Table of Contents
To my wife of twenty-five years, without whom the world would be much poorer, and with whom my life has been infinitely richer.
INTRODUCTION
Ideas Have Consequences
THERE IS NOTHING SO ABSURD, QUIPPED THE ANCIENT ROMAN philosopher-statesman Cicero, that it cant be said by a philosopher. Unfortunately, philosophers absurdities arent limited to classroom sophistry and eccentric speculations. They make their way into print and are thereby released upon the public. They can be, and have been, as dangerous and harmful as deadly diseases. And as with deadly diseases, people can pick up deadly ideas without even noticing. These ideas float, largely undetected, in the intellectual air we breathe.
If we take a good, hard, sober look at the awful effects of such deadly ideas we can come to only one conclusion: there are books that really have screwed up the world, books that we would have been better off without.
This should not come as a shock, except to those who dont believe that ideas have consequences. Thomas Carlyle, the eminent Scottish essayist and sometime philosopher, was once scolded at a dinner party for endlessly chattering about books: Ideas, Mr. Carlyle, ideas, nothing but ideas! To which he replied, There once was a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first. Carlyle was right. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a book that inspired the ruthlessness of the French Revolution (and even more destructive things after that).
Common sense and a little logic tell us that if ideas have consequences, then it follows that bad ideas have bad consequences. And even more obvious, if bad ideas are written down in books, they are far more durable, infecting generation after generation and increasing the worlds wretchedness.
I submit, then, that the world would be a demonstrably better place today if the books were about to discuss had never been written. It was possible half a century ago (and even twenty years ago, among the academic elite) to maintain that Marxism was a positive force in history. But since the protective cover has blown off the Soviet Unionand Chinas has at least been tornno one can look at the tens of millions of rotting corpses revealed and conclude anything other than this: if the Communist Manifesto had never been written, a great deal of misery would have been avoided. The same is true of Hitlers Mein Kampf and the other books on the list, even when the carnage is sometimes of a more subtle and different sort.
What then? Shall we have a book burning? Indeed not! Such a course of action is indefensible, if only for environmental reasons. As I learned long ago, the best curethe only cure, once the really harmful books have multiplied like viruses through endless editionsis to read them. Know them forward and backward. Seize each one by its malignant heart and expose it to the light of day. That is just what I propose to do in the following pages.
Part I
Preliminary Screw-Ups
CHAPTER ONE
The Prince (1513)
Hence it is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good....
Niccol Machiavelli (1469-1527)
YOUVE PROBABLY HEARD THE TERM MACHIAVELLIAN AND ARE AWARE of its unsavory connotations. In the thesaurus, Machiavellian stands with such ignoble adjectives as double-tongued, two-faced, false, hypocritical , cunning, scheming, wily, dishonest, and treacherous. Barely a century after his death, Niccol Machiavelli gained infamy in Shakespeares Richard III as the murdrous Machiavel. Almost five hundred years after he wrote his most famous work, The Prince, his name still smacks of calculated ruthlessness and cool brutality.
Despite recent attempts to portray Machiavelli as merely a sincere and harmless teacher of prudent statesmanship, I shall take the old-fashioned approach and treat him as one of the most profound teachers of evil the world has ever known. His great classic The Prince is a monument of wicked counsel, meant for rulers who had shed all moral and religious scruples and were therefore daring enough to believe that evildeep, dark, and almost unthinkable evilis often more effective than good. That is really the power and the poison of The Prince: in it, Machiavelli makes thinkable the darkly unthinkable. When the mind is coaxed into receiving unholy thoughts, unholy deeds soon follow.
Niccol Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy, on May 3, 1469, the son of Bernardo di Niccol di Buoninsegna and his wife, Bartolemea de Nelli. It is fair to say that young Machiavelli was born into wicked times. Italy was not a single nation then, but a rats nest of intrigue, corruption, and conflict among the five main warring regions: Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples, and the Papal States.
Machiavelli witnessed the greatest hypocrisy in religion, including cardinals and popes who were nothing more than political wolves in shepherds clothing. He also knew firsthand the cold cruelty of kings and princes. Suspected of treason, Machiavelli was thrown into jail. To elicit his confession, he was subjected to a punishment called the strappado. His wrists were bound together behind his back and attached to a rope hanging from a ceiling pulley. He was hauled up in the air, dangling painfully from his arms, and suddenly dropped back to the ground, thereby pulling his arms out of their sockets. This delightful process of interrogation was repeated several times.
Machiavelli knew evil. But then, so did many others, in many other times and places. There is no shortage of wickedness in the world, and no shortage of witnesses to it. What makes Machiavelli different is that he looked evil in the face and smiled. That friendly smile and a wink is The Prince.
The Prince is a shocking bookartfully shocking. Machiavelli meant to start a revolution in his readers souls, and his only weapons of revolt were his words. He stated boldly what others had dared only to whisper, and then whispered what others had not dared even to think.
Lets look at Chapter Eighteen for a taste. Should a prince keep faith, honor his promises, work above board, be honest, that kind of thing? Well, Machiavelli muses, everyone understands that it is laudable... for a prince to keep faith, and to live with honesty. Everyone praises the honest ruler. Everyone understands that honesty is the best policy. Everyone knows the countless examples in the Bible of honest kings being blessed and dishonest kings cursed, and ancient literature is filled with tributes to virtuous sovereigns.
But is what everyone praises truly wise? Are all good rulers successful rulers? Even more important, are all successful rulers good? Or does goodness, for a ruler, merely mean being successful, so that whatever leads to successno matter what everyone may saymust be good by definition?
Well, says Machiavelli, lets see what actually happens in the real world. We see by experience in our times that the princes who have done great things are those who have taken little account of faith. Keeping your word is foolish if it brings you harm. Now, if all men were good, this teaching would not be good; but because they are wicked and do not observe faith with you, you also do not have to observe it with them.
