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The fat lady sang and the law made both Gore and Kaczynski historical footnotes. The quiz, while more or less moot, is all that remains. |
The Gore/Unabomber Quiz:
Did Al Gore say it? Or was it the Unabomber?
It may be more difficult to decide than you think.
Each quote below is either from Al Gore's Book Earth in the Balance or from the Unabomber's Manifesto.
After each quote choose either Gore or Unabomber. At the end hit the Grade Me button and the quiz will be graded and you can view the correct answers. You will also have the opportunity to view the documentation. To be fair, I should point out that while Al and the Unabomber identify the "problems" similarly, they part on the solution. Al wants a "Global Marshall Plan" with enforcement across national boundaries while the Unabomber prefers the idea of revolution.
I got the idea for the test, by the way, from a column by Tony Snow.
There may or may not be an equal number of quotes from both thinkers.
"The twentieth century has not been kind to the constant human striving for a sense of purpose in life. Two world wars, the Holocaust, the invention of nuclear weapons, and now the global environmental crises have led many of us to wonder if survival - much less enlightened, joyous, and hopeful living - is possible. We retreat into the seductive tools and technologies of industrial civilization, but that only creates new problems as we become increasingly isolated from one another and disconnected from our roots."
1 - Gore Unabomber
"Again, we must not forget the lessons of World War II. The Resistance slowed the advance of fascism and scored important victories, but fascism continued its relentless march to domination until the rest of the world finally awoke and made the difference and made the defeat of fascism its central organizing principle from 1941 through 1945."
2 - Gore Unabomber
"It is not necessary for the sake of nature to set up some chimerical utopia or any new kind of social order. Nature takes care of itself: It was a spontaneous creation that existed long before any human society, and for countless centuries, many different kinds of 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 - Gore Unabomber
"Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet's ecological system. The ferocity of its assault on the earth is breathtaking, and the horrific consequences are occurring so quickly as to defy our capacity to recognize them, comprehend their global implications, and organize an appropriate and timely response. Isolated pockets of resistance fighters who have experienced this juggernaut at first hand have begun to fight back in inspiring but, in the final analysis, woefully inadequate ways."
4 - Gore Unabomber
"Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe."
5 - Gore Unabomber
" All pre-industrial societies were predominantly rural. The Industrial Revolution vastly increased the size of cities and the proportion of the population that lives in them, and modern agricultural technology has made it possible for the Earth to support a far denser population than it ever did before."
6 - Gore Unabomber
"The positive ideal that is proposed is Nature. That is, wild nature: those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control."
7 - Gore Unabomber
"Any child born into the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world will have an impact that is, on average, many times more destructive than that of a child born in the developing world."
8 - Gore Unabomber
"And tragically, since the onset of the scientific and technological revolution, it has become all too easy for ultrarational minds to create an elaborate edifice of clockwork efficiency capable of nightmarish cruelty on an industrial scale. The atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, and the mechanical sins of all who helped them, might have been inconceivable except for the separation of facts from values and knowledge from morality."
9 - Gore Unabomber
"The modern individual on the other hand is threatened by many things against which he is helpless: nuclear accidents, carcinogens in food, environmental pollution, war, increasing taxes, invasion of his privacy by large organizations, and nationwide social or economic phenomena that may disrupt his way of life."
10 - Gore Unabomber
"Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems."
11 - Gore Unabomber
"What does it say about our culture that personality is now considered a technology, a tool of the trade, not only in politics but in business and the professions? Has everyone been forced to become an actor? In sixteenth century England, actors were not allowed to be buried in the same cemeteries as 'God-fearing folk,' because anyone willing to manipulate his personality for the sake of artifice, even to entertain, was considered spiritually suspect."
12 - Gore Unabomber
Since March 18,1999
Sketches of Gore and the Unabomber courtesy of Rick Phillips www.algore-2000.org