Quarrel & Quandary Read Free

in 1849, fifteen Russian criminals, in groups of three, were led before a firing squad. They were all insurgents against the despotism of Czar Nicholas I. They were mostly educated men, idealists in pursuit of a just society. They felt no remorse. Several were professed atheists. All were radicals. A priest carrying a cross and a Bible accompanied them. The first three were handed white gowns and shapeless caps and ordered to put these on; then they were tied to posts. The rest waited their turn. Each man in his own way prepared to die. The sun was beginning to brighten; the firing squad took aim. At just that moment there was a signal—a roll of drums—and the rifles were lowered. A galloping horseman announced a reprieve. Although the condemned were unaware of it, the execution was staged, and the reprieve was designed to demonstrate the merciful heart of the Czar. Instead of being shot, the criminals were to be transported in shackles to a Siberian penal colony.
    One of the men went permanently mad. Another, fifteen years afterward, wrote
Crime and Punishment
, an impassioned assault on exactly the kind of radical faith that had brought its author to face the Czar’s riflemen that day. It was a work almost in the nature of double jeopardy: as if Fyodor Dostoyevsky in middle age—a defender of the Czar, the enemy of revolutionarysocialism—were convicting and punishing his younger self yet again for the theories the mature novelist had come to abhor.
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    A new type of crime is on the American mind—foreign, remote, metaphysical, even literary; and radically different from what we are used to. Street crime, drunken crime, drug-inspired crime, crimes of passion, greed, revenge, crimes against children, gangster crime, white-collar crime, break-ins, car thefts, holdups, shootings—these are familiar, and to a degree nearly expected. They shake us up without disorienting us. They belong to our civilization; they are the darker signals of home. “Our” crime has usually been local—the stalker, the burglar, the mugger lurking in a doorway. Even Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal sadist who kept boys’ body parts in his kitchen refrigerator, is not so very anomalous in the context of what can happen in ordinary neighborhoods—a little girl imprisoned in an underground cage; children tormented, starved, beaten to death; newborns bludgeoned; battered women, slain wives, mutilated husbands. Domesticity gone awry.
    All that is recognizable and homespun. What feels alien to America is the philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose who is driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism. Such a type has always seemed a literary construct of a particular European political coloration (
The Secret Agent, The Princess Casamassima
), or else has hinted at ideologies so removed from tame Republicans and Democrats as to be literally outlandish. Then came the mysterious depredations of the Unabomber. Until the melodramatic publication of his manifesto in major newspapers, the Unabomber remained an unpredictable riddle, unfathomable, sans name orhabitation. In garrulous print his credo revealed him to be a visionary. His dream was of a green and pleasant land liberated from the curse of technological proliferation. The technical élites were his targets: computer wizards like Professor David Gelernter of Yale, a thinker in pursuit of artificial intelligence. Maimed by a package bomb, Gelernter escaped death; others did not.
    In the storm of interpretation that followed the Unabomber’s public declaration of principles, he was often mistaken for a kind of contemporary Luddite. This was a serious misnomer. The nineteenth-century Luddites were hand weavers who rioted against the introduction of mechanical looms in England’s textile industry; they smashed the machines to protect their livelihoods. They were not out to kill, nor did they promulgate romantic theories about the wholesome superiority