The idea of liberty never seemed especially scary to me. That
was what we were all about as Americans — people fleeing
despotism. “Where liberty dwells, there is my country,” declared
Benjamin Franklin. I write for Liberty magazine. The
Statue of Liberty is the American symbol, a salute to freedom, not
to caution or obedience.
I was surprised, consequently, to see John Stuart Mill’s On
Liberty, a classic defense of freedom and individual
sovereignty, getting an honorable mention on a list published by
Human Events of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th
Centuries.”
Human Events, “The National Conservative Weekly,” asked
a panel of 15 top conservatives to compile a list of books that
have done the most damage to the human condition over the past 200
years.
There was no surprise about the books that placed first, second,
third and sixth — The Communist Manifesto, Mein
Kampf, Quotations from Chairman Mao and Das
Kapital. All four inspired purification drives that resulted
in the mass murder of millions of people by the state.
The other six spots on the Top 10 list are more contentious. In
the fourth slot, outranking Marx’s Das Kapital in its
hazard to humanity, is a 1948 study called Sexual Behavior in
the Human Male, commonly known as “The Kinsey Report.”
Human Events claims that this report by Indiana University
zoologist Alfred Kinsey was “designed to give a scientific gloss to
the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy.”
Kinsey’s report, said the conservative Washington Times
last year, “stunned the nation by saying that American men were so
sexually wild that 95 percent of them could be accused of some kind
of sexual offense under 1940s laws.” One could argue that it’s the
state that is out of control when 95 percent of a population is
classified as sexual outlaws.
It was 13 years after the publication of Sexual Behavior in
the Human Male that Estelle Griswold, the wife of an Episcopal
minister, and Dr. Lee Buxton, a licensed physician and a professor
at the Yale Medical School, were dragged into court and convicted
of providing medical information on contraception to married
couples. It wasn’t until four years later — on June 7, 1965 —
that the Supreme Court reversed the conviction, maintaining that
the outlawing of counseling about or the use of contraception was a
violation of the constitutional right to privacy.
Next on the list of dangerous ideas, coming in at No. 5, is John
Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Mr. Dewey “signed the
‘Humanist Manifesto,’” says Human Events, and encouraged
the teaching of “thinking skills” instead of “traditional character
development,” and thereby “helped nurture the Clinton
generation.”
The seventh most harmful book is The Feminine Mystique
by Betty Friedan, published in 1963. Traditional stay-at-home
motherhood was like “a comfortable concentration camp,” wrote
Friedan. Human Events reports that this founding president
of the National Organization for Women was a longtime “Stalinst
Marxist” who was “for a time even the lover of a young Communist
physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation
lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.” We’re lucky these well-connected
hot bodies didn’t nuke the Republican National Committee.
Dangerous book No. 8 is The Course of Positive
Philosophy by Auguste Comte. He’s the one who coined the term
“sociology” and said man could figure out things better through
science than theology.
Book No. 9 is Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. He
argued, correctly I think, that the world isn’t run by moral rules;
instead, “Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury,
overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity,
imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and
mildest, exploitation.”
And finally, the danger of bad economics comes in at No. 10,
with the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
by John Maynard Keynes, published during the depths of the Great
Depression. “The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government,”
says Human Events, referring to the Keynesian idea that
governments could reverse downward economic cycles by means of
deficits, borrowing and higher levels of state spending.
There’s cause for disagreement about the animus against Keynes,
Nietzsche, Comte, Friedan, Dewey and Kinsey. But when it comes to
the defense of liberty and individual freedom, it seems that
conservatives should see that John Stuart Mill provided a wise
caution. “Whatever crushes individuality is despotism,” he wrote in
“On Liberty,” “whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God
or the injunctions of men.”
For the next Top 10 contest, some good conservative editor
should ask for a list of the most damage done when conservatives
abandoned their principles and pushed for a bigger and more
intrusive state.
