Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

would give up my odd and always perilous career in journalism and starve to death rather than put it on record as something I had written. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” I was asked. In her world it was an overreaction. In mine, it was not, and for good reason.

Although mankind frequently takes backward steps, as in the rise of triumphant, dictatorial, murderous collectivism in Europe and China in the twentieth century, and the revival of group identity in the United States in the past twenty or thirty years, the maturation of civilization can be measured, more than even by its art and science, by its recognition of individual rights. This evolution can be charted from earliest times as it left behind serfdom, subservience, communal identity, and the expendability of individual persons. Strangely enough, those who now call themselves progressives would substitute the state for the king and once again make the individual a subservient means to an abstract end. For the sake of a usually vague and materialist goal, they would deemphasize those rights that have come up through history as slowly as the rise of continents, and yoke man, woman, and child to a plan. There is always a plan, the plan is always for the common good, and it always demands the submission of very large numbers of others who, if they do not comply, become the enemy.

The surest counter to such submission, even when the masses have long been subdued, is the individual voice, which shines through the confusion of oppression as nothing else can. It is the master of an authenticity that only an individual voice can convey—one soul in direct appeal to another—and that even the most oppressed can recognize instantly. Despite generations of indoctrination, mankind is able to hear this voice and to be moved by it as if on the world’s first day. The speeches of modern politics are generally so numbing and bland because, unlike Jefferson, Lincoln, and Churchill, modern politicians have abandoned its power and appeal. Without this voice, we are only the creatures of others, who are in turn the creatures of others, and so on and so on, because in the end in such a pathetic state there is no author, there is no one, and there is nothing.

The great promise of history as it has come down to us, a promise self-evident except in times of confusion such as these, is that each man has a right to be his own author and to fix and control his own expression rather than fall under the dictates and oppressions of another, whether in the name of cooperation or in the name of the king. As there is more than one person in the world, this right and necessity cannot be absolute. Neither, however, can it be dismissed.

But there will always be those who will be hostile to what has made them free, and they will always offer as a substitute for history’s most enlightening and beneficial turn the ethos of collaboration as if for its own sake, though, thankfully, most of their collaboration is simply talk about collaboration. Nevertheless, they persist. One of their objections to copyright is that it prevents others from taking a work and revising, jumping off from, using, and/or adding to it, as their ideal of the “Creative Commons” would allow in what they call “remix.” What a bloody nightmare this would be, infinitely worse than being in a hippie commune in which anyone who wants to can use your toothbrush—or your diaphragm. With each maniacal lack of fixedness, all of history would be demoted to a hallucination and subjected to the decrees of whoever had the most power at the moment. Though this may be the natural view of relativists, it is held at bay by the textual solidity that they are now so keen to abolish. Were they successful, they would be able to calibrate the world according to the ever-changing delusions that they themselves suffer, and they would perhaps finally feel at home.

One of the sine qua nons of achieving such a state is to concentrate power on whatever objective needs to be attained, overwhelmed, or removed, and it goes without saying that one of the ways to employ power is to direct mass. For instance, in responding to my twelve-hundred-word article, they organized by the thousand, coordinating, urging and directing one another to create “wikis”: that is, a kind of barn-raising in the electronic ether, in which wiki software allows anyone to contribute to or alter the group work to which he has access on the internet. Although the weaker among them were shamelessly directed by those who were dominant, the product nonetheless sank to the lowest common denominator, which fits their anti-elitist outlook perfectly. With no spur of authorship or responsibility, no controlling intelligence, no discipline of form or shape, no urgency of verification, the wiki courts all the vices of anonymity and rash action. Everything comes from without, as vast numbers of people egg each other on with no check.

Though such collective action is especially prone to hastiness and the pressures of conformity, its chief shortcoming is the suspension of individual judgment in exchange for reliance upon the preponderance of opinion not because it is right but because it is powerful. In December and January, 1914–1915, the Turkish Ninth Corps ascended Allah Akbar in the Caucasus to fight Russian troops at Sarikamish. As the many thousands of Turkish infantry moved along, they did not think that in their vast numbers, the size of a city, they might freeze to death. They took confidence from their mass and from their collective judgment when, in fact, the preeminent characteristic of their collective judgment was that again and again individual judgment was suspended or overruled as, in fact, half the division moved blindly toward their deaths, ten thousand or more, freezing in place in sight of the others.

The individual voice can suffer no such false confidence (although of course it can