Harmful
Human Events Online, a conservative “weekly” published on the internet, outlines the ”Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries”, including (of course) The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, Quotations from Chairman Mao, and Das Kapital, going on to list – and remember, they’re conservatives - The Kinsey Report (largely because it reports on homosexual experiences of adult males); Democracy and Education by John Dewey, because Clinton’s education followed the format advocated in the book; The Feminine Mystique, because Betty Friedan reportedly slept with Robert Oppenheimer; The Course of Positive Philosophy, because Auguste Comte didn’t believe in God; Beyond Good and Evil, because Nietzsche didn’t believe in God, either (and they go on to reassert that the Nazi’s used his philosophy is setting up their political system, whereas most people with any awareness of the link are also aware that its was Nietzsche’s sister’s rewriting of his material that the Nazi’s used); and John Maynard Keynes General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, because it advocated big government and deficit spending (leaving us to wonder what they think of their boy, George II).

The Honorable Mentions include Coming of Age in Samoa, Origin of Species, Unsafe at Any Speed, Silent Spring, and Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis, to list a few of the more notable titles.

From a humor perspective, this is a stand-out list, but I wonder if anyone really thinks these books are or have been actually “damaging.” Communism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc countries, China, and Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, has certainly been damaging where it’s been instituted, but it’s never been instituted according to what Marx outlined, which has more in common with some of the teaching of the Catholic Church than anything Lenin or Mao put together. Feminism is certainly under a lot of fire these days, but that doesn’t invalidate what was said or done in its name, regardless of whether you forgot to have a baby. I suppose there are more people who have read Keynes than William S. Burroughs, but I’d put Naked Lunch up against any economics text as potentially damaging to one’s psyche, and if you’re going to object to Kinsey because he says 37% of adult males had had at least one homosexual experience,” you ought to be prepared to object to Burroughs, whose most famous work is often cited by young men as cluing them in to their sexuality.

Too much text for too slight a problem. Who are these people?