he also appears on many programs and has been published in major newspapers and periodicals such as "the wall street journal," l.a. times, and the american spectator and inns his upcoming book is a biography of william f. buckley, jr. he has a password in english, duke university and a graduate in paris. he currently resides in alexandria, virginia, with his wife. i asked y'all to please join me and walking one of the best intellectual in the conservative movement, doctor lee edwards. [applause] . . spent two days

traveling with reagan in southern california when he was considering whether to run for governor of that state. at the end of the second day of, reagan took us up a steep winding road to his home in pacific palisades overlooking los angeles to service some iced tea and cookies. while he and nancy were in the kitchen, i walked over to the bookcases in their library dan and began examining the titles.

they were almost without exception works of history, economics and politics. they included conservative classics such as the road to serfdom, whitaker chambers's witness. henry hamlin's economics and one lesson and a book i have never heard of, the law. that wasn't good enough for me so i began taking out the books from the shelves and looking at them. he said don't do that. i said it is okay. looking around. they were dogged these books, annotated. i realize this was the personal library of a serious, fossil individual who has a are arrived at his conservatism the old-fashioned way, one book at a

time. history is filled with examples of books that inspired and motivated. for good and for evil. without calm marks's communist manifesto, marxism might have remained an obscure 30 and not become the power obsess ideology that caused the deaths of twelve hundred million victims in the 20th-century. without thomas paine's common sense the american colonists might not have been inspired to challenge the greatest military power on earth and win our independence. without the conservative mind, conservatism might have remained ignorant of its rich intellectual heritage and the conservative movement might have

remained nameless. most modernists argue that new media, like the internet, have rendered books irrelevant. in our 24/7 society you often hear the dismissive comment i don't have time to read a book. as one u.s. president was want to say, poppycock. recent heritage foundation survey of conservative leaders revealed books made a lifelong difference in their thinking and their actions. economics and one lesson, head of the pacific research institute was not part of the college curriculum but gave credence to my own views which on campus were seen as unpopular and even radical. economics in one lesson, sally said, served as a guiding light not only through college but for out my career.

every american students should read one day in the life of yvonne misinich. that was the advice of paul oo of the wall street journal who said that short novel explain why we fought the cold war and why we won it. barry goldwater's the conscience of the conservative, the head of public policy and laid the foundation for all that is good and worthwhile in the modern conservative movement and i am happy to note that the american foundation agrees with his assessment and published the conscience of the conservative in 1990. maybe it's time for another edition. are you listening? let me add here the titles of a couple of my favorite books. the roots of american order by

russell kirk. this is how five cities, athens, rome, gay jerusalem, london and philadelphia, shaped america. days gone by, william f. buckley jr. is a beautifully written autobiography by the founder of the american conservative movement. ethnic america pleaded no by thomas stole, our foremost black intellectual examines some of the ethnic groups, jewish, of rich, german, african-american, why some have a greater impact than others. let me be clear about one thing. a book is a book is a book. it is not a snippet or a scrap or a fragment. a book contains thousands of

words, hundreds of pages, which permit the author to develop their early his ideas and his arguments or his characters in a novel. a book doesn't have to be printed on paper. the success of audio books proves that. i would like to say a few complimentary words about the kindle, amazon's electronic reader. the kendall is about the size of a book. it weighs less than a pound and can hold more than 200 books and offers access to several hundred thousand titles at about $10 a pop. but i must confess, i prefer the printed and bound book. there is something tactile and titillating about holding a book in your hands, like holding your wife in your arms. successful reading, according to

georgetown university professor james shaw, great reader and a great writer requires three things -- sense of self discipline, a personal library and good guides. i might add you also need a good laugh, a comfortable chair and your favorite nonalcoholic beverage. i realize self discipline is not a popular virtue these days in these modern times but for conservatives, self discipline, the ability to apply yourself to a goal is vital if you want to learn what is really important and apply that knowledge in your lives. the building of a small personal library and i emphasize small personal library, a dozen or two books will take time and thought and it will be impeded by the fact that we live in an age that

is reluctant to accept, if not hostile to the idea that such things as books are better than others. but conservatives note, as russell kirk wrote, that books about the human condition and about the civil social order, can arouse a healthy intellectual reaction to preserve order, justice and freedom. i don't hesitate to suggests reading the right books, a guide for the intelligent conservative published by the heritage foundation, all of you have been given a bookmark listing 101 books in the heritage guide, one of the best books about reading is mortimer adler's how to read a book first published in 1940 and revised and updated many times since. here are a couple of his axioms.

passive reading is impossible. we cannot be with our eyes is immobilized and our minds this week. don't try to understand every word or page of a difficult book the first time through. writing down your reactions will help recall the tents of the author. books especially of history and philosophy should be read in relation to each other. you can't properly understand the federalist papers for example unless you have also read the declaration of independence and the u.s. constitution. the best books reward you in two ways. the improvement in your reading skill that occurs when you tackle a difficult book but more

importantly you become wiser about yourself and about the great and enduring truths of human life. what difference can books make? i like the answer of jeffrey nelson, former college president, now executive vice president of i s i. books of the right kind by men and women of imagination and perception are indispensable in the flourishing of quarter, freedom, justice and the authentic progress of civilization. let the reading begin. let me introduce our panel for this morning. harry crocker is a former journalist and political speech writer who spent several years as a book editor handling mostly political books at gregory publishing in washington d.c.. the author of several best-selling historical works

including his latest book, "the politically incorrect guide to the civil war," which has been praised by the washington times among others as -- for its great scholarship, great storytelling and great fun. a graduate of vanderbilt university, dr. benjamin wiker is a senior discoverer at the seattle institute in washington and at the st. paul center for biblical theology. the author of seven will receive the book, the most recent and provocative is "10 books that screwed up the world: and 5 others that didn't help". dr. elizabeth kantor is the editor of the conservative book club, frequent contributor to cumin events and blog and conservativebookclub.com. she earned her ph.d. in english in chapel hill which experience helped inspire her to write "the

politically incorrect guide to english and american literature". ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming our first panelist, harry crocker. [applause] >> thank you. i have worked in the book business most of my working life but i never thought to compare the pleasure of holding a book with the pleasure of holding my wife. i am not sure how she would take that if i told her i love holding u.s. much as i love holding the road to serfdom. i remember -- the american spectator recommend book for christmas and he said for you americans i think you should start with the bible and

shakespeare and work your way up from there. likewise i think we need to start with the bible. that is ten books and go down the list. it seems to me fundamental to read the bible. aside from whatever divine nature we might attribute to it, you cannot be a literate person in western civilization without having read the bible. i am not overly concerned with what translation you might choose. personally i think it is important to read the king james for its influence on our language but the july rheims work, i like that too. the revised kantor version as well. it is fundamental to start with the bible. [applause] i think the most important

subject is history. history is the experience -- we need to study actual history. will durant who wrote the multi volume history of the world once said that western civilization is caesar and christ. before christ you should go to see there. you could read virtually any roman historian, plutarch coarser tony as or caesar's commentaries, there is something about the roman world that has been with us to this day. it is important to understand. i have several books -- when i was growing up in 1960s and 1970s, one early thing that clung to me was the fear of decline. in large part it was driven by a

military history because during the vietnam war i had seen the fall of saigon and i thought this could be it. social upheaval and revolution. for me when i grew up to be an active participant in public affairs, my goal is to stop -- among the books i read, you never heard of this book, it hit me right in the face. the greatness of the romans and their decline. if you can't find that book, the machiavelli discourse on living. eternal lessons from them, rant

you should also read and take large parts of it with a grain of salt edward gibbons's decline and fall of the roman empire. churchill read the whole thing when he was a soldier in india. you can read condensed perversions as well. he is very right about a lot of things and it is splendid. edmund burke, everyone likes to put this book on their list. the first time i came to washington and started interacting with my fellow conservatives i thought you might not have read this book.

it was thrown by someone who is quite famous right now and he was a celebration of the french revolution party because for him it was the love of libertarianism and democracy. you have got to be kidding me! it was crazy then and it is crazy now. a lot of principles that burke plays out are crucial and truth, things that rubble lot of people in a knee-jerk way the wrong way. the famous line the age of chivalry is gone, economists and calculators have succeeded. how many conservatives today actually have no problem with that? how many of us would say -- he is so aphoristic. every paragraph is quotable. never more of should we hold generous loyalty to rank, that

proud submission, that dignified obedience, subordination of the heart which kept alive even servitude itself and exulted freedom. who talks like that now? who would support things like that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart? sometimes in our libertarian celebration of freedom, these baseline values, burke is great at pointing out of feudalism and marty were essential to limited government and how their abolition meant tyranny inevitably. we should think about this when we think about what is a good and proper government that might export to the world.

burke talks about -- very briefly -- the old feudal chivalrous spirit of fealty, fere both king and subjection of the extinct in the minds of men, thoughts and assassinations anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation on that long road which forms the political code of all power standing on its own honor and the honor of those who are to obey it. get rid of these ties between people only brute force and power. he also warns when we stripped away tradition we stripped away what is most valuable in life. on this scheme of things a king is but a man, queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal and an animal of the highest order. i don't think too many of us want to go there but that is the

direction a certain form of -- conservatism might take us. on a similar note, the life of johnson, a certain sort of englishmen, johnson has almost biblical authority for a good reason. it is fun to read. it is johnson who tells us that the first wig or the first liberal was the devil. it is a great reminder of something of that those of us involved can too easily forget, we are conservatives, the famous line -- how human hearts and were, laws are changed and cause or cure. politics, ideology is not the be all and end all of life. dr. edwards mentioned russell kirk. i agree the conservative mind, essential reading.

for nothing else, all politics are really more questions. that is very true. start off, we americans start with the bible and shakespeare, let's get to shakespeare. it you want to each participant in politics, read about leadership and a good way to learn about leadership is shakespeare's henry v. it is classic. this rousing, stirring battle cry of a play, it ends on a very down note. that is important too. it reminds us of the old line all political lives and failure. that is the cut off. all political lives end in failure. that is the nature of politics

and the nature of life. my ninth book -- one thing we conservatives often forget is we are always playing defense. we neglect to think about what sort of society would we really like to have? we are looking for that society, the republic of plate or anything like that. you should look to think or -- fiction, malls that focus on individuals and how they live their lives. the book that always worked for me in this regard is a book by siegfried, a war poet in the first world war. tremendously brave officer, unbelievably brave. lawrence of arabia thought if you ever wanted to find the epitome of an english gentleman looked to siegfried.

he wrote a book, a trilogy of novels, the complete memoirs of george shearson. is very autobiographical, slightly fictionalized. if you know the poetry it is very sarcastic. the book is the complete the the reverse. it is beautiful. beautifully written, showing a tolerant, well-rounded human being. a crucial volume of memoirs, second is memoirs of infantry officer, the memoirs of the fox hunting and show the same man growing up in england learning country sports and leading what to my mind is a life lived in a truly conservative society. a society where politics is very remote. people naturally have a christian order to their life.

it is not a book from the middle ages but the nineteenth or twentieth century. it may be that we need to achieve active politics, the goal is not to make us all hyper political beings. i often hear people say we should take over the school board or get more women in politics. i disagree. better we abolish the school board and public schools and have school volunteers. [applause] my last book is a book by george orwell. several people i have been mentioning were not card-carrying conservatives. but still worth while. orwell was a proposed socialist

but his literary journalism, if you look at these things as outstanding examples of style, i am a professional book editor. if i want to teach a young writer's style, i would say look to or well. he is honest. he is painfully honest. his painful honesty which makes many of his essays greatly conservative and defending conservative values. crucially for me for all of us as we trundled down this path into the dystopian future is his use of language as it should be. or well is one of the first really great authors to focus on how the bastard is asian of language is a political act.

[applause] >> i am going to give you great, good books and really great evil books. i will start with the latter, way they are more exciting in perhaps the worst sense, easier to get into some times than a really good book about good things but as daunting recognize that is always a question about what the state of our soul is. i wrote one book called "10 books that screwed up the world: and 5 others that didn't help" and harry crocker made me add

five more to that. there are several very good reasons to read great evil books. primarily you need to understand that evil, that the formation, that generation in society is the result of not accidents or stupidity but all too are often great intelligence gone awry. the deformation of what makes us most human. we need to understand that great bad things as plato and aristotle remind us several times and only because by great men. great evil men right great evil books. we live in evil times. as i argued in my first ten books that screwed up the world we need to understand those books that have most malformed our current culture. we don't want to excuse evil as people do when they get caught

by saying i made a mistake or did something stupid, is evil and we need to understand what deep and profound evil is. what should you read to know some of the most profound features of evil, machiavelli's the prince is one of the greatest books on evil of all time. he is an astoundingly influential author down to the modern day. if you ever studied the history of england you understand how far machiavelli when in destroying england. , as hobbes's leviathan. i learned more about political life. it is the text book, the heart of modern liberalism that is this focus on rights as opposed

to virtue. hobbs well studied opens up exactly what is going on now. that is a book published in 1651. it is important to read people who have been dead for long enough to have been wise. ..

>> to being just another animal that should be treated just as we treat animals. if you want to know what goes on behind our comprehensive health care push, you should read the descent of man because that will form the spirit of it. let's get to some good books. great good books are soul changing. they are the things that will let you know that you have a soul and what it was made for. college is a time when you will have enough leisure, i hope, maybe you have to make that leisure to study these great books, and i'm going to list two to begin with that had the most effect on me. they were like getting slammed by an intellectual 2x4 okay? read dante's divine comedy again and again, even the paradiso,

okay? but read it with a translation and commentary by one of the great minds of the 20th century, dorothy sayers. her commentary alone is a classic. it's an extraordinary insight into what it means to have a universe ordered by wisdom and love. plato's republic. i can't say enough about it. i felt like i was wrung dry after reading it. but what you understand in plato's republic is that the order of your soul is a reflection of the order of the regime in which you live. that is, if you live in a disordered regime, you almost cannot help but to have a disordered soul. and disordered souls make disordered regimes so they're resip roically related. so you have this relationship

between what's called the city and the soul, and plato provides an astounding analysis of the decline of souls and regimes together. just for your own barometric reading, we are now at the point of extreme democracy falling into tyranny. when i found that out, i was, i think, breathless for the next 25 years. read pror verbs. -- proverbs. in our particular regime we hold prudence or wisdom at a minimum, and we affirm the passions highly. everything is passion-based. proverbs reintroduces you to the kind of practical wisdom about human things that should define the basis of our reflection, our way of life and, hence, all politics if we have to be dragged in to work with it. okay? i agree absolutely with

dr. crocker that our imaginations need to be retrained. they're almost entirely corrupt. that is, our imaginations should be trained by wisdom, not by sort of twittering and, you know, sort of the equivalent of morning cartoons which has become our news services, okay? so you need something that deeply trains your imaginations and passions in accordance with wisdom, and i highly recommend shakespeare, of course, because he compels you to slow down. you can't speed read shakespeare, or if you do, you should feel you have violated a great sacred thing, okay? i would read as much jane austen as possible which means everything she wrote. but jane austen needs to be read, and what is so wonderful about austen is the fact that there are marvelous movies done

on her novels. absolutely marvelous. and there's nothing wrong with movies. and if you watch sense and sensibility or pride and prejudice, do it about 150 times. that's what we did at our house. you will be trained to love only a great movie. as you will be trained only to love a great novel. that is, it will form in you a distaste for what is vulgar, cheap and thoughtless. and the vulgar and the cheap and the the thoughtless is what rules us now, that is the condition of those who are moving from extreme democracy into tyranny. and on that happy note, i leave you. [applause]

>> it's a great privilege to be able to talk to the next generation of conservatives about what books to read. i'm not going to actually give you a list partly because this book, the politically incorrect guide to english and american literature, is essentially full of reading lists, eight of them, one for each of the first eight chapters going through the whole history of literature written in english. instead of telling you or urging you to read certain books, what i want to do is try to persuade you, try to sell you on a theory of how to pick books or what kind of books to read. essentially, i'm going to make the case that not just even though, but especially if you want to stay involved in politics, it's absolutely crucial that you not spend these formative years of your life, your youth, reading essentially political books. especially that you don't spend

it reading about contemporary politics. even though i'm as the editor of the conservative book club, that's what i do for a living, i sell those books, but there's plenty of time for you to read about contemporary events in politics later. the books that you ought to be reading now are, in a word, the classics. that is, books that made it into the canon not for political reasons, but for reasons of quality. because they were the best books, because they were the books that were superior in truth, in goodness and beauty to books that didn't make it into the canon. i'm talking about the great works from plato to t.s. elliott that were central to college curricula up until about the time that you all were born. i was thinking about this and doing subtraction. you've probably heard the story of how in 1987 students marched

across the stanford college campus with jesse jackson chanting hey, hey, ho, ho, western culture's got to go. that time, around the late '80s, was the time when professors across the country reconfigured their reading lists getting rid of the bad old dead white males and replacing them with authors picked for their gender or their politics or their ethnicity or sexual orientation or for some sort of victim status. of course, not all the classics completely disappeared. colleges still taught aristotle, shakespeare, but they began to teach those classics really differently. i'm going to give a could couple examples about shakespeare. sprigally -- traditionally for about 400 years intelligent readers, college professors said essentially three things about

shakespeare. they said he was universal, of universal interest. he's not of an age but for all time as ben johnson said. they said he mirrored nature, that there was something real about what shakespeare was able to put in his plays that's realer than any other literature. again, ben johnson, nature herself was proud of his designs, enjoyed to wear the dressing of his lines. and then thirdly they said that he wrote beautiful poetry. well into the second half of the 20th century, english professors were still teaching shakespeare for those reasons, because they wanted to put their students in touch with something that was universeally interesting, that taught things about human nature in a way you can't get anywhere else and that was a fabulous example of a beautiful work of art. but in the late 20th century they, college professors

typically started to see shakespeare in a different way. shakespeare became an example of what's oppressive about western society, and in some cases even professors make the case that shakespeare actually causes the evils of western civilization. i'm going to give you a couple of quotes from professors. somebody at u-penn says the domestication of women seems to be a major project of this play. that's about macbeth. here's a u- maas professor, here's what he says: so i ask my students, what if shakespeare is partly to blame for the danger that women have faced and continue to face in premarital sex? it has been compellingly argued, i explained, that shakespeare has played a significant role in the establishment and maintenance of gender roles that

subordinate women. if you read shakespeare with professors like these, you know, you haven't been introduced to shakespeare as somebody you can learn something of value from, you've essentially been given an anti-shakespeare inoculation. you've been trained not to take him seriously as a source of anything with value. this drastic change in the college curriculum means that if you're getting a typical college education in, you know, circa 2009 a.d., your education is dramatically drircht than -- different than the kind of education americans got for the previous 200 years. it's so different that i think we need to worry about whether people being educated in american colleges today are going to end up being citizens of the west, anything much like americans that we had before. i don't think, although i hope in the question period you'll share from your observations

what you think about this, but my impression is that leftist professors are not really succeeding in converting a lot of students to be radical femmists or diehard marxists, that they're not succeeding in turning a majority of the folks they teach into seeing things the way they see them. but what i'm afraid of is that students are being effectively cut off from the, our cultural roots. after all, culture is not something in your dna. you don't inherit it, it's learned. and, of course, you learn culture in your family and a lot of other ways that aren't in formal education, but formal education has been one crucial parking lot of cultural transmission in any civilization that we know about. college teachers today are not

typically great enthusiasts for translating western civilization to the next generation. some of them actively want to cut it off, stop it from being transmitted which is why it's not enough for you guys as conservative students to be up in arms sort of against political correctness on campus, although that may be quite necessary, it's not sufficient. thousands of young people committed to defending america are going to fail if there are no young people still getting the kind of education that used to turn students into educated americans. so at least some of you need to figure out how to grasp yourselves back onto the cultural roots of the west by your own reading. there are if you read mostly political and contemporary books, your conservativism's going to be too shallow. even the classics of the conservative movement, can teach us there are permanent things worth defending, but they don't

really establish us in those permanent things. if you're always looking to defend western culture, then there's a way in which you're always on the edge of your civilization where it touches what's barr brows or what's outside. if that's where we are, then our relationship to our own culture gets to be too much like what graham green said with his relationship with the catholic church, will end up with -- he talks about being a member of a foreign legion who fights around for a city of which he's no longer a citizen. to be full citizens of our civilization, we need to read deeply into its great literature. the kind of education that i think you need and i wish your professors would help you with it more but i'm afraid they're not going to is not a purely factual or merely intellectual education. it is both those things. it's true if you read the classics, you're going to come across fascinating information, ideas that you might not hear in

school. this can be a dramatic effect. the intellectual outlook of the typical english professor, for example, and i correspond with some of these folks and, you know, read their writings. i would characterize their intellectual outlook as one of extreme poverty. they're interested in essentially one kind of intellectual idea. they're interested in injustice. but they're not even interested in every kind, they're interested specifically in the kind of injustice that happens between powerful groups and weak groups, between members of one group to another. and their particular subset of injustice comes in a lot of different flavors. you know, there's the racism flavor and the classism flavor and the oppressed ethnicity of people and the, and the pick on people with the wrong sexual orientation flavor, but it's still a tiny, narrow range of

things to be interested in. the shame is if somebody was only those interests is teaching wordsworth or shakespeare, then everything their interested -- they're interested in -- the human imagination, love and marriage, death and jealousy, sin and salvation -- all those things that people were interested in before about 1980 seem from this very, this outlook of intellectual poverty to be just sort of like mass or covers for what's always really going on which is that people in a group with some kind of power are oppressing people in a group without power. so if you read these things without those race/class/gender glasses on, then you're going to encounter all kinds of ideas that are fascinating and have been of permanent interest to the human race. but the old-fashioned kind of education i'm talking about is not just about spending your youth collecting interesting things to think about, though that's a good idea, storing up things to think about for the rest of your life. it's also about committing to

principles, making judgments and adopting attitudes. now, i know from experience when i argue along these lines, i get got cha e-mails from english professors who think that they've caught me in an obvious faux pas. the idea that students should be learning to love some things and reject others as an essential part of their literary education is anathema to modern academic. but for millennia this was considered to be the purpose of education. aristotle argued that young men ought to learn poetry because virtue is about delighting and loving and hating a right. nothing is more necessary that be to make a habit to judge rightly and delight in good characters and noble acts. phillip sidney said no philosopher's precepts can sooner make you an honest man than the reading of virgil. it doesn't just teach honesty in the abstract, it shows the students an admirable character

and teaches him to want for himself the virtue embodied. this kind of education doesn't just inform, it motivates. this is how the classics will actually give you western civilization. they civilize you as americans and citizens of the west by showing you the things that have inspired americans in the past and offering you the chance to aspire to those same things. plato shows you socrates, and from him you learn a passion for free inquiry, to pursue the truth no matter what the cost. horace or the man who wrote the battle of hadden or 100 other poems show you that it really is beautiful to die for your country despite the blunders that also make every soldier's death a heartbreaking waste. some of the principles you learn from our classics are especially western or especially american. in canterbury tales we see the beginnings of chivalry, that uniquely western arrangement between the sexes.

in huckleberry finn, mark twain gives us the phenomenon of an uneducated boy who brings a new moral life on the basis of his own experience. but some of what we learn from the classics are lessons that no civilization can forget and survive. the universal truths about human nature that we find so perfectly articulated in shakespeare, the necessity that we have the courage to defend ourselves that we see in beowolf. we live in an age when the intellectual class is trying to learn even the most basic insights into human nature. it's up to you that they are not not -- it's up to you to insure that they are not forgotten. [applause] >> so we're lining up there. fire away. >> hi.

samuel, penn state. given that you all seem to agree that there are books that simply teach bad ideas, what role do you think censorship has or should it have a role in this oppression of evil and books that simply teach bad things 1234. >> well, either the -- it was a collection of irving crystal's essays in which he makes the case for censorship, and he says if you're for civilization, you have to be for censorship. in his case, though, i think he's thinking more about obscenity, if i remember right. i don't actually remember all that well. i don't know. it's, obviously, a tough question because we see it deployed against ourselves all the time. when i was your age and i was a college conservative journalist, we had plenty of censorship hurled at us. and you see it hurled all the

time at people who are saying perfectly unremarkable things. in europe especially now some of the anti-hate speech laws are quite prohibitive. so i guess if i remembered irving crystal's essay right i'd be of a similar note. i'd be opposed to on obscenity because i think it does degrade the soul, and it's hard for people to avoid. but i think i'm pretty libertarian on what's allowed politically. >> well, censorship is a slippery slope. we shouldn't engage in it period. [applause] >> apart from anything else, it just seems much more effective to read marx or machiavelli and point out what's wrong with what they say than to try to hush them up at this point. [applause] >> let me come out with both and make everyone mad. censorship will happen no matter

what you do. the question is, will it be principled censorship or unprincipled censorship? you can't help but censor simply by having people read some things rather than others, okay? so censorship is something that is always going on whether -- you can't say you are or aren't going to have it. that having been said, you can see what unprincipled censorship or censorship from the wrong principles would mean. when i wrote ten books that screwed up the world, three countries, i -- companies, i think, denied me the right to quote from books. i could not quote from kenzie's male report. i did not do anything other than quote. the worst thing i could do for alfred kenzie was quote him. okay? margaret meade's book, coming of age in samoa, denied the quoting, but it was too late. it got in anyway.

but the point of that is, you know, it happens. it's always going to happen. just by the way our intellects and our moral character must be formed, it will occur. you can't not -- otherwise you just say, we should read everything, you know? from the worst kind of foolish scribbling to shakespeare. so censorship is a function of judgment. and it always has been. and there's no way to get around it, so the question is, how do we do it well? how's that for a perverse notion of a conservative account of censorship? >> thank you. next question, please. >> good morning. any name is joseph, i'm a senior at virginia wesleyan in norfolk, virginia. i was -- this question is for dr. wiker and dr. edwards. i took a class my junior year, and one of my favorite authors that i used to quote although liberal was father benedict row shell. he's from new york and the

bronx, and he writes a lot of books. i was in a class of 30, i was the only one defending terry shy slow. my question was when i was in that class, i felt so outnumbered, and i didn't know what to do. and my question is, do you think when we have a class that challenges us that it would be good to take out quotes maybe and have, like, a list of talking points that would help us? because i'm a senior now, so it's like one more year and i'm done, but i felt that if i had some advice to really help me in really battling that, it would have helped me. so if i could give any light to that, thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> oh, okay. >> yeah. >> it's -- i went to vanderbilt, and it was awful. [laughter] but i learned a lot about how it

is that you function in sort of the intellectual underground and under continuous persecution. and it's not easy. it takes a lot of maalox, but that's essentially what you're doing. but the dullture will do that to you as well. the best thing is to understand the other side better than it understands itself, set out their position with more profound flourish and then demolish it and carefully sit down. >> i think the point is well taken that ben has made and that is that we not only need to study our side, but the other side as well. and i think that if putting down some talking points will help you, i think that's a good idea as well. >> thank you. >> josh lerner, university of chicago. dr. wiker, i note -- >> wiker. >> sorry. i notice both on your list and mr. crocker's list appear works by machiavelli.

is there a fundamental difference between the discourses and the prints? and a second question, you had hobbs as the right-oriented discourse, but aren't most rights discourses today based more on locke than anything else? the sort of right to life, liberty and the state? >> wow. well, i'm going to disagree with my own editor here that i think that machiavelli disourselves on -- discourses on libby is one of the most evil books of all time. [laughter] and it fits perfectly with the print. it was, it brings back the second aspect of your question. oh, the right. i believe that to put it succinctly and these aren't my words, but leo strauss', locke was just hobbs sugar coated. and, yes, you're right, he is the one that mediated hobbs' thought to america and, unfortunately, most conservatives refuse to understand that, and they keep locke as a kind of an icon when

they should really understand his foundations. and he is an example of someone who was very devious and, hence, very effective. >> thank you. >> hi, from young britons foundation. would you regard salmon rushty's satanic verses as essential reading? >> as what? >> as essential reading. [inaudible conversations] >> i think after it was banned i said, well, you know, why was it banned? so i thought one of those books i put on my reading table and never got around to reading. i wouldn't call it essential, but i do think that for an understanding of an important part of global culture it's probably, it would be useful reading is the way i'd put it. >> thanks. [inaudible] my school has a program that it

requires us to attend that it celebrates great writers. and i've noticed that many of these works are very leftist, and while i agree that we should read many of these works, what steps can we as conservative college students do to get more conservative works in the classrooms? >> well, that's a big, big problem, i'm sure probably others of you have had this same problem, i would gather, in your classes, am i right? yeah. well, i just think that you have to work, start with your professor, try to work with him. then go to the chairman of the department. then go to the dean. then if that doesn't work, try to figure out -- you might be lucky, there might, perhaps, be some alumnus on the board of trustees, perhaps a recognizable conservative that you could go to. i think, also, to try to get not

only yourself, but other students maybe to sign a petition in which you're saying here are some books that we think ought to be added, some of the things we've talked about here this morning to the reading list. and just keep at it and be as politely aggressive as you can be. >> okay. >> yes, please. >> what i'd say is i don't really think that our goal -- i mean, in politics and economics it's a little different, but in the humanities and particularly in all kinds of literature i don't really think that our goal should be to get more conservative books on the reading lists. i think our goal should be to depoliticize the reading lists and go back to picking books on the basis of their quality and not on the basis of the politics of the people who wrote them. [applause] >> i'm sorry, but i have to respectfully disagree with elizabeth that i don't think it's either/or.

it's not either/or. it's both. i think as we pointed out here that what harry and elizabeth and ben all said, there are certain classics, great books, and we're assuming that either, you either have or should or must read whether it's bible, shakespeare, plato and so forth, but on top of that you guys are political activists, and that's what we have to realize. that's the reality of what we're talking about here. and so not in addition to those great classic books, there are certain what i call books in the canon of the modern conservative movement which should be and ought to be added to any reading list that includes weaver, kirk, and whitaker chambers. ..

>> which cover the history of the developing of the church, and see how it aligns with the development of europe. i think both of those things are important. >> i would say just speaking

personally. i am a christian before i am a conservative and i think that's a good conservative position to have. [applause] >> the left is all about politics giving meaning to your life and sort of being everything that there is. and that's not what we are about. >> i would like to pick up on that last point because you get confused about whether it's to gain power over to reconstruct the order of society, so the good things can be our primary focus again. i will fight so that i can every morning be on my front porch drinking coffee with my wife and watching my six kids. that's what i fight for. okay, that's what you want to fight for. that's the primary thing. you don't want to get so caught up in politics and twittering and so forth that you miss what is worth fighting for. i'm going to add one more book.

read lord of the wings. it's all about the scheier, okay? and the orcs are in the shire now. [applause] >> as we look to all of you to be frodo's in the years and decades to come. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking our panel i think of getting a really wonderful panel discussion today. [applause]

>> the two founders in myspace, there were five but the two who kind of figure largest in the book are tom anderson and christa wolf. as i said before they were not technology. they were marketers. they lived in l.a. they had left a.com start up after a collapse in 2000, started their own e-mail marketing company. at the time e-mail marketing was not officially known as spam. but it was. because they were not getting consent from the people who they were sending the e-mail to. venture capital is had fled and they branched into selling in

addition to sending e-mails from other people they started selling their own products. they sold spy cameras that you could hide in your shoes. they sold the books with titles like how to hypnotize people and how to grow taller. which involve a lot of stretching. and they also distribute spyware as i was discussing right after 9/11. they distribute some software that would turn your cursor on your computer screen into a little american flag. it was actually spyware the track as you went around the internet and gave you targeted ads. so they were operating on what i call the fringes of the internet economy. >> this was a portion of a booktv program. you can view the entire program and many other booktv programs online. go to booktv.org. type the name of the author or book into the search area into the upper left hand corner of the page.

select to watch a link. now you can view the entire program. you might also explore the recently on booktv box or the featured video box to find recent and featured programs. >> primatologist jane goodall talk to an audience at georgetown university about her latest book, "hope for animals and their world." she describes several people around the world who are successfully saving endangered species. this event is about an hour and 15 minutes. >> it is my great honor to introduce someone who is a hero of mine, a friend of mine, when i first had the opportunity to meet her, must be seven or eight years ago i told you the story of how my sister, my younger sister, when she was in sixth

grade actually played her in a biography here in a school where they had to pick summary that they wanted to emulate and research and play for a day. and my sister chose jane goodall. she is truly an inspirational voice for the future of our planet, an accomplished scientist, and accomplished writer, the founder of the jane goodall institute, which supports research as well as many other programs in research and education that i've had a chance to visit their education programs in schools in massachusetts, and colorado. it is called roots and shoots, to bring kids closer to the issues of the environment. i see kids are today. they may be part of that environment. she continues to travel and speak to save our planet. over 300 days a year. in fact, the last time i ran

into her was changing planes in heathrow airport in london about two years ago. were both crossing and we knew each other, and we set high. and that is where she is most frequently found as she travels the globe, roots and shoots alone is now an over i thank 30 countries. as a voice, for primates, for chimps but more generally for our planet and for ourselves. she was designated by u.s. secretary in 2002 as a messenger of peace. she also has a number of great honors, a metal of tanzania, national geographic society's covered metal, the kyoto prize from japan, they unesco 60th anniversary prize, and the list goes on and on. in 2006, she was named a game of the british empire at buckingham palace that i'm working on

legislation in congress to issue commemorative coin that features are as well, which would also help raise some money for the jane goodall institute. it is a tremendous program, advocacy, educational outreach, and of course her personal presence and her personal inspiration, which has touched so many of us in such an intimate way. and i know that you will enjoy her book, what she has to say, and you also have the opportunity to ask questions. and one of the truly great women of our age, it is my great honor and distinction to introduce to you doctor jane goodall. [applause] >> ththank you.

well, thank you, congressman, derek. thank you for a wonderful welcome to all of you here. and i think the best i can do is to give you my traditional greeting, the voice of the chimpanzees from gandhi, the sound that would especially reach you people, to me it's one of the most provocative sounds of the african forests. hello. [laughter]

>> i'm going to try do quite a lot of things this evening in quite a short time, but fortunately i'm sticking to an educated audience so i don't have to belabor certain points. you will understand what i'm talking about when i'm talking about how we have devastated the environment and so forth. but there is a lot i want to share. so i want to speak about these things in a fairly abbreviated form in the hope that it will leave time for you to ask questions about those aspects that most teachers are yossi, or about which feel very fascinated. so first of all, of course the chimpanzees. we have got to start off with them, but for them i would not be a. actually it's not quite true, but for my mother i would not have gone to see the chimpanzee. so we start back there somehow. but she did support my childhood dreams. she's the only one who didn't

laugh when i said i wanted to go to africa and live with animals and write books about them back in the time when world war ii was raging. we didn't have enough money for a bicycle, let alone a motorcar. africa was still the dark continent that we didn't know much about it, and perhaps most significant of all, i was the wrong pic i was a mere girl and girls just to do that sort of thing. you could be a missionary's wife or something but that was about it. so it was my mothers supporting a saint if you really want something and you work hard, and you take advantage of opportunity and to never give up, you will find a way. so eventually i got to africa. it didn't have a degree. i had not been to college at that time. and in order to get their i was invited by a friend, i left the job i had in london and worked as a waitress, and the money for my return fair. got to kenya, hurried about the

late richard lee, a conservationist today and paleontologist. louis leaky was his father. very famous paleontologist, anthropologist. and i went to see them. he offered me a job basically as his secretary. and then that led to him getting me this extraordinary opportunity to go and study not just any animal, but the ones more like us than any other. and over the nearly 50 years that i and my team have been studying these chimpanzees, we have begun to uncover portrait of an extraordinary being we are still finding out new things all the time. a chimpanzee led to the over 60 years. so we have only been in 50, so you can imagine that we need far more years of research to collect more history and family history. and the history of communities. i've been in the position of

being a historian to record the history of these amazing beings who cannot record their own, at least as far as we know they can't. and these years have provided an insight, not only from the work in the field and other scientists working in other parts of africa, but also a lot of details of knowledge that's coming from working with captive individuals, for example. we now know that the dna of humans and chimpanzees differs but only just over 1%. that when the genome with a chimpanzee was unraveled it turns out that the main difference was in the expression of the gene. we note that the blood and immune system is so like ours that they can be used for basically discovering -- they are being used in medical research to test vaccines and explore diseases which otherwise unique to