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Books have greatly influenced western culture over thousands of years, most notably starting with the Bible. I was reading a discussion among scientists and I thought I'd list what books they considered to be prominent.
Every educated America has read at least two of those books and likes at least one. In no particular order:
1. Francis Bacon, The New Organon or True Directions Concerning the
Interpretation of Nature (1620).
It laid the foundation for the scientific method and explains that the essential characteristic of science is that it is not driven by preconception or "idols of the mind." In my view modern institutions of science have strayed from this core concept by embracing materialism as a dogma or preconception. It is my view that the scientific revolution was fueled by Bacon's open-minded concept, not the close-minded concept of methodological naturalism.
2. To Kill a Mockingbird
This book explored race relations and how people are more or less all the same despite physical characteristics.
3. 1984
The idea of Big Brother
4. Jurassic Park
Can We vs. Should We? The dangers of science run amuck.
5. God Delusion
Atheism is now polite conversation
6. Lord of the Rings
Good and evil, monumental struggles; our search for the good cause or good war
7. Sex and the City
Columns made into a book made into a TV show made into a movie
8. Da Vinci Code
Christianity is all a conspiracy. I've discussed this in my recent article on Assassin's Creed 2. It's amazing how many people believe the falsehoods in this book to be true. It's like a modern myth.
9. Sherlock Holmes
Inspired modern forensics and influenced how people scrutinize the "facts" they're given in daily life.
10. Frankenstein
Anticipated the modern reductionist approach to humanity, and the consequent atrocities of our century
11. Machiavelli -- "The Prince."
The inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)
12. Descartes' Discourse on Method
"Proved" God's existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego
13. Hobbes' Leviathan
Led to the belief that we have a "right" to whatever we want
14. Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto
Could win the award for the most malicious book ever written
15. Darwin's The Descent of Man
Proves he intended "survival of the fittest" to be applied to human society
16. Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil
Issued the call for a world ruled solely by the "will to power"
17. Hitler's Mein Kampf
A kind of "spiritualized Darwinism" that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism
18. Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
Simply put, autobiography masquerading as science
Ideas can certainly be dangerous but, once they are articulated in print, a thinking person has an opportunity to consider them rationally and counter them. This process is much more difficult if we are working from an oral articulation of ideas because orators can sway emotion and equivocate more effectively. The reality is that few who have proffered some of these writers as icons of enlightened intellectualism, namely the professorial and teaching class, have taken the time to consider their products rationally. And, certainly those to whom it has been asserted that the writings comprise a source of deep reflection beneficial to humanity - essential to an understanding of humanitas - have not taken the opportunity to consider them rationally and counter the assertions. These vapid arguments have seeped into the mainstream only because they were developed by "so-and-so." In other words, the foundation is ipse dixit; the proof is hearsay.
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