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Opinion: Technophobe Misses the Mark in Blame for Mass Suicide

Note: This is a rebuttal to the “Paradise Lost” opinion piece written by Richard Rodriguez and published in the Los Angeles Times on March 30, 1997.

See also: • Commentary: The Internet and Heaven's Gate Mass Suicide • Readers' Forum #2

In publishing the “Paradise Lost” article by Richard Rodriguez, the Los Angeles Times has done us all a great favor. It illustrates only too well that, in spite of the death of Marshall Applewhite and his 38 Heaven’s Gate followers who committed suicide last week, there are still among us people willing to subject us to their fatuous precepts.

In his article, Rodriguez attempts to pound his Luddite-inspired square peg into reality’s round hole. He concocts his wild-eyed theory that California and its high-tech community manifest hell in Eden’s cloak, then attempts to rationalize this ill-conceived hypothesis by pointing at the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide and the groups’s many computers to say, “See, I told you so.”

Go to your room, Richard, and don’t come out until you can say something rational.

To lay the blame for the mass suicide at the feet of technology, Bill Gates and, by association, all the bright, creative and life-loving minds behind digital electronics, is to blame Johann Gutenberg and the printing press for the Salem witch trials, it is to blame pen, paper and ink for the murderous Inquisition, Islamic jihads and the Christian Crusades at the birth of this millennium. It’s killing the messenger.

Let’s consider how the Rodriguez article would have read were it written a few generations back:

... “They looked like book worms,” one of their gaudy neighbors said about the disciples of Heaven’s Gate. In the paintings and illustrations that survive their deaths, they certainly appear earnest and dour. They resemble no one quite so much as the early American Puritans (who, in their neo-pagan belief in the powers of witchcraft, sentenced innocent victims to horrible deaths) in their plainness.

Step into their monastic compound. Enter the realm known as the library, where all the information is available to you (including the works of such cynical philosophers as Thomas Hobbes and Bernardo Machiavelli). Locate Heaven’s Gate. There! In black and white, with its table of contents — and German, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Japanese ... translations — you are now, safely, forever, in your imagination.

The dead yet speak to us from our newspapers, magazines and books. One said, in an interview before her suicide, “There is nothing for us here.” She meant there was no way for her to go on living in (name your personal favorite for hell on Earth) in the daylight.

This is not religion. It is the expression of despair in our (era of choice) age.

Rodriguez blames Bill Gates and Microsoft — now there’s a tough target to hit — for the lamentable demise of these misguided souls. I’m surprised he didn’t take a swipe at the inventor of the wheel while he was it, since it’s the wheel that carried most people to California — Rodriguez’s Paradise Lost — in the first place.

When has Bill Gates, one of the most optimistic people in the world, spouted nonsense about achieving a higher level of spiritual existence by “shedding one’s container” and joining celestial beings in outer space? What an affront to the man’s purpose and motivation.

Rodriguez also needs to re-examine his revisionist view of history. He credits San Diego as the birthplace of California’s reputation as a refuge for religious eccentrics by pointing to the Theosophical settlement in the early 1900s. While San Diego may deserve that dubious honor, he has the wrong century. With equal merit, it could be said that Father Junipero Serra, in founding the San Diego mission, laid the cornerstone of religious eccentricism in this state (and slaughtered those who refused to come into the Church’s fold).

What’s more, Rodriguez debunks his own hypothesis by the mention of Jim Jones and Guyana. Jones and his followers left California seeking paradise, just as millions left Europe, then our East Coast, followed by Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee and the Midwest, for points farther west. Jones found the “end of the line” not in California, but a South American jungle.

Rodriguez does cultural historian Edmund Wilson a great disservice by using the author’s astute observations to bolster his own misguided tenet that West Coast-spawned technology is to blame for these deaths. I wonder how the brilliant minds at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology feel about being left out of the equation? Rodriguez further focuses his vitriol on the Web — and by association, the Internet. Curious, since the Web is the brainchild of British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at CERN, the renowned particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, at the time, and the Internet is the outgrowth of the Pentagon’s Cold War defense strategy.

Ironically, Bill Gates pooh-poohed the Internet until just 15 months ago. The Heaven’s Gate cult was formed in the mid-’70s, several years before even the first personal computer made its debut.

Rodriguez’s argument isn’t even logical. He tries to indict California, but since he needs to include Bill Gates, a product and resident of Washington state, to support his anti-technology thesis, he conveniently broadens his scope. What, weren’t William Hewlett, David Packard, Steve Jobs, et al., evil enough for you, Mr. Rodriguez?

But Rodriquez showed his true conceit in his penultimate paragraph. He quotes one cult member as saying, “There is nothing for us here,” and concludes that, “She meant there was no way for her to go on living in San Diego in the sunlight.”

For Rodriguez to presume to know that she was thinking in such precise geographical terms is arrogance of the highest order. I humbly suggest that most clear-thinking folks would take “here” to be a more abstract reference to life on planet Earth, and that his “brave new line” stretching from San Diego to Seattle (why not make it North America or the Western Hemisphere?) is a mere coincidence. The last time I checked, San Diego did not have a monopoly on suicide, nor did California.

Indeed, one group member is quoted in a separate article as saying, "I've been on the planet for 31 years and there's nothing here for me." Hmmm. No mention of San Diego or California.

Instead of professing such a simplistic, sophomoric answer to a dilemma that has dogged humankind since it was first capable of pondering its own existence, I modestly propose that Mr. Rodriguez focus his efforts on finding an answer to why some people conclude that by hastening their deaths, they will achieve what they find so lacking in life on this planet, regardless of where they happen to live, and regardless of the current level of technology that facilitated the communication of their beliefs to others.

Or better yet, perhaps he could examine his loathing for his home state, its technological revolution, and, apparently, his subsequent longing for the mythical “good ol’ days” when life was untainted by anything so diabolical as circuit boards and silicon wafers.

Let me know what you think:
larry@larryedwards.com

— Larry M. Edwards

You can also read some of the comments others have written.

Related Web Links

  •   Higher Source (original)   •  
  •   Opinion: Technophobe Misses the Mark
in Blame for Mass Suicide   •  
  •   Mark Steinbeck's Heaven's Gate site   •  

•   LarryEdwards.com   •

Copyright © 1997, Larry M Edwards