Not Worth The Paper They Are Written On

Darwin, Marx, Lenin? Freud, Kinsley, Nietsche?

Who is the individual whose teachings/writings have most devastated civilization?

Benjamin Wiker has written 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help to address this question. The Franciscan University of Steubenville philosophy professor tears into the above-mentioned historical figures and adds a few others as well. In his review on insidecatholic.com, columnist Logan Gage recommends that “whether you're looking for a quick course on the Great Books or to inoculate a child going off to college, this book is a must-read.” (http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4333&Itemid=48)

According to Gage two primary criticisms are addressed by Wiker in the book: “Exposing our often blind worship of ‘Science’ and revealing the central mistake of the past several centuries of intellectual thought: the attempt to destroy and replace the West's traditional understanding of the human person and his place in the world.” Historically there have been many instances of blind worship of science, and one of the examples Wiker cites is the scientific community’s immediate and unquestioned acceptance of Margaret Mead’s biased anthropological account, Coming of Age in Samoa, which was later shown to be, in Gage’s words, “junk science”.

After emerging from the bloodiest century in human history, many historians, philosophers, and theologians attempted to explain the 20th century in the hopes of preventing a repeat. Pope John Paul II was among those who insisted that a faulty concept of the human person was a major cause in this unprecedented evil; in fact, the former pontiff argued that it was the cause of it. In Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, author George Wiegel reports that “his [Pope John Paul II] fundamental conviction has remained constant: the horrors of late twentieth-century life, whether Nazi, communist, racist, nationalist, or utilitarian in expression, are the products of defective concepts of the human person.” (p. 8)

Wiker’s book sounds informative, and considering the number of zany philosophies Man has created since the dawn of civilization he deserves credit for finding a way to limit the damaging books to just ten.



Donald Tremblay