Intelligent Design
A Good Book About Bad Books
If you’re looking for a summary of Benjamin Wiker’s 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help, I’ve tried to provide one below. The article was originally written for InsideCatholic.com.
If ever there were a book designed specifically for the enjoyment of InsideCatholic readers, surely it is Benjamin Wiker’s new 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn’t Help. Wiker should be renowned (if he is not already) for Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists–a book that at once exposes both the ancient philosophical antecedents and modern cultural consequences of Darwinism.
In the present book, the professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville proposes not a new era of book burning, as some might suppose, but rather a learned critique of toxic ideas floating in our cultural water. Wiker plays the role of EPA in the “Great Books” world, covering Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx/Engels, Mill, Darwin, Nietzsche, Lenin, Sanger, Hitler, Freud, Mead, Kinsey, and Friedan.
10 Books‘s two main virtues consist in 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.
If there is one truth our children need before college, perhaps it is…
Read the rest here.