This doesn’t claim the status of definitive opinion. I’m
just throwing it out as an idle muse.
I have a series of classic novels that were released under
the generic title Books That Have Changed Man’s Thinking, and I wonder just how
much books are capable of changing the development of human culture and
behaviour. It seems to me that books are capable of influencing attitude, and
attitudes are certainly different now than they were fifty or five hundred years
ago. But it further seems to me that when the chips are down, what comes to the
fore isn’t attitudes but human nature; and that doesn’t seem to have changed in
all the centuries of known history, in spite of all the books.
I’ll muse on.
2 comments:
I'd say books can be pretty powerful. The ones that come to mind are the Bible and Harry Potter. (although Twilight is coming close) That's not to say all the change was for the better, of course.
Well, I don't even think of the Bible as a book, but that's a subject unto itself. As for the other two, I can't see them having the slightest impact on human nature.
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