Terrapin Tables

#8: The Course of Positive Philosophy

Sounds like a horrible book!

After watching the movie Kinsey recently, I was amazed at how much progress that book made. They talked about the advice and teachings of human sexuality before the book came out, and it was just horrible.

For what it's worth, the first Kinsey report (dealing only with men), was based off of sexual histories of interviewees with an inappropriate concentration on prisoners and patrons of gay bars, leading to a few incorrect figures when they're applied to the American population as a whole. But his work was refined by the time the second book came out five years later (dealing with women).

In any event, it's a good thing his book came out - subsequent teachings that built on Kinsey allowed us to have a much better understanding of venereal and sexually-transmitted diseases than we would if his work hadn't come out. He laid the groundwork to save millions of lives to date. It may go against your faith and belief on whatever, but how is a groundbreaking book about health harmful?

That list was on FARK...the common thread on that list is that those books are harmful to Puritan ideology, not necessarily mankind. While there may be little to redeem, say, Chairman Mao or Mein Kampf, books themselves cannot be dangerous. Ignorance, extremism, and corruption lead to the adoption of just-plain-bad ideas or the misappropriation of good ones - Jesus was a really chill dude: look what has happened to what he said.

These are the "least-likely to be found on Falwell's bookshelf" books. They are certainly not dangerous. In the case of Darwin, Dewey, Nietzsche, Quindlen, and Comte, these are some of the books that should be used to best define an ideal human state (using the Neitzsche only to show what happens when the people who make this list are given too much control).

The Kinsey is harmful because the messages are: sex is normal, sex can be a darn good time, and STDs are regular old diseases that can all (at that time) be treated. STDs are not, says Kinsey implicitly, the wrath of an angry god. Also, it puts average male penis length at like 5.1 inches, and that's still WAY too much for the kind of people that feel a need to exert power over others, condemn personal freedom, strike fear in a populace, etc. Yes, all conservative Christians have small penises. And I hope they burn in hell.

Sorry for that bit about "ideal human state." I've been reading a lot of Blake.

I like puppies.

I like to paint.

But on the whole, I agree with Chris. Science is bad, let's oppress women, I'm afraid of change, etc. are all wonderfully enlightened attitudes.

The amazing thing is that these aren't just isolated crackpots. I bet you that about half the population of the U.S., if not more, would agree with a lot of those scientific books they chose - they disagree with my narrow interpretation of religion, so therefore they must be evil. I'm not as literary as a lot of you, so I don't recognize a lot of those books, but I agree with Rick that Kinsey's books got scientists going in the right direction with sex research, Freud's books did the same thing for psychology (even if most of the information was wrong), and the Origin of Species is probably one of the most important scientific books of all time.