Monday, August 22, 2011

The Sickest Book has Merit

I'm not sure why, maybe Geoffrey Rush's appointment as President of AACTA, but I found myself thinking about the movie Marquis de Sade. I remembered that a friend of mine had read 120 Days of Sodom back when we were kids and books generally came on paper.

So I started reading up about the author and his novels on Wikipedia, reading about how he was a pretty sick guy, but his writings are both political and philosophical as well as sick. I downloaded a copy of 120 Days of Sodom to see what it was like, and was confronted with most of what is on the list of what would be blocked by Conroy's Folly. I won't even discuss in detail what was in there, because I don't want search engines to associate those keywords directly with my site.

If there ever was a book written to incite people to burn it, here it is. I've certainly deleted my copy. But should we force others to delete theirs? Hell no!

The story is disgusting, and I only skimmed parts, but there is certainly literary and philosophical merit which I could discern, even from my cursory reading. It seems to be an illustration of what happens when freedom is taken too far. Even libertarians believe that "the right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." Yet this book shows what happens if the right to swing my fist only ends where another person physically stops me. It is a conception of freedom that is so extreme and unbalanced that it becomes despotic. The story also clearly, and from the first passage of the introduction, serves as an indictment of the clergy and nobility of the time.

So while I find the story entirely distasteful, and it is clearly in the RC category, and its content is probably actually illegal in Australia, it still adds value to our world, even if that value is in illustrating where the boundaries should lie by showing what should not be allowed.

And my friend is pretty well-adjusted. He was not ruined by reading this book, despite what people like Conroy would like you to believe is the risk of encountering distasteful content.


  1. Hey Dave, it's Kamil here, sickest book has a merit? Do you mean it? Hmmm, I don't know mate? Hey, I am not going to make a case for Sade's "artistic" vision, never read it, probably never will. but how about books such as Mein Kampf? One could argue the same, that it has some philosophical merit. Should that be available to wide public too? Or, how about "how to kill other humans for dummies"?, is that OK too?
    See, in one of your previous posts you stated that it is scary to have ppl with IQ of 70 in our society making decisions (as long as they are inclined toward religion). But now, you are saying that the same group of people, would be perfectly fine to read the sickest books from manuals to set up bombs to how to build a nuke in a garage?

    I dunno, maybe you are not entirely against the censorship, or maybe you are? Should there be a line drawn in the sand somewhere?

  2. I said there's merit, not that the ideas are good. You make a thought-provoking point about putting horrific ideas into the heads of people with IQs of 70. My preference is that we try to put enough good ideas out there that the bad ones don't take sway.

    You can never block the spread of ideas, and suppressing them often has the opposite effect to what is desired, so while I don't advocate promotion of Mein Kampf, I still think it should be accessible to anyone who wants to understand what it's about. Read in context of what came before, who wrote it and what came after, I'm sure it's pretty enlightening, though I have to admit, I've never read it. Maybe it can be my next review.

    On the topic of "how to kill humans for dummies," I was once stumped for an idea for English class, back in year 11. We had to write an instructional piece, and after procrastinating until just before it was due, I finally wrote "How to Commit Regicide." I thought it was funny, but you know my sense of humour, so would you want it banned? :-)

  3. You shouldn't have written that essay.

    You wasted an excellent Australian studies paper on an uncontroversial English topic.