I don't mean to interrupt you all from reading Emma, but a friend of mine pointed this book out to me, and I thought you guys might find it interesting. It's got a different perspective on a few of the "Great Books" that we read.
At one point, the author writes: "The desire that something be true, rather than the desire for truth itself, may well be the root of all evil. It is certainly the origin of all ideology, and ideology was the source of much of the evil in the past century."
Interesting, no?
PS - I didn't actually *read* this book, so I have no idea if it's any good, and don't really know anything about it, I just think it's interesting how the Great Books come up everywhere, all the time, and are used for such a variety of purposes by so many different sorts of people
PPS - Do people inform you of any and all great-books-related things that they find? People certainly have started pointing them all out to me... it's quite funny.
2 comments:
Hmm... cute idea, but reading the reviews, he sounds a lot like that guy from the faith/reason debate that said all that is left is sex and stripmalls. I'll see if I can find it at a library, but before reading it, the premise makes me wonder: is the fact that any idea can be perverted enough to denounce all ideas (because who knows which ones will turn out to be harmful in the end!). Seems a bit crazy to go that far.
From Amazon:
* Why Machiavelli's The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)
* How Descartes' Discourse on Method "proved" God's existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego
* How Hobbes' Leviathan led to the belief that we have a "right" to whatever we want
* Why Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written
* How Darwin's The Descent of Man proves he intended "survival of the fittest" to be applied to human society
* How Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil issued the call for a world ruled solely by the "will to power"
* How Hitler's Mein Kampf was a kind of "spiritualized Darwinism" that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism
* How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations
* Why Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was simply autobiography masquerading as science
The Descartes bit made me smile, the Darwin expert of my family, who I assume knows more about Darwin's motives, refutes the Darwin bit. And we all clearly need to be reading Margaret Mead!
It sounds like the author of that book is trying to blame the books themselves for the false interpretations that people have made throughout history. That's sad and slightly ridiculous, and it is like saying that guns kill people, not people.
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