Reading promos for this book I was pretty excited - it seems like a read with a lot of potential for nuanced social commentary that scratches below the surface. So when I opened it and saw books such as “The Communist Manifesto” and “Mien Kampf” listed I was disappointed. The concept of “the communist book is bad because communism and the nazi book is bad because nazis” is clunking and immature. But Wilker asserts that bad books, even the worst books, should not be shunned but rather be read and read again in order to have their true horrors fully understood, so in the spirit of this philosophy I persevered. 

But at about page 35, while discussing Hobbe’s “Leviathan”, it crosses the line from a potentially interesting commentary on ripple effects to simply a petulant rant by a man defending his personal world view. 

There’s a lot of criticism of this book because the Wilkes blames the woes the world on atheism, and sure that’s annoyingly simplistic. But what’s interesting about how angry “Leviathan” made Wiker was how incredibly confronted he was by Hobbe’s observations that men are capable of inflicting great harm on one another if not kept in check. And for the most part both Wiker and Hobbe do seem to mean the gender, not mankind. 

Wiker angrily dismisses Hobbe’s conjecture that people can be more heavily motivated by protecting themselves from harm that they are by altruism. But Wiker states that Hobbe’s opinions are formed by his life experience of war. So what life experience can we assumed formed Wiker’s opinions? Undoubtedly, a life without much threat of harm. 

Women, the recipients of millennia of harm and violence at the hands of men, especially during war time, rate only two mentions in the entire discourse; once when they are referred to in a context of a wife with the potential to be “carried off” by a neighbour, and once in the context of “desiring an abortion.” So what we have is an assessment of a work which presents human existence as one long exercise in harm reduction, wherein that concept is dismissed not by reason but rage, in which the half of humanity for whom existence *is* one long exercise in harm reduction are summarily ignored save for a short nod to the Madonna/whore trope. 

As much as the “atheism ruined the world” essay was frustrating lacking in nuance and originality, what really made me abandon this one was the fact that you can’t write about society while you ignore half of it. That takes you from simple to stupid. 

Did I read the chapter on “The Feminist Mystique” to see Wilker’s assessment of women as humans? I did not. Not all terrible books should be read. 

{1 Star because the intro chapter on Machiavelli’s “The Prince” is actually very coherent and informative.}