It’s not procastination – it’s research

I’m giving a paper at an English conference on Monday. I’m not a student of English and I’ve no idea what they talk about so naturally I’m preparing by reading around the the blogs I look at regularly. They’re in English and hypertext (the subject of my paper) so it’s research, not procrastination. As well as Buridan’s Ass I’ve been browsing on notion of species at Evolving Thoughts. He makes an point which gets forgotten time and again when looking at ancient ‘science’, that it’s so easy to be anachronistic. I put the scare quotes around science because even that notion is anachronistic to an extent. Knowledge might be better.

Savage Minds, which I’ve been looking for an excuse to post a link to (beyond “Hey check out Savage Minds” which seems a bit shallow) has a thought provoking question. What are the most dangerous books of the 19th and 20th century?. It’s a response to an article in a right-wing mag. Marx gets into the list twice. Kinsey, who suggested sex may be a normal activity, is there. Even Keynes “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” gets in. Friedman, whose data guided the British economy into a slump in the 1980s doesn’t even get a mention.

It is a difficult question. It would be easy to draw up a list of best or perhaps controversial books. But dangerous? Books that should not be read? That’s not a way I think so it’s an interesting problem. For instance I wouldn’t advocate banning von Daniken’s books, but I certainly wouldn’t suggest using them as an introduction to archaeoastronomy. Thinking about it ‘Chariots of the Gods’ would make my list, because it opened the floodgates for a slew, not only of alternative archaeology books, but also pseudo-science in general. It proved to publishers there was good money to be made from peddling junk science.

On the other end of the scale I’d list ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ by Richard Dawkins as another dangerous book. Or at least it would be dangerous if it had the readership it deserved. It’s an extremely well-written introduction to critical and scientific thinking. If it was read and understood it would revolutionise public debate in democracies. Just imagine the uproar if politicians had to provide evidence for their assertions. I think Dawkins has done a lot in the UK to get science into the mainstream and even if his work isn’t directly read as much as I’d like, it helps create a climate of rationality by sitting on the shelves of other authors ticking like an intellectual time bomb.

The only bit of sad news I have, blog-wise, is that 64 Baker Street has deleted her blog The Bitter Boat. Hopefully something equally good will be coming from her keyboard soon. —–