Thomas J. Harrison

One of Leopardi's fondest spokesmen--the Icelander who converses with Mother Nature in Le operette morali --flees from the civilized world in response to a very simple and modest reflection:   "Deliberai, non dando molestia a chicchessia, non procurando in modo alcuno di avanzare il mio stato, non contendendo con altri per nessun bene del mondo, vivere una vita oscura e tranquilla."   All that it takes to achieve this quiet and obscure life, he believes, is to free himself "dalla molestia degli uomini." (1)  The true obstacle to individual happiness is nothing other than the pain caused by one's fellow man.   And so the Icelander removes himself from society entirely, hoping that this in itself will rid him of suffering.

Recently a man followed the itinerary of Leopardi's Icelander almost to the letter.   In 1971 he bought a plot of land far from the reach of his neighbors in the Montana woods, and built himself a ten by twelve foot shack.   To judge from his writings and behavior over the next twenty-five years, it seems that Theodor Kaczynski, the self-confessed Unabomber, also believed that the single greatest objection to life on earth is other people:   the coercions and corruption of organized society, the tyranny of social, political, and intellectual planning, the subjection of the individual to a whole series of life patterns which he or she is not free to reject.   A close reading of his manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future , would reveal the Unabomber agreeing with Leopardi's Icelander about the vanity and folly of men--who "combattendo continuamente gli uni cogli altri per l'acquisto di piaceri che non dilettano, e di beni che non giovano . . . tanto piú si allontanano dalla felicità, quanto piú la cercano" ( Operette , p. 152).

What Kaczynski did not know however--but Leopardi did--is that hell is not other people, but nature itself:   not the organization of society, but the organization of things themselves, even within one's psyche.   For, far from finding happiness in his isolation, Kaczynski went on to send mail bombs from his remote shelter back to the populated world, revealing that his discontent lay deep within himself and could not be so easily shaken off.   Leopardi graduated from the Icelander's early theory that society is the major problem facing the individual, moving, as it were, from social pessimism to cosmic pessimism; the Unabomber, instead, appeared stuck in that romantic anti-sociality.   Yet ultimately the distinction between the two thinkers is not all that neat.   At the end of the day, even Leopardi's cosmic pessimism is nourished and strengthened by his contempt for a whole series of articles of social faith.   His philosophy is also an instrument that enables him to inveigh against his bourgeois time, against the vanity and folly of an age to which he felt himself congenitally averse.

Now, I may as well come out and confess that I have been almost as fascinated by the Unabomber as by Leopardi, at least since reading his manifesto on the Internet in 1995.   Industrial Society and its Future , as it is called, was never fully published in the New York Times or The Washington Post , as Kaczynski had demanded.   But I remember that as soon as I read it in its entirety I became highly skeptical about the so-called expert opinions to the effect that this document was written by someone who had, at best, engaged in a couple of years of graduate study. (2)  When Kaczynski was arrested in 1996 and was reported to have an estimated IQ of 160-170, to have entered Harvard University at age sixteen, to have obtained an M.A. and Ph. D., and to have become a professor by age twenty-five, that sounded more plausible.   For any unbiased professor could see that this document is more articulate than the writings of most professors themselves.

Be that as it may, I was catapulted back to the manifesto two years later in an unlikely way.   I was teaching Leopardi's Operette morali at the University of California at Los Angeles, and felt I was hearing uncanny echoes, forerunning footsteps, conversations between two men separated in time and space by 170 years and forty times that in kilometers.   This is the nature of the comparative literature bug:   by thinking at some length along the lines of one theoretical context, you inevitably become sensitized to things in another which you would not have noticed otherwise.   It is something like going to a Hollywood movie after a course in gender studies, or using the word gentleman after reflections on imperialism and class difference.   You lose the beatific sense that things are as simple or autonomous as they appear to be.

Thanks to Kaczynski, then, I noticed things about Leopardi's essays that had not figured prominently in my previous readings.   The first was the sheer force of Leopardi's ideological militance:   singular, radical, and totalizing.   What made Leopardi's cultural polemic redolent of the Unabomber manifesto was his unmitigated disenchantment with the prides of his era, his boundless contempt for his contemporaries' thinking, his linkage of culture and collective deception, his dauntless unmasking of sacrosanct principles.   And finally his lucid despair--for Leopardi had no more of a solution to the ills he diagnosed than Kaczynski.   Nor was he more willing to relent in exposing them.    When you consider how the Operette morali ends, with another spokesman for Leopardi, the utterly disillusioned Tristan, calling for the speediest of all possible deaths, it becomes clear that this work performs one of the most determined assaults in history of a thinker against his time--more belligerent than Socrates', more political than that of Jesus, less inward than Kierkegaard's, and much more resentful than that of Nietzsche.  

The second thing I noticed about the Operette morali --and this only after being invited to reflect on "Leopardi and America" on the occasion of this conference--is that everything that Leopardi is set against in the nineteenth century could well go by the name of America:   the cult of happiness, pragmatism, and utilitarianism; the faith in science, technology and progress; the fascination with big city dwelling; the extolling of information and enlightenment as self-sufficient ends; the notion that humans do not only occupy the center of the universe, but are entitled to re-engineer it; the culture of mass media and of mass opinion.   This is, of course, not the America of Thoreau and Emerson, but the technological, twentieth-century America, which will act on (and act out) the fantasies of nineteenth-century Europe.   This, Leopardi's true target in the Operette morali -- summarized in the poem Ad Angela Mai as a grand activity of "computar" (v. 149)--is the root of what Kaczynski later attacks in Industrial Society and its Future .

To Leopardi's credit, he was enough of a gentleman to send bombs only in a metaphorical sense--explosive messages, rather than messages that exploded.   And yet one wonders what might have come of Leopardi had he been born 150 years later, say as the offspring of immigrants in a huge American city (Chicago), at a time when resentments and passions were no longer restrained by aristocratic manners.   Given his despondent gloom, his conviction of the cultural futility of writing, scholarship and learning, his apprehension that, in the age of the mass, a right-minded individual could only be the brunt of ridicule, who knows where his passion might have led him?   In the age of early nineteenth-century romanticism, it was quite proper to articulate one's differences from the group in writing.   By the end of the century, it seemed more appropriate to some to throw bombs.   And that anarchic tradition is the one to which Kaczynski the Pole harks back in the years between 1979 and 1996.   Where would Leopardi have fit--had he been as opposed to our time as he was to his own?

And what about the character of his opposition?   How much does it share with the vitriol of the Unabomber?   One must examine the specifics of the Operette morali , that searing critique of nineteenth-century vices which Leopardi performs following the work's introductory essay on the history of the human race.   The first criticism, in the second essay called Dialogo d'Ercole e di Atlante , is that the rich fervor of life on earth has been reduced to an affair of mechanics.   The mythological character Hercules has been used to giving Atlas a hand holding the huge globe from time to time.   But when he shows up to do so in the nineteenth century, this globe feels totally different.   The last time he felt it, he recalls, the earth "mi batteva forte sul dosso, come fa il cuore degli animali. . . .   Ma ora quanto al battere, si rassomiglia a un oriuolo che abbia rotta la molla."   The animal spirits have given way to a ticking sound.   What was once the great "rombo continuo" of wasps swarming around their nest has ceded to a deadly silence ( Operette p. 84).   The dense, heavy globe has been hollowed out.

The next dialogue, between Fashion and Death, is Leopardi's first attempt to provide an explanation for this strange development.   In fact, the dialogue attributes this cosmic death to human efforts to improve on nature.   "La Moda," speaking of her effect on civilized society, tells it like this:   "Ho messo nel mondo tali ordini e tali costumi che la vita stessa, cosí per rispetto del corpo come dell'animo, è piú morta che viva; tanto che questo secolo si può dire con verità che sia proprio il secolo della morte" ( Operette , p. 92).   What Leopardi argues in this dialogue is not simply that the modern fascination with cultural fashions has almost invariably adverse effects on physical and spiritual health.   It is also that in essence this fascination means simply uncritical commitment to progress and temporal change.   And this means to the ceaseless redesigning of nature.   Before one knows it, whatever essential reality there was is volatilized and dissipated in images, replaced with simulacra.   The felon is again the watch, or the hankering after change, with its same broken spring.

The fourth essay of the book consolidates this portrait of modernity as a situation of diminishing vitality, or dehumanization, which has been the subject of essays two and three.   It announces a series of prizes by a contemporary academy of "sillographers" to whoever can make any of three machines:   one to perform the functions of a friend, another to take the place of a virtuous and magnanimous man, the third to stand in for the ideal woman.   This assignment of prizes is perfectly congruous with that "età della macchina" which Leopardi identifies with the "fortunato secolo in cui siamo" ( Operette , p. 94).   The problem of present European culture is not only that "gli uomini di oggidì procedono e vivono forse piú meccanicamente di tutti i passati"; it is that in countless respects machines have supplanted the critical activity of human beings:   "oramai non gli uomini ma le macchine, si può dire, trattano le cose umane e fanne le opere della vita" ( Operette , p. 94).   If there is any question about what outcome this tendency will have in the century to come, we have this prediction from the Academy:   "ella confida dovere in successo di tempo gli uffici e gli usi delle macchine venire a comprendere oltre le cose materiali, anche le spirituali" ( Operette , pp. 94-95).

The fifth piece in the Operette morali , a conversation between an imp and a gnome, stipulates that, to the surprise of all creatures in nature, the race of these "master engineeers" has gone extinct--thanks to their own doing.   How did they kill themselves off? asks the gnome.   In dozens of different ways, the imp replies, "parte guerreggiando tra loro . . . parte infracidando nell'ozio, parte stillandosi il cervello sui libri"--but in one and all cases by "studiando tutte le vie di far contro la propria natura e di capitar male" ( Operette , p. 102).   Echoes of this theme can be found throughout the Unabomber's manifesto.   Indeed, this is its central point, "romantic" both here and in Leopardi by attributing a certain "propria natura" to humans which one choses either to respect or to ignore.   While the two men may not agree on how to define this fundamental nature, they certainly agree on what brings it to ruin: the numberless artifices that humans devise to force nature to conform to their needs--or to what they mistaken think are their needs.   The "tanti artifizi che . . . hanno usato gli uomini per andare in perdizione" are directly inimical to the "needs" they purport to serve ( Operette , p. 102).  

The dialogue between the imp and the gnome is eventually condensed into a charge against anthropocentrism, the ideology both legitimating and propelling technological advancement.   The raison d'etre of Western science and technology is essentially to improve the knowledge and control of that one being which is the measure of all others:   homo sapiens.   The inner dialectic of technology is anthropocentric.   Late in the twentieth century, however--in discussions of animal rights, the preservation of the human habitat, respect for biodiversity and the propriety of the earth's waters and airs--the sharpest scalpel in ecological operations is anti -anthropocentric sensibility, advanced as much by Leopardi in this dialogue as by the Unabomber in his manifesto.

The most important of the interesting things that have followed the demise of men, notes the imp, is this:  

la fortuna si ha cavato via la benda, e messosi gli occhiali e appiccato la ruota a un arpione, se ne sta colle braccia in croce a sedere, guardando le cose del mondo senza piú mettervi le mani; non si trova piú regni né imperi che vadano gonfiando e scoppiando come le bolle, perché sono tutti sfumati; non si fanno guerrre, e tutti gli anni si assomigliano l'uno all'altro come uovo a uovo. ( Operette , p. 101)    

This claim is curious.   It suggests that without humans in the world, Fortune has no more role, no more employment.   In truth it is they , humans, who cause all the upheavals they attribute to her with her blindfold.   Without humans Nature is perfectly at peace, needing no chimerical utopias or theories of social order to chart an unfettered course.   "Nature takes care of itself," writes Kaczynski.   "It was a spontaneous creation that existed long before any human society, and for countless centuries many different human societies coexisted with nature without doing it an excessive amount of damage.   Only with the Industrial Revolution did the effect of human society on nature become really devastating." (3) When this devastation eradicates human beings (as Leopardi imagines it) or when human beings themselves destroy technology (as the Unabomber sees it), then nature will be allowed to recover its essential character--that character which is interpreted , but not understood, by humans.

Romantic though they may seem in believing in an essential or natural order, neither Leopardi nor Kaczynski is romantic in idealizing that order.   Nature, as they see it, is a harsh arrangement for individuals of every species, an incessant struggle and battle.   And if anything, this is what these two unorthodox thinkers are attached to, believing that such an order brings out the best qualities of human beings:   a spirit of resourcefulness, resolve, and self-reliance.   The technologically organized lifestyles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have quite the opposite effect, making humans slothful, dim-witted, will-less, and passive--and precisely in the measure to which they reduce this natural contention, making things easier for members of the society, letting more and more affairs be taken care of by systems, institutions, legislation, and intellectual therapy.   Ironically, Leopardi's and Kaczynski's polemic against the technological offshoots of humanistic philosophy is fueled by a deeper spirit of humanism, another vision of humanity which is alarmed by the threats that enlightenment culture poses to its potential.   To take only one of Leopardi's many examples:   Nineteenth-century culture is intent on catering to the desires of the spirit while downplaying the importance of physical discipline, "e appunto volendo coltivare lo spirito, rovina il corpo; senza avvedersi che rovinando questo, rovina a vicenda anche lo spirito" ( Operette , p. 294).   Why is the spirit ruined by ignoring the body?   The hedonistic, utilitarian, technological ethic does a disservice to the spirit by relieving its practical stress--which keeps it intent on its goals.   Those people who are not forced to provide for their practical and physical needs, says Leopardi in the Operette morali (let us say, because they do not have to hunt, or seek water, or build their own shelter), "non possono per l'ordinario provvedere . . . a un bisogno principalissimo che in ogni modo hanno.   Dico quello di occupare la vita" (Operette , p. 217).   Or, as he puts it more clearly in the Zibaldone , "Quelli che non hanno bisogni sono ordinariamente molto piú bisognosi di coloro che ne hanno." (4) The strange new need of those who have few practical needs is not easy to fill.   It induces the practice of what the Unabomber calls surrogate activity:   "We use the term 'surrogate activity,'" he writes, "to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward" ( Manifesto , cap. 39). (5)  Such surrogate activities--collecting stamps as much as working for charities--are insufficient to provide a deep sense of fulfillment.   And that is why Leopardi, in the Storia del genere umano , has Jove introduce a whole series of ills and battles and pains into a world where people are so content with their organized lives that they are bored.

Leopardi and Kaczynski are convinced that much of what is done in the name of the greatest happiness of the greatest number goes tragically against the interests of human nature.   The more developed, evolved, and civilized human beings appear to become, the more unhappy--which is to say alienated, unmotivated, dependent, and despondent. "E però," writes Leopardi in the Zibaldone , "non c'è dubbio che i progressi della ragione e lo spegnimento delle illusioni producono la barbarie, e un popolo oltremodo illuminato non diventa mica civilissimo, come sognano i filosofi del nostro tempo, la Stael ec. ma barbaro; al che noi c'incamminiamo a gran passi e quasi siamo arrivati.   La più grande nemica della barbarie non è la ragione ma la natura." ( Zibaldone , I , p. 26).

Perfectibility as a goal and creed appears wrongheaded.   Dependence on external systems and the rationalization of human relations causes a diminution of self-reliance, individuality, vitality, and character.   This is the romantic individualism that underlies Leopardi's and the Unabomber's opposition to the technological ethic.   Their antagonism toward the bourgeois ethos is dictated by an older incarnation of humanist philosophy--a humanism that invented technology, but that is in risk of being undone by it.   That, too, is why they are such paradoxical figures, using technology against itself (in the case of the technician of mail bombs) or enlightenment against the dominion of truth (in the case of the poet-philospher).   Each is consoled only by lucid desperation, by a nihilism that refuses to accommodate itself to the spirit of the times--to the point not merely of absolute solitude, as it might seem at first, but also of absolute self-destruction.   "E di piú vi dico francamente," Leopardi confesses in the conclusive paragraph of the Operette , speaking indirectly for Kaczynski later, "ch'io non mi sottometto alla mia infelicità, né piego il capo al destino, o vengo seco a patti, come fanno gli altri uomini; e ardisco desiderare la morte, e desiderarla sopra ogni cosa, con tanto ardore e con tanta sincerità, con quanta credo fermamente che non sia desiderata al mondo" ( Operette , p. 299).   Ultimately one cannot bomb others, whether metaphorically or literally, without also bombing oneself.

(1) G . Leopardi, Le operette morali , a cura di Saverio Orlando, Milano, Rizzoli, 1976, pp. 152-153.

(2) The original, widely distributed FBI profile of the Unabomber read:   "A recluse, white man in his late 30's or 40's with at least a high school education. He is familiar with university life, too. He is a neat dresser with a meticulously organized life, probably likes to make lists, and is probably quiet and an ideal neighbor. He has low self-esteem, most likely has had problems dealing with women--because of his physical flaws, either real or perceived.   If he does have a relationship, it would be with a younger woman."

(3) Anonymous, The Unabomber Manifesto.   Industrial Society and its Future , Berkeley, Jolly Roger Press, 1995, cap. 184.

(4) G. Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri , II , scelta a cura di Anna Maria Moroni, Milano, Oscar Mondadori, 1983, p. 1071.

(5) And Kaczynski then proceeds to elaborate his "rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities":    "Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this:   If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental facilities in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X?   If the answer is no, then the person's pursuit of a goal X is a surrogate activity" ( ibidem ).