Title: Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber
Author/Artist: David Gelernter
Publisher: The Free Press
Media: Book
Reviewer: John Zerzan
The reigning social order definitively needs its unsubtle, single-minded champions of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, cloning, and the like, if it hopes to eliminate the undomesticated and ensure a totally synthetic and estranged world. But it requires the services of its humanist apologists even more, in the struggle for the acceptance of the unthinkable. It needs the voices of those who can reassure by "looking at all sides" of the question, who calmly counsel us to remember that technology "isn't everything" as they strive to disarm growing doubt as to its totalizing menace.
David Gelernter is precisely one of these latter smoothies, who sells the computerization of life, while claiming to be a reluctant techie and mainly an aesthetically-oriented kind of guy. He criticizes the weaker and peripheral anti-tech arguments, strenuously avoiding the basic ones, and thus helps to sell the project as a whole. As a computer science professor at Yale, he has been amply rewarded for his services, and also punished: on June 24, 1993, Gelernter suffered permanent disfigurement of his right hand and possibly permanent damage to his right eye when he opened a package from the Unabomber.
This explosion, perhaps not surprisingly, has altered his outlook to some degree, and inspired a nasty little book. Drawing Life departs from the tone of cultured "Renaissance Man" who sagely accepts the inevitable techno-future while leisurely imparting the comfortable message that we'll be able somehow to ensure that this future turns out well. Rather, this latest book, nicely timed for the advent of the Theodore Kaczynski trial, is a very embittered screed of the kind one might get from a typical Rush Limbaugh fan.
Drawing Life draws a bead on the usual right-wing targets: intellectuals, feminists, etc. The '60s, obviously amounted to a Very Bad Thing, full of tolerance and freedoms. Vaguely aware of the growing crisis of society, Gelernter sets up a good vs. evil framework that castigates the afflicted for their whining and lack of ethical fortitude. He offers his sour moralisms in lieu of analysis, never bringing the basic logic of this death's-head system into the equation. Of course he never faces up to the Unabomber's "Industrial System and Its Future," because it would undo his entire little rant. Once more of a confident liberal, now Gelernter rails shrilly in a threadbare game of blaming the victims. A pity he couldn't have found a way to also condemn species for disappearing, or old-growth trees for being cut down.
In his treatise, the Unabomber tried to uncover the social and historic why of the snuffing out of freedom and fulfillment from our lives. As the eco-disaster in Southeast Asia rages (fall '97), the fires of domestication join the toxins of industrialism. I find it not a little obscene for the lackey Gelernter to continue to enrich himself with what amounts to his latest homage to the demise of the individual and the natural world.
This review first appeared in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #44 (Fall/Winter 9'7-98, C.A.L. Press, POB 1446, Columbia, MO 65205 1446, USA)