Roger Shattuck

Candor and Perversion

Perverse Books

1. At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, by Francine du Plessix Gray — The leap of imagination that makes Gray want to domesticate a monster arises from profound naivete about human character. Why do women often sympathize with a cruel seducer? What is even more insidious, certain contemporary critics have set out to rehabilitate Sade's unspeakable writings.
    
2. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by E.O. Wilson — The world's greatest authority on ants has written a book that seeks to make ants out of all of us. Consilience preaches the doctrine that one explanation fits every phenomenon — "reductionism," a position that Wilson explicitly affirms. Everything, including human behavior, can be reduced to the laws of physics and chemistry. Molecular biology has paved over the last areas of doubt about consciousness and free will. Everything is determined. Yet, the book contains its own refutation by making us human beings responsible for the ruining of the environment.
    
3. Michel Foucault, Life and Writings — Foucault stands directly and explicitly in the heritage of Sade. Both men wished to detach sex from love, loyalty, and tenderness and to associate it with cruelty and promiscuity. Foucault hoped to become a shaman and wrote in a mumbo-jumbo prose that still impresses many natives.
    
4. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred Kinsey — Kinsey was a charlatan twice over. First, by going to a medical publisher, he made false claims about the scientific nature of his interviews and statistics, which have been exposed as irresponsible. Second, on the basis of this untrustworthy research, Kinsey argued for moral equivalence among all sexual behaviors. He is a very minor figure &$151; except that his fraudulent scientific posturing sent us off in the wrong direction in a major moral debate.
5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Life and Writings — Sartre wrote some trenchant literary criticism and a remarkable philosophical novel, Nausea (1938). But his cold-blooded collaboration with Stalinism in its most depraved moments threw his huge influence to the cause of falsehood and suppression. An intellectual traitor.
    
6. Mein Kampf, by Adolph Hitler — We tend to respect a man with a plan. Hitler's plan in this frenzied book found the magic mix: pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic racism, the superiority of the German state, revenge for World War I, and expansionism. Hitler's progeny is still with us in the Balkans.
    
7. Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche — Nietzsche tells us what we think we want to hear: Civilization has gone too far; we should roll back the institutions of justice, democracy, and decency and return to "might makes right." His aphoristic assertive style spares him the task of building a sustained argument and of assembling evidence for his claims. And this intellectual pervert is the most widely read philosopher today.
    
8. Karl Marx. Life and Writings — The essentially religious nature of Marxism — idealism and scientism crushed together into a totalitarian state that refuses to wither away — means that this faith will not disappear so long as there are opposing forces that have an equal faith in the free market.
    
9. Faust I & II, by Goethe — The great scholar, Dr. Faust, with five doctorates to his name, decides he still has insufficient experience of the world. He makes a wager with Mephistopheles in order to gain superhuman powers. His selfish curiosity runs rough shod over several lives, involving him in a series of homicides. This upstart is finally saved by a band of angels — because he never stopped "striving." Meanwhile, we celebrate "Faustian man."
    
10. First Discourse and Emile, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Rousseau furnished Nietzsche with many of his notions about the vices of civilized institutions and the need to return to our natural instincts. Emile, Rousseau's enormously successful book about education (under a private tutor), injected into the European bloodstream the idea of the superior wisdom and virtue of the child. We are still reckoning with this view, in the form of progressive education and a reluctance to teach a coherent program of basic subjects.
     

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