Do You Think You're Clever? by John Farndon Read Free Book Online Page B

be a popular literary device, resonant with ironic symbolism for a victim obsessed by books.
    However, maybe we should focus on the verbal content of books, rather than books as weapons. People have often lamented the effect of bad – that is, low-quality – books. Like bad daytime TV, trashy romances and thrillers are said to turn people’s minds to mush. People were saying much the same thing 200 years ago. Back in the time of the Napoleonic wars, the older generation in particular shook their heads and rued the effect of the new gothic and romance novels of authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Madame de Staël then so much in vogue with young girls. What these girls needed, they insisted, was a bracing dose of Socrates and Tacitus rather than these lightweight fictions that did nothing but inflame the imagination. And of course such attitudes rubbed off on some of the more high-minded youngsters. In her book on
Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia
, Wendy Rosslyn quotes an earnest adolescent girl who pompously proclaims that ‘novels donot do you any good and only lead you away from really good books’.
Plus ça change
?
    Among those indecently inflamed imaginations, of course, were great authors such as Jane Austen and Mary Shelley – not to mention a whole generation of other women whose imaginary worlds and ambitions were so crucially enlarged by reading ‘trashy’ novels. Just as now we can see the positive side of those early gothic and romantic novels, maybe people will in time see the value of what seems trash now.
    Beyond low-quality literature, though, there are throughout history books that have been considered so dangerous that they have been consigned to the bonfire. Indeed, whole libraries such as the Greek library at Alexandria and the House of Wisdom in Baghdad have been consigned to the flames. For most libertarians, the burning of any book is deplorable. It’s not simply that it’s a curtailment of free speech, though that is worrying enough, but a book is somehow even more precious, as a distillation of thought, a child of the human mind. That’s why the Nazi book-burnings seem a tragedy. So do the Spanish conquistadors’ burning of Mayan codices.
    And yet, there are some book burnings that most of us would actually condone – such as the police disposal of books of child pornography. As a libertarian, I hesitate to say that it’s right to destroy any book, or that categorically any book is harmful, but a book of child pornography probably is, not primarily because the contents are corrupting,though they may be, but because the production of the book involved abuse. Any book that could be produced only by abusing someone would be bad to encounter for any purpose other than to prevent the abuse.
    There may be a difference, of course, between books that are ‘bad’ for me personally and books that may be ‘bad’ for people in general. Conservatives and reactionaries believe that there are such things as dangerous books; books that are bad for people. The conservative news forum
Human Events
asked sympathetic scholars to come up with a list of what they considered to be the most harmful books of the last two centuries. Not surprisingly, Marx and Engel’s
Communist Manifesto
comes top of the list. Also near the top is Hitler’s
Mein Kampf,
the thoughts of Chairman Mao and the
Kinsey Reports
on sex. A less obvious inclusion is John Dewey’s 1916
Democracy and Education
, which the authors of the list claimed encouraged a skills- rather than knowledge-and-character-based approach to schooling which ‘helped nurture the Clinton generation’, and J.M. Keynes’ thesis on economics, which they say has saddled the USA with massive public debt. These inclusions begin to show why the notion of ‘harmful books’ is problematic; who is to say what is harmful and what is not? For others, Dewey and Keynes are enlightened and seminal writers.
    Of course, one can argue that without
Mein