The Terrorists Among Us by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Summer 2006

In Conrad’s The Secret Agent, for example, the Professor—“his title to that designation consisted in having been once assistant demonstrator in chemistry at some technical institution,” who quarreled with his superiors “upon a question of unfair treatment,” and who had “such an exalted conviction of his merits that it was extremely difficult for the world to treat him with justice”—is a man who has devoted himself to devising bombs and detonators. Predisposed to dissatisfaction by his small stature and unimpressive appearance, he develops “a frenzied Puritanism of ambition” that seems once again, after September 11, only too familiar to us. “The extreme, almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions, had set before him a goal of power and prestige to be attained without the medium of arts, graces, tact, wealth—by sheer weight of merit alone. . . .
To see [his ambition] thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world, whose morality was artificial, corrupt, and blasphemous. . . . By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige.”
Updike’s Terrorist has much in common with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, published 99 years previously. In both books, a double agent tries to get a third party to commit a bomb outrage; in both books, the secret agent ends up slain. In both books, the terrorists operate in a free society unsure how far it may go in restricting freedom to protect itself from those who wish to destroy it. The terrorists in Conrad are European anarchists and socialists; in Updike they are Muslims in America: but in neither case does the righting of any “objective” injustice motivate them. They act from a mixture of personal angst and resentment, which easily attaches itself to abstract grievances about the whole of society, thus disguising the real source of their consuming but sublimated rage.

The Terrorists Among Us by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Summer 2006