Friday, March 14, 2003

Very interesting book review in the local anti-Christian paper yesterday. The book is Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist by Alston Chase. Of course the Harvard educated unabomber (Ted Kaczynski) mailed explosive packages to people, killing 3 and wounding 20. Apparently Alston Chase calls the curriculum at Harvard a “culture of despair” ie…Camus, Sartre, etc.. From the review:
“The social sciences steered one to believe that morals were relative and religion a balm for the weak.”

Most interesting is the info on a Harvard professor, Henry Murray whose project involved Kaczynski and 21 other students being subjected to a weird interrogation:
“The subjects were filmed under intense lights while unseen interrogators mocked their views on life’s meaning as stupid and worthless. Murray never offered a convincing rationale for these unsavory ‘experiments’”. The future unabomber wrote an essay for this project in which he concluded “There is no morality or objective set of values”. Any wonder that he would have “chronic nightmares of psychologists trying to control his mind”. Although I am skeptical of the author trying to blame this evil on "Cold War 1950's" rather than the 60's radical nihilism, this sounds like a book I will have to check out at the bookstore. Remember, Harvard is the school that so many “Catholic” universities are trying to emulate.

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