The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Birth control pioneer Sanger thought that the pivot of civilization was getting rid of the carriers of supposed bad genes. Fat genes. Rat genes. Frat genes. Whatever. In her hands, the glorious cause was never about personal choice. It was about eugenics. Or, as Margaret liked to say: More children from the fit, less from the unfit.

So what happens?

If crime, pauperism, alcoholism, and general feeble-mindedness (however defined) are thought to be the result of genetic imperfections, then the eugenist will want to get rid of those genes by getting rid of the gene carriers. All it takes to construct a devouring eugenic juggernaut is the suspicion that there is some connection between particular genes and particular imperfections. In Sanger's deranged mind, a low or even moderate IQ was linked inextricably to nearly every social ill. It doesn't matter that she was wrong, what matters is if enough other people think she's right, and pseudo-science becomes well-funded public policy.

And people can actually be punished with babies.

Next: Ten Worst Books 7: Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Hitler's Mein Kampf is pretty famous, even among people who are not allowed to read it. (Hitler, of course, was the architect of the Holocaust, which murdered most Jewish people in Europe (about 6 million), along with some hundreds of thousands of others.)

I got into trouble when I was 15, because I wanted to read Mein Kampf. It was 1965, and I lived beside the Christie Pits in Toronto, where anti-Semitic riots had occurred in the 1930s.

The local librarian wanted to know why I wanted to read it. I said simply and truthfully that I was the daughter of a World War II veteran and I wanted to understand the history. I had already read William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich several times, and had a fairly good grasp of the basic dates and such. I had also listened to many World War II reminiscences from my father and one of his brothers, but none of that got to the root of the war.

The librarian was satisfied that I did not represent some hate organization, and she gave me a copy.

Well, I spent about two hours reading Mein Kampf one summer morning and quickly formed the impression - from the prose style alone - that the author was a boring egotist. I quickly returned the book.

Here is one of Ben Wiker's comments:

... Hitler took himself to be that rarest of things, the union of philosopher and king, political philosopher and practical political leader, program-maker and politician in one. Put this way, Hitler seems almost noble, until we realize that, the philosophy to which he ascribed was an amalgam of Machiavelli, Darwin, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche (as mixed with the racial theories of the Frenchman Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau). We might say that whatever hesitations to action one finds in Darwin, Schopenhauer, or even Nietzsche, Hitler casts aside with the ruthlessness of Machiavelli. (p. 152)

All this said, of course, Wiker quite appropriately reminds us that Hitler was not a person of original ideas. He was always borrowing from more original minds, and seeking power to enact the ideas. As for what he thought about the spiritual heritage of Europe, this must suffice:

Of course, Hitler's moral outlook on life was a quasi-Nietzschean form of spiritualized Darwinism. Christianity was useful as long as it supported Hitler's program. Liberal Christianity, with its flexible doctrine and morality and emphasis on curing social ills, could be particularly useful. But conservative Christianity - with its dogmatic claims and moral commandments, as expressed in such actions - was to be attacked whenever it contradicted the regime. The real religion of the Reich was not Christianity but the Wagnerian mystical Germanism that so entranced Nietzsche. (p. 160)

Mysticism gone wrong can do an appalling amount of evil.

Next: Ten Worst Books 8: Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927)

(Note: This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

One thing I really like about Ben Wiker is his zero level of popular illusions. For example, here is what he says about Sigmund ("all you really want to do is kill your father and marry your mother, and religion is really about your messed-up relationship with the dad you killed and ate - back when you were a cave man, which is why you don't remember") Freud:

Most of this speculation was impure fantasy, a bizarre projection of Freud's fundamental wish that religion be discredited by the most salacious conjectures he could conjure.

[ ... ]

Contrary evidence from experts didn't bother Freud or his devout disciples, however. His wish that his theory be vindicated had determined his use of the experts to begin with. "What he wanted from the experts," notes [biographer] Gay, "was corroboration; he pounced on their arguments when they sustained his own, disregarded them when they did not." In a spectacularly uncritical and hence revealing outburst written near his life's end, Freud defended his cherry-picking of evidence and his obstinate refusal to accept the ever-mounting counter-evidence gathered by ethnologists against his theses: "I am not an ethnologist, but a psychoanalyst. I had the right to pick out of the ethnological literature what I could use for my analytical work." (pp. 172-73)

Somewhat like the right Darwinists give themselves to seize on some minor bit of information that supports their case, and ignore the vast mountain that doesn't.

Freud was in the "man as beast" tradition of Hobbes:

... for all the claims of Freud's originality, he is ultimately indebted to Hobbes for his assumptions and also to those who followed Hobbes's lead. (And to be fair to Freud, he realized that what he was saying had already been proclaimed by "other and better men" who stated it "in a much more complete, forcible, and impressive manner. We are also not surprised, given the length of the pedigree of this view and the centuries it had to seep into the soil of the West and poison it, that the notions of the holy criminal and anti-social hero would eventually take hold of the intelligentsia and hence the popular imagination. (P. 169)

Wiker's comments, touched a nerve, at least for me, because I have so often found my nerves grating against films in which some criminal is portrayed as holy (with grossly inappropriate and dramatically unlikely explanations for his behaviour) and some anti-social hero is portrayed as somehow the righteous one (which so rarely happens in real life).

Freud's star has fallen pretty far these days, because the current epidemic of false knowledge has replaced him with evolutionary psychology, which has the advantage of offering us a bigger circus, including lots of apes and monkeys.

The most significant question is, how did Freud's ideas ever get taken seriously in the first place? I remember when they were absolutely dominant in popular culture, and on the lips of every local pundit. For that, I fear, there will be no accounting.

Next: Ten Worst Books 9: Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

(This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Margaret Mead's book, Coming of Age in Samoa, promoted the idea that promiscuity is natural and normal - fronted in typical publically funded sex ed courses today. Of course it wasn't true and couldn't have been true, but it was just what the age of advertising - using sex as its main selling feature - needed to hear. As Ben Wiker explains,

Mead's battle cry, then, is that we need to march forward and create a new era, "when no one group claims ethical sanction for its customs, and each group welcomes to its midst only those who are temporarily fitted for membership."

Then, Mead beams, "we shall have realised the high point of individual choice and universal toleration which a heterogenous culture and a heterogeneous culture alone can attain."(P. 189)

Now, a huge controversy has raged for decades about Mead's findings, which simply do not fit the known history of Samoan social life.

But Samoan social life did not really matter anyway. What mattered was assembling evidence, real or imagined, for the benefits of promiscuity for teenagers. Wiker notes that anthropology was the perfect discipline for Mead to infest:

According to Orans, himself a practicing anthropologist, "From its inception, its practice has often been profoundly unscientific and positively cavalier in its willingness to accept generalizations without empirical substantiation." Anthropology was thus the perfect scientific cover for cultural analysis that was no more scientific than the state of nature imagined by Hobbes and Rousseau. (p. 191)

And, as with Freud, every pundit somehow "knows" that Mead's pseudo-science was true. But, as Wiker cautions,

Bad books screw up the world only if they are consumed eagerly by those who are hungry to hear their messages.

Well, in the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of people were hungry for her messages - and many saw how they might make money off them.

Next: Ten Worst Books 10: Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)

(This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey helped touch off the sexual revolution, but The Kinsey Institute refused Ben Wiker's request to quote from the book. So he had to rewrite the chapter to "footnote everything very exactly, so that you, the reader, may skirt the Kinsey Institute's blackout."

Why a blackout? Well, Wiker says,

Even without the full light of day shining on Kinsey's private darkness, we should have known better. His Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (or, for short, the Kinsey Report ) is a scientific sham that could have been exposed on its first release. In fact, many of its obvious defects were pointed out at the time. But the truth is that, as with Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, too many people were eager to hear the sexual sermon preached by Kinsey, and the pseudo-scientific trappings simply helped to ease their consciences. (p. 197)

Curiously, Kinsey's views had a relationship to Darwinism:

... Kinsey was a passionate Darwinist, earning his Ph.D. from Harvard University in entomology and becoming a world-class expert on the gall wasp. Kinsey saw infinite and continual variation in nature as an essential evolutionary fact, not just of gall wasps, but even more important, of human beings and their endless sexual variations. There were no boundaries in nature: one species blended into another just as seamlessly as one human sexual proclivity shaded into another, all without a trace of sharp boundary.

[ ... ]

Reaching beyond Darwin to Machiavelli, we see on a deeper level a kind of Machiavellian assertion that the world should be defined by what most people actually do, rather than by some kind of pie-in-the-sky notion of what they should do. (pp 198-199)

It must have been very good news to some people that traditional ideas about what we ought to do are pie in the sky.

Next: The fifth book that didn't help? Betty Friedan's the Feminine Mystique (1963)

(This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I well remember Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique. I read it in 1964 (I was fourteen), and couldn't make much sense of it. The unhappy women described in the book had way higher incomes and more opportunities than we ever did.

When my mom got back from babysitting, she would often give me the money, to run to the grocery store and buy extra stuff for supper. Yet my mom later became one of the first graduates of the Quo Vadis nursing school in Toronto, which aimed to get older women, whose children were in their teens, to consider nursing as a late life career.

So if life was so oppressive for us in those days, why was she able to do this?

Ben Wiker comments:

As even her sympathetic biographer Daniel Horowitz notes, Friedan presented a distorted view of the real situation and feelings of suburban housewives in the 1950s, reporting anything that was negative and suppressing anything that was positive, kneading the data to fit her need for a crisis and ignoring (as Marx did) anything that contradicted her grand, abstract thesis. (p. 222)

As a matter of simple fact, living conditions in the United States and Canada improved significantly during the 1950s and 1960s, with the further spread of electricity, refrigeration, et cetera. The spread of labour-saving technologies enabled women to consider jobs outside the home.

Still, Friedan's words (she died in 2006) were pretty powerful stuff at the time. In my own view, what made her book so powerful was the offer of an urban society where even the most privileged women could see themselves as victims and all could fashion any type of life they wanted. And that is pretty much the offer widely available now - for better or worse, due to increasingly branded lifestyles.

Overall, the influence on the intelligent design controversy of all the books Wiker identifies is this: They taught ways of thinking that promote materialism. Materialism is, thanks to their influence, so natural now to the popular science press that no one would think of questioning it, even when it does not conform to the evidence. This problem will take a long time to resolve.

There is room for a few good books in the world.

Further resources for Ben Wiker's Ten Books That Screwed Up the World:

Wiker talks about his book. Here is a YouTube video.

(This post is part of a series that looks at Ben Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: and 5 Others That Didn't Help. Wiker discusses the books in order of writing, not "worst"-ness.)

Back to beginning: Ben Wiker picks 10 Books That Screwed Up the World and explains how

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).