Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

a hill nearby. They swept down en masse, trampled our city, and beat us with sticks. My friend was bloodied and almost lost his eye, because the little boys in this army were already running on a fuel that had bypassed their souls and taken charge of their bodies.

My next experience of such things was in the thousand athletic contests in which I played in school. Although in baseball the blood lust was well contained by the languid pace of the game and the spacing of the players, it arose quite frequently in hockey and lacrosse, and even in soccer. But all these sports worked in accordance with a system of constraint analogous to the grid baffling of an oil tanker. In the nineteenth century, when petroleum was first transported by sea, an inordinate number of tankers mysteriously disappeared in transit. Their hulls being caulked into a single vessel for the oil, the roll and pitch imparted by the waves would make of the shifting cargo the equivalent of what is known as a “water hammer,” and after some resonance in rough weather, this could burst the hull like a bomb, sinking the ship in seconds beneath waters that then ironically were calmed. The solution, quickly determined, was to cage the momentum of the fluid by building crosshatched walls within the hull. No longer could force build upon force unchecked until the breaking point. The effect of this kind of containment is visible both in the divisions of an ice tray and the structure of American government.

In sports, the dampening passion was accomplished by numerous such interlocking walls: the rules of the game, the traditions of sportsmanship, the consequences of the civil law outside this structure, referees, delineated spaces and zones, an audience of people (parents, teachers, girlfriends, trustees, their order of importance determined by the luck or delinquency of each player) to whom one was responsible in various ways and who were influential and able to chastise and withhold. The events themselves, in my experience, took place on fields surrounded by palisades of trees both in the wild and domesticated in orchards. Nature was ever present as an exemplar of stillness, symmetry, balance, and dignity. The structure of all this—spectators on the sidelines, tall trees backing them, teams facing off within a rectangle, the contest timed to the second—provided yet more direction and restraint. And there was no anonymity. We knew each other, and even had we not, we had numbers on our jerseys, like license plates, assuring constant accountability. The impulse was there, and the fire, descended from the stoning and piercing of mammoths, but it was shaped by the civilizing action of many thousands of years.

Other than on the political battlefield, where soldiering for those who, win or lose, usually went on to disappoint, the last time I felt the impulse of coordinated aggression was marching in a column of two thousand heavily armed infantrymen, or, on occasion, in small-unit operations when cohesion was high and everyone was uncharacteristically well rested. Even then, there were the general laws from without and military regulations from within, orders, designs, schedules, and the rigidity of technique imparted by training, most of which was devoted to teaching the preservation of habit and control under stress. Many forms of discipline, day by day, were required and enforced, from strict schedules through codes of dress, salutation, sanitation, equipment maintenance, fire discipline, and by-the-book procedure for everything from patrol to how to tuck your pant legs into your boots. And above all was the hierarchy of command, to which each soldier was bound on pain of prison and, in extreme cases, death. The entire military way of life, it seemed, was a proportional response to the great potential for unwanted destruction possessed by large groups of men primed and trained for war.

More important in vitiating and directing the power of mass actions even than civilizing controls from without, has been the individuality of the person; that is, his separation from others in a semi-autonomy created by fact, accident, and the demands of culture in its various and broad forms. Perhaps the deepest American political expectation is of independent judgment on the part of each citizen, neither rushed, nor coerced, nor coordinated. Ideally, action requires consent, consent requires deliberation, and deliberation requires independence of thought. From the earliest days of the republic this species of independence was sustained by the vast amounts of space and time in which one could come to one’s own conclusions and hold fast to them.

The polity was so intensely divided and cross-divided—not so much philosophically as by region, state, area, custom, dialect, law, and distance—that today we would consider its fastest reflexes glacial in speed. The citizenry was different then, educated differently in school, church, and by the landscape itself. It may not have been taught a mass of things, but the quality imparted in the study of classical languages, the Bible, and great works of literature (including the documents of the Founding) enlarged autonomy of thought. For, contrary to modern educational theories, discipline fosters not subservience but independence, as independence requires great strength to uphold. The differences in the quality and depth of political discourse between earlier and the most recent presidents is due to many factors, but not least that the earlier citizenry was primed to deliberate rather than merely to react. It came prepared to receive intelligently something of the nature of Lincoln’s First Inaugural, or Washington’s Farewell. It expected virtually nothing on the instant, it took time, and it looked hard. That is not to say that all Americans were models of dignity and concentration, but by and large they were quite different from what we are now. In the year of my father’s birth, the murder rate, absent any gun laws, was one-eighth of what the last few decades have taught us to accept as normal. Human nature was no different, but the forms of culture that channeled it and the means of understanding it