Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

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Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
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NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
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Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
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Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

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    Sunday, August 21. 2011

    What were your most "big picture" influential books? (from our archives)

    A commenter here mentioned C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man recently. It got me thinking about what the most influential books have been for my adult thinking about socio-religio-political topics.


    My list would have to include:


    Hayek's Road to Serfdom
    Fromm's Escape From Freedom
    C. S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man
    C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity
    Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain
    Orwell's long essay Politics and the English Language
    Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning
    Huxley's Brave New World


    I'm sure I omitted quite a few, but these came to mind. (I guess, as an ole Yankee, I am rather freedom-oriented and leave-me-alone-oriented rather than gimme-oriented. I was raised to fend for myself and to shoot my own moose, but that might be old-fashioned nowadays. The "modern" women, apparently, want government to be their help and support in life instead of husbands. That's pathetic - on both sides.)


    When I think about writings that influence me, I wonder whether they indeed influence, or whether they articulate half-thought and semi-formed thoughts that were already brewing in the back of my brain from my life experience.


    This is a quote from Charles Warman's review of The Abolition of Man at Amazon:



    In an ironic conclusion, Lewis predicts that what will be hailed an man's ultimate victory over Nature (such as human cloning?) will actually be Nature's ultimate victory over man. This will occur when we can fully control the kind of people the next generation will be (i.e., how they think), but in the absence of moral standards, this choice will be made arbitrarily; that is, according to purely Natural impulses - thus we have the Abolition of Man as man and the ascendancy of man as animal.



    Feel welcome to add your personal list to the comments.

    Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss at 12:28 | Comments (85) | Trackback (1)

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    A few Saturday morning links
    Obama: "I will change the world." Good grief. If I said that, they'd have the guys in white coats take me away.Who knew that the US Supreme Court defined "vegetable" in 1893?More press lies perpetuated. We expect this from politicians
    Weblog: Maggie's Farm
    Tracked: Oct 18, 07:01

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