Earlier this month, Ted Kaczyznski—the mathematician-turned-terrorist who murdered three people and left several others with lifelong injuries—died, apparently of suicide, in a federal prison. Stephen Hayward re-examines both Kaczynski’s 1995 “manifesto” and Alston Chase’s 2003 biography. To Hayward, Kaczynski’s “views on technology are neither original nor wholly ill-founded,” and owe much to such philosophers as Jacques Ellul, who was honored by Yad Vashem for helping to save French Jews during the Holocaust:

[Kaczynski] had even corresponded with Jacques Ellul, the French thinker who wrote one of the earliest critical analyses of the subject back in 1965, The Technological Society. Ellul, however, never became an anti-technology radical. To the contrary, by the 1970s Ellul had become an evangelical Christian, and largely discarded his early fixation on the evils of technology. But Kaczynski became a homicidal fanatic.

Kaczynski’s violent revolutionary ethos was generated not by leftism, but nihilism. The almost droll embrace of killing brings to light what is conspicuously missing from his manifesto: any sense of ethics or a ground of morality that would both foreclose violence, or offer a pathway to putting technology in perspective and finding meaning in life, as Ellul’s religion did for him. If asked, Kaczynski would say any ethical or moral code was impossible in our technocracy because the premises of modern science have proven that there is no objective ground for morality or meaning.

Chase notes that Kaczynski was raised an atheist by his liberal parents (his father committed suicide), and his brother, a Columbia graduate, was equally disaffected by American society. By the time Chase and Kaczynski arrived at Harvard, “the faculty had lost faith in the idea that morality was rational. . . . Although no one noticed, the religion of reason was giving way to something one could call the culture of despair. . . . He became a true believer in the scientific method and its philosophy, positivism, which allowed him to think that morality was meaningless.”

[E]ven though Kaczynski disdained environmentalists, his overall anti-technology, anti-Western civilization view does illuminate the innermost character of the environmental movement.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.