Enemies List

I read in last weeks’ newspaper of the death of Daniel Schorr, a C.B.S. newspaper correspondent on former president Richard M. Nixon’s notorious ‘Enemies List.’ 

I have thought that it would not be a bad idea for me or others to have an ‘enemies list’ of people or things that we should be very wary of. A handy cliché to this end would be, ‘To be forewarned is to be forearmed.’ In the Bible, the apostle Paul encourages the Christian disciple to “put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” In my own Christian denomination we are told that God said, “In consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, I have warned you, and forewarn you….” So I say, in all seriousness, make no mistake, there are devils of various kinds out there—carnal, spiritual, chemical, temporal, social, intellectual—that can bring us down. Are they not our enemies?

In the interest of ‘transparency’ I will share two of my ‘intellectual’ lists with personalities or concepts of various genres (I could, of course, have other lists); for lack of better titles I tentatively call them my Foes List and my Friends List. These are based on my own reading and education and in a few cases on the recommendation of those whose judgment I trust (as in, ‘In God We Trust’). I concede that their personalities or ‘contributions’ may not be all black, or all sterling and glorious, on the one hand or the other, but I think you will get the drift.

Foes: much of Greek and Roman philosophy; Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, Descartes; secular humanists from various disciplines, notably: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, John Watson, B.F. Skinner, J.S. Mill, John Dewey, Margaret Meade, Carl Becker, Charles Beard; the ‘New Left’ of the ‘60’s; the ‘British Invasion’ of rock music in 1964, especially those groups whose lyrics promote the 'drug culture' or lewd language or behavior (e.g., The Rolling Stones, etc.).

Friends: Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Hegel, Friedrich Froebel, the Founding Fathers of our country, The Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln, Utopianism, Shakespeare, Goethe, Heine, Bach, de Tocqueville, Walter Lippmann, C.S. Lewis.

The reader might have on their lists (and I encourage them to make such lists) other people, organizations, foods, hobbies, habits, etc., that they know, by sad experience, have or could lead them to grief or derail them from their noble or worthy goals. But also make a positive or ‘friends’ list of those who can lift and point you in the right direction. 

Since experience is not the only teacher, I would hope that some of my readers would consider my list as more or  less valid, or at least use it as a starting point, and thereby be forewarned about the perils of our time and start to be forearmed.