Genealogy of the Unabomber
Review of Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist by Alton Chase
The Independent, 3 September 2003
For sixteen years, Ted Kaczynski led the FBI a merry dance, stuffing his intricately crafted parcel bombs with tantalising, impenetrable clues. By 1995, his campaign had struck sixteen targets – grad students, computer store managers, academic experts, an airline executive, a timber baron – and taken three lives. That year he blackmailed the New York Times and Washington Post into publishing his 35,000 word manifesto, “Industrial Society and its Future,” which mingled militant libertarianism with environmentalist apocalyptic.
This act of ideological hubris proved his undoing. Tell-tale phrases in the manifesto sounded uncomfortably familiar to his brother, who eventually led the FBI to Ted’s cabin in Montana. In 1998, after resisting his legal team’s attempts to plead insanity, Kaczynski was sentenced to life without parole.
For the American media, the Unabomber (a moniker created by the FBI) was both an anti-social freak, a congenital reject, and a representative type, “a product of the 60s”, its “violent extremism” and “anti-American ideologies”. As Alton Chase shows, however, Kaczynski was very much a product of the Cold War heyday that preceded the rebellions of the 60s, and moreover of one of the American establishment’s core institutions.
Like Kaczynski, Chase was a bright working class youth who found himself uneasily transplanted to the Harvard of the late 1950s. He uses this shared experience effectively, and his reconstruction of the social and intellectual ambience of Harvard in this era – an amalgam of class snobbery, Cold War manichaeism and existential nihilism – is the best part of the book.
Chase asks us to see Kaczynski as an intellectual, someone powerfully motivated by ideas. Much of his book is given over to a genealogy of those ideas. He argues that the key to understanding the Unabomber is nothing less than the long-running tension within Western civilisation between humanist universalism and scientific relativism. As an exercise in the history of ideas it is far too pat (“There was, suggested Karl Marx, no objective truth”) and as an explanation of the Unabomber it is unilluminating. One could trace the same lineage in the thought of any number of individuals or groups.
Chase’s major revelation concerns a Harvard-based psychiatric research programme in which the undergraduate Kaczynski served as an experimental subject. His account of these government-sponsored, often invasive and abusive investigations is eerie and compelling, but he doesn’t establish their impact on Kaczynski. There’s no evidence that this experience transformed the lonely young mathematician into the dedicated serial killer.
Like the media he disparages, Chase subordinates the peculiarities of the Unabomber to his own world picture. In the final chapter, he links this “American terrorist” with both Osama Bin Laden and “Kaczynski’s anti-globalist allies” – who are said to include the 300,000 anti-WTO protesters at Genoa in 2001. All these, Chase avers, share “a hatred of modernity” and “feel threatened by civilisation.”
Ironically, it’s Chase, more than Kaczynski, who seems imprisoned within the intellectual parameters of 1950s Harvard. He has a distaste for ideology in general but assumes that his own American liberalism is ideology-free. He routinely deploys the word “evil” as if its meaning were self-evident. In the end, his argument is too contrived, his history too cartoon-like, to bring us much closer to whatever wider truths lurk behind the Unabomber’s extraordinary career.
