While Joe Carter is running a project to compile the best lists of books for expanding your mind in any direction, his fellow conservatives are compiling a list of books close-minded people should avoid becoming knowledgeable about. As with every demonstration of the right’s addiction to ignorance, it tells us more about them than about their intended subjects.

Human Events online asked a group of conservative activists and think-tankers to nominate candidates for “Most Harmful Book of the 19th and 20th Centuries”, then vote among the resulting list. (Why is it that people who don’t support a nuclear non-proliferation treaty regard books as dangerous?) The outcome was 30 books nominated by a panel of 15 respondents, of which 10 were rank-ordered by each panelist as the most-”harmful” of the bunch. (The aggregate rankings don’t reveal how many panelists voted any given book into the top 10, as they account both for number of votes and relative ranking of the book by each voter.)

The results were predictable: conservatives are still obsessing over Communism (5 books out of the total of 30, including 3 by Marx, with The Communist Manifesto - surprise! - as #1 Most Harmful Book of the last 200 years). Mein Kamp gets in there at #2 (oddly, perhaps, since the book itself was probably not responsible for convincing many people to follow Hitler). But beyond Communism and Hitlerian Fascism, what are the most harmful sources of knowledge in recent human history?

Sex, science, and rational philosophy. (C’mon - don’t even bother to claim you were surprised by this, either.)

Sex!

#4 - The Kinsey Report, responsible for “normalization of promiscuity and deviancy”

#7 - , which “disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood” (double-shocker!: “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects” - yes, feminism is Communism!)

#21 - Coming of Age in Samoa

#23 - The Second Sex

Science!

#10 - General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, by John Maynard Keynes - yes, the theory that underlies all modern economics and ended the Great Depression is surely the 10th-most dangerous idea in history (hilariously, they claim that “FDR adopted [Keynes's] idea[s] as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt” - without mentioning that our last Keynesian President, Bill Clinton, left a multi-trillion dollar surplus and that the entire debt is the result of George Bush’s tax-cutting irresponsibility!, or that the only previous supply-side President, Ronald Reagan, bankrupted the government in exactly the same way!)

#15 - Beyond Freedom and Dignity, by B.F. Skinner (granted, nobody takes Skinner very seriously anymore, but that’s why the inclusion of his book is so odd - it never had any serious influence on psychology or public policy - as usual, conservatives regard as “dangerous” any idea they just don’t like)

#18 - Origin of Species - enough said . . . if this isn’t self-evident self-parody, nothing is.

And oh - by the way - toss in #30 - The Descent of Man, by the same author, just to put the icing on it. If there’s anything funnier than a conservative expounding on “dangerous ideas”, it’s a creationist conservative expounding on dangerous Darwinian ideas.

#27 - Introduction to Psychoanalysis, by Sigmund Freud (you had to know this would be in there - human psychology and sex! - it’s a wonder that this book doesn’t just burst into flames all by itself!)

Philosophy!

#5 - Democracy and Education, by John Dewey - who “encouraged the teaching of thinking ’skills’ . . . [which] . . . had great influence on the direction of American education–particularly in public schools–and helped nurture the Clinton generation” - no, I’m not making this up (and why is “skills” in scare quotes? - apparently conservative thinking doesn’t involve any skill . . . hey, they said it, not me!)

#8 - Positive Philosophy, by Auguste Comte - damn atheist

#9 - Beyond Good and Evil, by Nietzsche - damn atheist individualist

#13 - Authoritarian Personality, by Theodore Adorno (note that Adorna thought it was a bad thing; conservatives think that is “dangerous”)

#14 - On Liberty, by J.S. Mill (note that Mill thought it was a good thing; conservatives think that is “dangerous”) (odd, too, that conservatives - who today often claim to be inheritors of “classical liberalism”, now disown the author of that credo)

#19 - Madness and Civilization, by Michel Foucault - his critique of the use of social authority to control and program individuals (conservatives think that’s a “dangerous idea”)

Who else makes the list? Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson . . . the Club of Rome . . . the usual lot of bomb-throwers and anarchists (as well as, well . . . some bomb-throwers and anarchists, including Frantz Fanon and Antonio Gramsci). It’s basically yet another conservative enemies list (they love those, don’t they?), but funnier than most.

I say read ‘em all - what you don’t know can hurt you (if you don’t know enough about enough subjects, it’ll turn you into a conservative).