mcgees.org

No complete report on Author Unknown yet, but I wanted to take a moment to follow a thread from a couple of chapters ago.  Foster writes:

[T]he Unabomber obtained names and addresses for Charles Epstein, a geneticist […], and David Gelernter, developer of the networking software called LINDA. Both scholars were critically injured by Unabom devices a week later. (pp. 136)

This passage suddenly personalized the Unabomber attacks.  I began (and abandoned) one of Gelernter’s books, The Muse in the Machine. I did not particularly care for his theories or his writing, but regardless I felt I somehow knew him. Suddenly, the Unabomber attacks were personal.

I find the results of the Unabomber’s actions to be horrific. I am overjoyed that Gelernter and his family survived, and I mourn the three men successfully murdered by Kaczynski. I felt somewhat foolish and irresponsible not knowing of his 1993 accident (which was, by the way, before I purchased his book.) I set out to Google in an “Is he OK?” panic. One article grabbed my attention but only listed his being “severely wounded”, so I put the page in the background until I found the specifics (disfigurement and partial loss of use of right hand, partial loss of sight in right eye, disfigurement [implied] to the right side of his face, injuries to the right side of his body requiring ten surgical operations.) I breathed a partial sigh of relief (he can see, hear, walk, type, etc.), as much as one can when learning when an injury “could have been worse”.

Now I turned back to the attention-grabbing article entitled “Save the Unabomber” which argues (quite convincingly, I think) against executing Kaczynski:

If there were real justice in America, the Unabomber would be institutionalized, probably for the rest of his life. And his brother would be invited to the White House lawn and given a medal live on national television by our selectively empathetic president.

Like decorated veterans and patriots, David Kaczynski confronted one of the most awful choices in life - to betray a member of his own family to save innocent lives - and did the right thing. He saved others at dreadful personal expense. It’s hard to think what more any country could expect of a citizen.

Concerned about possible future victims, he decided to notify the FBI of his suspicions in the spring of l996. Federal officials have repeatedly have said they might never have arrested Kaczynski - or any suspect - if not for this information. The only thing David asked for from the beginning was that his brother not be executed.

I did not need any convincing in the first place. I am a strong and vocal opponent of the death penalty, which I consider to be barbaric, ineffective, and cruel. But this objection is a novel, and quite moving, twist.

So continuing with the Google search, I find that Gelernter has written a book entitled Drawing Life : Surviving the Unabomber in which he advocates killing the Unabomber and (according to Amazon) “locate[s] the madman on a continuum of modern social degradation,” with the remainder of the “degradation” composed of scum such as liberals, intellectuals, feminists, etc. (one Amazon reader wrote an excellent critique; I wish the author had left an email address so that I could write to express my compliments.) Amazon describes the book as “not tightly reasoned”. Well, no, one wouldn’t expect it to be: this is Gelernter. This is the reason I gave up on The Muse in the Machine to begin with.  That book, which would like to consider itself in the same category as books by Denett, Hofstadter, and even Penrose, is full of absurd assertions that Gelernter does not bother to substantiate.  An example, from my copy of the book:

“If I ask you to close your eyes and imagine lying on the beach, the better you succeed, the closer you’ve come to staging a small-scale auto-hallucination. If we say you have a vivid imagination, we mean that what you imagine seems real to you.” (pp. 10, emphasis his.)

This is, at best, a miserably incomplete definition.  What if my next question is “What do you see?”  Subject A reports:

A blue sea, with perhaps three-foot swells. The sky is pale blue, paler than the water, with small pockets of white cumulus clouds. To my right is a mother, dressed in a red and black one-piece bathing suit, sitting on a striped beach towel under a green umbrella. She is trying to applying sunscreen to her four-year-old boy straining to run after his big brother into the surf. Above, a few seagulls, cawing out of unison. To my left, a boy and girl, probably siblings, building a sand castle with an old garden spade and an empty plastic plant pot. The sand is near white, the reflection blinding around the rims of my sunglasses; I’m glad I wore them. When I stretch my arm out, the sand is perceptibly and uncomfortably warm on my hand. So are my kneecaps and earlobes; I should probably apply some sunscreen or get in the shade. A quiet breeze is blowing up from the water. I can smell the kelp, a gentle iodine rot-smell, a stone’s throw away.

Subject B reports:

Umm … the ocean?  Some sand?  Uhhh … a sand castle?  I guess that’s about it….

The relevant difference here is not that Subject A is more accomplished at self-deception. Subject A is, in my view, better at associating stimuli and memories with each other, visually modeling situations in order to closely examine them, holding complex images in the mind at once, etc. But the hallucination interpretation is apparently obvious enough to Gelernter that it does not deserve supporting evidence, not even supporting examples. Further Google explorations uncovered a transcript of Gelernter’s C-SPAN “Booknotes” interview. Gelernter continues in the same fashion, with unjustified generalizations and instances of false consensus perceptions:

“There are very few people who can live their lives
without [religion].”

“Environmentalists are explicit about the spiritual,
religious side of what they’re doing.”

“[T]here are […] many other people who, when they
look for this New Age stuff […] and that self-esteem
movement, seem to be groping pathetically in the dark
for the kind of moral and spiritual guidance that
traditional Christianity rendered very successfully
for a couple of millennia and Judaism for even longer.”

“And I have a feeling that many of these people are
coming up with makeshift simulated religions […]
because they don’t know what their traditional
religions are. I can tell you the average Jew in this
country has no concept of what Judaism is[…].”

“I’ve always been in favor of the death penalty for
murderers […] I can’t conceive of […] our not
sentencing such a man to death if we are serious about
murder, if we are serious about our absolute refusal
to tolerate murder.”

“[T]he art market today is such that there isn’t a
person in America who couldn’t sell artwork for money.
My pet parrot could. Anything goes on today’s art
market.”

“I’m not a great talker; I mean, I’d rather write than
talk. But very–all writers feel that way.”

As a jab at him, note:

“I’m just tremendously impressed by the imaginativeness
of this technology [that repaired my right eye after the bombing] and by the skill of the surgeons
who did it.”

Good thing those technologists are adept at “auto-hallucination”, eh David?

Gelernter says he does not wanted to be treated as a “victim” (as I understand it, this is a central point of Drawing Life.) I believe this statement and I congratulate him. But in my view the most dangerous possibility is that people consider him a victim anyway and neglect to question his assertions simply because “he’s been through so much” or “I could never understand what he went through.” Mail-bomb or no, these statements deserve skepticism on our part and justification on his.

But all this notwithstanding: Dr. Gelernter, please accept my best wishes for you and your family.

Tue, 09 Jan 2001 20:42:24 -0600
Under complaints, politics, science
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