Damaging Books?
As I Please peruses the archconservative weekly Human Events to find an article entitled “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries”. The question I have is, just exactly what is the purpose of such a list? To be fair, I suppose you could find similar lists among those publications tilting to the extreme left, but as yet, I haven’t found them. But, orthodoxy is orthodoxy no matter what flavor it comes in. While Human Events holds back from telling its readers not to read these “evil” books, the implication is clear; books will damage you.
This is the fundamentalist mindset in a nutshell – whether it is the variety that springs from the right or left, or the religious or non-religious. “We don’t like ideas that are different than ours,” therefore a list must be compiled. And, as it is too often the case in history, the list becomes a bonfire. Ideas, and after all, what are books but ideas in a portable form, are dangerous and must kept away from the true believers – whatever that belief may be.
