Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

department heads. With the disappearance of copyright, the sacrifice of the individual voice would be accompanied by the subjugation of the independent voice. Perhaps not coincidentally, at least the leaders of the anti-copyright movement (and likely many of their followers) are in this situation already, an advance guard the performance and temperament of which do not recommend well for the future. (In anticipation of the criticism that I myself am affiliated with a think tank, I should point out that I am not an employee, cannot by law receive direction, and derive only a small part of my income from such association.)

Most real writers have or have had other professions, at the outset of their careers anyway, having been forced to this by the nature of the informal apprenticeship they undergo. This is salutary and instructive, for it gives them knowledge of life and the world that one cannot get from writing school, the essential premise of which is unsustainable. Virtually no writers have not done something else, or a number of things. But when they began to get traction, however, it was possible to make the transition into writing as their sole activity, which, without the structure of copyright, would not have been feasible.

To the challenge that no one should have the right to expect to earn his keep as a writer or composer, and that holding down another job is hardly a tragedy, my answer is that just as a successful dentist, computer programmer, or dry cleaner has the right to expect a living if he can sell his services or his wares, certainly in the richest, most specialized economy the world has ever known, so should a writer if he can sell what he produces. It would be very easy to destabilize or abolish any profession simply by removing the essential laws or protections that make it possible. Such a great affection for a cause that would lead to the abolition of whole vocations at a stroke, especially ones so longstanding and so important to civilization, is frighteningly arrogant. In its essence it is similar to what Burke called the homicidal philanthropy of the French Revolution. But because those who recommend it are so often what I believe are called “dorks,” it seems not quite as threatening, like a My-Little-Pony™ version of the Khmer Rouge. People who fall in love with their own radical decrees tend to become thoughtless and cruel.

The oft-cited champion of the anti-copyrightists is Macaulay. That is, Thomas Babington Macaulay, one of the great though cracked pillars of English historiography, a genius of style and a learned and experienced statesman, who, with Carlisle, and various Trevelyans who were Macaulay’s relatives all, shaped the understanding of English history for more than a century. Despite his many faults, Macaulay was first among those and his influence has never been surpassed by any single practitioner of his craft, even if Churchill continues to threaten his displacement. In my education it was assumed that one would read Macaulay and study Latin, in much the same way that today it is assumed that a student will know about Harriet Tubman and collect aluminum cans. Macaulay’s oddities are perhaps best expressed by this subtle and arresting line from the Reverend Michael David Knowles’s short biographical essay: “In 1835 his sister Hannah left him to marry a promising young servant of the East India Company.”44 And he had very strange views, of which more later, about copyright. Just as today, boundless leaps in the technology of distributing information (which then made possible mass circulation periodicals and enormous print runs for books) shocked and rearranged the field, necessitating changes that in turn brought bitter debate. But in regard to the point here in question, even Macaulay deserts those of our contemporaries who regard his views as the seminal text for their own.

“You cannot depend,” he says, “for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works that require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can expect only from persons who make literature the business of their lives…. It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable books.”45

Without a single fact, this is beautifully stated merely as an assertion. Of course, that is Macaulay’s great talent. He could make an argument so gracefully that those incapable of independent judgment would simply be carried along as if on fumes of ether. It is why he has so many disciples among the anti-copyright partisans, and why I have included this quotation that runs against their grain and yet is from someone they mercilessly revere. That they would imperil other than amateur concentration on writing or composing may be explained by a blindness to the potential of both as exemplified in the great texts or models to which one may aspire only if one is willing to shape one’s whole life accordingly. Or are they saying that the lines of work in which one finds Bach and Yeats are insufficiently demanding to justify full-time employment?

Then there is the following: “They are aggrandizing the rights of the content holder by stealing the existing rights of the content users.”46 I can best respond to this statement with the following story. Thirty-five years ago, my parents’ house was burglarized. The sound of a primitive alarm I had rigged up, muffled as it came from the attic, was interpreted by the burglar as an approaching police siren. He grabbed his loot, jumped in his car, and sped off at panic speed over the lawn and down an ever-narrowing dead-end road that eventually wedged his vehicle between two trees and elevated its front wheels. He then fled on foot, leaving a chunk of himself on a barbed-wire fence. The police had his car, wallet, burglar