on April 21st, 2011 by admin
I must admit the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski was an afterthought for me. I stumbled upon a 2004 article of college professor Alston Chase. He wrote a book called Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. I immediately checked this out at my local library. I think this is an important book because it highlights what happens when ideas are taken to their logical conclusion.
Our culture likes to justify the murderous behavior of individuals as having mental illness. Chase rightly concludes that this is a cop out, and in the case of Kaczynski, completely false. In fact, the ideas that fuelled Kaczynski’s bombings were: the disparagement of technology, of industry and of civilization itself, are in full force in our culture. All one has to do is look at the news about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The problems with their nuclear power plant, and the constant drumbeat about it being like Chernobyl. Or what in the late 70’s with Three Mile Island. Despite the fact that nuclear power is the cheapest, cleanest, and safest form of energy; no one has died. Also, the need for “clean energy” and to stop our dependency on oil. Even though giant windmills and solar panals cannot sustain our energy needs cheaply in our highly technical society. Kaczynski was the poster child for the environmentalist movement.
Chase’s focuses on the education Kaczynski received, and how it actively undermined his mind. A highly intelligent individual; in short, his education was the embodiment of nihilism. Instead of embacing reason, individual rights and a respect for modern progress. It turned him into an irrational brute, whose emotional whims guided him for 2 decade long murderous bombings.
I liked the fact that Chase was able to see how educational philosophy can have a dramatic impact on an individual such as Kaczynski. However, there is a flaw in the author’s inablility to explain how and why anti-intellectualism is so prevalent among American education. As the title of this post suggests, our educational system is steeped in German philosophy. Chase, who is also a graduate of Harvard University, lists the type of courses Kaczynski was exposed to. Chase states:
The Gen Ed[General Education] courses in social science quickly introduced us to the relativity of morals and the irrationality of religion. To establish that ethical standards were merely expressions of Western cultural mores, we were assigned to read works by anthropologists such as Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa), Edward Westermarck (Ethical Relativity), William Graham Sumner (Folkways), and Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture). We were introduced to logical positivism and emotivism through the works of A.J. Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic), Charles L. Stevenson (Ethics and Language), and countless other writers who had absorbed the messages of these doctrines.
Chase calls this chapter Harvard’s Culture of Dispair. It’s a fitting title because the courses reflected a malevolent universe premise. Chase writes:
In Humanities 5, we read Karl Marx warn of “the intellectual desolation artificially produced by converting immature human beings into mere machines.” We read Camus’s observation in The Myth of Sisyphus that “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth“, as well as Sartre’s bleak description of the human condition in Being and Nothingness that “I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without anything or any person being able to lighten it….I am abandoned in the world…..alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.”
….We encountered Thorstein Veblen’s prediction that “so long as the machine process continues to hold its dominant place as a disciplinary factor in modern culture, so long must the spiritual and intellectual life of this cultural era maintain the character which the machine process gives it”. We discovered Erich Fromm, complaining how technology contributes to the “insignificates and powerlessness of the individual.”(Bold added)
So much for respecting the efficacy of reason. How can values and respect for man’s rights be engendered from these writers? These writers were elevating the negation of the mind as a metaphysical standard. Is it any wonder Kaczynski had a hatred for happiness and life in general.
Chase also notes what sealed Kaczynski’s life of murder was has participation in a psychological experiment by Henry A. Murray. This was bizarre to say the least. Murray, an oddball, who was a sexual sadist, used this experiment to inflict emotional turmoil among his students. He was acting out his decades long affair on the students.
For a better understanding of ideas and their consequence to life please read The Ominous Parallels by Dr. Leonard Peikoff. I think Peikoff gives the best explanation of how the ideas of Immauel Kant doomed Germany and have infiltrated America. I do not, nor does Chase imply that Kaczynski is not responsible for his actions. He had free will and made a conscious decision to commit murder. But let’s not forget that barbaric ideas can only lead to barbaric actions.
Bookish Babe
Update: Added an additional sentence.
Tags:
Alston Chase,
Dr. Leonard Peikoff,
German Philosophy,
Harvard University,
irrationalism,
terrorism,
The Ominous Parallels,
Theodore Kaczynski,
Unabomber | Posted in
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