The Unabomber

“THE PURE PRODUCTS OF AMERICA GO CRAZY:”THE UNABOMBER & PURITAN PATHOLOGY

The author FC, now known to us as Theodore Kacyzinski, makes a by now familiar case against the putative evils of technology in his tendentious manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Part reactionary Luddite jingoism, part half-baked psychological analysis, his essay is immediately notable on two counts: its complete lack of intellectual distinction, and its utter failure to delineate a specific and practicable method for the abolition of technology. FC’s Cassandra-like warnings of humanity’s imminent doom from technology we have been hearing since at least the time of Blake. His brand of pre-Industrial nostalgia is nothing new. What’s of interest in the document is the awkward, self-conscious motion of a deep and private pathology on full display. This is a conclusion, moreover, any intelligent reader can easily arrive at without knowing anything more of the violent pogrom Mr. Kacyzinski directed toward American technocrats.

One of the more curious features of the manifesto is its author’s focused rage against what he calls “the dangers of leftism.” Leftism, FC assures us, is one of “the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world” (6). (N.B. Because of Internet formatting numbers for quotes refer to paragraphs, not pages). Who are these leftists? None other than the “socialists, collectivists ... feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like” (7). Left out of this accounting are environmental activists, long and almost exclusively associated with the Left. For FC, though, they are part of his revolution against the industrial state. Leftism is subjected to a sophomoric psychoanalysis, its causes found not in the formation of the modern nation state (the French Revolution was a failure, we are told in passing), but in “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization.” This latter condition might best be described as going so far as to want to live with other people. The inferiority that mysteriously afflicts only members of the Left (or causes them to go Left, it’s not clear,) expresses itself through feelings of hatred for anything that is “strong, good or successful,” which basically includes all of “Western civilization” (15).

It would be tedious to outline the remainder of FC’s outlandish conceptions of history and culture. He castigates contemporary humanity for pursuing “surrogate activities” instead of real goals, but he never states what a real goal looks like (40-41). From his description of the surrogate goals, they look a lot like real ones. Interestingly, when he begins to expound on the nature of freedom, FC almost rises to the level of discourse analysis. His attack on the institutional practices of surveillance, the culture of the modern police state, etc., sound a Foucauldian note (95). And a little later on, we come on this cogent diagnosis of our ills: “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness.” Marx himself couldn’t have put it better. These are brief lapses into reason, though. Immediately, we are back on FC’s relentless hobbyhorse.

At the heart of “The Unabomber Manifesto” lies a deep terror, not of machines or technology per se, but of what can only be called ontological mutation. For FC, dogmatic essentialist that he is, human nature is a category of the real that has seemingly remained undisturbed for millennia. He correctly intuits that technology acts as a kind of self-reflexive mechanism capable of effecting qualitative psychological changes in human beings. And he is afraid that these changes will only lead to the increasing collectivization of humanity. There’s a sneaking compulsion to admit that he may, afterall, be right about technology, though for all the wrong reasons. FC’s answer to the terrible threat posed by technology, however, is expressed in an absurdly nostalgic longing for the past, for the primitive, and finally, for an order that is not any order at all. His revolutionary project, his vision, is a-utopic, in a sense, for he has no wish to replace the existing order with a new order, only to abolish it (182).

But FC’s paranoia about technology is really a fear of progress in general and it has ample precedent in American cultural history. Historian Richard Hofstadter has admirably outlined this strain of American paranoia in two of his books, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. William Carlos Williams has perhaps best summed up this reactionary Puritan fever in his poem, “To Elsie” (from Spring and All), where he writes, “the pure products of America go crazy.” Though he only hints in his manifesto at a form of violent resistance to the industrial state, FC’s modus operandi as the Unabomber is as American as apple pie, exemplifying what historian Richard Slotkin has called in The Fatal Environment and other works the central trope in the American Frontier Myth, namely, “regeneration through violence.” Briefly, “the structuring metaphor of the American experience,” the trope of regeneration through violence grew out of the colonists desire to reconstitute their personal lives and institutions, a desire that inevitably became linked to the violence used to attain it.

FC is the postmodern avatar par excellence of this peculiar strain of American “nativist,” Know-Nothing isolationism. This ideology, which he shares in common with the numerous militant groups now flourishing in the hinterlands, relies on a discourse of rugged individualism for its philosophical underpinnings. Its true psychic vector was located by D.H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature. Commenting on Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, Lawrence writes, “you have there the myth of the essential white America ... the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” The cult of the American pioneer derives more from Nineteenth-Century propaganda than from the actual historical record. The settlement of this country, as historians Donald Worster and Patricia Nelson Limerick have pointed out, was made possible by the very government and business interests FC decries for the accelerating decline of the quality of life.

Heidegger’s conclusion in “The Question Concerning Technology” that technology offers humans a deeper way into Being sheds some much needed light here. For Heidegger, the process of Enframing (which is accelerated by technology), whereby things, and through things the quiddity of Being itself, are reduced, singularized and homogenized, threatens to pauperize the human relation to Being. But it is precisely this danger which offers humans the opportunity to engage Being at a deeper level of cognition. He quotes Holderlin to illustrate his point: “But where danger is/There also is the saving power.” As Heidegger puts it, man’s solemn duty to watch over unconcealment (that is, truth, or the presencing of Being) is heightened by the danger technology poses. “It is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belongingness of man within granting may come to light, provided that we, for our part, begin to pay heed to the coming to presence of technology” (32). And it is precisely this kind of argument (its arcane rhetoric notwithstanding) for a deeply responsible engagement with technology -- with its awareness and acceptance of the full complexity of the issue -- that eludes the benighted FC. For in the final analysis, as Heidegger so wisely realizes, the problem of technology is first, last, and merely the continuing problem of how to be human.