Less Than Great Books of the Twentieth Century
Since it has come to my attention recently that there is some nebulous impropriety in having a historian teach the great books in a humanities class and further that a course in the history of ideas at AMU must, inexplicably contrary to the practice at any major university, refrain from assigning great books, it has occurred to me that I might obviate such cavils by teaching a course on contemporary books that have not been great.
I am thus tempted to offer a course on the worst books of the twentieth century, but it seems there were too many worthy candidates for one course. Even after sequestering a group of grossly overrated but not irredeemable books and authors (Galbraith, The Affluent Society; anything by D.H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf or H.G. Wells or Jean Paul Sartre, for example) the number of influential, highly touted volumes that imposed upon the reader malignant lies and or moral idiocy and or audacious stupidity and or apologias for evil and or gratuitous cultural vandalism and or tendentious folly and or destructive self deception, was simply too great to allow the inclusion of all deserving volumes.
I confess that I have a bias in favor of what might be termed highbrow books, but I may be forced to include some egregiously popular middlebrow books because of their extraordinary lack of intellectual merit and their conspicuous contribution to dumbing down a culture that was not remarkable for its intellectual virtues to begin with. For example, Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series, the twentyfirst century apocalyptic wetdream of rural American folk religion, is twelve volumes. This five thousand pages of prodigiously tedious written material is middlebrow. Sustained reading is required to enjoy the release of resentment and anxiety that comes from this endlessly tedious literary mutation; a hybrid between the book of Jeremiah and Harlequin Romances. Lowbrow readers simply cannot read this much. There are no lowbrow books to consider in the 20th century as they are now supplanted by videos.
I am left with a course proposal that is uniquely constrained by all too limited time and nearly unlimited resources. Lamentably, I just do not have the room to include It Takes a Village or Pizza Tiger, or Are Men Necessary? Moreover, since God is merciful, I must gratefully concede that I have a finite knowledge of the numerous truly wretched books published in the last century, so I have surely omitted some very deserving works. I will claim merely that the underwhelming books on this list are highly influential and flamboyantly less than great.
THE POLITICS OF EVIL
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism, A New Civilization
Merleau-Ponty, Violence and History
Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, 1922
Mao, The Sayings of Chairman Mao 1966
Chomsky and Herman, After the Cataclysm, 1979
Hitler, Mein Kampf
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, 1964
McKinnon, Only Words 1993
Henry Ford, The International Jew
Paisley, An Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans, Prepared in a Prison Cell
Rockwell, White Power
Duke, My Awakening
Sorel, Reflections on Violence
PERIOD PIECES FROM THE AGE OF ANXIETY
Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Brown, The DaVinci Code
Pierce, The Turner Diaries
Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die
John Davis, ed. Earthfirst Reader
Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle
Kevorkian, Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death
GOOD BRAINS WITH BAD IDEAS
Beard, An Economic interpretation of the Constitution
Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1964
Dewey, Democracy and Civilization
THE ABOLITION OF THE SELF
Branden, The Power of Self Esteem
Harris, I’m OK, You’re OK
Toward a State of Esteem. The Final Report of the California Task Force to Promote Self-esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility
Foucault, Madness and Civilization
VARIOUS INTELLECTUAL FRAUDS
Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928
Hubbard, Dianetics
Bernal, Black Athena
Kinsey, Sexual Behavior of the Human Male
Meyssan, The Big Lie, The Pentagon Plane Crash that Never Happened
Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Menchu, I, Rigoberto Menchu,