Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

were. Rather than a massive comparison, suffice it to say that although today not everyone is like Paris Hilton, and in the nineteenth century not everyone was like Emily Dickinson, each of these is far more characteristic of her age than would be the other, and that this is self-evident along with all that it implies.

Winslow Homer’s beautiful and moving painting, “The Veteran Returns to His Fields,” is emblematic of the difference. The veteran has left the long rank and file of blue, or possibly gray, and now stands in informal homespun, a scythe rather than a rifle in his hands. With his back to us, he confronts a field and the horizon above it. The wheat is golden and the sky a deepening blue. Though death is behind him, it is also ahead, and he will reconcile the two, alone, with much time in which to reflect. Having survived the convulsion of the mass, he is now protected on all sides by silence, color, and palisades of light. He will not parade his suffering or present what he has learned to an anonymous audience that would devour it in seconds and then skip forward to something else, and something else, and something else again, which would have left him more alone than had he remained alone in the first place. And he will not submit his conclusions to that impatient mass, but rather to those he loves and to the judgment of God expressed nowhere perhaps but in his heart, where it will be infinitely satisfying and indifferent to the passage of time.

The ethos then, and not that long ago, was of a life of one’s own, of privacy, constancy, and tranquility. Sins and virtues were the same, but the arena in which they contested was different and would differently direct the outcome of the battle. Henry Adams thought that at the beginning of the twentieth century the world had begun to move at an unsustainable pace. Little did he know, and perhaps in light of the future little do we, but now the rhythm of life is not that of the dynamo, with its gleaming copper windings, or the steam engine dripping water like a draft animal in the heat, but the silent, invisible, unapproachable electron, incomprehensibly fast and indifferent, to which, as we accommodate, we sacrifice much of what is in us by nature. All for fear of not following in the wake of its speed and power, for fear of missing out, of not having, and of being left behind. The character of the machine is that of speed, power, compression, instantaneousness, immense capacity, indifference, and automaticity.

These are what were apparent above all else in the mass of arguments that came like a flash in response to my simple and rather unambitious newspaper column. The substance was disturbing if only for its implicit comment on the state of contemporary education. The form, however, was most distressing, in that it was so thoughtless, imitative, lacking in custom and civility, and stimulated—as if in a feedback loop or feeding frenzy—by the power it brought to bear not by means of any quality but only as a variant of mass and speed.

In my mind’s eye I saw again and again the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch, both the more and less calamitous ones—those of torture and hell, and those depicting the relatively minor sins and difficulties of ordinary life. What did this have in common with a wave of reaction washing over the internet? In perhaps the most nightmarish of all paintings, Brueghel’s “The Triumph of Death,” one can see absolute horror, hopelessness, terror, and despair. The artist has depicted the kind of holocaust that in an instant can blast away the will and ability to resist. Death is a skeleton riding a horse that is red because it has been flayed and it lacks its skin. And yet the horse serves its rider energetically, carrying him and his immense scythe across a paralyzing landscape to harvest with boundless energy a crop of suffering mortals. Death himself is a human skeleton impressed into service and pressing others to follow. Though the horrors of the painting are many, the one most pertinent is that man has been enlisted into the cause of his own demise, and embraces it with lust. All the characters in the masterful paintings of Bosch and Brueghel, which document a time of dissolution and “paradigm shift” so faithfully that motion appears magically even in the illustration of sloth, are creatures of unconscious impulse and automaticity. They are driven to the quick and the reflexive, and behave as if they are entranced. Even those who may be relatively contemplative are pushed away from the habit of contemplation, in favor of action for its own sake and as the legitimizing principle of life. They cross the landscape in mobs, extending their paroxysms of self-destruction to everything in their path. Thoughtless and overquick, they move and strike like the living dead, their only sustenance being momentum.

In 1947, the critic Howard Daniel wrote that, “The schizoid nature of our modern civilization accents motion (no matter the direction), violence, and sensation. The opportunism of its commercialized culture points up the instability of its ideas and its ideologies; these are [as] subject to rapid change as fashions in dress.”54 (Compared to present change, however, fashions of dress move as slowly as redwoods grow.) This was the beginning of an intense acceleration far greater than the cumulative change and instabilities in the chaotic era of Bosch and Brueghel. Our era is potentially (though not yet) just as dangerous to the person, gentler and more insidious, faster almost beyond comprehension, and far more ruinous to the soul.

The apostles of the machine and what it has wrought have rushed to embrace it without critical regard. In perhaps unconscious service of instantaneity, automaticity, and collectivity, they have taken to the field to war against stability and tradition. And although they may not be aware enough to