's significant that Wiker says that "Mein Kampf" led to genocide by "willing" Germans. This echoes the theme--and the title--of Daniel J. Goldhagen's controversial book "Hitler's Willing Executioners.")
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion--a fundamental attack on religion, dismissing it as mere wish-fulfillment by infantile minds; yet itself a "projection" of Freud's desire to discredit religion by the most salacious conjectures he could conjure. (Freud described himself as a "Godless Jew," but Wiker attributes much of Freud's hatred of religion--especially Chrisitianity--to the fierce anti-Semitism of his native Austria.)
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa--a little book that contained a big lie that all too many wanted to hear--that women could have fun too in Rousseau's pansexual paradise (which turned out to be a creation of Mead's own sexual confusions and aspirations). (The noted anthropologist had a number of marriages and a lesbian relationship with Ruth Benedict, another anthropologist. Mead also ignored the fact of the modest clothing foisted on the carefree Samoans by American missionaries decades before her arrival in American Samoa in the 1920s.)
Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male--in which every manner of sexual deviance is decked out charts-and-graphs style to seem perfectly normal, but was simply Kinsey himself writ large. (As a book reviewer who quotes from the books under review, I can't understand the refusal of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University to allow Wiker to quote from the book. This is a violation of the First Amendment, in my view).
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique--once again, autobiography masquerading as science, in which Friedan's attacks on the roles of "wife" and "mother" were defined by her own personality and personal conflicts. (The upper middle class woman from Peoria was also responsible for the founding of NARAL and NOW.)
If you operate from a secular point of view, you'll undoubtedly take issue with Wiker's assessments, but the book works for me in explaining the conservative, religion-driven point of view of the author. By the way, the almost heroic portrayal of Alfred Kinsey in the motion picture of the same name is a thorough "whitewash" of Kinsey, Wiker writes.
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David Kinchen resides in Port Lavaca, Texas, and is editor of